[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