re: How different would WW2 have turned out if Germany didn't delay for 3 days at Dunkirk?

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No Dunkirk then Hitler probably invades soon and you have Vichy Britain

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Couple of things.

(1) Hitler was never really going to invade Great Britain. He just wanted them out of the war.

(2) Even if the BEF had surrendered, Germany still could not invade sooner because if the simple fact they had no means to pull off a cross channel invasion. Even ifcthey'd have wanted to invade in he summer of 1940, it would have taken months, perhaps even a year to have the capability to transport an invasion force to Home Islands.

(3) The RAF and Royal Navy were the main worries or the Germans, not a few hundred thousand defeated and unarmed soldiers rescued from French beaches.

ETA: some whiney bitch can't counter my opinion with anything of substance so they hide behind a down vote like a little bitch.

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The real "what if" is if the Germans and Soviets leave each other alone. The US and Brits are left to take on the Germans without the Soviets killing 7/8ths of them.

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This. The third reich would likely still be standing if they don't go to war with the soviets.

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The only way war between the US and Japn could have been avoided was either the US lift it's embargo in Japan or Japan withdraws from China.

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Interesting. Considering how strong isolationist sentiment was at that time, we may have done just that. Take into account the 1940 election. If GB loses big at Dunkirk in May-June and Churchill receives a vote of no-confidence and GB sues for peace, there is a good chance FDR decides to cut his losses and tacks towards an isolationist platform (he was already essentially doing that anyway early on).

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I don't understand why people simply conclude that British failure at Dunkirk would mean that Britain would be forced to make peace with Hitler.

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Militarily they probably could have fought on for quite some time. Politically, I think you see a vote of no-confidence and the Parliament dissolved.

People forget that GB and US were near complete Naval powers.

The BEF was nearly all the gas in the tank for a land based army because you don't need a standing army unless Napoleon comes out the crypt

France being knocked out was pretty much all the Continental power. Northern Europe didn't have the population to resist a trained and properly maneuvered military and were taken out piecemeal. Even the Finns would've had a rough time.

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Mainly because Britain would have lost over 50% of its standing army.

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Keep in mind that only men and rifles were evacuated from Dunkirk. The British DID LOSE every anti-tank gun, every tank, every vehicle, every field artillery piece, and every supply dump that they sent to France. So they did lose over 50 percent of the standing army's ability to fight on a WW2 battlefield. You needed more than men with rifles to win a WW2 battle.

So those evacuees were not ready to fight for a long time after Dunkirk because they had to be re-equipped. Why didn't the Germans invade at that point? The British Army was really no better able to fight a WW2 battle at that point than had the soldiers at Dunkirk been lost.

The Germans didn't invade then because they didn't have air and naval superiority -- not in June, 1940; not in July, 1940; not in September, 1940. By October the weather worsened but, the Germans didn't have air or naval superiority by then, either.

I'm not saying that the consensus is absolutely wrong and that I'm absolutely right. I simply want to say that the consensus, IMHO, might be wrong and that it's not a slam dunk.

It's not so much the Luftwaffe underperformed as they were assigned an impossible mission in the Battle of Britain.

The British were able to replace material loss in aircraft greater than destruction inflicted and pilots had the advantage of bailing out over friendly territory.

Germany never put much into heavy bombers even after/or because they participated in the Spanish Civil War and determined that medium bombers were enough for military
and civilian targets. The medium bombers would've been enough to reduce the RAFs southern airfields to rubble after repeated engagement. Hitler ordered moving to the cities which could absorb the bombs more readily. Basically it was large scale tactical bombing on strategic targets.

All it did was give Churchill the ability to stiffen the resolve of the British people. Had Hitler blockaded and forced the Home Fleet and RAF to languish as Fleets-in-being. The political will at home for war for the Brits would have waned.

Dunkirk was the ignition, the Battle of Britain the fuel, and the North Africa campaign the momentum that kept Britain in the fight. There's other near misses but those are what kept the Great Britain in Western Europe.

Britain would have sued for peace as it essentially would not have had a home army. This would have taken its navy out of the picture as well and given Germany and the Axis control of the Med and the North Atlantic. This would have helped keep Italy afloat and viable, and could well have made the USSR winnable due to the absence of a Western Front.