Why did the French put up such a pathetic display in 1939? Fuck even the Poles gave it a good go...

Hitler was a WWI veteran.

>Dieing faster
Yeah well a short period of heavy combat will cause more casualties per day, but what matters in the end is how many enemies you defeat or territory you take.

Imagine being a French veteran. Fighting tooth and nail to preserve France and just 20 years later the same guys just steamrolls you.

>Fuck even the Poles gave it a good go, they didn't throw their asses up for the Germans like hookers in heat.

Wut?
Poland lasted even shorter than France

...With less manpower, technology, no allies, while being surrounded from all sides and attacked also by Soviet Union, and having no time to develop war industry.

Don't forget Germans lost in Poland around 30% of their 1939 vechicles and had to use so much ammunition that whole German army after the campaign had its reserves left only for 2 weeks.

>1939
Amerimutt thread

...the frogs had no allies either.

>What is Great Britain
>What is Benelux
>What are North African colonies

>while being surrounded from all sides and attacked also by Soviet Union

Uh, akshually, Poland had basically already fell to the Germans when the Soviets finally invaded

>What is Great Britain

Troll?
BeNeLux were indeed worthy allies, but Brits....you know how they acted

>>What is Great Britain
kek, an enemy as we saw

>What is Benelux
>What are North African colonies
well, not much help, but at least they weren't enemies

>Why did the French put up such a pathetic display in 1939?
Read "A Strange Defeat" by Marc Bloch

I say this in every thread like this one but the thing is that none of you actually care about history and you just want to shitpost like this is /int/

Because their intelligence was bad and their doctrine was worse.spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977623/1/Parker_MA_F2013.pdf

How are BeNeLux worthy allies but not Britain?
Inb4 they didn't completely manage to save us

To be honest, I've never been crazy about Bloch's analysis. His mass psychological failure thesis, IMO, does a lot more to explain why french resistance was so anemic rather than why the country militarily collapsed. You can sort of stretch what he's saying to cover poor tactics and poor reaction times, but he spends a lot of time talking about morale failures in lower echelon units, which were really of a limited effect; as they mostly happened after the Germans broke through and were tearing up all the support elements anyway.

That being said, it is infinitely better than /int/shit. Honestly, /int/ is a worse scourge to this board than /pol/

True, but pointless. Pathetic 12 yo /pol/tards are unable to learn the truth, and this exact thread is made every other day. We don't care, we have more to be proud of than our military history, which at least us won't forget, especially the glory in it.

"Strange Victory" is better because the author has the advantage of 70+ years of hindsight whereas Bloch was a medieval studies professor working with purely anecdotal evidence coming from his own eyeballs. The book was written as a sort of unofficial sequel to Bloch's book, as the name makes obvious.

And then you turn to your English ally to see whether he feels the same, but surprise, he is long gone.

10 years after, he'll make jokes about it.

I've been meaning to read May's work, but I've not gotten around to it. He goes into something or other about intelligence integration, doesn't he? I seem to remember hearing that from a friend of mine whose read it.

France had the big Maginot line they thought would protect them from invasion but Germany blitzed around it and France didn't really have serious contingency plans because having contingency plans on top of a giant wall of fortifications would be pretty expensive.

>>What is Benelux

F: Hey Belgium. Can we station troops in your territory, in case the Germans try going through your country again?
B: Lol no. They wouldn't try the same thing twice xD.

Literally everybody knew that the Germans would come through Belgium. That wasn't the issue.

Yes, but this doesn't invalidate this gentleman's point For the sake of neutrality, Belgium refused to be defended. They went even as far as putting troops on the French border. To be fair, since they had stationned troops on the German border. Yes, Belgium, which I love, is a mistake. Or a meme. Or both.

Maginot Line wasn't a wall.

>"Strange Victory" is better
How can a book written by an American totally divorced from the war be a better source than a book written by a man who literally lived through it?

>How can a book written by a historian who has access to archival material from all sides concerned in a conflict be better than someone who was a journalist living through it.
FTFY.

...

you nigger

Historians are glorified journalists. Secondly, the main point of the post was that that author had 70 years of hindsight, which means nothing, because hindsight is just narrative crafting to fit the facts. Added years only changes the fashion. Additional archival material makes a difference, but not extra years of hindsight.

Hindsight does make a difference. And for fuck's sake, you're asking a man in wartime to make an evaluation of a military matter when most of the necessary information would be classified. How the FUCK is someone like Bloch supposed to know how German command and control functions relative to French or British command and control? You think he could just go arrange some interviews with a few generals and ask them how their communications setups work?

>because hindsight is just narrative crafting to fit the facts.
Bullshit. Hindsight is a sorting process in which inaccurate and irrelevant information gradually gets given less weight, and more important, and more accurate information is brought to the forefront.

>Added years only changes the fashion.
And, you know, information that is available at all. It has to be discovered, and discovering information takes time.

But of course, we both know that you're not actually being anything more than an /int/shit with this line of questioning anyway, otherwise you'd feel no need to bring up the nationality of authors.

The Germans are the bitterest losers in the world. Once they defeated France, Hitler had the armistice agreement signed in the same train car in which the treaty of Versailles was signed, and then he had the train car blown up. Following that he hosted a massive German army parade following the exact parade route as the French victory day parade in 1918, and I found it really amusing how bitter the fucking Germans they marched pass the Verdun memorial plaques

Covered in the greatest documentary series of all time: dailymotion.com/video/x125jdn

You've misrepresented my argument. I agreed with you that the additional material makes a large difference in the analysis. My point of contention is the claim that hindsight is useful. As you say

>Hindsight is a sorting process in which inaccurate and irrelevant information gradually gets given less weight, and more important, and more accurate information is brought to the forefront.

This means nothing beyond the removal of literal falsehoods. Everything else is fashion, where certain facts are given more weight based on the opinion of the author. Take for example ideas and opinions regarding Thomas Jefferson, who as time has gone on, has had his legacy and opinion change markedly with the times. Hindsight is just fashion. I will change my position to say that it does mean something rather than nothing, as a change in fashion can bring about new and valid ideas to the forefront. But the addition of time does not automatically make any work more valid.

Beautiful, can someone turn the niggrrhand into a waffen ss hand?

>Take for example ideas and opinions regarding Thomas Jefferson, who as time has gone on, has had his legacy and opinion change markedly with the times.
But you're talking about two wildly different things. As far as I'm aware, and I want to condition this statement by having done no real in-depth study of Thomas Jefferson; the overall historical narrative of Jefferson hasn't changed much, if at all. People aren't disagreeing about where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, or what his probable sources of inspiration were. They might disagree as to how you should react to his life, but the core "narrative" of his life, of his career, of what happened where, when, and why, is pretty static.

When you look at the outcomes of Fall Gelb and Fall Rot in 1940, you don't have that narrative yet. What and where were reasonably well known, that the Germans broke through the French line at Sedan on the 15th of May, that the pocket was formed on the 21st and closed by June 4th, which left a mostly depleted French army to face against Fall Rot. You've got people scrambling to try to come up with a coherent "why" out of those wheres and whens. And the process of forming that "why" is going to take time. Time isn't the only factor, mind you, but to analyze the individual facts when there are so many of them, to sort out the trivial from the important, doesn't happen overnight either. You need analysis and debate for that to happen. And I did not mean to imply that more time equals greater reliability, but without some sort of vetting process, you're likely to be left with all kinds of nonsense, which is why I'm not too impressed with primary sources for anything more than point data.

>implying the french aren't the sorest loser

they participated in a victory parade for ww2, a war they all intents and purposes lost

Why is that woman clapping if she's so worried?

Wow, you have actually made me feel sympathy for the French. Well done.

>and Germany lost like half of its aircraft and tanks.

Considering that France afterwards, IIRC, was rivaled only by Czechslovakia as industrial "donors" for Kraut war machine, they have made up for it.

What is your point exactly?

More like a quarter. And a bunch of those were operational, not total losses.

>dem gommunists were trying to save polen from nadsi fascidts invasion :DDDD

The french lost the main battle of 1940, but they did took their small part in the Victory. They covered the Brits' asses at Dunkerque, at Bir Akeim, held the krauts in St Nazaire, Lorien tand other pockets so that the yankees could focus on Germany, etc... Not to mention the resistance, who did well jeopardizing the supply lines during overlord.

This topic is overdiscussed but one thing I learned is that the French leadership wanted the Germans to go into Belgium. Does Belgium have all the good ports? I don't fucking know. But Belgians are low key somehow more industrious than the rest of yurope. Maybe they don't take 2 hour lunches every day? I don't get it but people gave a big fuck and it led to the de-facto evil people in the world being Germans for 100 years and going strong. This goes back to the Great War.

Based on what I have learned most of Europe's elites wanted to shed chunks of their populations and they succeeded.

wrong

>a short, intense war has a higher death rate per day than a 4 year long war

>Time isn't the only factor, mind you, but to analyze the individual facts when there are so many of them
And my contention is that there are simply so many facts on the ground that occur, to get a full rendition of what happened unless you lived through them. Looking at documentation and then declaring High Command was incompetent is a lot different from having to obey the commands of incompetent commands as your homeland falls before your very eyes. You simply, as a human being, absorb far more nuance on a daily basis which can never be captured in correspondence. Now, there are limits to this, as you said earlier issues of command and control in this particular case, but additions to a historical analysis and record do not automatically invalidate, or reduce, a more primary work.

Going by that logic Poland was a bigger contributor to allied victory than France

Why would living through them give you the facts on the ground? Suppose, for instance, that you think that the overall cause of French defeat in 1940 was outdated infantry, artillery, and armor doctrine? Unless you're in a rather select bit of the military establishment, you probably aren't even in a position to know what French doctrine is relative to German doctrines. How do the millions of people who lived through it have any sort of advantage from having done so?

>Looking at documentation and then declaring High Command was incompetent is a lot different from having to obey the commands of incompetent commands as your homeland falls before your very eyes.
And looking at documentation can help you determine exactly in what methods high command was incompetent, in what orders were bad and what training was missed out on, in a way that a generalized "yeah we sucked" doesn't necessarily impart.

>but additions to a historical analysis and record do not automatically invalidate, or reduce, a more primary work.
Similarly though, a vague sense of appreciating nuance doesn't necessarily make a primary work more reliable.

Because she knows that when Francois isn't looking, she's going to get WEHRMACKED™ by a BBC (Big Blitzkrieg Cock), along with all the other madamoiselles while their French men get cucked. Then afterward when her nation is liberated, she's going to have her head shaved and be paraded through the streets and humiliated like the dirty little collaborator she is. That facial expression is not one of concern, but one of sheer sexual exhilaration regarding the Wurstfest that is to come.

>Who is responsible for the Allied defeat in France, 1940

please do it.

Fucking kek

Marc Bloch's book is interesting and I enjoyed reading it, but it's still just anecdotal evidence from the eyes of 1 man who didn't have access to much information besides what he could see with his own eyes. It's a very good read, and I would highly recommend it to anybody with an interest in the events of 1940. But as far as actually answering the question: "Why did France lose?" It can't do that very well on its own for the simple reason that the German POV is completely absent, because Bloch never had access to German army documents, or Hitler's private memos, or anything like that. He died before the war ended. "Strange Defeat" is mostly concerned with filling in the German POV.

Churchill remarked that if the Vichy French had fought half as hard against the Germans as they did against the British then the Germans would have been thrown back in 1940.

Churchill was a drunkard and an imbecile.

Belgium is flat as hell and lacks large modern native defences. There is a reason Belgium was so heavily filled with forts and castles.

He's right akshually
France lasted 45 days and Poland 35
Not that it makes the French any less pathetic tho, faring roughly the same as some obscure Eastern European nation is quite humiliating for a Great Power

Belgium saved France's ass in WWI
You're welcome

>There is a reason Belgium was so heavily filled with forts and castles.
Hey nothin' personnel kid

Exactly what start and end date are you using to come up with those numbers?

*blocks your path*

France's courage died at the Somme and the Marne. It's the same reason they( & Britain) gave Czechoslovakia to the Germans in '38. Note, that if they had pushed into Germany during the beginning of the phony war the whole war would have gone very differently. During the Saar offensive the French over doubled the number of men the Germans had there, had over 30 times as many artillery present , and had 400 tanks but Germany had none present.

>I have no idea what I'm talking about concerning the state of German preparations

niehorster.org/011_germany/39-oob/c/_ag_c.html

The Saar offensive was a minor action against a small portion of those defenses. If an effort was made to actually break through, nothing stops armies 5 and 7 from showing up to reinforce their buddies over in 1.

I understand why the Germans did what they did, but I still find it hard to fucking believe that anyone with a living memory of WWI would tolerate it happening again in their lifetimes.

Still going by that logic, no. Not even close, however loud you want to yell that :)

France didnt have enough young men to attack, literally ww1 deeply scarred France.

>Enschuldigun, Madeeeemoiselle, iz zis correktly ze Eiffel TOWER!?

It was more of a "salvage what we can before krauts take everything".
Don't forget that by soviet war doctrine, the main enemy was considered Poland and Krauts were expected to be supporting force.

>Not that it makes the French any less pathetic tho

To be honest, French, at least, were not spreading fake news about how brave polaks are bombing berlin together with british friends and killing Nazis left and right.

Actually, fucking Poland is even more pathetic:
>Muh colonialism
>muh true christians
>muh will beat soviets with one hand and krauts with other
>GTFO Hitler, we won't give danzig
>Terrorize ukrainian bydlo (this one mutual)
>REEEEEEEE POOR POLAND DINDU NUFFIN, ETERNAL VICTIM OF EUROPE, JOOS, COMMIES
>Take money from the EU
>Crush the local food industry in balt states
>EU demands some rapefugees taken in return
>REEEEEEEEE POOR POLAND DINDU NUFFIN, EVIL EU WANTS TO FLOOD IT WITH NIGNOGS, REEEEE FUCKING COMMIES AND JOOS

You have to do something when you don't have TV

>EU demands some rapefugees taken in return
And the poles are fucking right to resist the mondialist death machine.

The official ones, my dear man

>WIkipeia articles
>Official dates of anything
>Somehow ignoring that the one on the left started some 9 months after the war, which of course you won't count for anything.
>Counting from the start date of an operation to what end date? Wiki doesn't mention
>But 25th of June is when an armistice was signed, whereas 6th of October was when the last pocket of resistance was defeated in Poland. Poland of course surrendered earlier than that. history.com/this-day-in-history/poland-surrenders but you're not counting that... why exactly?

So which is it? Ignorant or dishonest?

>mondialist death machine
What does that mean?

Although they were incompetent, many French generals died bravely fighting alongside their men in Dunkerque and the rest of the Battle of France.

>capital and its garrison surrendering means country surrendered

So what ARE you using as the point of surrender then? Because you're not getting those numbers unless you're counting things differently between Poland and France.

those are my only posts in this thread

Just look at current France and tell me it's not dying a shameful death, teared between the acculturation of their autochton people, the africanization of their demographics, and the americanization of whatever rootless consumerist mass is being created

I was under the impression that the Germans went around the Maginot line and encircled the French Army, more or less capturing and destroying it to the point France was defensless.

The way the victory happened was in a way pretty detrimental to the Germans. It gave them the biggest ego possible and led to more mistakes being made because they thought they were literal gods of warfare.

Accurate.

150k kids were born to German fathers in France from July ‘40 to July ‘44

Just women being women

>be France
>Can't defend your own country
>Blame it on everything but France

Wut?
Most French I see blame it on their shitty generals and politicians

Sometimes they put Brits back in place, when those have the nerves to mock France for 1940 even tho they themselves cowered and ran away tail between legs, but I don't see frogs blaming bongs for the defeat as a whole

There you proved my point, Frances Generals could not protect France, then you blame the bongs for not dieing for a country that cannot protect its self

>be france
>blame it on the vichy french and collaborators

>then you blame the bongs for not dieing for a country that cannot protect its self

Nope
Only for making make fun of France for 1940 when they themselves got BTFO and cowered back on their island
No one blames bongs for running away after getting BTFO, but only for allowing themselves arrogance despite getting rekt into fleeing

why are frogs such ungrateful shits?

even in ww1 french generals demanded brits to constatly throw themselves against german machine guns to relieve pressure from french incompetence at verdun, and this was pretty much french policy for ww1 until 1918

then they complain about brits bailing in ww2 and not completely getting destroyed and thus possibly ending ww2 in 1940 with a peace treaty with britain

What was the reason the French and British didn't make an attack in 39 when Germany was buddy with Poland?