75 Years Ago Today

[Cybermat47]

Despite all their efforts, the enemy had won. Despite their bravery, their armies had been crushed, their Air Force lay in shreds, and their Navy was burning. They had no choice but to surrender, reliving the humiliation that they had handed out 22 years before.

 

But this was simply the beginning.

 

To the north, across a narrow strip of water, a nation was still taking in what they had been told four days before:

 

"What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin."

 

In the coming months, the British and their allies would defend Britain against the might of Germany's Luftwaffe and Italy's Regia Aereonautica. It was a battle that neither side could afford to lose.

 

(Feel free to post any events related to the Battle of Britain in this thread, any at all.)

[Stallion]

[Youtube]

[/Youtube] Edited June 24, 2015 by Stallion

[6./ZG26_Custard]

_{The film...}

 

 

 

_{The documentary...}

 

_{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpTrygZfC-g}

[6./ZG26_Emil]

and their Navy was burning.

 

 

After their allies sank their ships in Oran 

 

With friends like these.......

[SCG_Neun]

http://www.battleofbritain1940.com/#/

 

Interactive Timeline

[Cybermat47]

After their allies sank their ships in Oran 

 

With friends like these.......

 

Yeah, that made things... awkward.

 

So awkward, in fact, that in Operation Torch, British units pretended to be American so that the Vichy French would surrender easily 

[SharpeXB]

Yeah, that made things... awkward.

 

So awkward, in fact, that in Operation Torch, British units pretended to be American so that the Vichy French would surrender easily

That's an amazing fact about WWII most people don't know. Or at least here in the U.S. where the average person knows nothing about WWII. It's my favorite trivia question.

What was the first country the U.S. found itself in combat with in the European Theater?

A. The Germans

B. The Italians

C. The Russians (have to throw in that answer for the fully ignorant to stop and think about)

D. The French

[6./ZG26_Emil]

D

[ZachariasX]

D

 

Funny huh? Also the Germans found them great fun to be bombed.

 

British bombing the French as well doesn't count, that's raison d'être.

 

Now enough of sarcasm....

[6./ZG26_Emil]

Funny huh? Also the Germans found them great fun to be bombed.

 

British bombing the French as well doesn't count, that's raison d'être.

 

Now enough of sarcasm....

 

Don't get it

[Original_Uwe]

After their allies sank their ships in Oran 

 

With friends like these.......

If Darlan, or ANY of the French had held to their word mers-el-kebirs wouldn't have happened.

But no they decided to trust in Hitler rather than Churchill.

You know what they say, stupid should hurt, and in this case french stupidity got their fleet sunk.

 

EDIT: OP Ive read through the William Manchester biography of Churchill about a dozen times, its truly inspiring that this man was able to turn his 'Island race' around from the co conspirators of Munich to the warriors who would save western liberal civilization. Ive always loved the opening lines in the first volume "Visions of Glory"

 

'THE French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.

 

Behind them lay the sea.

 

It was England’s greatest crisis since the Norman conquest, vaster than those precipitated by Philip II’s Spanish Armada, Louis XIV’s triumphant armies, or Napoleon’s invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone……

 

. Now the 220,000 Tommies at Dunkirk, Britain’s only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy’s vessels were inadequate. King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for “hard and heavy tidings.”

 

Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Grade Fields; Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade’s fire-float Massey Shaw — all of them manned by civilian volunteers:

 

English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.

 

Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge. These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich.

 

Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven.

 

It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost.

 

England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolf Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces.

 

Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked.

 

A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury.

 

An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become.

 

Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny;

 

an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people

 

— a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was “equally good to live or to die” —

 

who could if necessary be just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve.

 

Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.

 

In London there was such a man. '

 

Apologies OP, but you cant think BoB without thinking of WSC.

Edited June 25, 2015 by forsale

[ZachariasX]

Don't get it

It seems everybody bombed the French in that conflict, even they themselves...