"Dunkirk "What if"" Topic

Interesting thread here…

link

Armand

Just an aside to British morale at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation.

Winston Churchill said something like 'you don't win a war by retreating' and was afraid of what the British public would do to the returning soldiers. So much so that he ordered the blinds closed on the trains transporting them as he feared that they would have a hostile reception.

But the W.I. (Womens Institute) took another view and set up tea counters at the stations to welcome husbands and sons safe return and turned the defeat into victory celebration. Of course Pathe news reporting helped at lot.

Never under estimate the W.I.

Very interesting read, Armand.

Grelber

Happy you enjoyed it my friend!.

thanks John G….

Armand

One morale factor which is often overlooked is that if Dunkirk had failed, those 250,000 British soldiers wouldn't have been killed, they would have been captured. A quarter million British boys in German POW camps and no hope of getting them back as long as the war went on. I think there would have been considerable public pressure on the government to negotiate a peace settlement so they could get those men home again.

I just can't see how the Germans could possibly have got an army across the channel and sustained it with fuel and ammunition. They had no suitable transports, no landing craft, no experience of amphibious operations and were massively outnumbered in warships.

Even with air superiority over the Channel, they had shown at Dunkirk that the Luftwaffe wasn't yet very good at sinking ships at sea.

The Germans started the war with 22 destroyers and lost 10 or 11 in Norway – the RN kept 50 fleet destroyers in the UK specifically for anti-invasion duty, as well as those escorting major units.
I think (quick check, open to correction) the Germans only available capital ship was the newly commissioned Bismarck (Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both under repair) v 14 or 15 for the RN (depending on when this happens relative to HMS KGV commissioning in October 1940).
7 cruisers and pocket battleships; having already lost the Graf Spee, Blucher, Karlsruhe and Königsberg; v 50+ for the RN.

The landing force would have risked a massacre with any survivors that did manage to get ashore cut off from resupply.

They had no suitable transports, no landing craft, no experience of amphibious operations and were massively outnumbered in warships.

Yes the Germans didn't have the assets, tech, or knowledge to do Seelowe.

The Channel Islands they occupied, for the most part, AFAIK, all of UK troops had already been withdrawn. The Germans simply landed at the airport and/or dock at a port.

There was no resistance … the islanders mutually coexisted with their occupiers. What else could they do? In some cases they got along pretty well with the Germans.

Just happened across this quote today in the epilogue of AJ Barker's Dunkirk, The Great Escape:

"What the future course of the war would have been if we had succeeded at the time in taking the British Expeditionary Force prisoners at Dunkirk, it is now impossible to guess"

- General Heinz Guderian

Barker also mentioned something about General Student wanting to drop two divisions on Southeast England "during" the Dunkirk evacuation