growstuff, in regard to your post @11:46 today, once more you demonstrate inaccuracies in your recounting of the strategic position of both the British and German forces following the Dunkirk withdrawal in 1940.
As I stated in my earlier post, the British achievement in evacuating more than three hundred thirty thousand of its personal from those beaches was nothing short of a miracle, but that army left all its equipment, including the vast majority of its small arms on those French beaches.
By example to the above, my father was one of those brought off the beach at Dunkirk arriving at Ramsgate aboard a British Destroyer. So as to get as many people on that ship as possible all their backpacks etc had to be thrown over the side as they boarded. For others, their rifles had to be discarded as swam out to the small craft that took them from the beach.
My father was readily put on a train from Ramsgate which took him to Blackpool Sands in South Devon where they were expected to oppose the immediate invasion that everyone believed would follow Dunkirk.
However, when my mother caught up with him in Devon four days after he had arrived back in Britain, out of an infantry company of one over hundred men only twelve had joined up at Blackpool Sands, and they only three rifles between them along with the uniforms they stood up in. Such was the state of the British Army at that time
That stated, Britain still had an effective Air Force and Navy following its European mainland defeat, and that Hitler had to overcome if he was to invade Britain or at least bring this nation to capitulation.
That situation brought about "the Battle Of Britain" in which the German Airforce losses were more than 1700 Luftwaffe (German air force) planes destroyed. The 2662 German casualties included many experienced aircrews, and the Luftwaffe never fully recovered from the reverse it suffered in August-October 1940.
The Battle of the Atlantic also commenced at that time in which Hitlers sacrifices over the four years of that battle where the loss of 783 U-boats and 47 German surface warships, including 4 battleships which included the Kriegsmarine flagship the Bismark.
So growstuff do you seriously believe that Hitler and his national socialists would have put all the above effort and loses into those battles if he had not wished for Britain to totally succumb to his domination?
I also find your "putting down" of all those who took part and gave so much in the above conflicts totally shocking. For Churchill summed up the true mood of this nation when he stated of the effort Britains fighter pilots made in the Battle of Britain, "Never Has So Much Been Owed By So Many To So Few".
The above is an Expression that is still as meaningful today as they were on the day those great Winston Churchill words were spoken.
And some would belittle those words and the enormous effort and sacrifice they encompassed.
