Quote Originally Posted by SJPONeill View Post
A solitary battle? Oh, please...!! Solitary except for the support it got from the Dominions...you know...Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, plus India, and all the soldiers, sailors and airmen from Occupied Europe and the support that was already starting to trickle across the Atlantic...poor little England standing alone? Yeah, right...that's gratitude for you...
Read what I wrote. "IF". So if Britain had been invaded and surrendered in 1940/41, the dominions would have fought on?
Didn't happen in France. Troops not in the UK would have been operationally irrelevant.
The dominions would have become de-facto independent nations with no interest in liberating the UK, and struggling for their own existence. Canada is the possible exception, but it lacked the means and manpower to do much.
And if you take samples at every twenty years from 1940 i.e. 1960, 1980 and 2000, all you see is a steady decline to a nation with no (real) carriers, the shadow of an air force and an army that struggles to keep a brigade deployed on operations...
Not arguing with that. Actually, you see a sharp rise and then a sharp decline, after about 1956. Yes the UK became less strategically relevant, relative to those in it's league (US,UK, USSR, France, and China).
WW2 substantially altered the world strategic map, but I fall of my chair open mouthed, if someone tries to convince me that the main benefactor of WW2 was the Soviet Union.