So In ww2 what did the British do? I've learned alot about what America and Russia did but never Britain

He's continuing to protect the world from the evil that is Germony, obviously.

Based Dad.

They made the biggest contributions against the Nazis, after the Soviets and Americans. Pretty primary school stuff.

Defeated Germany in the Battle of Britain, the first major campaign fought entirely in the air, this happened before the USA and the USSR joined.

Conducted a major strategic bombing campaign against Germany.

The overwhelming majority of the naval forces and not far off half of the land forces that took part in D-Day were British.

I voted Out.

>b-b-but muh Eagle Squadron.
>SweatingAmerifat.jpg

All of the above plus inventing Special Forces and writing the book on Intelligence Gathering.

Radar and the breaking the Enigma Code were pretty sweet tricks too.

>crack the enigma code and provide the allies information on their intelligence gathering
>victory at the Battle of Britain
>victory at El Alamein and North Africa
>victory in the Burma campaign
>kept allied shipping/supply lanes protected through naval escorts
>annihilated the German Kriegsmarine, sinking the Bismarck and Tirpitz as well as most of their U-boat fleet.

Good answer.
Tfw when Merkel tries to conscript me from my cozy home in Ireland to fight the Russians or Iranians

beat the kriegsmarine
beat the luftwaffe
beat the africa korps
beat the shit out of the rhineland
beat the italians
beat the japanese in burma

if anything we are underrated and i say that unironically as a brit

So pretty much just acted as a base for the Americans to do the heavy lifting.

Wow, this thread is actually pretty non bias and fair to Britain. Quite nice to see.

While not nearly as much as america and Russia, it was Britain who prevented the Axis winning in 1940. It then, despite near starvation was able to fight on.

While it certainly became america;'s sidekick by 1943, it stayed in until the end and provided valuable aid in North Africa, beat the Japanese in Burma, and was a major ally on the western and italian fronts.

Honestly it's ww2 that makes me feel quite proud to be british, to know our country stood against fascism alone and kept on fighting out of principle and genuine moral reasons.

Their North Africa campaign was vital and the Browning Automatic Rifle is the one of the best weapons ever created.

The British did a lot, but most of what they did that was visible they didn't do alone.

For starters, depending on where exactly you were, roughly 30-40% of the forces in the late war Western or Italian front were either from Britain itself or their various commonwealth or colonial nations.

They did quite a bit of the strategic bombing campaign. While it did fail to force the Germans to surrender in absence of ground troops, its stated goal, it drew up enormous luftwaffe resources and caused considerable damage.

They also carried a lot of the forgotten fronts of WW2. They occupied most of Syria, Persia, and Iraq, and had only token help in those endeavors. They occupied enormous areas of non-vital enemy colonies in East Africa. And people tend to forget that both Germany and Italy had quite a bit of Atlantic trade (Italy's biggest pre-war trading partner was the u.s. itself), which there wasn't even a battle to oppose, they simply stopped as soon as the British pushed the proverbial button to shut them down.

So while the Brits were undoubtedly the weakest of the Big Three, they did do quite a bit. And most people underestimate just how many tanks and planes and artillery they turned out, how much of the Axis strength went opposing actual British operations, or just potential ones, garrisons into places like Norway that never actually saw fighting.

Ran away at Dunkirk, surrendered at Singapore and bombed civilians at Dresden

Sat on their island and cried until Yanks agreed to help them.

wow for 13 posts this thread was going okay

a new record

...

conscripted colonial soldiers...fought in the pacific to defend Australia. Fought in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe.

Successfully defended their island in the Battle of Britain…night time bombing of German industry.

They were involved in all of it, if only to a lesser extent.

Britsh led operations like Dieppe and Market Garden were notable failures though.

>someone put actual time and effort into making this shit

sad

Dunno about men, but the women had sex with Americans

As opposed to the heroic, glorious Germans who ran away at Stalingrad, surrendered at Berlin and bombed civilians at Coventry, right?

You know this is an Axis propaganda leaflet and basically never happened right? it's sad as hell when Americans smugly post this shit.

They're biggest victory was the fact they retreated from Dunkirk in an orderly fashion. Think about that.

Not much, but somehow they still believe they mattered

What about Crusader?

This is Axis propaganda... They used it to demotivate soldiers.

>year of our lord and savior, John Browning, 1911+106
>Implying the BAR is British.

I hope you just mistook it for the Bren.

Yeah, let's think about that

>posting literal Nazi propaganda

You 2 realize the reason Dunkirk is considered a success is because far more lives were saved than expected?

No one claims it was a military victory, but it was almost certainly a miracle.

It wasn't a miracle, lives were saved because the French rearguard sacrificed themselves so all of the British and some of the French could evacuate

youtube.com/watch?v=w6C5P-AYGdY

I never denied that?

But the fact that the lines were able to hold on so long so so many could escape IS a miracle.

Not every post is a dig at france you insecure shit.

>Not every post is a dig at france you insecure shit.

Every post claiming that Dunkirk was a [British] success is
All they did was wait on the beach and evacuate

It WAS a success for the allies

Keep in mind they were expecting the entire BEF to be killed or captured, and over 300,000 were saved. It was a fantastic beacon of hope for the allies.

Reminder that Allies had 8 fucking months that they could had used to launch an attack against Germany but all they did was to sit in their bunkers&trenches on the franco-german border and hope that the war in the west would be another static war like WW1.

it's almost like the french-german border had massive defenses and mines on both sides...

wow.....

damn whats this!?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Line

must be some kinda alt history....

The French were still traumatized by WW1
They declared war out of obligation but hoped that if they just sat there, the Germans would forgot they were at war and everything would just fad away

And the British....well, the British have always been too much of pussies to ever fight alone so they just waited alongside the French

Holy shit, you make an excuse for the French but when the British do the same thing, they're pussies?

Do you not see the blatant hypocrisy?

Doesnt mean offensive was impossible
The French started some offensive but then changed their mind and withdrew

Not the guy you're responding to, but that probably has to do with the enormous number of new German divisions that were being called up and how they were going to get shitstomped if they stayed much longer.

Largely because of 2 reasons:

>They were rapidly approaching much larger defenses and were ill-equipped
>they were more suited to defensive warfare

Remind me how many troops the British lost in WW1 compared to the French?
The British weren't traumatized, they wanted to fight (which was shown by how they didnt surrender like the French)

What they didnt want was to fight alone
They never even once had the guts to face another european power at war alone in their entire history (unlike the Germans, the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch...etc)

>4.5% of population lost during the ww1 and significant part of the country being bombed/shot/mined/gassed to hell vs lets sit on our islands and keep feeding the colonial troops to the huns

>700,000 of your men are killed

>hahhaha this dude bordering you with a larger population lost 1.1 million so your trauma is invalid, sorry

What?

7/10 British Empire troops in ww1 were English, despite only around 1.5/10 being from england. Drop the 'Britain relied on colonial troops' meme.

They made the Americans forget what morals is and convinced them to bomb civilians.

>85% of your troops being from colonies does not mean that you rely on colonial troops

You misread my post.

1.5/10 Citizensof the Empire were English
7/10 Soldiers were English

>with a larger population

Actually, Britain had a slightly larger population than France by 1914

>waiting for the enemy to attack your prepared, fortified position is a bad thing now

FFS.

>7/10 British Empire troops in ww1 were English

Wrong, only around 50% of the troops Britain mobilized were from the UK
Pic related

Mobilized can mean anything, from radio repairman to pilot. Casualties is the actual important part.

Too bad that that line wasn't as solid as Brits&French thought.

Basically a big jump off point.

And fucked up the Nazis in Africa

Did a lot in Asia too

They literally went around the line?

>drag France into declaring a war they don't want before they're ready
>French agree because Britain says they're doing it but they're cautious about perfidy
>somehow get rekt by a second-rate naval power in their own backyard leading to neutral Norway falling
>real war starts
>send troops to fight for thirteen fucking days in France before abandoning the French entirely
>evacuate unannounced while the French are still getting their asses kicked trying to hold the rest of the country alone without their mechanized northern flank
>sit on island and watch over the next month as the French get rekt
>decide to bomb the French killing hundreds of their soldiers because you don't want the Germans to seize their ships
>Germans don't seize their ships anyway
>win air battle but somehow keep getting rekt on the seas despite having one of the world's strongest navies and your enemy having little more than U-boats
>be heavily propped up by American materiel that provides literally 1/4 of your war budget and most of your modern tanks yet still can't defeat one fucking German corps stiffening out a couple corps of Italian light infantry and a couple Italian armored divisions
>for nearly three years
>cry and cry until the Americans enter the war
>play second-banana as America does everything on fronts you claim credit for
>70 years later smugly mock the French as cowards and take all the credit
>meanwhile you run ineffective area bombing raids that do nothing but cost you tens of thousands of planes while ignoring the Americans' recommendations for precision strikes that Speer admits were way more effective
>"oy we won that second world war we did'

First and last few lines in particular must be emphasized. They really fucked over their allies.

Meanwhile almost everything that actually mattered, the BEF's materiel, was captured by the Germans.

wwiiequipment.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=125:british-equipment-losses-at-dunkirk-and-the-situation-post-dunkirk&catid=50:other-articles&Itemid=61

I'd say Human lives are *slightly* more important than equipment

>with a larger population

AKSHUALLY

mad french tears

if you're the Americans with effectively unlimited funds and skilled soldiers are actually harder to replace than materiel, yeah.

Not if you're a resource-poor island with inferior industry to your opponent and an army that was tiny to begin with in terms of materiel.

So less than a million difference, fair enough.

That said, Britain still lost 700,000 people, that's terrible.

I'm not dismissing France or Germany's trauma, I understand they had a worse time, I'm just saying england didn't exactly enjoy ww1 either

Holy shit you're the edgiest cunt ever if you actually think equipment is more important than saving lives

>an army that was tiny to begin with
>well we lost 300,000 of them, but we got all the tanks and artillery back home!
>why is noone joining up to replace the guys we just threw away?!?!

this, not to mention you've just given 300,000 sons, fathers and brothers a death sentence basically.

The states should focus on special ops and intelligence instead of killing soldiers as lackeys for corporate interests.

We learned it from watching the Germans.

Yep, that's going to look really good when we ask Mrs. Muggins to donate her railings to the Spitfire fund isnt it?

>not if you're a resource-poor island with inferior industry to your opponent

But that's wrong, you retard.

The Germans who specifically targeted industries instead of cities. But since factories can be defended the cowardly brits decided to target peoples homes instead.

Tell me, what industries were they specifically targeting at Rotterdam, or Warsaw on the first day of the war?

>actually expecting France to be able to defend France is too much to ask for

>this is what werhaboos actually believe

Specifically targeted industries like Coventry Cathedral, St Julians Church in Norwich and the Wallace Collection?

>The RAF just survived by the skin of their teeth though, to be fair

you mean won comfortably.

seriously the RAF grew in strength over the course of the battle

and yet not only was all of that material replaced relatively quickly, as in almost comleteyy by july/august with enough having been produced to send some 300 tankks to north arfica but by the spring/summer of 41 the british had sufficient spare to send some to russia.

the loss was enormous for sure but with industrial production ramping up to full war economy levels it was hardly irreplaceable

>you mean won comfortably.

In hindsight. Goring's shitty orders are the only reason the RAF survived long enough to grow in production.

bullshit, pure bullshit, they targetted cities with industry, as did the british but they werent any more accurate tending to gut residential districts more often than they hit factories.

and the british aimed for factories they just accepted that accuracy was shit and that plastering a whole area was the best way to get bombs on target and incidently force huge resources to be diverted to defending against the attacks

Not that user, but seriously. Do you know how many bombs were dropped on Germany? Here's a pic. The idea that Germany could bomb Britain into submission, even against no fighter opposition whatsoever, is ludicrous. And of course, the British can always pull back to bases in the Midlands if things got bad, lowering their reaction speed for making it way, way harder to strike their fighters on the ground.

They won pretty easily, and Goering's shitty orders had a lot less to do with the fact that the British had a larger aircraft industry and the home field advantages in a purely aerial war.

you're forgetting (as everyone does) that the UK ran the most devastating intelligence operation the world has ever seen, which undoubtedly hastened the end of the war by years. They invented modern computers to break the German military's code encryption.

>and the british aimed for factories
Dresden

Again, not the guy you're responding to, but your post has a lot of errors.

>bullshit, pure bullshit, they targetted cities with industry, as did the british but they werent any more accurate tending to gut residential districts more often than they hit factories.

They actually were more accurate. German bombers were repurposed ground attack craft, by and large. Things like Ju-87s and 88s bombed from much lower altitudes than British bombers, leading to higher accuracy.

>and the british aimed for factories

They really didn't. The main thrust of British strategic bombing was a morale effect, and they thought thebest way to go around it was "dehousing". Harris thought of economic bombing as a distraction the RAF couldn't afford. If you want to look up on the subject, I'd recommend Bomber Command by Hastings.

>The idea that Germany could bomb Britain into submission, even against no fighter opposition whatsoever, is ludicrous.

It is, but it's not ludicrous to suggest that if Britain were exposed to such bombing, public support for the war would wane and a negotiated peace would be on the cards.

700,000 casualties, didnt surrender until they are pushed back to a tiny pocket of the city while on the brink of starvation in some shithole 1000km from home.

Honestly what did he mean by this? Its such a disgrace to all the people who died here to label them cowards. I guarantee you would have kecked yourself to death in terror. Either that or get slaughtered with an entrenching tool in some delapidated porch

>but it's not ludicrous to suggest that if Britain were exposed to such bombing, public support for the war would wane and a negotiated peace would be on the cards.

Other than the fact that it very rarely works in any other case example, and the Blitz did not in fact damage British willingness to fight. Rallying around the flag is a much more typical reaction to indirect attacks on civilians like this than is terrorizing into submission.

Hitler never really focused on England yet they claim they "held fast". Things only started moving when America started supporting them heavily.

>and the Blitz did not in fact damage British willingness to fight.

If the Germans briefly could establish dominance in the air it would've been a lot worse, and hit factories more often and crippling the British ability to fight back.

If the people still want to fight, the government won't when they have no ability to.

>my disasterous defeat is actually really glorious because more of us died, not like your disasterous defeat!!!!

Despite the fact for over a year, England was the only allied power in the war, Hitler never focused on them?

Nigga what?

Between June 1940 and June 1941, England was literally on its own, Hitler had no one else TO focus on.

again, no.

the RAF production rates didnt increase significantly during the fighting, fighter production was always ahead of losses averaging around 460 single engine fighters a month with pilot replacement rates and the return of wounded aircrew to service meaning that pilot numbers even at worse et pace with casualties.

the luftwaffe on the other hand never had a adequate supply of replacement pilots and didnt have great aircraft production rates either, the luftwaffe even when it was successfully grinding down RAF strength wasnt doing so fast enough as its own strength was diminishing more rapidly

Eh, fair enough i suppose, you win!