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Originally Posted by Ruse
As for the WWII argument, that seems like the only decent argument out there to me. France fell to Germany within a week. We unded up pulling their asses out of the fire along with the rest of Europe with the combined force of the US, England, and Russia. Some might say that it was our job as allies to do that and I have no argument there. My only problem was that they made no attempt to repay the losses that we had while trying to recover what they gave away, seemingly, so willingly.
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Wrong. I hate to defend the French, but you are wrong. France was invaded on 5/10/1940 and capitulated on 6/22/1940. That's just a bit longer than less than a week. They also seriously got the shit kicked out of them. French Casualties for WW2 (most of which came in 1940 when the Germans invaded): 201,568 killed in action, 400,000 wounded. United States Casualties (this is for both theaters): 291,557 killed in action, 670,846 wounded. The numbers are quite similar, yet the French fought for 43 days while the US fought for roughly 3 years. They were slaughtered. As I've said before, the German blitzkreig strategy simply overwhelmed their enemies, and France was no different. We were lucky, because by the time we went in, they had stopped using blitzkreig and had reverted to using defensive lines much like the Maginot line. Please educate yourself a bit more before you make such silly claims.
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Originally Posted by tspikes51
Guys, don't forget that we fought Vietnam for them too... Vietnam was a French territory before WWII, and they were afraid of it getting taken over by the communists. I was just wondering, originator of this thread, what country are you from??? I am good friends with a German citizen/resident that says that most Germans, and for that matter, many Europeans don't like the French either. It just seems to me that they think that they are better than everybody else, but as soon as there's somebody with an army knocking at their door, their first resort is letting somebody else bail them out.
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Also WRONG. The French left Vietnam in 1956, after the debacle at Dien Bien Phu nearly two years earlier. The siege of Dien Ben Phu lasted for 170 days. The French had a cumulative total of 15,709 men, of whom only 3,290 came home alive, many which died in prison camps after the battle. The Viet Mihn had somewhere on the order of 100,000 men, of which they took 8,000 KIA (some works estimate 12,000 KIA and 20 to 30,000 WIA) 15,000 to 20,000 WIA of whom a great number certainly must have died from the results of poor medical care. We did not "bail" the French out of Indochina. We went in almost 8 years after they left.