Probably because it would have been laughed out of congress if he had tried to get a declaration of war , the nation was not on a war footing and just out of a depression, both to tool up the factorys and gain institutional knowledge both for workers and management.
But just for giggles , you as president can ship four divisions , under equipped to fight , where are you gonna send em. Poland was over run in 6 weeks , France , meh , england looked like it was only a matter of time before they capitulated to the nazi war machine, specially if lord halifax gained the Prime ministership.
I think France’s biggest failing at the time , was not to have an operational maneuver group, as its called now. The Maginot line ,from what I understand actually worked , but the weak link was belgium , once the german army broke out and started doing end runs , the French army was isolated in static pockets.
I imagine that the French leadership decided that they had conducted an honorable defense and threw in the towel.
The weak link wasn’t really Belgium. Most of the french forces, and the BEF were precisely massed at the Belgian border, awaiting for the German invasion. The weak link was the Ardennes where an attack wasn’t expected and that was defended only by second line troops (typically reservists) without reserves. The allied forces that had rushed into Belgium as soon as Germany launched there a"diversion" attack, were unable to withdraw quickly enough to avoid being cut off from France (lack of mobility, compounded by a massive number of refugees clogging the roads and by the German air superiority, since most of the french aiforce, already clearly inferior to the German one had been sacrified in the Ardennes). Once cut off, they were eliminated in quick order, except for the troops evacuated from Dunkirk (without their equipment, that had been left behind all over Belgium or on the beaches, hence not operational).
Poland held out longer than the French. With vastly inferior technology and geography than the French. Partly in hope of an attack on the west from the French and the English. If France had helped make a two front war, America could have theoretically lent military might there (not that they would have, just sayin’…)
British and American support is nice to have, but an effective two front war wasn’t going to happen without France.
Right. We’re on the same wavelength here.
Another thing with the whole 1940 issue, is that as I mentioned earlier, at the time most of western public opinion viewed the Reich as just an aggressive totalitarian state, rather than as infused with Evil Itself. The idea that it had to be stopped at all cost and resisted to the last drop of blood had not taken hold.
The summary of French plea to US in 1940 was to come out and declare which side are they on. They didn’t even demand troops immediately. Paul Reynard basically said to US, “If you declare war on Hitler, we will continue the fight, otherwise we will sue for peace.”
Yes, France and Britain (plus Australia and New Zealand) declared war on Germany but there were only minor skirmishes on German west border. It was known as Phony War. All the allies performed miserably during 1939-1941.
Just finished reading The First World War by Keegan. There are two episodes that ixtisme may have been thinking of.
The first actually involved the Belgians. Belgium was neutral until invaded by Germany. Their main static defence was the series of fortresses around Liège. Ludendorf was in charge of the German attack on Liège. He’d made some progress, but the Belgians were putting up a good fight. The situation was in flux. Keegan states:
The other potential episode occurred during the German offensive of Verdun in 1916. The context is important: the German army had launched a major offensive on the Verdun area, which had not been in play since the early days of 1914. The French had been treating it as an area of static defence, so it was not heavily manned. The German army had some initial success in advancing, but not all of the forts that made up the Verdun complex had fallen.
So in both cases, the fort in question had been under considerable attacks and the garrisons had taken casualties, and were in situations of considerable uncertainty. Surrenders in this type of situation doesn’t mean much to my mind other than that in those circumstance, surrender was a reasonable option.
Does anybody have any sense of the current capabilities of the French military? I know that they have more nuclear warheads that just about anybody (the exceptions being the Americans and Russians) which gives them a certain amount of military credibility, independent of any other factor. I think they pride themselves on their air force, but how good are the Mirages, really, compared to the top American and Russian planes?
Of course, not having any real enemies makes it hard to assess how they would do in an actual war. Which, when you think of it, suggests that military irrelevancy is a good thing, rather than a cause for shame.
Most of the reputation that the OP speaks of is regarding the French in the United States. In my experience, other nations don’t share the same sentiment. And even then, any intelligent American realizes how bunk it is.
If id had been Britain bordering Germany and France had been an island, the British would have surrendered just as quickly if not quicker. Hell, if Britain hadn’t had that nice natural defense (the English Channel) throughout it’s historyI have my doubts that Britain would exist as a nation today.
Historically, France has always been quite a major military force, mostly because they had to be. Tactically, their location is horrible.
Also, you can’t underestimate the value of the French resistance to the Allied conquering of Europe during the war, the resistance lent a tremendous amount of intelligence and covert assistance to the American/Canadian/British troops that landed to re-take France.
France has dismantled its land-based missiles fllowing the end of the cold war, and only kept sub-based ICBMs. Besides, it kept aircraft-based tactical nuclear weapons. I couldn’t tell how much. But anyway, only 8 countries have nuclear weapons. Excluding India and Pakistan, that still aren’t major nuclear powers, only 6 are left. So, maybe Frane has more nukes than China, the UK and Israel, I wouldn’t know, but it’s not extremely relevant. What akes a difference is having them. Having a dozen more or a dozen less than other countries you’re extremely unlikely to ever fight anyway doesn’t mean much. Once you can obliterate some dozens cities, really, who cares?
I know nothing about aircrafts, so I couldn’t tell. I once posted how many planes France had to answer some question here, but it was a pain in the ass to figure it out exactly, so, unless I find this post I’m not going to search again. I only remember I was surprised that the number was so large, but only because I was previously under the mistaken asumption that aircrafts were quite rare, and that countries in general (not specifically France) had much less of them.
I wasn’t aware that France prided itself on its airforce, by the way.
It is truly sad when our opinion of an entire country is based on a Simpsons quote.
BMalion, the French Underground, through it’s sabotage, was hoped to delay German reinforcement in Normandy by, at most, a few days. Instead, it contributed to a delay of two weeks, long enough for us to consolidate the landings. They also helped many Allied fliers escape occupied territory; I’ve mentioned before on this board that I owe my existence to the French Underground.
Is that a Simpsons quote? I had heard it several times in The Pit and other places but I don’ t watch the Simpsons so didn’t know thats where it origniated.
I thought it was Hitler directly that gained the allies those two weeks respite because he was convinced the invasion of Normandy was a diversion and the REAL invasion was going to be somewhere else (Pas-de-Calais I believe is where the thought the real invasion was going to be) and continued to hold much of his armor and several divisions of troops in reserver for the expected invasion. By the time he realized that Normandy WAS the real invasion it was too late…we were too firmly entrenched on the beaches. His attempt to rush re-inforcements to the area and drive us into the sea was mostly destroyed (IIRC) by tactical air strikes destroying his columns.
I’m not trying to discount the French Resistance but I think your above statment is overblown as far as their impact on saving the D-Day invasion and giving them 2 weeks. Unless you have a cite that says they were the key factor of course.
Since when did Poland hold out longer than France? The invasion of Poland lasted from September 1 to September 29, 1939. The invasion of France lasted from May 10 to June 22, 1939.
German intelligence was utterly, thoroughly conviced that Pas-de-Calais was the real invasion point - the result of a brilliant Allied deception scheme. In fact, the German army put a lot of effort into convincing Hitler to concentrate their forces at Pas-de-Calais.
Even after the invasion at Normandy, the Army continued to advise Hitler that the “real” invasion would soon fall on Pas-de-Calais.
That said, it’s true that the German failure to defend the right area was largely a failure of Germany, not the actions of the Resistance - but this wasn’t one that can be blamed on Hitler.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I was making a joke. I plead ignorance of the semantics used. I thought that when you typed “allied” you meant to type “axis”. I guess I never really thought of the Allied liberation of Europe as an “invasion”, but then again, what else could it be?
Thats fine…I usually leave myself enough wiggle room you could drive a truck through.