Damn good post.

France actually does help the US - the only non-US planes to drop bombs in
Afghanistan were French, and the US now uses a French base in Djibouti. The
difference between the french and the Brits is that France offers help on
its own terms, while the Brits are basically subservient to the US and will
do whatever it says.

Mike

"Skysurfer" wrote in message
. 0.75...
http://www.exile.ru/175/175052003.html


The new big thing on the web is all these sites with names like "I
Hate France," with supposed datelines of French military history,
supposedly proving how the French are total cowards. If you want to
see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

Well, I'm going to tell you guys something you probably don't want
to hear: these sites are total bull****, the notion that the French
are cowards is total bull****, and anybody who knows anything about
European military history knows damn well that over the past
thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history
in Europe, maybe the world.

Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I
hate Chirac too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry
'do and the snotty smile. But there are two things I hate more than
I hate the French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are
ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military
history, he's not just being ignorant, he's being ungrateful. I was
raised to think ungrateful people were trash.

When I say ungrateful, I'm talking about the American Revolution. If
you're a true American patriot, then this is the war that matters.
Hell, most of you probably couldn't name three major battles from
it, but try going back to when you read Johnny Tremaine in fourth
grade and you might recall a little place called Yorktown, Virginia,
where we bottled up Cornwallis's army, forced the Brits' surrender
and pretty much won the war.

Well, news flash: "we" didn't win that battle, any more than the
Northern Alliance conquered the Taliban. The French army and navy
won Yorktown for us. Americans didn't have the materiel or the
training to mount a combined operation like that, with naval
blockade and land siege. It was the French artillery forces and
military engineers who ran the siege, and at sea it was a French
admiral, de Grasse, who kicked the **** out of the British navy when
they tried to break the siege.

Long before that, in fact as soon as we showed the Brits at Saratoga
that we could win once in a while, they started pouring in huge
shipments of everything from cannon to uniforms. We'd never have got
near Yorktown if it wasn't for massive French aid.

So how come you *******s don't mention Yorktown in your cheap
webpages? I'll tell you why: because you're too ignorant to know
about it and too dishonest to mention it if you did.

The thing that gets to me is why Americans hate the French so much
when they only did us good and never did us any harm. Like, why not
hate the Brits? They're the ones who killed thousands of Americans
in the Revolution, and thirty years later they came back and
attacked us again. That time around they managed to burn Washington
DC to the ground while they were at it. How come you web jerks never
mention that?

Sure, the easy answer is because the Brits are with us now, and the
French aren't. But being a war buff means knowing your history and
respecting it.

Well, so much for ungrateful. Now let's talk about ignorant. And
that's what you are if you think the French can't fight: just plain
ignorant. Appreciation of the French martial spirit is just about
the most basic way you can distinguish real war nerds from fake
little teachers'pets.

Let's take the toughest case first: the German invasion, 1940, when
the French Army supposedly disgraced itself against the Wehrmacht.
This is the only real evidence you'll find to call the French
cowards, and the more you know about it, the less it proves. Yeah,
the French were scared of Hitler. Who wasn't? Chamberlain, the
British prime minister, all but licked the Fuhrer's goosesteppers,
basically let him have all of Central Europe, because Britain was
terrified of war with Germany. Hell, Stalin signed a sweetheart deal
with Hitler out of sheer terror, and Stalin wasn't a man who scared
easy.

The French were scared, all right. But they had reason to be. For
starters, they'd barely begun to recover from their last little
scrap with the Germans: a little squabble you might've heard of,
called WW I.

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was
worse if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five
years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of
it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the
moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the
few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French
lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million
fighting the Germans from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died
charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I'd really like to
see one of you office smartasses joke about "surrender monkeys" with
a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You'd **** your dockers.

****, we strut around like we're so tough and we can't even handle a
few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for
five years, and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the
Germans, not the French, who said "calf rope."

When the sequel war came, the French relied on their frontier
fortifications and used their tanks (which were better than the
Germans', one on one) defensively. The Germans had a newer, better
offensive strategy. So they won. And the French surrendered. Which
was damn sensible of them.

This was the WEHRMACHT. In two years, they conquered all of Western
Europe and lost only 30,000 troops in the process. That's less than
the casualties of Gettysburg. You get the picture? Nobody, no army
on earth, could've held off the Germans under the conditions that
the French faced them. The French lost because they had a long land
border with Germany. The English survived because they had the
English Channel between them and the Wehrmacht. When the English
Army faced the Wermacht at Dunkirk, well, thanks to spin the tuck-
tail-and-flee result got turned into some heroic tale of a brilliant
British retreat. The fact is, even the Brits behaved like cowards in
the face of the Wermacht, abandoning the French. It's that simple.

Here's a quick sampler of some of my favorite French victories, like
an antidote to those ignorant websites. We'll start way back and
move up to the 20th century.

Tours, 732 AD: The Muslims had already taken Spain and were well on
their way to taking the rest of Europe. The only power with a chance
of stopping them was the French army under Charles "the Hammer"
Martel, King of the Franks (French), who answered to the really cool
nickname "the Hammer of God." It was the French who saved the
continent's ass. All the smart money was on the Muslims: there were
60,000 of them, crazy Jihadis whose cavalry was faster and deadlier
than any in Europe. The French army was heavily outnumbered and had
no cavalry. Fighting in phalanxes, they held against dozens of
cavalry charges and after at least two days of hand-to-hand combat,
finally managed to hack their way to the Muslim center and kill
their commander. The Muslims retreated to Spain, and Europe
developed as an independent civilization.

Orleans, May 1429: Joan of Arc: is she the most insanely cool
military commander in history or what? This French peasant girl gets
instructions from her favorite saints to help out the French against
the English invaders. She goes to the King (well, the Dauphin, but
close enough) and tells him to give her the army and she'll take it
from there. And somehow she convinces him. She takes the army, which
has lost every battle it's been in lately, to Orleans, which is
under English siege. Now Joan is a nice girl, so she tries to settle
things peaceably. She explains in a letter to the enemy commanders
that everything can still be cool, ".provided you give up France.and
go back to your own countries, for God's sake. And if you do not,
wait for the Maid, who will visit you briefly to your great sorrow."
The next day she put on armor, mounted a charger, and prepared to
lead the attack on the besiegers' fortifications. She ordered the
gates opened, but the Mayor refused until Joan explained that she,
personally, would cut off his head. The gates went up, the French
sallied out, and Joan led the first successful attack they'd made in
years. The English strongpoints were taken, the siege was broken,
and Joan's career in the cow-milking trade was over.

Braddock's Defeat (aka Battle of Monongahela) July 1755: Next time
you're driving through the Ohio Valley, remember you're passing near
the site of a great French victory over an Anglo-American force
twice its size. General Edward Braddock marched west from Virginia
with 1,500 men-a very large army in 18th-c. America. His orders were
to seize French land and forts in the Valley-your basic undeclared
land-grab invasion. The French joined the local tribes to resist,
and then set up a classic ambush. It was a slaughter. More than half
of Braddock's force-880 men-were killed or wounded. The only Anglo
officer to escape unhurt was this guy called George Washington, and
even he had two horses shot out from under him. After a few minutes
of non-stop fire from French and Indians hidden in the woods,
Braddock's command came apart like something out of Nam, post-Tet.
Braddock was hit and wounded, but none of his troops would risk
getting shot to rescue him.

Austerlitz, Dec. 1805: You always hear about Austerlitz as
"Napoleon's Greatest Victory," like the little guy personally went
out and wiped out the combined Russian and Austrian armies. The fact
is, ever since the Revolution in 1789, French armies had been
kicking ass against everybody. They were free citizens fighting
against scared peasant and degenerate mercenaries, and it was no
contest. At Austerlitz, 65,000 French troops took on 90,000 Russians
and Austrians and destroyed them. Absolutely annihilated them. The
French lost only 8,000, compared to 29,000 of the enemy. The tactics
Bonaparte used were very risky, and would only have worked with
superb troops: he encouraged the enemy to attack a weak line, then
brought up reinforcements who'd been held out of sight. That kind of
tactical plan takes iron discipline and perfect timing-and the
French had it.

Jena, Oct. 1806: just a quick reminder for anybody who thinks the
Germans always beat the French. Napoleon takes on the Prussian army
and destroys it. 27,000 Prussian casualties vs. 5,000 French.
Prussian army routed, pursued for miles by French cavalry.

You eXile guys might want to remember that the French under Napoleon
are still the only army ever to have taken all of continental
Europe, from Moscow to Madrid. I could keep listing French victories
till I had a book. In fact, it's not a bad idea. A nice big
hardback, so you could take it to the assholes running all the anti-
French-military sites and bash their heads in with it.