> don't let the british retreat from france hitler did order the dunkirk pocket be destroyed, but the area around the town was very heavily defended by british and french troops and the german forces in the area needed time to rest and reorganise before they would be ready for such an assault - especially the infantry who had more or less just marched across the whole of france because the wehrmacht was surprisingly very poorly mechanised - and in the time it took for that to happen the royal navy managed to organise and execute the evacuation. > invade england soon after with a land invasion this was almost literally impossible with the state of the kriegsmarine in 1940/41, the plans were some looney tunes nonsense (e.g. using industrial barges to transport tanks across the channel because suitable landing craft did not exist) and nobody on the german side seemed to really believe that it was realistic either.
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