Derrrrrrr. Hey Mister. I think dah green bit s’posed to be in dah middle or some-thin’

Peter - 21 July 2011 11:12 AM

Derrrrrrr. Hey Mister. I think dah green bit s’posed to be in dah middle or some-thin’

*whack* If you explain the joke….

While I get the point, I can’t help but reflect upon the fact that I like neither wine nor French cooking. 

micolr - 08 August 2011 12:00 AM

France has never actually won a war.

With the minor exception of the many wars that they won. 

Yeesh.. gotta love how the French get their brie handed to them by a surprise maneuver that catches them with their pants down, and suddenly they have a reputation that they’re a buncha pansies.

Racism at it’s finest. Need a ‘reason’ to hate someone? Find something they didn’t do as well as they might have, and make fun of them for that.

Actually it wasn’t even a surprise maneuver.  It was exactly the maneuver they expected, it just hit them a lot faster and harder than they thought possible.

If you’re referring to the outflanking maneuver around the Maginot Line, I should point out that almost NO military analysts of the day thought that Germany would violate the neutrality of Belgium or The Netherlands.  The forts would have been very difficult to defeat in a frontal assault.

This can be credited to a classic “failure of imagination” - and I don’t think that any country should assume it is immune to it.  By definition, one can only plan countermeasures to assaults one can imagine, so if an adversary does the “unimaginable”, one just might be toast.

Hubris?  Not necessarily.  Sometimes bad luck (in having a foe that thinks slightly differently than you) is all it takes.

Well, I’ve often said that wars are won by the side that has the most crazy bastards on their side. It’s one thing to be smart, but it takes a particular kind of batshit-crazy out-of-the-box dirty fighting to win a war.

My favorite example is the Enigma codes. The Allies finally got their hands on one of the Navy machines, and cracked the code but good. Do they use this to intercept battleships and blow them out of the water left right and center? No. If they’d done that, the Axis would have realized their mail was being read, and would have switched to a different code system. Instead, we targeted their supply logistics, targetting supply ships carrying kerosene for tanks. Soft targets, that just happened by ‘random chance’ to run afoul of a lone destroyer out on patrol, while our own supplies slipped through with confidence. The result being that the tanks that were a primary focus of Axis power were crippled.

But yeah, France just wasn’t expecting that. Conventional warfare at the time stated you attacked ONE country at a time, so as not to fight multiple fronts. The idea that you would push into a country just enough to flank an opponent? Unheard of. It would be like playing football and the other team charged through the stands to the goal.