OK, I’ll give you the 1945 but I’ll raise you a 1940. The French outnumbered the Germans 4 to 1 in 1940 but could not get off their collective asses and stop the Germans in Belgium. The brains and talent had already left for Casablanca in North Africa and the best fight they could put up was shooting at our guys when we went to clean up North Africa. Their slide took 150 years and we have to guard against our own. At least Hitler didn’t destroy Paris but it looks like he left it for the Muzzards?
“The French outnumbered the Germans 4 to 1 in 1940 but could not get off their collective asses and stop the Germans in Belgium. “
As a matter of historical accuracy, the French did stop the Germans in Belgium.
The problem was they didn’t stop the Germans who went thru the Ardennes, and the war was basically over in a week.
The term hadn't been invented yet, but the Germans figured out how to exploit the OODA loop. The shorthand term was blitzkrieg. They sliced through everything anyone could put up against them for three years before their opponents, slowly and very painfully, learned the new tactics, operational styles, and revised unit organization and training down to the fire team level. Russia bought time with vast distances and immense sacrifice of life. The Brits got their heads handed to them in 1940 but then had a couple of very dicey years in North Africa to begin sorting things out. And the Germans started to run out of men.
The French hadn't recovered psychologically and morally from WWI, but they would still have done much better in 1940 had they not still be fighting the last war. The French command structure simply couldn't match the German tempo of operations.
That is not accurate. The German force and the Allied Force were right about 3.3 million each in the battle of France 1940. And they fought damned hard and lost 85k dead in 6 weeks. Their leadership was not up to snuff. Neither was Brit leadership. The Brits fled the battlefield and evacuated at Dunkirk.