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To: Vicomte13
“Its like when France decided in one day to surrender to the Germans after a month of hard fighting. Call it crossing the line from ally to merely a neutral.”

An ally?

To the British, not to the US. And of course France didn't really go "neutral", but a combination of occupied country and nominal alley to Hitler.

Only after the Japanese attacked America and Hitler declared war on the United States did the United States then, and only then, become part of the Western Alliance. Before that, the United States was as useless as Brazil in defending the world from either Naziism OR Communism.

I wasn't aware that Brazil had provided supplies, ships for example, disguised as "Lend Lease", nor that Brazillians were joining the RCAF and RAF in significant numbers.

Just as in England and France, there was a great deal of "Never Again" sentiment in America after WW-I. Misdirected in all those countries, into pacifisim, rather than the "Never Again" attitude of the Jews/Israelis following WW-II. Any of the three, France, UK or US, or any combination of them, could have stopped Hitler cold when he broke the treaty of Versailles and re-militarized the Rhineland. None of us did. All of us paid a heavy price for not doing so.

187 posted on 04/04/2007 5:02:41 PM PDT by El Gato ("The Second Amendment is the RESET button of the United States Constitution." -- Doug McKay)
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To: El Gato

You let America off the hook too easily.

America let France fall in 1940. Poland, Belgium, Holland too. Stood aside and did nothing. There was no Lend Lease for France. America let Britain be bombed flat. Sent a few overage destroyers to fight the U-Boat threat...but then, the U-Boats were attacking American shipping too, so the Americans actually had an interest in that fight.

Once the US was attacked, America joined the alliance.

My comments about the US in 1940 are in juxtaposition to the constant vilification of France in the present. France did not, and does not, support the American war effort in Iraq. France never hid their opposition, and fought hard diplomatically to forestall it. BUT while the French were doing that, French soldiers were still alongside the Americans fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and still are. And French counterintelligence was working hand-in-glove with the Americans to track down Islamofascist terror, and still are. Now, the French have a full battlegroup in the Middle East operating with the Americans, but there is still this inveterate snarky hatred towards France, because France thought the Americans were committing a foolish and horrible mistake by going into Iraq and wanted no part of it.

And to vilify the French further, to really stoke up the bile and contempt, there is the reference to World War II.
Fine then. On those terms let’s do go back to 1939 and 1940. France FOUGHT Hitler. And lost. America that wouldn’t fight Hitler until Hitler attacked America. The French were militarily incompetent, no doubt about it. The French Maginot mentality is like the Bush Adminstration’s Iraq mindset: catastrophically incompetent from the get go. But France DID FIGHT. She, and Britain, and Canada, even, DID declare war on Hitler when Poland was violated. America refused to fight.
The French were incompetent, but by the terms hurled at France here all the time, the Americans of 1940 were moral cowards.


190 posted on 04/04/2007 5:15:29 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Le chien aboie; la caravane passe.)
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