Reddit reviews The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940

As compared to the British and the Germans? It's a valid question.

But the real answer is so much more interesting than most people have the time to learn. So instead they make jokes about the easily surrendering French.

> The French fought valiantly, but they were betrayed by their leadership.

Stabbed in the back, eh?

Sure, the French political leadership was vacillatory, and their general staff appallingly clueless, but in a democratic society, the people have to take some fair share of responsibility for the failures and successes of those chosen to lead. It's also a fact that the French forces were vastly outclassed by the Germans, even though they had rough parity in men and equipment. Morale eroded steadily during the Sitzkrieg, and while individual units may have "fought valiantly", most were sent scrambling.

It's incontrovertibly clear that decades of petty squabbling and shortsightedness among the French body politic, from the Dreyfus Affair on down, left them woefully unprepared to deal with the resurgent German menace. Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic covers this descent exhaustively.

Finally, I think what you rather melodramatically call "Anti-French hatred" wasn't limited in its origins to their catastrophic performance in WW2. You can't forget that during the Cold War, France took more than a few military adventures upon herself, nearly none ending well, while at the same time acting as at best a temperamental ally.

>But if it came down to actually tangling toe-to-toe with china, a few hundred miles off their coast? It would be hard to keep our fleet floating against anti-carrier ballistic missiles. They might even be willing to nuke us on the open water.

The Taiwan Strait is much narrower than a few hundred miles: its 81 miles at ts widest point.

Instead of thinking about it from the American side, think of it from the Chinese side: do you really want to launch an entire amphibious landing across 81 miles of laboratory-perfect conditions (flat, dark cold background with hot, large objects) for missiles to scan, acquire, track and engage targets? You could damage Taiwan with a saturated missile strike (like N Korea could level S Korea's Seoul with artillery bombardment within an hour) but you wouldn't hold any ground and you'd get attacked by other nations for killing tens of thousands of unarmed civilians.

We would get involved because the chance that we'd win would be very, very high.

They only have a few Russian super-sonic anti-ship missiles. You're probably thinking of the SS-N-22, the Subburn, right? We've spent billions of dollars on anti-missile technology and packaged all that into the umbrella Ticonderoga escorts:

They have dozens of SM-2s which can, and have, engaged incoming hostile missiles.

They also have CIWS (the R2D2 domes) which can throw out a wall of lead in seconds.

They also have SM-3s which are low-level satellite-killers to knock our enemy surveillance and data relays.

An orbiting Hawkeye using the GrIIm RePer upgrade could identify, track and sort practically all airspace targets clear into Mongolia and Tibet so missile launches would be identified, tracked and engaged as quick as the computers' brains could sort it out.

>What if they shock and awe'd taiwan, and took it over within a matter of days/weeks, ala France during WWII?

France fell from internal socio-political conditions that started in 1860s and worsened over the next 80 years. Read Shirer's "The Collapse of the Third Republic" for an indepth analysis of the conditions present. Nations don't "fall" the way France did... or else Afghanistan would've bowled over when we invaded instead of having an active insurgency now a decade later. We've spent more time in Afghanistan than we have in Vietnam but that's another debate.

>Our hands would be effectively tied at that point, as I don't see us carrying out an amphibious landing to liberate Taiwan in the teeth of determined Chinese resistance.

China wouldn't create one to begin with so that's a moot point.

>Americans would feel bad at Taiwan getting invaded, but I don't think we've got the political will and stomach for the level of carnage that would result in.

The American people haven't had a say in what wars the US' leadership decides to declare since oh, ever?

Had more been referring to Gamelin's debacle, of anything! They reaaally didn't listen to Estienne or de Gaulle after him in the push to create independent armored divisions until it was far too late, right around the first Czechoslovak Crisis (The May Crisis) in '38. It was his words that Guderian had reflected in his formation of the Panzer divisions, as well as Guderian's experience on the opposite side of such a combined forces action during the "Black day of the German army," 3ème Bataille de Picardie, circa 1918 - if I'm remembering correctly! Guderian even credited the French in his memoirs, no less.


It's de Gaulle's espousing of Estienne's teachings so closely that helped urge the creation of LeClerc's 2e Division Blindée (aside from LeClerc's performance with the unit prior to the name, of course!). Prior to this the Tanks were interspersed throughout the units of the standing, defensive forces under overly-cautious Gamelin.


...There's much that can be ranted on regarding the debacle, The Collapse of the Third Republic by Shirer being quite a good book for such musings! He does not hide his bias therein, though his detailing of events is still quite stellar.


My great-uncle served with one of the Forces françaises libres divisions as a radio operator during the invasion of Germany at the end, and my grandfather as a submariner in the Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres - despite having been in port during la bataille de Mers el-Kébir, to be true - so the disposition of French forces has always been a passion hereabouts. Je suis un Franco-Américain, il est bon de savoir que l'histoire des deux côtés!

My reading is normally/naturally about 700wpm. Not sure how or why, but I long ago stopped looking at small words, and haven't internally voiced what I read since 1st grade. I was able to read The Collapse of the Third Republic in about 4 evenings, probably half of that time being consumed by checking references and such things. And by evenings I mean a couple hours per.

I do slow down and mentally voice out a lot of what I read when it's fiction or purely for enjoyment, otherwise the insights and overall 'texture' or 'feel' of it is lost, which defeats the purpose. I'm not sure reading The Catcher in the Rye in 10 minutes would have any purpose or lead to any personal growth.