Hi Gina Vener; Re: "I don't understand how you can say WWI did not have an impact on on France's "willingness to fight" up to and including WWII. ..."
Hey, that's quite the retreat from your post that started all this:
Gina Vener, October 18, 2002
The French damn near bled to death at Verdun, and never got over it. They don't have the will to fight as a nation anymore, Charles DeGaulle was their last gasp. But they like to keep their illusions. #reply-18129366
Pretty good come back, I'd say. Since I've shown that the French have been the most militaristic of any EU country since WW2 (hell, any country that was industrialized in 1945), your argument that France wasn't willing to fight was getting kind of hard to carry, LOL. I was kind of wondering how you were going to come back from having your post completely devastated by the facts.
But let's cut to the chase. The current topic is the attack on Iraq. The reason France comes up is because France does not support us on this. This is now, not between WW1 and WW2. So your thesis about France's not having guts due to losses at Verdun in 1916 is dead, dead, dead. If you want to continue arguing for it you will only convince people that you (a) are ignorant of military history, (b) are unable to think clearly, or (c) are unable to admit being wrong.
A better retreat would have been for you to suggest that France's post war experiences in colonial warfare has turned them into pansies, and that you simply had a typing error that confused "Verdun" with "Vietnam".
Re: "... I notice that that at full strength the US had roughly 1/4 the divisions the Germans had (for 2 theatres, yet) so it's not just numbers."
I'd love to tear apart this simplistic and misleading statement, but I'm busy today. Remind me again later and I'll dig up links that show that the Axis, as a whole, was severely outnumbered by the Allies, as a whole. When you look at the US vs Germany figures, you're ignoring a very important contribution by the USSR, as well as others.
-- Carl |
