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The Folly of Dunkirk:

Could the Germans' have won the Second World War? There were many points in the entirety of the conflict that would have shifted the turnout of various battles in favor of the Wermacht. Nobody really knows for sure if different outcomes would have led to the Nazi victory, but there were battles, that if won by the German Army, would have shifted the entire tide of the war. The Battle of Dunkirk, which could have led to the complete destruction of the British Expeditionary Force, would have been one of these battles.

After the Germans invaded Poland, Great Britain declared war on the Third Reich and lined their troops along the French-held Maginot line and the Germans along their Siegfried line. For the first seven months of the war, relatively little happened. During this time, Germany was securing its newly acquired lebensraum, or living space, of Poland.(Hitler, p. 636) While the Germans were preoccupied in the East, the allies were building up their forces in the West. The British were mass training their troops and Canadian soldiers were landing on British soil. The U.S. was also supplying the Allies with supplies, although they were technically neutral at this time. In lieu of very little going on, the allies called this period the Phoney War and the Germans called it the Sitzkrieg. Eventually this lack of conflict would give way to much destruction on a magnitude that either side could never have predicted given the circumstances of the first seven months.
The Battle of France ended the Phoney War when Germany decided to attack the West after Hitler decided that the Eastern Front was secure enough due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was a peace between Russia and Germany involving the occupation of Poland. (Shirer, p. 476) Hitler decided to attack the West because he knew that Germany would never win a two-front war. He realized that Russia would be the hardest egg to crack in the war and he discerned that his forces were not yet adequate to take on the massive Red Army. In order to make progress in the attempt to fight a one-sided war throughout the conflict, Hitler thought it would be best to get the weaker coalition in the West off Germany's back in order to free up troops to attack the East.
Initially Hitler tried to make peace with Great Britain much like he did a few years earlier with former British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Newly appointed Prime Minister Winston Churchill would have none of it and vowed

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