Hamlet
Manic Depressive
Originally posted by MrPresident
Actually this is completely wrong. There was period in the war were Britain was the only nation fighting the axis. The Soviet Union had made peace with Hitler and the US had not yet been attacked. I admit that Germany was preparing for the Russian invasion but 6 months was more than enough to conquer most of Europe.
But you're missing the point - Hitler was, mistakenly, never really concerned about Britain in the same way he was about The USSR. Britain didn't feature in his grand short term war and ideological plan, whereas the USSR did in Lebansraum.
In the period you describe, Hitler was both fighting Britain and yet he wasn't. He had little concern with actually conquering Britain, and was merely damaging it (or at least attempting to), rather than actually massing his forces to attack it.
Again, I can only stress that if Hitler had mustered the entire material and resource power of mainland Europe against it in a concentrated attack, Britain wouldn't have lasted long. Fortunately, he never did.
The main problem would have been securing a way to move troops onto The British mainland. However, once this was established, Britain would have been finished. Consider: it took until around 1943 before Britain could properley re-group and rebuild it's armed capacity before D-Day.
Originally posted by MrPresident
It has been proven that there was a game resembling football played in England in the 14th century. Admittely it doesn't have any of the modern rules but it was football.
This is a rather moot point: I assume people have been kicking balls about since the year dot.