Ungrateful Americans Unworthy of the French

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. If you want to
see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

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 eXile 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.

-----

ONLY THE IGNORANT DARE CALL FRENCH COWARDS
Copyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2003
May 1, 2003

VERDUN, France - Something keeps drawing me back to this most evil and
sinister battlefield on earth, a mere 18 km (10.8 miles) by 10 km (6
miles), where during ten hellish months of 1916 1.4 million French and
German soldiers were killed or gravely wounded.

Each year it is my custom to greet spring in France's exquisite
countryside, exploring battlefields and forts of the two world wars.
But this, my sixth journey to Verdun, holds particular personal
meaning.

Decades of travel, covering many wars, reading the history of man's
folly have made me a cosmopolitan who detests borders and earnestly
believes mankind's worst evils are nationalism and religious
fanaticism. Still, there are four countries that I hold particularly
dear and to whom I feel respectful (as opposed to hormonal)
patriotism, respect, and loyalty - Canada, France, Switzerland, the
United States (in alphabetical, not emotional order), and reserve a
special place for Pakistan.

Quixotic as it may sound, while at Verdun, I apologized as a US Army
veteran to France's fallen soldiers for the slander and disgraceful
lies hurled at their memory by American know-nothings and pro- Israel
neo-con pundits who poured venom on the French for not agreeing to
President George Bush's imperial oil war against Iraq.

`Defeat monkeys'….`surrender specialists'…..`never won a war'…`always
saved by Americans'…`in war, like an accordion, useless and noisy..'
`cowards' …were hurled at France by American commentators. The
internet filled with anti-French jokes and lists of French military
defeats.

I invite all those flag waving, fire-breathing American couch patriots
who called French cowards to visit Verdun. The air here still stinks
of death; only deformed, stunted bushes grow on its poisoned soil. In
the towering gray stone Ossuary repose bone pieces of 135,000 men.

In 1916, the Germans sought a decisive battle on the strategic heights
above Verdun, where they planned to bleed France's army to death with
their massed artillery. On the first day of battle alone, French
positions were inundated by one million heavy shells. The titanic
bombardment went on for ten months, explosives against human flesh.
Trenches and dugouts were pulverized. Entire French regiments were
destroyed in hours.

The French commander, Gen. Nivelle, ordered his 2nd Army defending
Verdun: `No surrender; no retreat, not even an inch: die where you
stand.' And so they did.

On 4-5 June, the Germans poured 100,000 poison gas shells - chlorine,
phosgene, and cyanide - onto only 4 kms of French-held front - then
launched divisional assaults against the position. French soldiers had
no gasmasks. Thousands died in hideous agony, or were blinded. Yet
they somehow held.

Shells churned the battlefield into a gigantic quagmire of mud,
rotting corpses, body parts, dead horses, overhung by a toxic miasma
of chlorine and mustard gas. Troops went days without food; they drank
from shell craters filled with bodies, and often drowned in them.
German flamethrowers inflicted frightful casualties. Shells rained
down round the clock. Every tiny elevation, every fort, became a
little Thermopylae.

At the height of the German attack on Fort Vaux, over 2,000 heavy
shells an hour, some 405mm 1,000 kg monsters, were exploding each on
its roof and glacis. When we today talk about soldier's combat stress,
think of the heroic garrison of Vaux, burned, gassed, poisoned by
toxic smoke, dying of thirst, fearing they would be buried alive at
any moment, yet fighting on. The French lost 100,000 casualties trying
to retake another fort, Douaumont.

Three-quarters of the French Army, an and entire generation of
France's men, passed through the inferno of Verdun. Units stayed in
line until they had lost 60% casualties. Every town and village in
France bears a war memorial with names of its sons fallen at Verdun.
The heights above the Meuse River became France's Calvary; `They shall
not pass' the army's and nation's credo.

The attacking Germans fought, as always, like lions, losing 400,000
dead. They almost broke through, but were finally held at the last
line of French defenses, at fearsome sacrifice. French soldiers fought
like tigers, with their legendary fury and élan: over 430,000 died at
Verdun; 800,000 were gassed or crippled for life. Bones are still
unearthed here today, 87 years later; French metro's and busses only
recently ended reserved seating for `mutilated war veterans.' After
the war, there were not enough young Frenchmen to farm the fields or
produce children.

In the end, the French held Verdun. In this battle alone, France lost
almost 1.5 times total US losses in all of World War II, and 20% of
its nearly 2 million dead from 1914-1918.

To the northwest of here is Sedan. In May, 1940, the racing German XIX
Panzer Corps negotiated the dense Ardennes Forest and fought across
the Meuse, dividing, then shattering the French Army. Italy attacked
in the south.

The French did not simply surrender, as some Americans claim. Their
army fought valiantly, but was overwhelmed and torn apart by German's
high-tech military machine, just as Iraq's outdated forces were
recently obliterated by high-tech US forces.

The French government wanted to fight on from Brittany, but there were
no army divisions left intact. France lost 210,000 dead in 1940
fighting Germany and Italy; America lost 292,000 men during the entire
war. Let's keep the historical record accurate.

-------

BM

On 7 Oct 2003 06:56:05 -0700, (The Black
Monk) wrote:

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. If you want to
see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

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.

Germany 2, France 0, enough said.

Al Minyard

Germany 2, France 0, enough said.

Al Minyard


Actually it's Germany 3 France 0.
Shows your knowledge of european history.....
Enough said.
--
_________________________________________
Pierre-Henri BARAS

Co-webmaster de French Fleet Air Arm
http://www.ffaa.net
Encyclopédie de l'Aviation sur le web
http://www.aviation-fr.info

"Alan Minyard" wrote in message
...

Germany 2, France 0, enough said.


Germany is two and oh versus France? Didn't Germany surrender in WWI?

"Pierre-Henri Baras" wrote in message
...

Actually it's Germany 3 France 0.
Shows your knowledge of european history.....
Enough said.


What three conflicts would that be?

posting a war nerd article eh?

apparently he got published in an american newspaper not too long ago. i
don't know which one though.

"The Black Monk" wrote in message
om...
The French

by Gary Brecher

snipped

(The Black Monk) wrote in message . com...
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. If you want to
see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

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 eXile 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.

-----

ONLY THE IGNORANT DARE CALL FRENCH COWARDS
Copyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2003
May 1, 2003

VERDUN, France - Something keeps drawing me back to this most evil and
sinister battlefield on earth, a mere 18 km (10.8 miles) by 10 km (6
miles), where during ten hellish months of 1916 1.4 million French and
German soldiers were killed or gravely wounded.

Each year it is my custom to greet spring in France's exquisite
countryside, exploring battlefields and forts of the two world wars.
But this, my sixth journey to Verdun, holds particular personal
meaning.

Decades of travel, covering many wars, reading the history of man's
folly have made me a cosmopolitan who detests borders and earnestly
believes mankind's worst evils are nationalism and religious
fanaticism. Still, there are four countries that I hold particularly
dear and to whom I feel respectful (as opposed to hormonal)
patriotism, respect, and loyalty - Canada, France, Switzerland, the
United States (in alphabetical, not emotional order), and reserve a
special place for Pakistan.

Quixotic as it may sound, while at Verdun, I apologized as a US Army
veteran to France's fallen soldiers for the slander and disgraceful
lies hurled at their memory by American know-nothings and pro- Israel
neo-con pundits who poured venom on the French for not agreeing to
President George Bush's imperial oil war against Iraq.

`Defeat monkeys'?.`surrender specialists'?..`never won a war'?`always
saved by Americans'?`in war, like an accordion, useless and noisy..'
`cowards' ?were hurled at France by American commentators. The
internet filled with anti-French jokes and lists of French military
defeats.

I invite all those flag waving, fire-breathing American couch patriots
who called French cowards to visit Verdun. The air here still stinks
of death; only deformed, stunted bushes grow on its poisoned soil. In
the towering gray stone Ossuary repose bone pieces of 135,000 men.

In 1916, the Germans sought a decisive battle on the strategic heights
above Verdun, where they planned to bleed France's army to death with
their massed artillery. On the first day of battle alone, French
positions were inundated by one million heavy shells. The titanic
bombardment went on for ten months, explosives against human flesh.
Trenches and dugouts were pulverized. Entire French regiments were
destroyed in hours.

The French commander, Gen. Nivelle, ordered his 2nd Army defending
Verdun: `No surrender; no retreat, not even an inch: die where you
stand.' And so they did.

On 4-5 June, the Germans poured 100,000 poison gas shells - chlorine,
phosgene, and cyanide - onto only 4 kms of French-held front - then
launched divisional assaults against the position. French soldiers had
no gasmasks. Thousands died in hideous agony, or were blinded. Yet
they somehow held.

Shells churned the battlefield into a gigantic quagmire of mud,
rotting corpses, body parts, dead horses, overhung by a toxic miasma
of chlorine and mustard gas. Troops went days without food; they drank
from shell craters filled with bodies, and often drowned in them.
German flamethrowers inflicted frightful casualties. Shells rained
down round the clock. Every tiny elevation, every fort, became a
little Thermopylae.

At the height of the German attack on Fort Vaux, over 2,000 heavy
shells an hour, some 405mm 1,000 kg monsters, were exploding each on
its roof and glacis. When we today talk about soldier's combat stress,
think of the heroic garrison of Vaux, burned, gassed, poisoned by
toxic smoke, dying of thirst, fearing they would be buried alive at
any moment, yet fighting on. The French lost 100,000 casualties trying
to retake another fort, Douaumont.

Three-quarters of the French Army, an and entire generation of
France's men, passed through the inferno of Verdun. Units stayed in
line until they had lost 60% casualties. Every town and village in
France bears a war memorial with names of its sons fallen at Verdun.
The heights above the Meuse River became France's Calvary; `They shall
not pass' the army's and nation's credo.

The attacking Germans fought, as always, like lions, losing 400,000
dead. They almost broke through, but were finally held at the last
line of French defenses, at fearsome sacrifice. French soldiers fought
like tigers, with their legendary fury and élan: over 430,000 died at
Verdun; 800,000 were gassed or crippled for life. Bones are still
unearthed here today, 87 years later; French metro's and busses only
recently ended reserved seating for `mutilated war veterans.' After
the war, there were not enough young Frenchmen to farm the fields or
produce children.

In the end, the French held Verdun. In this battle alone, France lost
almost 1.5 times total US losses in all of World War II, and 20% of
its nearly 2 million dead from 1914-1918.

To the northwest of here is Sedan. In May, 1940, the racing German XIX
Panzer Corps negotiated the dense Ardennes Forest and fought across
the Meuse, dividing, then shattering the French Army. Italy attacked
in the south.

The French did not simply surrender, as some Americans claim. Their
army fought valiantly, but was overwhelmed and torn apart by German's
high-tech military machine, just as Iraq's outdated forces were
recently obliterated by high-tech US forces.

The French government wanted to fight on from Brittany, but there were
no army divisions left intact. France lost 210,000 dead in 1940
fighting Germany and Italy; America lost 292,000 men during the entire
war. Let's keep the historical record accurate.

-------

BM

Excellent post and use of historical facts. I can't wait for Keith
Willshaw to show up and say something stupid in reply!

Rob

p.s. They don't also want to hear how the first Continental Army was
trained by a Prussian general or how German-Americans fought with
honor during both World Wars... not to mention how much of the
"American Arsenal" of today originated in the "Third Reich" or how a
German dream (Von Braun's) got us to the moon- man's greatest
achievement thus far.

The Black Monk wrote in message
om...
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. If you want to
see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:


Yeah and the French were ruled by gay kings and lead by mentally-ill
girls, should we treat the French as if that ancient history is still
current? Maybe we should.

--

Scott
--------
"Interestingly, we started to lose this war only after the embedded
reporters pulled out. Back when we got the news directly from Iraq,
there was victory and optimism. Now that the news is filtered through
the mainstream media here in America, all we hear is death and
destruction and quagmire..." Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2003/091703.htm

"Steven P. McNicoll" wrote in message ink.net...
"Pierre-Henri Baras" wrote in message
...

Actually it's Germany 3 France 0.
Shows your knowledge of european history.....
Enough said.


What three conflicts would that be?

He means the Franco-Prussian war.

regards,

BM

Alan Minyard wrote in message . ..
On 7 Oct 2003 06:56:05 -0700, (The Black
Monk) wrote:

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. If you want to
see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

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.

Germany 2, France 0, enough said.

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.

BM


Al Minyard