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.



