Our contempt for the French is the return for their contempt for the whole rest of the world, including us. As I’ve posted before, EVERYBODY hates France.
Jacques Julliard, “Sur une déculotée,” Le Nouvel Observateur, July 19, 2001, after the poor reception to France’s offer to host the 2008 Olympics. Quoted in the book Anti-Americanism by Jean-François Revel.
Not at all. The Maginot Line was never “overrun” - in fact it served its primary purpose, to ensure that the Germans would not be able to succeed with a direct invasion from the East across the Rhine. Nor is it true that the Line ended at Belgium so that the Germans simply “went around” the line from the North - it did extend along that border as well, all the way to the Channel, if not as strongly fortified on that side.
As well as being a general deterrent to invasion, its purpose was also to slow down any invasion to allow the French army to mobilize, as the French recognized that they were seriously outnumbered by the Germans in the event of another war by almost 2-to-1. In the end, this is what really killed France’s will to fight: the Germans were not only able to break through, by steamrolling through Belgium going through the dense forest of Ardennes which had been considered “impassable” by a significant military force, but were able to do so with an awesome speed, before the French army could mobilize (which would take about three weeks).
By the time the French government surrendered, most of the Maginot stations which had seen action had held their ground, but had been bypassed and could be attacked from behind.
Don’t have an answer for the OP but regarding the issue of the Maginot Line, it seems to me that the real problem wasn’t reliance on the fortifications, but rather France’s unwillingness to attack Germany after the invasion of Poland (though this is a charge which could be leveled at Britain too).
The US perspective of France is not mirrored in Europe. It’s a pretty strange and ignorant perspective as best I can see.
The thing needs context, whether French assistance to the former British colonies in the War of Independence or WW1 when France sustained literally unimaginable casualties.
If Americans want to criticise France for not having the balls to fight, you might want to compare French losses in any campaign - including Napoleonic and WW1 - to what the US public will accept before it’s time to declare ‘victory’.
In relation to WW2, no nation joined by land was able to stand up to Nazi Germany except the Soviets at the end of a 1,000 mile supply chain in the middle of winter.
But this isn’t a cock -measuring competition, it’s just a response to what seems a very long-standing and ignorant perspective. I guess if it wasn’t the French, it’d be another country - it seems to be the nature of these things.
I have seen the reference numerous times in various books and memoirs about WW2, it was always a joke made by British Tommies attempting to sell captured Italian supplies after the first British offensive in North Africa. I am digging through my books to find a concrete reference because google is throwing up a lot of anti-french noise.
Same here - the joke was
Regards,Shodan
I’d heard the joke earlier than the Six-Day War, in reference to Lee Harvey Oswald’s Italian rifle.
A collary joke was “how does an Italian admiral review his fleet? With a glass-bottom boat.”
robardin, I did misspeak, “overrun” was not correct, but “bypassed”, “outflanked”, or “blown by” may have been better. The fortifications were and are amazing, and many remained intact as fighting positions, mostly the ones the Germans bypassed, analogous to Island Hopping in the Pacific.
IIRC, right after WW2 when more scientific studies were made of actual infantry combat, it turned out that the vast majority of troops really fired very few shots anyway.
I recently read Theodore Dalrymple’s book, “The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism” and he addresses the topic of the French collapse during the German invasion of WWII.
The German invasion was much more successful than anyone, except Hitler thought it would be. Most of the German high command thought it would fail or at least expected a long hard campaign.
The trouble is that the French intelligentsia was infected with pacifism after WWI and this carried over into the French school system. Young men who had been taught that all governments are morally equivalent and that there is nothing worth fighting and dying for are not the ideal troops for a dogged defensive fight.
The German occupation was a devastating counterpoint to pacifist ideas and many prominent French pacifists ending up in the French resistance, but the damage was done.
I recall that Thomas Sowell explores some similar themes in his book, “Intellectuals and Society”.
If I had to pick the greatest military leader ever, I’d say Genghis Khan. But my second choice would be Napoleon. I still make French jokes, though. (I like telling people that the French used up their allowance of badassitude for the next 500 years with Napoleon).
And to follow on from the weird and ignorant stuff about the French, the Italian stuff is even more obviously ignorant - why the fuck would anyone want to fight for a stupid Fascist like Mussolini? Of course you’re going to surrender at the first opportunity.
Some really odd parochial shit in this thread.
I’d like a near-mint, never fired Rasheed (only 8000 made). Maybe they were planning ahead for the export market. :dubious:
Are you suggesting that the Italians were all willing to surrender ASAP because they hated Mussolini so much? He may have not enjoyed the support that Hitler had, and was certainly offed by his own countrymen, but I don’t think you can assume a lack of support and motivation. There are Mussolini apologetics around today, even, so not everyone could have considered him a “stupid fascist.” I don’t know enough about that battlefront to say what affected Italian performance, or even if they hadn’t fought quite well after all.
It seems that their performance in the first Italo-Abyssinian/Ethiopian War might have something to do with it. The Ethiopians were the only (one of the few?) African nations to defeat an European colonial power, and I’m sure it created some negative reputation for a time.
I think people conflate Italy’s role in WW2 with Germany’s.
Italy was only in the war for 3 years (June 1940 > until Mussolini was thrown out). It had a very small industrial base, it’s hardware was outdated - for example, Mussolini got the air force involved in the Battle of Britain with bi-planes and the army was in no better condition, and the country as a whole really wasn’t fanatical about fighting for the Fascist leadership.
For goodness sake, the population of Naples threw the Germans out. Italy, even today, is left-leaning (socialism to communism), it was even more the case then - of course a great chunk of the population wanted rid of the fascists.
As others have pointed out, it would be a bit rich for the Americans to criticise the French for not fighting on in 1940, when the Americans themselves were staying well clear of the war.
I suspect this meme – in so far as it applies to the French – owes a good deal to the British. After the French signed their armistice with Germany the British did all kinds of quite unpleasant things, like sinking the French fleet – with substantial loss of life – because they didn’t trust French assurances that it would not be made available to the Germans, mounting air raids in which many French civilians died, etc. The British felt understandably conflicted about this – they had been allied with the French until very shortly before, and France had displayed no hostile intent towards the UK. One way of resolving this conflict would have been to play up the “we were betrayed by cowardly Frenchies” idea.
And it would have leveraged off an impression left in the Great War. In the early years of that war the French army in the field was very, very much larger than the British. It bore the brunt of various attacks and offensives, the experience of which demonstrated that, with the military strategy and technology of 1914, defending forces were practically impregnable and attacking forces would suffer horrendous losses. So the French suffered absolutely appalling losses – much more, in numerical terms, than the British. After Verdun the French generals were pretty well aware that the morale of their troops was badly degraded, and that requiring them to engage in further offensives would damage it further, and could lead to mutiny. Hence from 1916 on they adopted a largely defensive position. The brunt of offensive actions was thereafter born by the British armies who, by this stage of the war, had been built up considerably.
The upshot of all this is that the British experience of the Great War was, to a large extent, of British forces mounting difficult offensives while the French sat tight in defensive positions. This was not likely to build up a strong impression among the Tommies of the fighting qualities of the French. And this was a preconception that they could draw on a generation later to help justify to themselves their actions against the French in 1940 and afterwards.
This gives some sense of the scale of casualties in WW1 - it’s beyond crazy:
You must be kidding. Napoleon was an adventurer. After his initial successes, he got thrashed. Egypt? Russia? Spain?
The long term antipathy to France was due to de Gaulle’s “go it alone” attitude. They tried to be both in and out of NATo, for example.
The current hatred is more American/Republican. When GWB was arm-twisting the minor nations in the security council to agree to an invasion of Iraq for relatively bogus reasons, they were making offers like “you’ll never get another cent of American aid and we’ll block any international organizations we contribute to as well.” FOr nations like (IIRC) Mozambique, foreign aid is very important. The French consider themselves (perhaps too pompously) defenders of the third world and announced they would veto the resolution, thus relieveing several small countries of having to decide to sell their soul for food. Hence the adoption of the whole Simpsons “Cheese eating surrender monkeys” meme (Simpsons never miss an opportunity to insult anyone), “Freedom Fries”, and all that other crap.
Who was right? That’s another question.
Not really a question of who was right; morally, legally and in every other sense that comes to mind, Rumsfeld’s ‘Old Europe’ (which included France) was correct. At least 700,000 dead and innocent Iraq’s would likely agree, as would the millions still living in camps.
If you want to ask questions, how about why so much of US society got behind that retarded, jingoistic characterisation - you don’t even need to leave these boards, just take a look at the “Freedom Fries” threads in the archive.
Really, in comparison to what the great US/UK alliance did, the significance of French “attitude” pales somewhat.
My guess is the meme is solely from WW2. Few Americans today know that Napoleon was French, and his empire covered most of Europe at one point. Probably he’s better known for being insane.