[Blood of Tyrants]

Million? Highly doubtful. Probably more died from ambushes by the French Resistance than from the French Army, which did not exist from mid 1040 until near the end of WWII.

[PAR35]

Don’t know where you studied history, but World War I and World War II were different wars.

[Gnarly]

I’m not a French apologist, but enough is enough. The French fought valiantly in WWI and in WWII were basically let down by their leadership. The following stats speak for themselves:

World War I cost France 1,357,800 dead, 4,266,000 wounded (of whom 1.5 million were permanently maimed) and 537,000 made prisoner or missing — exactly 73% of the 8,410,000 men mobilized, according to William Shirer in The Collapse of the Third Republic. Some context: France had 40 million citizens at the start of the war; six in ten men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were permanently maimed.

[GAB-1955]

The Marquis de Lafayette, Napoleon Bonaparte, Michael Ney, Achille Bazaine, Patrice MacMahon, Ferdinand Foch, Joseph Gallieni, Charles de Gaulle, Marie Pierre Kœnig, Joseph Joffre, and even Alfred Dreyfus would disagree with you.

You want a real loser army? Take the Ottoman Empire's army. Though there were some major failures in command and control in 1870 and 1940, overall the French Army has been better than most of its European counterparts, and even Hitler admired the bravery of the French soldier.