[DirectorKrennic]

On Dunkirk:

> Chairman Mao: They shouldn’t have attacked Moscow or Kiev. They should have taken Leningrad as a first step. Another error in policy was they didn’t cross the sea after Dunkirk.

> Dr. Kissinger: After Dunkirk.

> Chairman Mao: They were entirely unprepared.

> Dr. Kissinger: And Hitler was a romantic. He had a strange liking for England.

> Chairman Mao: Oh? Then why didn’t they go there? Because the British at that time were completely without troops.

> Dr. Kissinger: If they were able to cross the channel into Britain… I think they had only one division in all of England.

> Prime Minister Chou: Is that so?

> Dr. Kissinger: Yes.

> Prime Minister Chou: Also Sir Anthony Eden told us in Germany at that time that a Minister in the Army of Churchill’s Government said at that time if Hilter had crossed the channel they would have had no forces. They had withdrawn all their forces back. When they were preparing for the German crossing, Churchill had no arms. He could only organize police to defend the coast. If they crossed they would not be able to defend.

Mao making fun of the idea of the USSR invading China and getting the Chinese treatment:

> Chairman Mao: If there are Russians going to attack China, I can tell you today that our way of conducting a war will be guerrilla war and protracted war. We will let them go wherever they want. (Prime Minister Chou laughs.) They want to come to the Yellow River tributaries. That would be good, very good. (Laughter.) And if they go further to the Yangtse River tributaries, that would not be bad either.

[ggm]

Angus Calder has a quote I can't recall about the "fight them on the beaches" speech Churchill gave, somebody in the house of commons said something to the effect "well we will be flinging beer bottles at them, it's all we've bloody got" and indeed the home guard was being taught how to make Molotov cocktails by ex Spanish civil war volunteers, and parading with pikes. A three man suicide squad technique was deviced to jam tank tracks with a baulk of wood, climb onto the tank top and set off a sticky bomb or a Molotov cocktail.

Getting 350,000 men and some materiel back from Dunkirk was a big deal.

Mao had similar concerns in the long March. Just surving was half his battle.

[cryptonector]

The British Navy was intact though, and the Germans did not have air superiority. Had they had air superiority they'd have been able to keep the British Navy at bay and then invaded. It was a close-run thing.

[ffgjgf1]

But Germans didn’t even have the naval to capacity to successfully execute a mostly uncontested landing unless there was perfect weather.

[ggm]

Eric Hobsbawm notoriously said counterfactual history is shit but that said, who knows what a demoralised British government might have done with a successful German landing even if small.

[kjkjadksj]

Suppose the germans just forced the local french fisherman at gunpoint to take them over. Would the royal navy lay waste to thousands of french fisherman in the same seas as thousands of british fisherman loaded with their soldiers? I’m surprised the germans also didn’t just lay waste to them at dunkirk with indirect fire.

[ffgjgf1]

> fisherman in the same seas as thousands of british fisherman loaded with their soldiers?

Logistically it was impossible to launch an invasion at the same time as the Dunkirk evacuations were happening. Even if they manage to get to England on a few fishing boats what would they do there?

> Would the royal navy lay waste to thousands of french fisherman

The British didn’t have that many qualms about blowing up a significant part of the French navy as a mere precaution. So yes. That not how successful naval invasion work though anyway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-Kébir

[ffgjgf1]

I wonder if Mao was truly stupid enough to believe that German could’ve invaded Britain without naval and air superiority or they were all talking in jest.

After all he was the man who thought of killing all the sparrows in China and forcing people to build non-functional steel smelters in their backyard instead of working in their fields..