You don't know much about the French other than the crap you see in movies do you? Let's clear up some stuff for you.
"The myth of the Surrender monkeys." The French aren't cowards. The French fought the Germans in WW1 until the point of exhaustion. Their people were at the point of revolt and of course the Marxists were there leading them. The numbers they lost in that war were devastatingly high. Society ending numbers.
They reordered their society, opened their borders to former colonies and did what they could to rebuild. They poured money into their military, but having lost almost an entire generation, there is only so much that can be done with troop strength. There was also a great distrust of the generals, as many viewed the number of casualties as the fault of generals who did not value life.
To counter, France invested heavily in building the greatest wall of fortifications ever until that point. The Marginot Line. It wasn't a silly idea either. The concept was designed to slow the Germans and to force them to go around it, allowing the French to mass their forces and to meet the Germans in the ground the French desired. The problem was that the world went and changed. The German Army it was designed to stop was the nightmare the French faced in WW1, not the mechanized juggernaut of WW2. Germany bypassed the Line and raced through the French forces and simply overwhelmed the French before it could even mass it's main force.
Some French fought anyway and died. Some fled to other nations where they continued to fight on. The Vichy cooperated with the Germans, and doomed France to the state we see today. When it was all said and done, the French government that was formed was comprised of loyal French, that didn't include a lot of the right wing entities in France. That had become a very unpopular movement, understandably so.
Very very very simplified reading of French history in the 20th Century.
No, we will not put ourselves in you're place, we are America not France. We are Americans not Frenchman. We will fight. Not cower.
You don't know much about the French other than the crap you see in movies do you? Let's clear up some stuff for you.
"The myth of the Surrender monkeys." The French aren't cowards. The French fought the Germans in WW1 until the point of exhaustion. Their people were at the point of revolt and of course the Marxists were there leading them. The numbers they lost in that war were devastatingly high. Society ending numbers.
They reordered their society, opened their borders to former colonies and did what they could to rebuild. They poured money into their military, but having lost almost an entire generation, there is only so much that can be done with troop strength. There was also a great distrust of the generals, as many viewed the number of casualties as the fault of generals who did not value life.
To counter, France invested heavily in building the greatest wall of fortifications ever until that point. The Marginot Line. It wasn't a silly idea either. The concept was designed to slow the Germans and to force them to go around it, allowing the French to mass their forces and to meet the Germans in the ground the French desired. The problem was that the world went and changed. The German Army it was designed to stop was the nightmare the French faced in WW1, not the mechanized juggernaut of WW2. Germany bypassed the Line and raced through the French forces and simply overwhelmed the French before it could even mass it's main force.
Some French fought anyway and died. Some fled to other nations where they continued to fight on. The Vichy cooperated with the Germans, and doomed France to the state we see today. When it was all said and done, the French government that was formed was comprised of loyal French, that didn't include a lot of the right wing entities in France. That had become a very unpopular movement, understandably so.
Very very very simplified reading of French history in the 20th Century.