The reason that the Germans failed to stop the British leaving Dunkirk (from a land perspective) is that the British has just counterattacked and badly mauled Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division at Arras. Add to this fierce British resistance at several other ports and towns.
The Nazis did not want to have to enter Dunkirk and take the town street by street, house by house. As we would have inflicted serious losses on them.
It is a myth that the British ‘fled’ like Usain Bolt on a good day to Dunkirk. The British put up legendary stands at Boulogne, Arras, St Valery, Calais. Inflicting heavy casualties and allowing many British and Allied soldiers to escape.
You’re wrong. The British did not brilliantly escape through a series of dazzling rearguard actions. The panzers would’ve crushed them had not the Nazis deliberately let them go. They did this because the British were not their primary enemies. Rectifying the embarassing end to the previous war was the goal, and back then as in 1939-45 they simply couldn’t cross the channel. They remembered the starvation caused by the blockade 20 years earlier, and also wanted to keep the Americans from again bailing out their Anglo-Saxon brethren.
I offer as further evidence the fact that the Nazis didn’t start the famed Battle of Britain until after Churchill bombed them.
“It is a myth that the British ‘fled’ like Usain Bolt on a good day to Dunkirk”
Three good days, actually, during which Hitler sat idly by. How do you explain that, other than that they let them go? Oh, I see, they feared heavy casualties. This from the army that had conquered in a month and a half what two previous wars couldn’t accomplish. I’ve also heard that they stopped the tanks because Goering wanted a chance to prove himself. But Nazi reliance on the luftwaffe has been vastly overrated, I assume to make the Battle of Britain more romantic and to excuse Britain and America’s barbaric air campaigns.