WW2 Question

Because they didn’t have the firepower to keep the Germans in place?

Even if the French could have taken the Germans in a stand-up fight, that’s exactly what the charge through the Ardennes was supposed to avoid.

They were an Allied power when they invaded Poland along with Nazi Germany in 1939? Or when they invaded Finland?

  1. Maginot line. Ha ha. What, Belgium is immune to invasion? Why bother to reduce a fortress when you can just go around it? Strategic thinking stuck in 1914, apparently plus a considerable amount of idiocy that was inconsistent with their stated defensive strategy.

  2. Didn’t understand how to use armor or even unarmored mechanized forces. Of course the British didn’t either, took them until Operation Crusader to even begin to figure it out. German forces in the invasion of France were both individually (per-unit) and overall inferior to French forces.

  3. Didn’t understand how to use air power. Didn’t have much to use in any event no doubt for the same reason. Quick, name a WW II French fighter or airplane. Anyone?

  4. Forward garrison corps encircled and cut off by reckless German actions that in the event proved to be just what was needed. I think if the French policy had been to maneuver to destroy an invasion instead of to ward one off through stolid defense they would have had no problems, since their force was so strong and they had the advantage of tactical defense.

  5. Apparent extreme confusion in high command during the invasion. Artillery would have been really good against those feeble proto-panzers, had anyone ever managed to target them, and while they may not have had a good force balance for a mechanized war, they did have a lot of artillery. Interior lines are supposed to be efficient for this kind of thing, but somehow the French seemed to have worse transport problems than the Germans.

  6. Apparently they didn’t really want to fight to defend their country for some reason (painting with a broad brush here, obviously there were many heroes of the French resistance and many determined Free French fighters.) Their whole diplomatic and grand-strategic attitude prior to the war mystifies me, but their rapid collapse is consistent with it.

No, they were an allied power later. We didn’t know of their involvement in the Molotov treaty with Germany.

What? Yes we did. It was a huge shock to the Allied powers.

To be totally contextually clear: the west was not, at that time, aware of the secret provisions of the Molotov-Rubentrop Pact which divided up the baltics and Poland and other places which, while mentioned in the agreement, I can be arsed to look up right now.

For crying out loud.

With the benefit of hindsight, popular opinion has labelled Hitler as virtually insane for invading the Soviet Union, but at the time many people - including those influential in both Britain and America - thought his decision was a sound one. Indeed, Hitler came much closer to pulling off his grand plan than the Soviet Union was ever prepared to admit.

You can read more here.

  1. Japan declared war on us (thought timing was off by what, an hour?)
  2. We declared was on Japan
  3. Germany declared was on us (Alliance)
  4. We declared war on Germany.

Thus, we only declared war on Germany and Japan after they had declared war on us. I’m not sure if we ever declared war on Italy.

By the way, I wish the Constitution would be upheld still and we’d have to declare war though Congress, instead of these unilateral executive branch decisions. It’s mighty dangerous and stupid. Can you imagine FDR not declaring war, but just acting on his authority and telling people he had to kill “the bad guys?”

The French did actually want to have a battle of maneuver with the Germans - they just wanted to do it in Belguim. Needless to say, the Belgians weren’t to hot on this idea and declared themselves neutral. Germany, of course, failed to care and attacked through Belguim anyway.

[emph. added]

I believe there were many undeclared skirmishes and wars pretty much from the onset of our nationhood. Particularly in Caribean/Latin America, we were fighting frequently in the first half of the 1900s…

Well, it’s not like Congress doesn’t have some power here to prevent this - they control the budget.

BTW, here’s a list of “234 instances in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes” (through 1993). Obviously, only a small handful were declared wars.

And here’s a shorter Wikipedia list of undeclared wars (only hits the bigger ones)

Yeah, but little skirmishes are much different than say, invading a whole country, forming a new governemnt for it, controlling its infrastructure and guarding its borders, and establishing a what-looks-like-to-the-region permanent position, including building permanent fortications and bases, taking over the airport, etc. Also, the troop levels and money involved.

That kind of action needs a war declaration, because it can impact the entire nation and our economy and foreign relations for years and years to come, if not forever.

Different than say, shooting a dozen rebels that are trying to breach an embassy wall or sending relief troops to an area temporarily.

For the French angle, I recommend reading Strange Defeat (I think that’s it), which was written by a member of the French Army. He discusses the paralysis that seized high ranking military officials at that time. His belief is that the French could have at least put up a good fight, but that confusion and indecisiveness prevented them from mobilizing their forces and producing a true counter-attack or even strong defense.

Ah, ok. I see what you meant, now.

I don’t know why this would matter in the slightest to the question. They invaded the Baltic countries and Poland, and Finland nearly immediately after that. They invaded neutral countries.

Why would it matter whether we knew the secret provisions of the Pact? We could certainly tell that they rolled a bunch of tanks into countries without provocation and took them over. In fact, just like Nazi Germany did.

I genuinely have no idea what you are trying to get at here, or why you are being so strident about whatever “it” is you are trying to say.

Hitler pretty much presented his reasons in his book, Mein Kampf, written in the mid-1920’s. He looked around the world and realized that the superpowers of the second half of the century would be countries that a) controlled the natural resources of modern industry (coal, iron ore, oil), b) had enough agricultural land to feed themselves, and c) could support a population of over 100 million. The countries at that time that met those requirements were the US, USSR, British Empire, French Empire, and Japanese Empire. Germany met none of those requirements.

On top of that, Hitler/Nazis hated communism. Combine the two and an invasion of the USSR was inevitable. Hitler’s plan was to occupy the western/european part of the USSR. He actually tried to end the war with Britain after the defeat of France, but the British refused. Hitler was impatient and decided to go after the USSR, but he didn’t consider it a risk as he (and the German military) were convinced they could defeat the USSR easily. It was a miscalculation of the strength of the USSR and the delays due to the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece earlier in 1941 didn’t help.

I’ve always been convinced that Hitler could have won had he been more patient with Britain. Most of Europe was afraid of communism and it’s an often overlooked fact that a decent number of non-Germans voluntarily joined the German army in what they saw as a crusade against communism. If Britain was out of the war, the US would not have done much more than look on, particularly if a war with Japan had broken out.

The main reason was French divisional organization. French armor was, as a general rule, distributed piecemeal throughout the army instead of being concentrated into divisions. They viewed it as infantry support, not an independently effective force. German armored divisions disabused them of that error quickly, but it was too late.

Well, the fact is that France and England didn’t really care. They knew that Germany would be enemy enough. Fighting the Soviets and Hitler both would have been impossible. Pragmatism triumphed over ideals. The Baltic states, Finland, and eastern Poland could just go twist in the wind.