That joke was just soooooo funny, Tom ! Let me remind of telling it to the 100,000 French soldiers who died fighting Nazism.
Atlantic, I’ll apologize to Frenchies for that joke when you and your countrymen start apologizing for the wretched coverage of America and Americans, including President Bush for the past 50 years. Your nation’s media is appalling, your nation’s arrogance is unchanged for 300 years, and while your Freep description is appreciated we Yanks who remember the sacrifices we made to liberate Europe rarely see the gratitude that you express, from the rest of your countrymen. So I won’t apologize for the fact that I and tens of millions of other Americans do not feel that the French (unlike you, of course) are a bunch of worthless ingrates. Worthless leftist ingrates until you had the foresight to elect a conservative like Sarkozy.
100,000 French soldiers dying to defend France? 400,000 Americans died fighting a war that we didn’t start — a war that in Europe would never have happened if your ancestors in the military and the Government had had the balls to invade Germany in 1936 or 38 when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, invaded Austria, or invaded Czechoslovakia. But no, they sat around debating and arguing and pretending that their cowardice was diplomacy. And, in 1940, yes it was the French leaders who were primarily responsible for consigning your nation to four years of occupation. Your idiotic Government falls apart the day before invastion. The idiotic head of your military — too old to remember his own mistress’ name — resigns on the eve of the invasion. All this ridiculous Gallic pride and arrogance over four years leading to a disaster in Western Europe in 1940.
I know WWII well and the French stories I remember are the ones where German tanks raced passed retreating French soldiers, told them to stack their weapons, ran over the stacked weapons with a tank, and then continued on. The Frogs standing there looking on helplessly. Not much courage there. At least one of them might’ve tried to take out a few of the Hun b-stards rather than wandering back to Paris to drink more red wine.
I might believe that 100,000 French resistance fighters lost their lives far more easily. I think the pretty French girls carrying explosives in their lunch baskets to destroy German transports showed more courage than the worthless poilus who surrendered without a fight.
Sorry, more Brits died than Frenchmen on the battlefield in WWII. Don’t go trotting around your casualty statistics and pretend that between 1936 and 1944 that the French military was anything more than a paper tiger. And a cowardly one at that.