French Cowards

Got some fresh hate mail about the new column going up tonight:

Have you thought about moving to France…. They don’t fight anyone, even peoples invading their own country.

Yeah, but more of them can spell. But enough of that.

One trope of the extreme/Bushist right is that France is an effete nation. “Old Europe,” Herr Rumsfeld calls it. They didn’t fight in World War II, for example.

While France was shamed by the conduct of many of its citizens during the war—the Vichy regime was heinously fascist and anti-Semitic, and participated in deporting thousands of Jews to their deaths—I find the notion that they didn’t fight pretty damned amusing. After all, 390,000 French soldiers died trying to defend their country from the German onslaught during the six week invasion of May-June 1940. That’s more than the U.S. soldiers who died fighting on both fronts of World War II, Korea, Vietnam the two Gulf Wars combined.

In every war, one side loses. France, most historians agree, lost to Germany in 1940 because its military and political leaders committed a series of errors. They failed to extend the Maginot line to the Belgian frontier, allowing the Germans to simply go around it. They refused to appreciate the importance of tanks as the new weapon of modern warfare. They created a defensive strategy that relied too extensively on fortifications. And their Allies evacuated to Britain rather than fight to the end. But none of the 390,000 Frenchmen who died in 1940 deserve any of the blame for those strategic errors. And the Republican Right ought to be ashamed to impugn their bravery.