Dunkirk is irrelevant; Britain only deployed a token air force to the continent, so even if it had been entirely wiped out it would have made little difference. I've already discussed the Battle of Britain above; all I'll say here is that German fighters didn't have the range to even fly over the whole of the isles, let alone establish air superiority. I consider the suggestion laughable.
Dunkirk was irrelevant to any outcome other than the British agreeing to a truce, yeah. I'd started out discussing that possibility but then cut it out but didn't remove reference to Dunkirk.
What "modern thinking" are you referring to when you say they had no chance of winning a battle for air supremacy? OKL clearly changed its priorities several times during the BoB. Historians have disagreed on the cause (initially thinking it was retaliation for the bombing of Berlin when it probably wasn't), but I haven't heard any say that it made no difference on the outcome.
This is a surprise to me; I've hear of no such thing. The effectiveness of aircraft against naval targets was only really recognised after the Battle of Taranto, which was after the BoB was decided. Moreover, aircraft are in general vastly inferior to submarines for interdiction purposes; submarines can hunt undetected for months, far from any identifiable base.
It was clear much earlier during the battle over Norway that aircraft had a role in naval warfare. Most ships on both sides were lost to bombing rather than in ship-to-ship action.
Yes subs can remain undetected, but they usually just sit in a shipping lane and wait. Aircraft had the substantial advantage of active reconnaissance, and I'd argue in terms of raw tonnage destroyed are superior to subs. Yes they can be intercepted, but my premise was that the British airforce was knocked out.
For example, in 6 months of 1941 (since admittedly subs can operate year round while aircraft cannot) the Luftwaffe, shrunk from the BoB and with the vast majority of their forces on the eastern front, accounted for 811,000 tons sunk. The Uboats sank 2,172,000 tons over the entire year. Although again I have to point out that OKL deprived those Uboats of any aerial reconnaissance, so if they'd actually cooperated the Uboat total would have been higher as well.
Well, I guess that's true, but I think only getting full Spanish entry into the war would have helped. The British demonstrably carried out several landings against fortified points in Europe and the Med; there is every reason to believe that the importance of Gibraltar would have forced them to do it there.
Most of those landings were failures and contributed to the "late" start of Husky and Overlord.
Which was a course of action Rommel himself had advised against, until and unless Malta could be taken. Which it was not.
It took some daring supply convoys to relieve it, if Gibraltar had been taken so would have Malta.
This would have been directly contrary to the Japanese war plan, which knew full well that their only hope was to smash the Americans so badly and so quickly that they could force a settlement; detaching forces to pick fights that did not contribute to this goal would never have been considered.
True, but the issue was the total lack of communication and in fact high degree of miscommunication between Berlin and Tokyo. If that's corrected, those war plans would change at least to some degree. I disagree that their "only hope" was a blitz against the USA. As slim as the chances of Germany knocking out Britain, the chances of Japan knocking out the USA were
much slimmer.
I'm not saying all this is
likely mind you, but I have to point out these possibilities if someone says there was "no way" something could happen. There were many times and places where the outcome of the war turned, for and against both sides.
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