stodge, whenever the idea comes up of Hitler(Goebbels being irrelevant) suddenly offering terms remotely resembling peace with honor we have entered ASB territory.
I have this crazy idea: Why don't we reserve the term ASB for things that really are ASB--that require modifications to the laws of physics or that are mathematically impossible. I know that on this board it's often used to say something on the order of 'I really disagree', and nothing personal--I actually agree with your argument, but using ASB like that trivializes the term so much that it's becoming meaningless.
The issue isn't that Hitler wouldn't offer reasonable terms. He probably would. He wasn't really interested in destroying the British empire, at least not in the short term. The issue is whether or not the British would trust any terms Hitler offered.
Since he shredded Munich Hitler's credibility is seen as nil in London and yet another proof of this is about to be added by his negotiating in extremely bad faith with France, leaving the French delighted because the treaty did not mention Alsace-Lorraine...because Hitler was simply taking the provinces without informing the soon-to-be Vichy French.
Yeah. Hitler pretty much ensured that if war came it was going to end in either total German victory or total German defeat when he ignored Munich and grabbed the rest of Czechoslovakia. After that nobody but Stalin was stupid enough to enter into a pact with Hitler if they didn't have to. The only way the Brits would accept a peace with Hitler is as a temporary expedient because they felt that not doing it would lead to an invasion or more likely an unstoppable partitioning of their empire.
DaleCoz, the likely result might be a slight delay in the (largely) outdated weapons that the US shipped to the UK at this time. Certainly the destroyers will go as the arrangement very much favored the US.
True, the small arms were mostly World War I surplus, but they were serviceable and would have been useful in places like the Philippines or China, or even in training and equipping the US army through early 1942. The French plane orders that got reassigned to the Brits were actually a mixed bag, but did make some difference.
On the destroyers, I don't know. The US might well have figured that they could simply take the bases the British leased as payment if, as expected, the Brits folded and became 'Vichy Britain', which a lot of Americans expected. If the British situation was perceived as desperate enough the US might have given the destroyers, but made even more extensive demands.
It really depends on US perceptions. In retrospect we can find a lot to admire about the fighting spirit of the Brits, but what indicators of British fighting spirit did Americans have in the summer of 1940? Well, there was appeasement, Munich, what was widely perceived as half-hearted responses to the invasions of Poland and Norway, the rapid fall of France, and in this scenario a surrender of the bulk of the BEF. Not much there to indicate that the Brits had the will to fight. Why ship perfectly good weapons to somebody without the will to use them? Again, this was a matter of perceptions. The Brits needed to demonstrate fighting spirit. The Dunkirk evacuation didn't exactly do that, but they were enough to convince the US to give Britain the benefit of the doubt.