Well this may sound a little daft but I’ll state it anyway.
When I was much younger I asked my mother why didn’t we make peace with Germany and avoid the bloodshed of WWII.
My mother was 17 when WWII finished, had no participation whatsoever in it and had no direct family members who fought in the war either. However that didn’t stop her having a grasp of what was actually happening.
Anyway this was her reply with words to tne effect of;
“Because we’d have been OK for a bit.
“Then he (Adolf Hitler) would have wanted to have come over here telling us what to do, making us fly swastikas from every lamppost, having Jerries goose stepping down Pall Mall with Buck House bring draped with tne Swastika and him giving the Nazi salute to Moseley and his Blackshirts. We’d have been as badly off as having been invaded !”
To be honest my mother was probably right.
And I think Winston Churchill also recognised that and that was the main reason he decided to fight.
NOTE : A HUGE ‘THANK YOU’ for all the upvotes c 4800 given to this answer. I never imagined in my wildest dreams I’d have so many upvotes for essentially quoting my late mother who passed in 2007.
Hitler was anxious for a peace deal. He respected the British and never had any faith in invasion plans drawn up by his generals.
Churchill had no illusions about peace with the Nazis. He had seen what had happened to the other states that made peace with Hitler: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, etc. They were mere puppet states similar to the Soviet satellites.
Churchill knew the Germans would want the British fleet surrendered making liberation of Britain more difficult.
Churchill believed he had a duty to preserve the British Empire. In November 1942, Churchill had said that “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”
Finally, he knew peace through a surrender would mean the end of Great Britain. British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax had urged Churchill to plea for peace before the full fury of the German Luftwaffe was unleashed over London skies.
Churchill replied, “Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those who surrender tamely are finished.”
Hitler was trying to use a tactic frequently used across time – including by Vladimir Putin at the moment.
Firstly, make a sudden attack. Because you have the element of surprise, you will be able to capture quite a lot of territory. But after a while your troops will get tired and consume your resources, and your target will get its defence together. So your advance slows and stops, so the war becomes expensive and for no gain.
So you offer peace. You may even offer to withdraw from some of your conquered land, but crucially not all of it. If the offer is accepted, you withdraw your troops intact, declaiming loudly that you are satisfied with your gains.
And immediately start expanding and rearming your army. And in a small number of years, repeat the process with another sudden attack,
No peace deal with Hitler would have lasted more than about two years. And, because those two years would have been spent madly rearming by both sides, the restarted war would have been even more bloody.
