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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (52987)	10/18/2002 5:04:27 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "Or maybe, like France, we would surrender quickly and set up a collaborationist regime in the unoccupied part of the country. Who knows?" When faced with overwhelming military force, it is human nature to surrender. If you somehow doubt that the US would do this, you should consider history, and simply note that the South didn't rise again, and that the British were able to maintain garrisons in many regions of US territory during the Revolution. The whole point of your argument, that the French are different from others, is racist or nationalistic. To support it, you need to find much better evidence than the simplistic arguments you have come up with so far. The historical facts in June 1940 do not indicate that the French lacked a will to fight. They lost in a war of maneuver against the Germans who outnumbered them, had better weapons, were better organized, and had more experience. Here are their problems: (1) France is a lot smaller than Germany. (2) Germany had 189 divisions, France had 105, Britain 34. (3) France had only 3 armored divisions Germany had 10. (4) France was wrong about the penetrability of the Ardennes. (5) The Germans had recent experience in Poland. (6) France only had 900,000 regular soldiers, the rest were reserves. (7) Their aircraft were insufficient in comparison to the German. etc. A useful resource: angelfire.com That the French were victorious in WW1 was because of the overwhelming advantage of the defense in that war. They'd already been beaten by the Germans in 1871. These defeats are not due to the French being pansies, it's due to the French being severely outnumbered by the Germans, and frequently having less efficient military units. History is complicated, it has no room for simplistic bullshit like "the French lost their will to fight". -- Carl