Two other things "besides Goering's hubris "saved the British Army at Dunkirk: a week of superb late spring weather in the English Channel, and the courage of hundreds of common British citizens who braved the seas and the Luftwaffe attacks to help rescue 338,000 British, French, and allied troops. It marked the first of many major failures by Goering (Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, Messenger op. cit.).
"Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?
Because, Hitler had no great personal animosity towards Great Britain, whom he thought of as fellow Aryans (Bullock, op. cit., p.337). He was hoping that Great Britain would see the error of its ways, and join him in his crusade against the Bolshevik Jew in the East, the ultimate source for the lebensraum (land for expansion) Hitler had written about in Mein Kampf. A change of government, with someone like his friend J.F.C. Fuller at its head, would have turned the Axis triumvirate into a foursome that included the resources of the largest empire in the world.
"Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet?
As I said before, Hitler never understood naval warfare. Additionally, most of the French fleet was not in European France where he could get his hands on it. When France surrendered, many of the French ships at sea preferred internment by the British, or in the United States, rather than surrender to the Nazis. Most of the rest of the French fleet ended up in either Dakar in French West Africa, or Oran in French Algeria. The Royal Navy, in a tragic preemptive strike, sank or disabled much of the French fleet at Oran. (Messenger, op. cit.)
"Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez?
And just how would Hitler have transported troops there? Could he have transported them through a neutral and unwilling Turkey? Or across an Eastern Mediterranean controlled by the Royal Navy?
Additionally, the British had units next door in Palestine, and at the first indication of France ceding Syria to Hitler, the British would have brought in reinforcements from Egypt and India and taken it away, just as they did a year later when the Vichy French tried to use Syria "at Hitler's instigation "to support the revolt in Iraq. It is self evident (to me at least) that demanding and controlling Syria were far beyond Hitler's capabilities, and he knew it.
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