http://www.exile.ru/2003-October-02/war_nerd.html

The French,

By Gary Brecher


The new big thing on the web is all these sites with names like "I Hate
France," with supposed datelines of French military history, supposedly
proving how the French are total cowards. Well, I'm going to tell you guys
something you probably don't want to hear: these sites are total bull****,
the notion that the French are cowards is total bull****, and anybody who
knows anything about European military history knows damn well that over
the
past thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history in
Europe, maybe the world.
Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I hate
Chirac
too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry 'do and the snotty
smile. But there are two things I hate more than I hate the French:
ignorant
fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths
off about French military history, he's not just being ignorant, he's being
ungrateful. I was raised to think ungrateful people were trash.
When I say ungrateful, I'm talking about the American Revolution. If you're
a true American patriot, then this is the war that matters. Hell, most of
you probably couldn't name three major battles from it, but try going back
to when you read Johnny Tremaine in fourth grade and you might recall a
little place called Yorktown, Virginia, where we bottled up Cornwallis's
army, forced the Brits' surrender and pretty much won the war.
Well, news flash: "we" didn't win that battle, any more than the Northern
Alliance conquered the Taliban. The French army and navy won Yorktown for
us. Americans didn't have the materiel or the training to mount a combined
operation like that, with naval blockade and land siege. It was the French
artillery forces and military engineers who ran the siege, and at sea it
was
a French admiral, de Grasse, who kicked the **** out of the British navy
when they tried to break the siege.
Long before that, in fact as soon as we showed the Brits at Saratoga that
we
could win once in a while, they started pouring in huge shipments of
everything from cannon to uniforms. We'd never have got near Yorktown if it
wasn't for massive French aid.
So how come you *******s don't mention Yorktown in your cheap webpages?
I'll
tell you why: because you're too ignorant to know about it and too
dishonest
to mention it if you did.
The thing that gets to me is why Americans hate the French so much when
they
only did us good and never did us any harm. Like, why not hate the Brits?
They're the ones who killed thousands of Americans in the Revolution, and
thirty years later they came back and attacked us again. That time around
they managed to burn Washington DC to the ground while they were at it. How
come you web jerks never mention that?
Sure, the easy answer is because the Brits are with us now, and the French
aren't. But being a war buff means knowing your history and respecting it.
Well, so much for ungrateful. Now let's talk about ignorant. And that's
what
you are if you think the French can't fight: just plain ignorant.
Appreciation of the French martial spirit is just about the most basic way
you can distinguish real war nerds from fake little teachers'pets.
Let's take the toughest case first: the German invasion, 1940, when the
French Army supposedly disgraced itself against the Wehrmacht. This is the
only real evidence you'll find to call the French cowards, and the more you
know about it, the less it proves. Yeah, the French were scared of Hitler.
Who wasn't? Chamberlain, the British prime minister, all but licked the
Fuhrer's goosesteppers, basically let him have all of Central Europe,
because Britain was terrified of war with Germany. Hell, Stalin signed a
sweetheart deal with Hitler out of sheer terror, and Stalin wasn't a man
who
scared easy.
The French were scared, all right. But they had reason to be. For starters,
they'd barely begun to recover from their last little scrap with the
Germans: a little squabble you might've heard of, called WW I.
WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse if
you
were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like
General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern
France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but
craters and rats and entrails.
Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the few
who
survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5
million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans
from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests
with bayonets. I'd really like to see one of you office smartasses joke
about "surrender monkeys" with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You'd ****
your dockers.
****, we strut around like we're so tough and we can't even handle a few
uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for five years,
and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the Germans, not the
French, who said "calf rope."
When the sequel war came, the French relied on their frontier
fortifications
and used their tanks (which were better than the Germans', one on one)
defensively. The Germans had a newer, better offensive strategy. So they
won. And the French surrendered. Which was damn sensible of them.
This was the WEHRMACHT. In two years, they conquered all of Western Europe
and lost only 30,000 troops in the process. That's less than the casualties
of Gettysburg. You get the picture? Nobody, no army on earth, could've held
off the Germans under the conditions that the French faced them. The French
lost because they had a long land border with Germany. The English survived
because they had the English Channel between them and the Wehrmacht. When
the English Army faced the Wermacht at Dunkirk, well, thanks to spin the
tuck-tail-and-flee result got turned into some heroic tale of a brilliant
British retreat. The fact is, even the Brits behaved like cowards in the
face of the Wermacht, abandoning the French. It's that simple.
Here's a quick sampler of some of my favorite French victories, like an
antidote to those ignorant websites. We'll start way back and move up to
the
20th century.
Tours, 732 AD: The Muslims had already taken Spain and were well on their
way to taking the rest of Europe. The only power with a chance of stopping
them was the French army under Charles "the Hammer" Martel, King of the
Franks (French), who answered to the really cool nickname "the Hammer of
God." It was the French who saved the continent's ass. All the smart money
was on the Muslims: there were 60,000 of them, crazy Jihadis whose cavalry
was faster and deadlier than any in Europe. The French army was heavily
outnumbered and had no cavalry. Fighting in phalanxes, they held against
dozens of cavalry charges and after at least two days of hand-to-hand
combat, finally managed to hack their way to the Muslim center and kill
their commander. The Muslims retreated to Spain, and Europe developed as an
independent civilization.
Orleans, May 1429: Joan of Arc: is she the most insanely cool military
commander in history or what? This French peasant girl gets instructions
from her favorite saints to help out the French against the English
invaders. She goes to the King (well, the Dauphin, but close enough) and
tells him to give her the army and she'll take it from there. And somehow
she convinces him. She takes the army, which has lost every battle it's
been
in lately, to Orleans, which is under English siege. Now Joan is a nice
girl, so she tries to settle things peaceably. She explains in a letter to
the enemy commanders that everything can still be cool, "...provided you
give up France...and go back to your own countries, for God's sake. And if
you do not, wait for the Maid, who will visit you briefly to your great
sorrow." The next day she put on armor, mounted a charger, and prepared to
lead the attack on the besiegers' fortifications. She ordered the gates
opened, but the Mayor refused until Joan explained that she, personally,
would cut off his head. The gates went up, the French sallied out, and Joan
led the first successful attack they'd made in years. The English
strongpoints were taken, the siege was broken, and Joan's career in the
cow-milking trade was over.
Braddock's Defeat (aka Battle of Monongahela) July 1755: Next time you're
driving through the Ohio Valley, remember you're passing near the site of a
great French victory over an Anglo-American force twice its size. General
Edward Braddock marched west from Virginia with 1,500 men--a very large
army
in 18th-c. America. His orders were to seize French land and forts in the
Valley--your basic undeclared land-grab invasion. The French joined the
local tribes to resist, and then set up a classic ambush. It was a
slaughter. More than half of Braddock's force--880 men--were killed or
wounded. The only Anglo officer to escape unhurt was this guy called George
Washington, and even he had two horses shot out from under him. After a few
minutes of non-stop fire from French and Indians hidden in the woods,
Braddock's command came apart like something out of Nam, post-Tet. Braddock
was hit and wounded, but none of his troops would risk getting shot to
rescue him.
Austerlitz, Dec. 1805: You always hear about Austerlitz as "Napoleon's
Greatest Victory," like the little guy personally went out and wiped out
the
combined Russian and Austrian armies. The fact is, ever since the
Revolution
in 1789, French armies had been kicking ass against everybody. They were
free citizens fighting against scared peasant and degenerate mercenaries,
and it was no contest. At Austerlitz, 65,000 French troops took on 90,000
Russians and Austrians and destroyed them. Absolutely annihilated them. The
French lost only 8,000, compared to 29,000 of the enemy. The tactics
Bonaparte used were very risky, and would only have worked with superb
troops: he encouraged the enemy to attack a weak line, then brought up
reinforcements who'd been held out of sight. That kind of tactical plan
takes iron discipline and perfect timing--and the French had it.
Jena, Oct. 1806: just a quick reminder for anybody who thinks the Germans
always beat the French. Napoleon takes on the Prussian army and destroys
it.
27,000 Prussian casualties vs. 5,000 French. Prussian army routed, pursued
for miles by French cavalry.
You, guys might want to remember that the French under Napoleon are still
the only army ever to have taken all of continental Europe, from Moscow to
Madrid. I could keep listing French victories till I had a book. In fact,
it's not a bad idea. A nice big hardback, so you could take it to the
assholes running all the anti-French-military sites and bash their heads in
with it.