My Rebuttal to an article by Molly Ivins that appeared in the Chicago Tribune

See the original article here

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Wow...where to start?

Miss Ivins must be one of the under-educated Americans she refers to at the end...I'll try to take this in order.

Caveat: I don't believe for an instant that individual French soldiers did not fight bravely in combat...it's the nation of France as a whole that is totally inept at war, and worthy of scorn.

Ivins wrote:
One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Hitler.... On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Mr. Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny. In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly.


One of the primary reasons that the French took such horrific losses during the First World War was that their stodgy old commanders were wedded to the idea of constant attack. Even after they discovered that modern artillery and machine guns would mow down attacking columns like wheat, the French commanders proved unable to come up with anything better.

Now, WW2... "they were outmanned", nope, so sorry, the German army that was directly responsible for the defeat of France consisted of 45 divisions of which 7 were armored (tanks), facing them were 65 divisions with 22 in reserve.

"Out-gunned"...I'm not sure what she means here...the French army was considered the finest in Europe at the time, they certainly had comparable weaponry to the Germans.

"Out-generaled", well, this is correct, and is indicative of an army sucking. Once again the French relied on attacking without thought, this time sending the bulk of their army into Belgium to deal with what they discovered was a feint that left few troops between Paris and the real German thrust.

"Above all, out-tanked", this is just ill-informed. The French not only had comparable numbers of tanks, they had far superior tanks. The large majority of German tanks were little more than training vehicles, lightly armored and armed with only two machine guns (99% useless against an other tank). The German armaments industry was having problems keeping up with the requests for better armed and armored tanks. In
a tank-vs-tank fight the French had a hands-down superiority, their tanks were very heavily armored and they all carried guns that could destroy any of the German tanks.

So, why did they lose then? Well, they spread their tanks out into small groups that were distributed throughout the whole army, whereas the Germans concentrated their tanks for maximum shock value. The French also left a section of their front line sparsely defended on the assumption that the Germans would not be able to get tanks through the heavy forests of Luxembourg and southern Belgium...

Oooops...guess where the Germans massed most of their tanks and managed to find a way through? After the Germans broke through the French lines they turned north and headed for the coast, which trapped the bulk of the French army in Belgium, unable to effect the drive against Paris (which was declared an open city to avoid any damage).
Ivins wrote:
In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly


I'm not sure what facts this is based on. Even though their tanks were superior to the German vehicles, they were employed in such unimaginative ways that they while in a few places they stalled the German advance, the Germans simply went around the areas with French tanks and defeated them by destroying their supply centers and headquarters. The major difficulty that the French tanks had was that the French saw no need to have the tanks be able to drive much faster than a walking man, because they were supposed to be used as infantry support weapons, rather than as weapons in their own right. They also saw no need to provide their tanks with radios. You can imagine the fun it must have been in a tank battle to have to pop yourself out of the hatch on top and send semaphore signals with little flags to the tanks under your command. This allowed the faster, radio equipped Germans to dictate the pace of the battle and use their local numerical superiority to defeat the French by basically going around them.
Ivins wrote:
Relying on the Maginot Line was one of the great military follies of modern history, but it does not reflect on the courage of those who died for France in 1940. For eighteen months after that execrable defeat, the United States continued to have cordial diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany.


You know, I would say that making "one of the great military follies of modern history" is grounds for derision... perhaps if the French were not so inept at war they would not have lost so many men fighting a lost battle. The fact that men gallantly died trying to defend France is not enough to obviate the blame that the nation itself has for not defending itself properly.

As for the US having "cordial diplomatic relations" with the Nazi's after France fell, what would she expect? The US was not at war with Germany, most Americans considered it a European problem and none of their business. Sorta similar to the attitude the French have towards our invasion of Iraq that she finds so noble...
Ivins wrote:
One of the great what-ifs of history is: What would have happened if Franklin Roosevelt had lived to the end of his last term? How many wars have been lost in the peace? For those of you who have not read "Paris 1919," I recommend it highly. Roosevelt was anti-colonialist. That system was a great evil, a greater horror even than Nazism or Stalinism.


I'm not sure that Roosevelt had any plans to force his allies to give up their colonial possessions. What the hell this has to do with the French being inept soldiers is beyond me. Maybe letting us know what "Paris 1919" was about would let me comment on this, but since I have not read (or heard of) this book, I will be silent.

I have no idea what Paris in 1919 had to do with Roosevelt being an anti-colonialist. I'm getting the impression here that Miss Ivins is saying that colonialism after WW2 was really the fault of America...I guess those poor stupid Europeans were unable to see this "greater evil" themselves and required an American 12-Step program to break free.
Ivins wrote:
If you have read "Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild, you have some idea. The French were in it up to their necks. Instead of insisting on freedom for the colonies of Europe, we let our allies carry on with the system, leaving the British in India and Africa, and the French in Vietnam and Algeria, to everyone's eventual regret.


Well...if *you* had read "Leopold's Ghost", Miss Ivins, you'd know that it was about Belgium, not France.

I really DO NOT UNDERSTAND what the hell she is blathering on about here...how would we "insist" that the allies give up their colonial possessions? Perhaps we could declare war on them if the opted not to give them up? How does this defend the French? It just points out that besides being useless in war, they were practitioners of a "great evil".

And by the way...if colonialism was a greater evil than Nazism, why does she chastise the US for remaining cordial with the Nazi's after they defeated France? Aren't they the lesser of two evils?
Ivins wrote:
Surrender monkeys? Try Dien Bien Phu. Yes, the French did surrender, didn't they? After 6,000 French died in a no-hope position. Ever heard of the Foreign Legion? Of the paratroopers, called "paras"? God, the trouble we could have saved ourselves if we had only paid attention to Dien Bien Phu.


Here we go again...the French make an idiotic blunder and their soldiers die in a gallant, hopeless battle and we are supposed to find that admirable? Dien Bien Phu is an example of the French at their worst...I mean even a person not well versed in military tactics should be able to figure this one out. Here is the situation: The Vietnamese Nationalists (the Viet Minh, not all communists as the Viet Cong would be) controlled the interior of the country and the French had a lot of difficulty projecting any lasting force into the hinterlands. So they decide to build a fortified location in the interior to base their troops out of.

Where do they pick? They choose a valley that floods during the rainy season and is surrounded on all sides by jungle covered mountains...the only way that any troops or supplies could be brought in was by aircraft which were fired at from the hills surrounding the airfield. The Viet Minh were able to bring troops an guns in overland at a much faster rate than the French could fly in their Foreign Legion troops and their paratroopers ("paras" is just short for paratroopers, it doesn't connote anything special.)

As an interesting side note, a large portion of the troops that were left to die at Dien Bien Phu by the French government were French colonial troops... they didn't want to risk actual French troops... how admirable, eh Miss Ivins?

The French also begged the US to help them, and we declined. They asked that we drop nuclear weapons on the Viet Minh to relieve the pressure on Dien Bien Phu, we said "no".

As for learning from Dien Bien Phu, we did. We never once dropped our whole army in the middle of the jungle with no way to resupply or reinforce it. We also never begged our allies to nuke the Vietnamese for us. The reasons that we lost our war in Vietnam are completely unrelated to the reasons that the French lost theirs.
Ivins wrote:
Then came Algeria for the French. As nasty a war as has ever been fought. If you have seen the film "Battle of Algiers," you have some idea. Five generations of pieds noirs, French colonialists, thought it was their country. Charles de Gaulle came back into power in 1958, specifically elected to keep Algeria French. I consider de Gaulle's long, slow, delicate, elephantine withdrawal (de Gaulle even looked like an elephant) one of the single greatest acts of statesmanship in history. Only de Gaulle could have done that.


How again does this make the French look good? Besides, this is sophomoric writing..."Then came WW2 for the Americans. As nasty a war as has ever been fought. If you have seen the film "Saving Private Ryan", you have some idea". So the author is basing her comments on a movie she saw...I feel much more informed now.

Then it gets completely idiotic: "I consider de Gaulle's long, slow, delicate, elephantine withdrawal (de Gaulle even looked like an elephant) one of the single greatest acts of statesmanship in history. Only de Gaulle could have done that." Why? What does de Gaulle looking like an elephant have to do with anything? How is a "long, slow, delicate, elephantine" withdrawal a great act of statesmanship? Was Nixon's similar withdrawal from Vietnam equally laudable? Why could de Gaulle have been the only one to do this?

There is not one shred of support for anything that is stated here. It just comes across as semi-literate Fracophilic cheerleading. I thought the French were the evil colonialists? Oh wait...that was a different paragraph (or para).
Ivins wrote:
Those were the years when France learned about terrorism. The plastiquers were all over Paris. The "plastic" bombs, the ones you can stick like Play-Doh underneath the ledge of some building, were the popular weapon du jour. It made Israel today look tame. For France, terrorism is, "Been there, done that."


At this point I had to go back to the beginning of the article to remind myself what the thesis was. I should have known it had nothing to do with what I was reading. Ok, France suffered from Algerian separatist terrorists. So what? "Been there, done that"...what the hell is that about? What does that have to do with anything? Done what?
Ivins wrote:
I was in Paris on Sept. 11, 2001. The reaction was so immediate, so generous, so overwhelming. Not just the government, but the people kept bringing flowers to the American embassy. They covered the American Cathedral, the American Church, anything they could find that was American. They didn't just leave flowers, they wrote notes with them. I read over 100 of them. Not only did they refer, again and again, to Normandy, to never forgetting, there were even some in ancient, spidery handwriting referring to WWI: "Lafayette is still with you."


What, again does this have to do with anything? Nobody said that the French ignored us after 9/11, the outpouring of emotion for us from most of the world was touching and very moving. The fact that they remember that we saved them in two wars is not grounds for claiming they are good fighters (which was the point of this article, if memory serves). Also, Lafayette is a reference to the American Revolution,

Lafayette was a French officer who fought alongside us and lobbied the French king to send troops to help us. General Pershing, the American commander of the troops we sent to France in WW1, announced "Lafayette, we are here" as a way of saying we were repaying the debt we owed them for their help in our defeating the British.

After all that, I still have no idea why we shouldn't mock the French ability to wage war. Losing wars is not usually considered a sign of military superiority, and the French just have a long track record of losing wars.

 

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