Although it's attracted practically no attention in the news, today is the 70th anniversary of France's surrender to Germany during WWII. I was watching "France Falls," the episode of the series "The World At War" dealing with the French collapse.

Even after all these years, the story is unbelievable. The program interviews a German general who says that if the French had only invaded Germany in September 1939, when the war began, they could have defeated the Germans. Instead, they advanced only five miles into the country (the "Saar Offensive"), and even that petered out. They then spent the winter of 1939-40 inactive on the border, and when they did fire their big guns, it was mainly to impress visitors like the Duke of Windsor! It would be hilarious if it didn't really happen with serious consequences. Then, in four days during May 1940, the Germans broke through and starting racing all over France. The French did virtually everything wrong despite the fact that victory had been in their grasp. Unbelievable.

Today is also the anniversary of the beginning of "Operation Barbarossa," the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which took place exactly one year after the defeat of France. It will surely be a big deal in Russia when the 70th anniversary of the invasion rolls around next year, given that WWII is rememred much more there than in the U.S. (the Soviet Union lost about 27 million people in the war, compared to about 400,000 for the U.S.).

With the exception of Pearl Harbor (which was remote from most Americans), we really saw no fighting in US soil.

My daughter just had a final in Global History, and we were reviewing World War II. It was amazing how the world allowed Nazi Germany to almost take over.

LOL I thought this thread was about the French soccer team

That's why it irks me to no end when some Americans (principally right-wing conservatives) are incredulous that modern Europeans are reluctant to embrace war as a solution to problems (with some exceptions, for example the war in Bosnia). The most egregious example of this was the "Freedom Fries" nonsense leading up to the Iraq War. Modern Americans (not meaning American soldiers who have served in combat, but the American public as a whole) simply don't know how destructive war is the way Europeans (and many others around the world) do. The scene in "The Pianist" which shows Warsaw, which had been a beautiful, flourishing city on the eve of the war in 1939, completely reduced to rubble gives a real sense of this destruction.

And remember that in Europe and Asia there are still numerous unexploded bombs from WWII (and even WWI) that continue to cause injuries and deaths today.

Many historians (more recently Eugen Weber, "The Hollow Years - France in the 1930's") cite underlying French weaknesses: deep political divisions, depletion of male population due to losses in WWI and low birthrate, failure to motorize armed forces and excess reliance on easily circumvented fixed defenses), antiquated military leadership, weak governments, etc. The Germans were stronger and better motivated--and they had near-complete control of the air. And, France (and the Low Countries) had been lulled into complacency by the "Phoney War" period. Rather than fight to the finish, the French accepted the split of France into the occupied zone and "Free France" The Germans couldn't lose.

Conversely, if Hitler had armed every German man, woman and child and sent them into the USSR, they'd never have made Russia capitulate. The USSR was too big, its industry too diffuse, its people too inured to suffering, to give up. Even if the Germans had captured Moscow, Stalin would have moved the capital to the east, as he had so much of the USSR's industry. The Germans couldn't win.

My mother remembers being bombed by the Germans in WWII. Her older sister was evacuated to the country like so many other city kids but my Ma was still quite young and stayed with her Mother. Every night the Germans come to bomb the shipyards and they had to go to the shelters!

That is the price the Brits paid for showing some backbone instead of rolling over and surrendering like the French.....

Russia cannot be invaded successfully for the reasons TB has stated and also because there is a thin window of opportunity to win. The winters are brutal, and the Russian strategy is to allow the enemy to make gains into the early winter, and then cut their supply lines when it gets really cold, and basically start picking them off.They even go so far as burning their own villages to insure the invaders are far enough inside Russia that they can choose between starvation or retreat. Napoleon learned ths the hard way, and Hitler didn't learn anything from Napoleon.

The other problem is that asides from not having the guts to fight another major war, UK and French governments in power at the time of 1938 truely thought that the true enemy was the Soviet Union. As bad and menacing Hitler was, UK/French thought they could tolerate the pro-capitalist fascist thugs in Berlin and Rome if they could rope Hitler and Mussolini with UK and France in a broad grand alliance against the Bolsheviks.

Of course Churchill was one of the few major voices who called bullshit, but ignored. He knew Hitler would just play along with this jargon because hey if he just parrot what these guys wanted to hear (but which he didn't believe) then he'll get what he wanted. And he did.

Meanwhile that Munich Agreement royally pissed the USSR off who thought (rightly perhaps) that the "West" (UK/France/Nazi Germany) colluded to sacrifice Czechslovakia, which held a mutual defense treaty with the Soviets. Because of that mistrust is one of the reasons why Stalin gave his blessing to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which effectively gave Hitler free reign to invade Poland, and thus started the very war that Munich was supposed to avert.

Thus a lesson to be learned: Don't get too binded by ideology to pragmatically miss the real issue. A lesson we Americans seem to forget every generation.

I think there can be a decent argument made that WW1/WW2 were really just one conflict. Because the German army was still largely outside of German territory when WWI ended the myth of the stab in the back took hold and virtually guaranteed a future war in a short period of time.

Stalin had decimated his army and general staff to the point where the German invasion MIGHT have succeeded had Hitler not insisted on invading so late and more importantly had not determined that it would be a war of enslavement and extermination. There were enough foes of Stalin and of Communism and of Muscovite hegemony that a more pragmatic invader would have made better use of them. But once the Nazi aims were out in the open there was no way Germany could have received mass support from the Slavic inhabitants of conquered areas.

And purely on a tactical level the Germans made a mistake diverting resources to the South and North to attempt to capture Leningrad and Stalingrad instead of going for the Moscow knockout immediately.

I think the only group to attack Russia in the winter and win were the Mongols.

Churchill caught a bit of luck during Britain's darkest hour:
As the new PM, he had to deal with the fact that he had less prestige and government experience than Halifax and Chamblerlain. Both of them deluded themselves into believing that Hitler was an Anglophile, and would cut a deal that would enable the UK to give up some of its African empire to Germany in return for holding on to the rest, and maintaining autonomy at home. The US pressed Churchill to agree for the US ambassdor to Italy to ask Count Ciano, Italy's foreign minister (and Mussolini's son in law) about a deal.

Churchill probably would have resigned if his Cabinet or Parliament urged acceptance of that deal. But Ciano dismissed it out of hand. Then Italy declared war on the UK. Then, miraculously, the Luftwaffe failed to finish off the Dunkirk beachhead, and 350,000 allied (mostly Brit) troops escaped via that heroic flotilla across the Channel. Then Churchill made that famous speech...



At Yalta, deGaulle imperiously made demands on Stalin for postwar concessions from occupied Germany. Stalin was dismissive of French claims because they had folded so soon. deGaulle replied that the reason the USSR held out was "because you had more room to run from the Germans."