[DariusBane]

The French military is not to be despised.

It is well armed with the latetest weapons.
It is possesed with admirable esprite de corp.
It is part of a 1000 years of history.

To make fun of the French is easy, and I have done it myself. They never recovered from losing a generation of young men in WWI. France lost 4.2 percent of it’s population. The highest rate of any of the major powers. The only higher were Serbia and Romania. Great Britain lost 2.19 percent. Germany loss 3.8 percent, Austria/Hungarian Empire 3.05 percent.

France was shocked to the core. It’s young men dead and underground. The very best, the tallest, the strongest, the bravest dead. They questioned themselves. They questioned God. They never recovered.

The United States never has been so traumatised.

[samtheman]

Good post, Darius. Well said.

I remember reading off and on over the years praise from individual US military personnel directed at the French military.

[Strategerist]

Yeah, I like a good “Frog” joke as much as the next guy myself, and the French can be pretty irritating.

But it gets old after a while, especially when people (like many of the other posters on this thread) display shocking ignorance of military history. People have no idea what France endured in WWI, as your post pointed out. NOTHING in the US military experience remotely resembles the horror of Verdun, for example.

Also, even the pst-war French can be pretty ruthless and violent when it suits them.

When Qadaffi invaded Chad in the 1980s, French air strikes crushed the Libyan air force, and they then provided the Chadians with Milan anti-tank missiles, which they mounted in the flatbeds of Toyota pickup trucks and used to rather amusingly completely massacre large Libyan tank formations (hence the “Toyota War”.)

[Colonel_Flagg]

The French military is not to be despised.

Ils ne passeront pas.

[unkus]

The United States never has been so traumatised.

---

Around 600,000 dead in the Civil War.

[Westbrook]

> The United States never has been so traumatised.

Yes it was, in the Civil War.

We recovered because our immigrants were mostly Europeans at the time seeking opportunity. They loved their new country and became Americans. They and their descendents fought in our wars against our enemies.

France’s immigrants are MoHamHeads.

I can think of no worse people group from which to draw immigrants.

[brothers4thID]

I would like to add that were it not for the Marquis de Lafayette and Admiral de Grasse we would never have won the American Revolution.

It's easy to make fun of the French, but that doesn't mean it's justified.