Figure 1.--Here British Expeditionary Forces queue up on the beach at Dunkirk to await evacuation. TYhe British launched Operation Dynamo to get them home. The Royal Navy was not optimistic they could get many hime. They succeeded in getting almost all of the BEF home. This was a mixture of Royal Navy execution, RAF air cover, and the hastilly orgnized small boats. They were imeeasurably aided by nine other that Herman Führer Adolf Hitler who order the Panzers to stop at a critical point. The evacyaiion not only saved the prifessional cire of the Briutih Army, but the Churchill goverment which at the time has only tenouous support in Parliament. If Churchill had not kept control, it is very likely that Halifax and Churchill were headed toiward a British Vichy.

The threat to the Western democracies was that the totalitarian powers began preparing for war while the Western Democracies refused to recognize the danger and restricted military spending. This very nearly resulted in an Axis victory. The threat became whether the Allies could prepare and mobilize their industry for war production. As it was The British Expeditionary Force was nearly destroyed and France fell. A huge development was the Dunkirk evacuation. If Britain had lost its army in France may have fallen and Chamberlain and Halifax would have done deal with Hitler leading to a British Vichy. Britain was the only country still resisting the Germans. A British Vichy would have irreversibly changed the world balance of power. Churchill famously said, "... we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old." [Churchill] The problem is that without Britain it is unlikely that even America with its prodigious economic base could not have come to the rescue. Part of the problem was leadership, but the major problem was that the voting public did not want military spending for two reasons. First, because the Allied voting public were dead set against another war. Voters tended to equated military spending with war and pacifist feeling was growing. Second, because the voters wanted money spent on programs to promote recovery from the Depression and relief for those adversely affected by the Depression. The democracies had the industrial power to counter the totalitarians, but failed to use it. Rather than preparing, the Allies (Britain and France) decided to appease Hitler with disastrous consequences. A lesson still not learned. And American became staunchly isolationist. Democratic countries with capitalist economies have the capacity of expanding industrial production and creating wealth. Totalitarian socialist economies were less capable, but while the democracies failed to prepare for war, the totalitarian powers poured vast resources into preparing for war. The democracies only began matching the totalitarians once the those powers had amassed huge military forces. Even this, however, night have been enough. At the time, NAZIs propaganda stressed superior weaponry. What actually led to stunning victories, especially the fall of France, was that the NAZIs had developed a superior tactical doctrine--Blitzkrieg. The German tactical doctrine integrated mechanized war and aerial support -- in essence modern war. And the Allies were slow to adopt these tactics. The British did not begin to match the Germans until mid-1942 and the Americans until mid-1943. Fortuitously the British and Americans learned to fight the Germans in North Africa where they the Germans were weakest. The Soviet Red Army at huge cost had to confront the NAZIs at the peak at their strength in Europe where they were the strongest. The result were unbelievable casualties and near defeat. The NAZI lead in weaponry, which was never as substantial as believed, began to evaporate early in the War. British aircraft defeated the Luftwaffe in the battle if Britain (summer 1940). The superb Soviet T-34 tank began appeared even as Barbarossa unfolded (June 1941). The British Lancaster bomber appeared (early (1942). The American B-17 joined the Brutish (1943). American fighters were eventually able to take on the Luftwaffe in the skies over the Reich (1944). American and British technology defeated the German U-boars in the Atlantic (mid-1943). Not only were Allied weaponry increasingly superior, but once Allied industry was converted for war, they swamped Axis production. The NAZIs had air planes, submarines, and missiles that were several year ahead of anything in the Western arsenals--but they proved of little real military value. What the NAZIs did not have was the industrial capacity and time to build them to build them. This was in part due to the Allied strategic bombing campaign. The Allies had secret weapons as well, and those weapons while not as 'glamorous' as the NAZI weapons, but actually had an impact, technologies like the cavity magnetron and proximity fuse, not to mention the atomic bomb.

Sources

Churchil, Winston. We shall never surrender speech. (June 4, 1940). This was adelivered in Prliament just after the evcuation was ebnding and the miraculoudsly the BEF and large numbers of French troops hadmade in safely across the Channel to Britain.