Sarah Paine – How Hitler almost starved Britain

The Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of British trade. It's close because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports but about half of its food supply. Malta Cree and the Suez Canal lie in the center of Italian ambitions. The Britains are in a world of hurt.

Fall of Norway, fall of France, blockade of Malta, fall of Cree. It is really bad news. Germany should have bought a completely different navy. skip the surface fleet, buy a lot more yubot.

Maybe they would have zapped the British before the United States gets its act together in either World War. If Hillary had just done the unloo and maybe done the Sudetan number in Czechoslovakia and quit, he'd be called Bismar II a genius. But that's not who he is. It turns out that the possibilities for maritime and continental powers are a little different.

Basically, a small subset of countries can defend themselves primarily at sea and that opens certain possibilities and others can't and that opens and closes certain possibilities. And I'm going to talk at this uh story from Britain's point of view, the country with the 360 you can't get me mode. And it's an an instructive case for the United States of the possibilities and the perils of having this sort of uh position. So that is my game plan today.

And you can look at the great peninsula of Europe where Britain is located. And you can see this northern coastline for Britain where it's uncomfortably close to the continent and its enemies are sitting there. It's an an interesting neighborhood. So here's my plan.

I'm going to talk about talk about these continental problems that Britain has been dealing with. If you think about it, Britain was always fighting France and then in 1871, Germany reun uh unifies and then the problems Germany and I'm going to pick up the story in 1939 when things are really bad for Britain. So I'm going to talk about first these continental problems and then I'm going to talk about how Britain tried to deal with it and first it has to do with getting sea control and then once you can do that finding some peripheral theaters where you might be able to fight and deal with the continental problem and you probably need allies and so that those are the first uh ...