Take a close look at films and photos of British troops hauling ass at Dunkirk and see if you can spot any of them even carrying a rifle. Not very many. They at least could have toted some man- portable stuff back to England.
The British made much of their “Miracle at Dunkirk” but it really was an unmitigated disaster.
That they were able to return so many men to England also had a lot to do with the Germans hoping to get Britain to sue for peace. They could’ve conducted much more aggressive operations against the fleet of vessels involved in the rescue.
It was great that so much of the BEF didn’t finish the war in POW camps or died defending themselves, but all that was a silver lining in a very dark cloud.
Imagine if Chamberlain, rather than Churchill, was still Prime Minister... He might have waved another piece of paper in the air that had the Articles of Surrender on it... Imagine a British National Socialist party in charge of the Royal Navy...
What could have the United States done in the Fall of 1940? Nothing! Still, eventually our commerce would’ve made shipping goods to Nazi Europe as routine as shipping goods to the UK and France. We might have even been a willing partner to Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union...
We owe a lot to a British half-American named Winston.