Nightmare Mun's Miscellaneous Blog!

sturmtruppen:

horsefricker:

it has been 60 years

stop making ‘HA HA THE FRENCH RETREATED IN WWII THEYRE SUCH COWARDS’ jokes

just stop

let it go

shut up

Well it wasn’t merely them supposedly ‘retreating’ in WWII (or even WWI, they didn’t either time and fought as valiantly as you could expect anyone in their position to) but more likely how things went for them during their abortive attempts at cold war colonialism, such as the French Indochina War, the bungling of the Algerian affair, their withdrawal from NATO in the middle of the cold war, the heavy-handed douche-canoeing of de Gaulle and their general reluctance to participate in multinational military engagements afterwards.

They have, perhaps unfairly, earned an international reputation as not being the best fellows to go into a fight alongside, but saying that it was merely because of some events sixty years ago is short-sighted and totally ignores their illustrious history of military failures since.

Not to mention the fact that France’s military track record wasn’t so great even prior to WWII. While they were pretty powerful militarily, especially during the Napoleonic wars, they tended to lose eventually anyway. It just took them longer.

sturmtruppen:

oddly enough this is pretty much what happened

One interesting Cold War factoid I’ve come across is, until the mid ’60s, the Soviet Union probably couldn’t attack the United States except via what was effectively a suicide run.

The Soviet’s longest-ranged bombers could only manage the trip to the US mainland one-way without running out of fuel, and Soviet midair refuelling capabilities at the time were crude at best. Bomber crews making the run would probably have to bail after the attack, and hope they got picked up by friendlies rather than (the most likely case) the US military.