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.