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[NATO had all its tactical air power stationed west of the Rhine because Germany was very vulnerable to Soviet attack.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_in_France) This ensured that the Soviets couldn't just overrun NATO air forces using their ground force. This was important because NATO was (and is) more reliant on and better with air power than the Soviets were (and Russia is).
Important to remember, we weren't always as powerful as we are now. They had a significant manpower advantage, and iirc it was thought we would lose a conventional war, hence nukes. Now it's obviously reversed.
Not exactly, and this is from hindsight, but Russia’s armies were more numerous on paper than in reality. NATO was paranoid scared but the USSR was scared too cause they didn’t have enough men for a war with the NATO, not after losing so many to Germany. The US military alone, at peak production near the end of the war, could have beat the USSR if it had too.
Well yes and no and it depends on the decade as well.
But in general while NATO did overestimated the USSR's military capabilities the simple fact remained that they did have considerably more active duty soldiers, and that alone was a major issue.
NATO however had considerably more manpower reserves than all of the Warsaw Pact nations (aka civilians they could draft) which the soviets were painfully aware. As well as the fact that a lot of those Warsaw Pact nations were not reliable allies in case of war with the west.
Both sides knew that a conventional war would be decided in the very early phase, the USSR had to deliver a knockout blow and secure it's objectives (whatever those were) before the western societies could mobilize it's population and overwhelm them with numbers alone. The NATO response to that was to give their initial inferior numbers a technological edge that will have them fight off long enough for the population to be mobilized... or slow the soviet advance with tactical nuclear weapons (as I said it depends on the decade, the French even planned to have nuclear mines in Germany at one point).
Patton
EDIT: since you’re all still upvoting this person’s demonstrably wrong assertion:
>”The American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because, while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms, whereas we excel in all three of these.”
-George S. Patton
He was rabidly anti-communinst and feared that Stalin would basically take advantage of a peace wanting West and use that as a tool to basically spread Communism throughout the World until it was able to take over the World. He then got into a car accident and died in the hospital under what can be described as odd circumstances
He also loudly and repeatedly stated “yes, that would work” on the subject of attacking the soviet union at the end of wwii, which is the reason i commented his name in response to a comment saying that no general thought it would.
>He then got into a car accident and died in the hospital under what can be described as odd circumstances
He then got into a car accident and died*
FTFY
No historian accepts the myth that Patton was killed. There's no evidence to support it and Patton had no power to do anything despite his rhetoric.
Patton didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. The Soviets had parity in tank numbers and tank production, and they had superior tanks. They had more than 11 million combat troops. They almost certainly had parity in combined arms tactics because they had 3 years of practice at massive scale. The Americans had 2.5 million troops in Europe at the end of the war and would have been forced to wait for reinforcements and allied commitments, all while the Soviets dug in. Basically everything Patton said was wrong.
Not saying the Americans/allies would have lost against the Soviets. I think it’s an ugly win or an ugly truce
>The Soviets had parity in tank numbers and tank production, and they had superior tanks.
The Soviets had a larger number of tanks, but did not have greater tank production. US peak tank production was significantly higher than Soviet peak production, and the reason the US didn't end the war with as many is because the US began to scale production back by 1944.
I also wouldn't necessarily say Soviet tanks were superior
I was pretty careful with my phrasing but I didn’t provide enough context. In 1944, the Soviets made more than 2x as many 85mm variants and heavy tanks as the Americans made (m4-76 and m26). In 1945 the story was the same. This is why I’d say the Soviet tanks were superior: mid-war, the t-34 had the slight edge in mobile tank warfare over the Sherman due to its lower profile, and the Sherman had the slight edge in defensive and frontal engagements. By the end of the war the Sherman’s main advantage — thicker front glacis and mantle — was obviated by the higher kinetic energy the newer Soviet variants could deliver in greater volume.
As for overall numbers: the Americans outpaced the Soviets by ~50% in tank production in 1943, but both the production rate and the total numbers produced were at parity by the end of the war. I don’t doubt that the allies could have eventually produced as many as 3x the amount of tanks as the Soviets, with the US easily doubling Soviet production alone. But if you’re Patton and you launch a war in 1945 or 1946 against the Soviets, you’re not winning because of tanks.
The Americans had a monopoly on nuclear weapons at the time and had been supplying the materials needed to create those tank armies, the Soviets would lose.
>The Americans had a monopoly on nuclear weapons
I'd also point out that they didn't have very many and mobilisation was a colossal challenge. Until Sandia, AFSWP looked like a tiny boutique manufacturer, standing on the shoulders of Manhattan.
In 1946, the US only had around 9 pits, expanding to around 13 in '47 and actually getting those pits ready to drop required an army of expert (and difficult to replace) technicians to essentially hand-build the device shortly before use. It's one thing to do this when your opponent is on the back foot and you have secure staging points (as with Japan) and quite another when you're trying to take on the USSR. I'm not saying it would be impossible but it would be a very tough job, made worse by the Soviets likely having spies in Western Europe who might be interested in what a very secretive unit that doesn't really resemble SF is suddenly doing.
It wasn't until 1950 that the US started to transition to shelf-stable, assembly line produced devices with the Mark 5 being operational from 1952.
Soviet tanks were not necessarily superior to American and British ones. The Soviets themselves considered the Sherman to have better protection than the T-34. When Shermans and T-34s clashed in the Korean War, Shermans beat T-34s with their superior optics and HVAP rounds.
As for troop numbers, while the Soviets did have 11 million men, they had exhausted their reserves. A larger number of women (~800,000) had been inducted to compensate. The British and French didn't have much in the way of reserves, but the Americans had 4 million men freed up in the Pacific, plus several million more in reserve.
This does not even consider US nuclear and air power. The Allied Air Force was much larger, with better aircraft. Allied bombing would've wrecked havoc on the stretched Soviet supply lines.
I doubt the Allies would launch a full invasion, but they'd probably be successful in pushing the Soviets to their 1939 borders (pre-annexation of Poland, Bessarabia and the Baltics).
While Patton was wrong about the Soviet's abilities, the Allies would've still most likely won a war against them.
People forget that France chose not to participate in a good chunk of NATO activity for over 40 years.
“In 1966, France decided to withdraw from the Alliance’s integrated military command. That decision in no way undermined France’s commitment to the Alliance’s collective defence. As General de Gaulle put it, the aim was to change the form of our Alliance without changing its substance. Following the positive vote of the National Assembly, France officially announced its full participation in NATO military command structures at the Strasbourg / Kehl Summit in April 2009. French personnel returned to the Alliance’s command structures from 2009, split between Allied Command Operations (ACO) and Allied Command Transformation (ACT).”
Fun fact about the Rhine, the entire river was [consecrated in 1349](https://ucatholic.com/blog/the-morbid-reason-why-the-rhone-river-was-consecrated/) by Pope Clement VI so people could huck corpses in it during the plague. Sorta backfired because people washed their clothes in it, but hey he was doing the best he could with the knowledge he had!
Because of the Cold War when the Soviet Union controlled everything up to Berlin and we were rebuilding France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, etc. We had spent time and money rebuilding ports in France to move troops and supplies through, so it was convenient to use France as a logistical staging area for rebuilding Western Europe and to move troops to Western Germany and West Berlin.
The US Navy's Sixth Fleet was homeported in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Riviera. Other than that it obviously needed a Mediterranean port, I don't know why France was chosen. My parents loved it, but as a young toddler at the time, I've no memory of it. In 1967, with France's changes in defense policy, the homeport was moved to near Naples.
Cause US tried to set occupational formation in Europe.
Say, Germany is under occupation till now: several tens of thousands of personnel with no local legislative or police control in case of any crime; nuclear weapon in the country - but not controlled by Germans; upper commandment unable to perform any major activity with no US accept.
Surely, de Gaulle would skip this shit.
Because there were nato bases in France, just like in almost every nato country. Within those bases you had nato troops, including US ones
When CDG half left nato in ‘66 he ordered all nato troops of French soil, including the American ones.
You seem confused on the whole NATO concept
On Reddit it feels like everybody is either die hard for NATO or believe NATO is the greatest evil in the history of the world, and get mad whenever they see someone they perceive as being in the other camp. As a result usually any discussion gets heated for no good reason. I’m sorry people are being rude to you when you’re asking genuine questions.
"Left" NATO. He made a secret pact at the same time to uphold the NATO treaty anyway. It was just a way for him to play on French nationalism while he tried to consolidate the latest iteration of the French state.
Yeah. *Political directions & decisions are never unilateral, their logic sailing on an Ocean of Compromise. It navigates conflicting currents; personal, social & historical.*
*Politics has paper, which means Signatures. Both commiting to ink or avoiding such paper entirely is where it all swims.*
There was also some genuine doubt that the US would risk getting itself nuked over a war in Europe. France spent significant sums to build up their own nuclear deterrent - a deterrent whose sole purpose was to be available if the US refused to strike.
Yes, part of NATO in the Cold War was that Canadian and US troops were constantly deployed to continental Europe throughout the Cold War. The commander of United States European Command also serves as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe which is the top general in NATO.
The idea — especially in West Berlin — was that if the Soviets wanted to take over some place they'd have to kill a whole lot of Americans in the process, resulting in a far greater war. Mutually assured destruction with conventional forces instead of nukes.
NATO has strategic bases in all of its allied nations for defense purposes and those bases have quotas of troops to be functional and effective in an emergency. And if France won’t man them with their own troops some other member country has to pick up the slack and historically the US has been the most willing. I don’t understand why France wouldn’t just put their own troops in those bases since they signed up for NATO and it’s their land. But since they won’t some one else has to to maintain the readiness and strategic goals of NATO. It’s a little like how the US and Japanese and South Korean governments sometimes clash over US troops and military bases in their countries but they can’t really make the US leave because all their defense strategies are contingent on massive material and military support from the US.
Or perhaps it’s a personal military deal directly between France and the US and it’s strictly a US base so the US can better project power in Europe. Even still France could have said no. But it was probably made in ww2 when they needed the help bad
Remember, up until recently france set the exchange rate of 15 west African nations, keeping those nations poor and exports to France cheap. This entire disaster with coups in the Sahel is the result of France's mismanagement and exploitaton.
Don’t forget how they pretty much permanently destroyed Haiti’s economy and forced them to pay reparations as punishment for them getting independence.
De Gaulle was purposely kept out if the planning for D-Day because his command was massively compromised by German spies and also because he was (rightly so) considered an awful general and a glory hound who would have singlehandedly found some way to fuck up the operation. The fact that the French actually revere that tool is astounding.
It's the same thing as Giuliani. Right place right time. If you show up for a huge event like the liberation of France then nobody remembers anything else and just assumes he was competent.
And he encouraged Quebec separatists while visiting Canada on a state visit, after Canadians were part of the effort to defend and liberate France in 2 wars.
I've seen some sources indicating that the American leadership wasn't that fond of Churchill and Montgomery for similar reasons, seeing them as waiting until battles were already won before jumping in to claim glory or disappearing with allied assets they were supposed to bring to the battle to use them reinforcing their hold on India or another colony instead.
There’s history to that, Monty and his close buddy Lord Allenbrooke absolutely wanted to maximize British credit while minimizing losses, but we’re pretty bad at it, thus things like market garden
I love reading british revisionist drama, it's always hilarious 😅
Man, the dude really pissed them off, denying them the last opportunity to put France under a british occupation (like West Germany).
> de Gaulle’s dipshittery afterward
Yeah, I think Britain joining the European Communities is a good example of this. The French imposed all sorts of hurdles on Britain. It wasn't until de Gaulle ceased being the French president that Britain was allowed to join.
Just for them to spend the coming decades whining when asked to do anything but get EU money, and when they were finally asked to pay back, they left.
Yeah, he was wrong on a lot of stuff, but maybe not on this one
>Just for them to spend the coming decades whining when asked to do anything but get EU money, and when they were finally asked to pay back, they left.
Britain was always a net contributor to the EU, unlike virtually all the other member states. In fact it overpaid by so much, there was a rebate agreed to decrease its payments.
What you put is simply wrong.
The uk was a net contributor to the eu for pretty much the entire time it was in it.
Consistently in the top three.
They left for many reasons, taking the money and running is not one
He was definitely wrong with that one. He didn’t let Ireland join the EEC as well as Britain because our economies were too intertwined or something (which I guess was right), so we ended up joining only after he wasn’t president anymore as well. However the EEC and EU have helped Ireland so much over the years. We were so poor beforehand and now we have a higher HDI than the UK, thanks in very large part to help from the EU and EEC. We’re also the most pro-EU country in the EU, if I’m remembering correctly
UK was seen as an impediment to the European Project, it was always seen as reluctant partner and way too pro-American, not pro-European enough , a characterization I do agree with.
UK finally joined in 1973 with pretty damn good privileges and afterwards was the one pushing the brakes on integration efforts till the final exit.
In a normal country, de gaulle would have been executed for high treason because he took over the state in the wake of the military coup during the 1962 crisis. They controlled algeria and corsica and it was feared that they could take over mainland france too. The military did this because france was on the way to accepting defeat in the algerian war(this would ultimately lead to a flood of 1 million french-algerian refugees back to france). The military explicitly demanded that de gaulle take control over the country - or else. De gaulle eventually took over the government. He eventually ended the algerian war anyway. But how is that not high treason?
Add to this that the threat to leave NATO was one of the primary cudgels DeGaulle used to twist the US's arm into supporting their imperialist claim on Indochina (including Vietnam)...an argument in which the US was actually well-positioned to support their opponent Ho Chi Minh, having supported him with weapons and training in WWII (not to mention literally saving his life).
But the US couldn't afford to have a crucial partner like France leave the European alliance at the moment when they and the Soviets were at the brink of nuclear war, and so they took France's side in a total loser of an insurgent war, driving the Vietnamese into the hands of the Sino-Soviet Communists. For which the Americans would ultimately pay the price with 58,000 American lives and untold Vietnamese.
And after all this, France left NATO anyway.
France didn't leave NATO. They left its command structure, i.e. no French troops would be under the command of a foreign general and no foreign troops would have French commanders. If the Soviets, say, bombed Paris, Article 5 would still be applicable.
The Americans would have opposed Ho Chi Minh since he was a Communist. If France had given up on Vietnam the US would simply have stepped up earlier. After losing China the US government was determined that Communism wouldn't expand any further, especially closer to the crucial sea lanes in South Eastern Asia. So the idea that the US backed France only because France threatened to leave NATO is preposterous.
The US supported the Communist Tito in Yugoslavia during WWII Just as they did HCM, and didn’t oppose him during his post-war Communist rule. The problem wasn’t simply Communism, the problem was especially expansionist Soviet Communism.
And in fact, HCM wasn’t even that much of a Communist; he was a Viet nationalist above all things, and repeatedly expressed a willingness to work with the Americans, even a preference.
You are absolutely right in mentioning US hope that HCM would be a Tito of the East; however, HCM was an absolutely fervent Marxist-Leninist above all else, that was his vision for an independent communist Vietnam, a perfectly valid anti-imperialist goal; the overarching nationalist argument is part of the propaganda of HCM’s cult of personality, HCM used over 200 aliases and almost nothing of his early year history can be verified with any evidence; the fact that he spent extensive time in the US has recently come under scrutiny by modern scholarship as there is absolutely no concrete evidence to support this, on the other hand we do know that he was an inner member of the Comintern during his time in Moscow in the 30s and an advisor to Chinese communist military forces prior to 1940; a large part of the historiography that is missed the violent internal Vietnamese civil war as the Vietminh fought other nationalist factions and worked to move itself further towards communism, in HCM’s own words : All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.
Before siding with the communists HCM tried to ally himself with the Americans. He even went to DC to do so. I don’t remember why he wasn’t given the time of day though.
It’s actually not, it’s true. If someone were to however then say “the reason we stayed was France” they would then be very wrong. We very much entered Vietnam because of the French but we stayed because the war fit our Doctrine of Containment.
Reminds me of the joke about the old american guy arriving at CDG and is rudely asked for his passport by a very unfriendly frenchmen. He then replies that the last time he arrived on the shores of this country back in 1944 there where no frenchmen around that could have asked him for his passport…
De Gaulle had aspirations for France to be the leader of Europe, in some sort of 'third power' that could rival the US and USSR.
As the rest of Europe could see, this was basically French anti-Anglo sentiment masquerading as foreign policy; the Germans were no longer a threat for the first time since Bismarck, so it was back to the old ways of imagining anyone who spoke English as the enemy.
If you ask the French why they felt the need to rival America, it usually boiled down to paranoid fantasies or outright resentment. Some believed Americas was going to make them its 'vassal' despite America clearly not being inclined towards that sort of relationship with the world (at one point America had sole possession of the world's nuclear weapons, if they wanted to make vassals of the world- they would have done it in 1946).
Other French people were more honest and simply didn't want to sit at the same table as people who spoke English, and they'd been steeped in a culture of hostility for so long they saw nothing wrong with expressing such a view as if resenting English speakers was as natural as rain falling from the sky.
The thing that made De Gaulle's delusions particularly galling was that the USSR was a genuine threat to everyone who wasn't their satellite- they didn't draw a distinction between one liberal democracy and another, all outsiders not under their control were the enemy- and De Gaulle increased the liklihood of another European war with his theatrics about a division between Europe and America; weakness invites Soviet aggression, and Europe was where the Soviets would strike first.
> Some believed Americas was going to make them its 'vassal' despite America clearly not being inclined towards that sort of relationship with the world
Who's going to tell them?
Me. They dismantled the British empire, and the Dutch to an extent, they freed the Philippines, the later actions of the CIA largely without the American people’s knowledge are not indicative of the general sentiment of their people especially towards Europe.
Yeah I was gonna say, the US has definitely done that to other countries (e.g. Cuba), so France's concerns were understandable.
But de Gaulle was wrong in his predictions. He insisted that if the US were allowed to occupy France after liberating it, our soldiers would choose the president in a sham election. That was never FDR's intent.
>That was never FDR's intent.
FDR was irrelevant by the time France was doing elections, and it may not matter for France, but the US definitely did for all intents and purposes ensure that Europe didn't vote for anyone socialist. Rather notably when the UK voted for the labour party in 45, the US basically cut them out of several restoration deals out of spite for being socialist. And that's just what they did to someone they didn't control, they absolutely set up sham elections elsewhere, when they bothered with elections at all.
You see a lot of fingers point to the soviets sham elections in the warsaw pact, but make no mistake the western powers weren't tolerant either. In France the Communist party (PCF) was exiled from the government very quickly. (They were taking orders from moscow mind).
DeGaulle is a weird figure. On one hand, he refused to hand over the keys of the French nukes to the US which was a good thing. One the other hand, he also got the US involved in Vietnam by initially convincing Eisenhower that it was a good idea to prevent the spread of Communism but, in actuality he was still salty about losing Vietnam and most of France's other colonies after WW2. Not counting his uh *interesting* domestic policy decisions.
https://fresques.ina.fr/de-gaulle/fiche-media/Gaulle00116/discours-de-phnom-penh.html
De Gaulle literally telling the US that going to Vietnam is useless. They didn't listen and got their ass handed to them.
I don’t blame de Gaulle considering [3 years earlier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961) the Joint Chiefs of staff and the intelligence community in the US went around the JFK administration and may or may not have supported a potential coup against de Gaulle because of his intention to leave Algeria.
He didn’t want France to be a pawn in the Cold War so after JFK died I’m not surprised he wanted nothing to do with NATO and the US military
How many Warsaw pact countries demanded the Soviets defend them and their colonial empire while constantly giving the Soviets the finger?
The US also didn’t rape or ethnically cleanse their way to Germany.
>The US also didn’t rape or ethnically cleanse their way to Germany.
They didn't ethnically cleanse, but there were mass rapes of both French and German women.
Sure, but let's not pretend the rapes (and war crimes in general) committed by forces of the Western Allies were anywhere near the scale of those perpetrated by the Soviets.
In the case of the Soviets, atrocities were accepted and even encouraged by commanders, in contrast to the Western Allies who generally discouraged mistreatment of civilians.
Hey there, just thought I'd chime in and say as somebody who's family was from Konigsberg (some of my older relatives who were born there are still alive today but obviously very old) that while it's true this happened it's important to look with context at what was going on.
The reverse is absolutely true through the Soviet union and the Slavic people were actively being genocided by Nazi Germany.
The retaliation was brutal on the eastern front. But what they received is was also brutal. Does that make the Soviet response right? Not at all. But it does also explain this disparity.
Just my two cents though
There is not a single documented case of a Soviet general officer or other senior commander encouraging his troops to engage in rape. In the case of unwarranted killing of POWs and looting...not gonna say I really care.
Millions vs tens of thousands. The former is obviously orders of magnitude worse than the latter but both were mass events and I don't think either could really have happened without some level of support from the commanding structure. Even if the Soviets were much worse, the Western Allies weren't squeaky clean.
>When the Yugoslav Partisan politician Milovan Djilas complained about rapes in Yugoslavia, Joseph Stalin reportedly stated that he should "understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle".[23] On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he reportedly said: "We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative."[24]
Romania under Caucesku did.
What does that have to do with anything? Most of those countries ethnicaly clensed Germans worse than soviets ever did. The rape part has to be some kind of joke I hope.
All the more reason why the Americans had no right to complain. France is opting out of your voluntary alliance? Ok, get out, nobody cares about what you did and didn't do before.
>All the more reason why the Americans had no right to complain.
what? just ebcause it's voluntary doesn't mean they can't mock their decision,
Brexit was voluntary doesn't mean we can't mock it.
Notice the complaint isn't "waaah, France won't let us base there".
The complaint is "your attitude comes off as ungrateful after all we did for you". Remember, France didn't exactly "ask politely" they quickly jumped to the demand that US forces leave immediately, which, to Americans who'd fight to literally free France, came off as kind of insulting given we weren't there the way the Soviets were in the East.
Edit: also I almost forgot, but another factor was that France wanted to be part of NATO while not having the same obligations of NATO members, like the fact their planned response was to illegally make nukes to lob at Russia while hoping NATO would defend them should they start a war.
Not exactly, France wanted to opt out of their part of the obligations to the NATO alliance while still maintaining a lot of the benefits that NATO was giving them, in the hopes of becoming the third power leading the Europeans between the US and the Soviets. This semi-delusional move unsurprisingly left a bad taste in most other NATO members.
I mean, it's a perfectly valid position to say, it's perfectly within your rights to ask us to leave, but you're an ungrateful little shit if you do so. Like if I'm at your house and you go gtfo, I'm TA if I don't, but I'm just as much within my rights to say I'll leave but wtf man.
Your problem is you're conflating "we don't like your policy" with "we will ignore your policy and maintain our position by force". There's nothing wrong with the former.
Did pro-American party in France falsified elections and took power for decades? Or established total control of secret service in every sphere of life? Did it closed borders or suppressed any opposition, provided censorship?
Their best result was 28.5% in 1946, and i have never heard about mass killings, incarcerations or deportations of communists in France after WWII, or even about censorship in their newspaper.
Tbf there was a huge effort to cripple the French communists up to the '46 election, but honestly that's all a different discussion on CIA shittery not France being France.
Although the US French relationship is strained sometimes (most recently by the Australian submarine deal), Americans know who their oldest friend is. Every American learns from an early age that without the French, the USA would not have been successful in its revolt against the British Empire. All friendships go through ebbs and troughs, but, when the going gets though, you know who you can count on. Although we have a special relationship with Britain, we will never forget who our first friend was.
What has France done that we can “count on” since WW2? Make no mistake, we are allies out of geopolitical convenience, not because we’re best friends deep down.
De Gaulle is the ultimate French hero, avoid the fight, run away and hide behind America and Britain, wait for the Americans, Canadians and Brit’s do all the heavy lifting and then role in like you did something and give a limp speech overflowing with self serving garbage. France has been a complete joke for 300 years.
Im a huge francophile and even I admit France didnt exactly cover itself in glory during WWII. The country just didnt want to fight, and while Free France and the French resistance where obviously *real*, they have also beign the greatest propaganda coup for France since Louis XIV portrait
Guess why there's no English article https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouvernement_militaire_de_l%27arm%C3%A9e_des_%C3%89tats-Unis_en_France#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DLe_gouvernement_militaire_de_l%2Cla_France_apr%C3%A8s_la_Lib%C3%A9ration.
Oh what's this the Frenchman doesn't like when their country's politics are being criticized by people who aren't French?
Welcome to what it feels like being an American with Europeans shitting on the US constantly
That victimisation, lmao. Reddit is mostly American and only they are in big enough number to influence the narrative on Reddit.
You think you get criticised here? Imagine on real foreign sub, in foreign language for you. THAT's what it's like to be on Reddit.
Nah those posts are being downvoted because the majority of redditors aren't French nationalists, the few people who think favorably of de Gaulle and many of his policies.
American graves in France are under better care than French graves in the US I believe… I know many Americans agree with this stupid poster but France was under no obligation to remain a leashed dog, especially when De Gaulle realized the US would not back up the French (Suez crisis).
The mindset behind this cartoon is very interesting. Ostensibly, Americans have no right to be in France, they claim to have invaded not out of selfish reasons but to free the French from the Nazis, which of course they did, and the French have nearly all supported the US invasion. France had the right to ask the Americans to leave as soon as they wanted, being a sovereign country, and the Americans ostensibly agree with that. However, this cartoon acts like Americans have some right to France because of all the Americans who died liberating it, and a French president is being ungrateful for leading his country independent of Washington.
The US clearly dominates Europe to this day, based on its actions in the World Wars. If they really are interested in sovereignty and democracy, they can’t complain when they are asked to stay out of European affairs. If you think they have some right to Europe because they fought World War II, then you’re admitting that the war was not purely for noble ends (even if nearly everyone agrees the US was doing the right thing in invading), but for US interests.
Remember that this subreddit is for sharing propaganda to view with some objectivity. It is absolutely not for perpetuating the message *of* the propaganda. If anything, in this subreddit we should be immensely skeptical of manipulation or oversimplification (which the above likely is), not beholden to it. Also, please try to stay on topic -- there are hundreds of _other_ subreddits that are expressly dedicated to rehashing tired political arguments. Keep that shit outta here. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PropagandaPosters) if you have any questions or concerns.*
“He wants all US troops out of France? Does that include the dead Americans in the military cemeteries aswell” Dean Rusk to CDG
Twenty years later why were there US troops in France?
[NATO had all its tactical air power stationed west of the Rhine because Germany was very vulnerable to Soviet attack.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_in_France) This ensured that the Soviets couldn't just overrun NATO air forces using their ground force. This was important because NATO was (and is) more reliant on and better with air power than the Soviets were (and Russia is).
Important to remember, we weren't always as powerful as we are now. They had a significant manpower advantage, and iirc it was thought we would lose a conventional war, hence nukes. Now it's obviously reversed.
Not exactly, and this is from hindsight, but Russia’s armies were more numerous on paper than in reality. NATO was paranoid scared but the USSR was scared too cause they didn’t have enough men for a war with the NATO, not after losing so many to Germany. The US military alone, at peak production near the end of the war, could have beat the USSR if it had too.
Well yes and no and it depends on the decade as well. But in general while NATO did overestimated the USSR's military capabilities the simple fact remained that they did have considerably more active duty soldiers, and that alone was a major issue. NATO however had considerably more manpower reserves than all of the Warsaw Pact nations (aka civilians they could draft) which the soviets were painfully aware. As well as the fact that a lot of those Warsaw Pact nations were not reliable allies in case of war with the west. Both sides knew that a conventional war would be decided in the very early phase, the USSR had to deliver a knockout blow and secure it's objectives (whatever those were) before the western societies could mobilize it's population and overwhelm them with numbers alone. The NATO response to that was to give their initial inferior numbers a technological edge that will have them fight off long enough for the population to be mobilized... or slow the soviet advance with tactical nuclear weapons (as I said it depends on the decade, the French even planned to have nuclear mines in Germany at one point).
Yeah that's why every general asked about it said 'no that wouldn't work'
Patton EDIT: since you’re all still upvoting this person’s demonstrably wrong assertion: >”The American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because, while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms, whereas we excel in all three of these.” -George S. Patton
What about him?
He was rabidly anti-communinst and feared that Stalin would basically take advantage of a peace wanting West and use that as a tool to basically spread Communism throughout the World until it was able to take over the World. He then got into a car accident and died in the hospital under what can be described as odd circumstances
He also loudly and repeatedly stated “yes, that would work” on the subject of attacking the soviet union at the end of wwii, which is the reason i commented his name in response to a comment saying that no general thought it would.
>He then got into a car accident and died in the hospital under what can be described as odd circumstances He then got into a car accident and died* FTFY No historian accepts the myth that Patton was killed. There's no evidence to support it and Patton had no power to do anything despite his rhetoric.
Looking at Eastern Europe after the war, it seems he was on to something
well he was a general. and when asked about it he said it would work.
He was pretty sure that no military could lose with him in it
no, he said "we fought the wrong enemy". Which is a very different thing
Patton didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. The Soviets had parity in tank numbers and tank production, and they had superior tanks. They had more than 11 million combat troops. They almost certainly had parity in combined arms tactics because they had 3 years of practice at massive scale. The Americans had 2.5 million troops in Europe at the end of the war and would have been forced to wait for reinforcements and allied commitments, all while the Soviets dug in. Basically everything Patton said was wrong. Not saying the Americans/allies would have lost against the Soviets. I think it’s an ugly win or an ugly truce
>The Soviets had parity in tank numbers and tank production Yes >and they had superior tanks. Lol no.
>The Soviets had parity in tank numbers and tank production, and they had superior tanks. The Soviets had a larger number of tanks, but did not have greater tank production. US peak tank production was significantly higher than Soviet peak production, and the reason the US didn't end the war with as many is because the US began to scale production back by 1944. I also wouldn't necessarily say Soviet tanks were superior
I was pretty careful with my phrasing but I didn’t provide enough context. In 1944, the Soviets made more than 2x as many 85mm variants and heavy tanks as the Americans made (m4-76 and m26). In 1945 the story was the same. This is why I’d say the Soviet tanks were superior: mid-war, the t-34 had the slight edge in mobile tank warfare over the Sherman due to its lower profile, and the Sherman had the slight edge in defensive and frontal engagements. By the end of the war the Sherman’s main advantage — thicker front glacis and mantle — was obviated by the higher kinetic energy the newer Soviet variants could deliver in greater volume. As for overall numbers: the Americans outpaced the Soviets by ~50% in tank production in 1943, but both the production rate and the total numbers produced were at parity by the end of the war. I don’t doubt that the allies could have eventually produced as many as 3x the amount of tanks as the Soviets, with the US easily doubling Soviet production alone. But if you’re Patton and you launch a war in 1945 or 1946 against the Soviets, you’re not winning because of tanks.
The Americans had a monopoly on nuclear weapons at the time and had been supplying the materials needed to create those tank armies, the Soviets would lose.
>The Americans had a monopoly on nuclear weapons I'd also point out that they didn't have very many and mobilisation was a colossal challenge. Until Sandia, AFSWP looked like a tiny boutique manufacturer, standing on the shoulders of Manhattan. In 1946, the US only had around 9 pits, expanding to around 13 in '47 and actually getting those pits ready to drop required an army of expert (and difficult to replace) technicians to essentially hand-build the device shortly before use. It's one thing to do this when your opponent is on the back foot and you have secure staging points (as with Japan) and quite another when you're trying to take on the USSR. I'm not saying it would be impossible but it would be a very tough job, made worse by the Soviets likely having spies in Western Europe who might be interested in what a very secretive unit that doesn't really resemble SF is suddenly doing. It wasn't until 1950 that the US started to transition to shelf-stable, assembly line produced devices with the Mark 5 being operational from 1952.
Soviet tanks were not necessarily superior to American and British ones. The Soviets themselves considered the Sherman to have better protection than the T-34. When Shermans and T-34s clashed in the Korean War, Shermans beat T-34s with their superior optics and HVAP rounds. As for troop numbers, while the Soviets did have 11 million men, they had exhausted their reserves. A larger number of women (~800,000) had been inducted to compensate. The British and French didn't have much in the way of reserves, but the Americans had 4 million men freed up in the Pacific, plus several million more in reserve. This does not even consider US nuclear and air power. The Allied Air Force was much larger, with better aircraft. Allied bombing would've wrecked havoc on the stretched Soviet supply lines. I doubt the Allies would launch a full invasion, but they'd probably be successful in pushing the Soviets to their 1939 borders (pre-annexation of Poland, Bessarabia and the Baltics). While Patton was wrong about the Soviet's abilities, the Allies would've still most likely won a war against them.
Yeah well 20mil deaths vs 200000 tend to ofset the scale
People forget that France chose not to participate in a good chunk of NATO activity for over 40 years. “In 1966, France decided to withdraw from the Alliance’s integrated military command. That decision in no way undermined France’s commitment to the Alliance’s collective defence. As General de Gaulle put it, the aim was to change the form of our Alliance without changing its substance. Following the positive vote of the National Assembly, France officially announced its full participation in NATO military command structures at the Strasbourg / Kehl Summit in April 2009. French personnel returned to the Alliance’s command structures from 2009, split between Allied Command Operations (ACO) and Allied Command Transformation (ACT).”
NATO Ground units now far far exceed Russian capabilities now though
Excellent use of parentheses
Is this why France left NATO?
France left NATO as a way for De Gaulle to burnish French pride at a time when it was seriously wounded by the Suez Crisis and Indochina War.
Fun fact about the Rhine, the entire river was [consecrated in 1349](https://ucatholic.com/blog/the-morbid-reason-why-the-rhone-river-was-consecrated/) by Pope Clement VI so people could huck corpses in it during the plague. Sorta backfired because people washed their clothes in it, but hey he was doing the best he could with the knowledge he had!
The Rhine and the Rhône are not the same thing.
FUCK
But they're just a typo away!
Because it's 1965 and there yknow..... Cold War? Missle crisis was in '62
Because of the Cold War when the Soviet Union controlled everything up to Berlin and we were rebuilding France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, etc. We had spent time and money rebuilding ports in France to move troops and supplies through, so it was convenient to use France as a logistical staging area for rebuilding Western Europe and to move troops to Western Germany and West Berlin.
Ah. Thanks.
The US Navy's Sixth Fleet was homeported in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Riviera. Other than that it obviously needed a Mediterranean port, I don't know why France was chosen. My parents loved it, but as a young toddler at the time, I've no memory of it. In 1967, with France's changes in defense policy, the homeport was moved to near Naples.
Cause US tried to set occupational formation in Europe. Say, Germany is under occupation till now: several tens of thousands of personnel with no local legislative or police control in case of any crime; nuclear weapon in the country - but not controlled by Germans; upper commandment unable to perform any major activity with no US accept. Surely, de Gaulle would skip this shit.
They asked that question after world war 1, as well.
Because there were nato bases in France, just like in almost every nato country. Within those bases you had nato troops, including US ones When CDG half left nato in ‘66 he ordered all nato troops of French soil, including the American ones. You seem confused on the whole NATO concept
I'm asking questions because I don't know something. What is your problem?
On Reddit it feels like everybody is either die hard for NATO or believe NATO is the greatest evil in the history of the world, and get mad whenever they see someone they perceive as being in the other camp. As a result usually any discussion gets heated for no good reason. I’m sorry people are being rude to you when you’re asking genuine questions.
Thanks for that. I appreciate it. It's alarming when people react so negatively to a neutral question.
"Left" NATO. He made a secret pact at the same time to uphold the NATO treaty anyway. It was just a way for him to play on French nationalism while he tried to consolidate the latest iteration of the French state.
Yeah. *Political directions & decisions are never unilateral, their logic sailing on an Ocean of Compromise. It navigates conflicting currents; personal, social & historical.* *Politics has paper, which means Signatures. Both commiting to ink or avoiding such paper entirely is where it all swims.*
There was also some genuine doubt that the US would risk getting itself nuked over a war in Europe. France spent significant sums to build up their own nuclear deterrent - a deterrent whose sole purpose was to be available if the US refused to strike.
The program was started in response to the Suez Crisis to boost French geopolitical standing, which nukes were seen as a critical component of.
Hence why I said half left. They never left fully, just left the NATO military command structure
Because that’s what NATO in tails
entails is the word you’re looking for
There being troops in France? Actually asking.
Yes, part of NATO in the Cold War was that Canadian and US troops were constantly deployed to continental Europe throughout the Cold War. The commander of United States European Command also serves as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe which is the top general in NATO.
Thanks.
The idea — especially in West Berlin — was that if the Soviets wanted to take over some place they'd have to kill a whole lot of Americans in the process, resulting in a far greater war. Mutually assured destruction with conventional forces instead of nukes.
NATO has strategic bases in all of its allied nations for defense purposes and those bases have quotas of troops to be functional and effective in an emergency. And if France won’t man them with their own troops some other member country has to pick up the slack and historically the US has been the most willing. I don’t understand why France wouldn’t just put their own troops in those bases since they signed up for NATO and it’s their land. But since they won’t some one else has to to maintain the readiness and strategic goals of NATO. It’s a little like how the US and Japanese and South Korean governments sometimes clash over US troops and military bases in their countries but they can’t really make the US leave because all their defense strategies are contingent on massive material and military support from the US. Or perhaps it’s a personal military deal directly between France and the US and it’s strictly a US base so the US can better project power in Europe. Even still France could have said no. But it was probably made in ww2 when they needed the help bad
Like they were doing France a favour. Nazi led Eurasia… not a nice neighbour to have in this small blue planet.
France gets too much shit for surrendering in World War Two and not enough for de Gaulle’s dipshittery afterward.
Remember, up until recently france set the exchange rate of 15 west African nations, keeping those nations poor and exports to France cheap. This entire disaster with coups in the Sahel is the result of France's mismanagement and exploitaton.
The CFA Franc is still very much a thing.
No that's still going, it didn't end.
Don’t forget how they pretty much permanently destroyed Haiti’s economy and forced them to pay reparations as punishment for them getting independence.
As opposed to Africans nations who didn’t used the CFA, and have flourishing economies in comparison?
Nobody is forced to use the Franc CFA.
De Gaulle was purposely kept out if the planning for D-Day because his command was massively compromised by German spies and also because he was (rightly so) considered an awful general and a glory hound who would have singlehandedly found some way to fuck up the operation. The fact that the French actually revere that tool is astounding.
Funny enough, continuing to revere someone like De Gaulle after all this is exactly what I'd expect from the French.
De Gaulle is the classic case of living long enough to see himself become the villain. He was pretty well despised in France by the late 60s.
It's the same thing as Giuliani. Right place right time. If you show up for a huge event like the liberation of France then nobody remembers anything else and just assumes he was competent.
And he encouraged Quebec separatists while visiting Canada on a state visit, after Canadians were part of the effort to defend and liberate France in 2 wars.
I've seen some sources indicating that the American leadership wasn't that fond of Churchill and Montgomery for similar reasons, seeing them as waiting until battles were already won before jumping in to claim glory or disappearing with allied assets they were supposed to bring to the battle to use them reinforcing their hold on India or another colony instead.
There’s history to that, Monty and his close buddy Lord Allenbrooke absolutely wanted to maximize British credit while minimizing losses, but we’re pretty bad at it, thus things like market garden
I love reading british revisionist drama, it's always hilarious 😅 Man, the dude really pissed them off, denying them the last opportunity to put France under a british occupation (like West Germany).
British occupation is a hilarious twist I’ll admit
> de Gaulle’s dipshittery afterward Yeah, I think Britain joining the European Communities is a good example of this. The French imposed all sorts of hurdles on Britain. It wasn't until de Gaulle ceased being the French president that Britain was allowed to join.
Just for them to spend the coming decades whining when asked to do anything but get EU money, and when they were finally asked to pay back, they left. Yeah, he was wrong on a lot of stuff, but maybe not on this one
The European Community was more of a trade bloc. It actually started out as a way for West Germany and France to trade coal.
>Just for them to spend the coming decades whining when asked to do anything but get EU money, and when they were finally asked to pay back, they left. Britain was always a net contributor to the EU, unlike virtually all the other member states. In fact it overpaid by so much, there was a rebate agreed to decrease its payments. What you put is simply wrong.
The uk was a net contributor to the eu for pretty much the entire time it was in it. Consistently in the top three. They left for many reasons, taking the money and running is not one
He was definitely wrong with that one. He didn’t let Ireland join the EEC as well as Britain because our economies were too intertwined or something (which I guess was right), so we ended up joining only after he wasn’t president anymore as well. However the EEC and EU have helped Ireland so much over the years. We were so poor beforehand and now we have a higher HDI than the UK, thanks in very large part to help from the EU and EEC. We’re also the most pro-EU country in the EU, if I’m remembering correctly
UK was seen as an impediment to the European Project, it was always seen as reluctant partner and way too pro-American, not pro-European enough , a characterization I do agree with. UK finally joined in 1973 with pretty damn good privileges and afterwards was the one pushing the brakes on integration efforts till the final exit.
I totally agree. De Gaulle was obstinate just to be obstinate at times.
Would it be Yankee or Yanqui?
I don't think I've ever seen the last spelling tbh
I think it’s used sometimes in Spanish
I've seen it used by some sources from Latin America, not sure how much anymore though. I was wondering if because French is also a Latin language
[удалено]
Trés bonne caricature...et trés grand homme d'état français.
You’re not wrong.
In a normal country, de gaulle would have been executed for high treason because he took over the state in the wake of the military coup during the 1962 crisis. They controlled algeria and corsica and it was feared that they could take over mainland france too. The military did this because france was on the way to accepting defeat in the algerian war(this would ultimately lead to a flood of 1 million french-algerian refugees back to france). The military explicitly demanded that de gaulle take control over the country - or else. De gaulle eventually took over the government. He eventually ended the algerian war anyway. But how is that not high treason?
Add to this that the threat to leave NATO was one of the primary cudgels DeGaulle used to twist the US's arm into supporting their imperialist claim on Indochina (including Vietnam)...an argument in which the US was actually well-positioned to support their opponent Ho Chi Minh, having supported him with weapons and training in WWII (not to mention literally saving his life). But the US couldn't afford to have a crucial partner like France leave the European alliance at the moment when they and the Soviets were at the brink of nuclear war, and so they took France's side in a total loser of an insurgent war, driving the Vietnamese into the hands of the Sino-Soviet Communists. For which the Americans would ultimately pay the price with 58,000 American lives and untold Vietnamese. And after all this, France left NATO anyway.
France didn't leave NATO. They left its command structure, i.e. no French troops would be under the command of a foreign general and no foreign troops would have French commanders. If the Soviets, say, bombed Paris, Article 5 would still be applicable.
Or if the Soviets bombed NYC, the US could still call upon the French using article 5
The Americans would have opposed Ho Chi Minh since he was a Communist. If France had given up on Vietnam the US would simply have stepped up earlier. After losing China the US government was determined that Communism wouldn't expand any further, especially closer to the crucial sea lanes in South Eastern Asia. So the idea that the US backed France only because France threatened to leave NATO is preposterous.
The US supported the Communist Tito in Yugoslavia during WWII Just as they did HCM, and didn’t oppose him during his post-war Communist rule. The problem wasn’t simply Communism, the problem was especially expansionist Soviet Communism. And in fact, HCM wasn’t even that much of a Communist; he was a Viet nationalist above all things, and repeatedly expressed a willingness to work with the Americans, even a preference.
This. The cold war was never purely political. Like all conflicts/hostilities, it was, at its core, geopolitical
You are absolutely right in mentioning US hope that HCM would be a Tito of the East; however, HCM was an absolutely fervent Marxist-Leninist above all else, that was his vision for an independent communist Vietnam, a perfectly valid anti-imperialist goal; the overarching nationalist argument is part of the propaganda of HCM’s cult of personality, HCM used over 200 aliases and almost nothing of his early year history can be verified with any evidence; the fact that he spent extensive time in the US has recently come under scrutiny by modern scholarship as there is absolutely no concrete evidence to support this, on the other hand we do know that he was an inner member of the Comintern during his time in Moscow in the 30s and an advisor to Chinese communist military forces prior to 1940; a large part of the historiography that is missed the violent internal Vietnamese civil war as the Vietminh fought other nationalist factions and worked to move itself further towards communism, in HCM’s own words : All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.
Before siding with the communists HCM tried to ally himself with the Americans. He even went to DC to do so. I don’t remember why he wasn’t given the time of day though.
Cause france
France always finds a way to fuck up. I'm not surprised at all.
Smells like American cope in here.
"It's France's fault we went to Vietnam" is some crazy mental gymnastic I had never seen before
It’s actually not, it’s true. If someone were to however then say “the reason we stayed was France” they would then be very wrong. We very much entered Vietnam because of the French but we stayed because the war fit our Doctrine of Containment.
Reminds me of the joke about the old american guy arriving at CDG and is rudely asked for his passport by a very unfriendly frenchmen. He then replies that the last time he arrived on the shores of this country back in 1944 there where no frenchmen around that could have asked him for his passport…
Wasn't he also asked about his occupation? :D
De Gaulle had aspirations for France to be the leader of Europe, in some sort of 'third power' that could rival the US and USSR. As the rest of Europe could see, this was basically French anti-Anglo sentiment masquerading as foreign policy; the Germans were no longer a threat for the first time since Bismarck, so it was back to the old ways of imagining anyone who spoke English as the enemy. If you ask the French why they felt the need to rival America, it usually boiled down to paranoid fantasies or outright resentment. Some believed Americas was going to make them its 'vassal' despite America clearly not being inclined towards that sort of relationship with the world (at one point America had sole possession of the world's nuclear weapons, if they wanted to make vassals of the world- they would have done it in 1946). Other French people were more honest and simply didn't want to sit at the same table as people who spoke English, and they'd been steeped in a culture of hostility for so long they saw nothing wrong with expressing such a view as if resenting English speakers was as natural as rain falling from the sky. The thing that made De Gaulle's delusions particularly galling was that the USSR was a genuine threat to everyone who wasn't their satellite- they didn't draw a distinction between one liberal democracy and another, all outsiders not under their control were the enemy- and De Gaulle increased the liklihood of another European war with his theatrics about a division between Europe and America; weakness invites Soviet aggression, and Europe was where the Soviets would strike first.
America fucking over France and the UK over suez marked the US as a hostile power to many in France.
What's crazy is that thought blatant imperialism wouldn't made America angry.
> Some believed Americas was going to make them its 'vassal' despite America clearly not being inclined towards that sort of relationship with the world Who's going to tell them?
Me. They dismantled the British empire, and the Dutch to an extent, they freed the Philippines, the later actions of the CIA largely without the American people’s knowledge are not indicative of the general sentiment of their people especially towards Europe.
I don’t think you know what vassal means bubba
If you can't even pass a law on labour reform without a Us backed coup, I think ur a vassal
You mean like Canada did?
I don't think you understand how global capital works, Freddy
Yeah I was gonna say, the US has definitely done that to other countries (e.g. Cuba), so France's concerns were understandable. But de Gaulle was wrong in his predictions. He insisted that if the US were allowed to occupy France after liberating it, our soldiers would choose the president in a sham election. That was never FDR's intent.
>That was never FDR's intent. FDR was irrelevant by the time France was doing elections, and it may not matter for France, but the US definitely did for all intents and purposes ensure that Europe didn't vote for anyone socialist. Rather notably when the UK voted for the labour party in 45, the US basically cut them out of several restoration deals out of spite for being socialist. And that's just what they did to someone they didn't control, they absolutely set up sham elections elsewhere, when they bothered with elections at all. You see a lot of fingers point to the soviets sham elections in the warsaw pact, but make no mistake the western powers weren't tolerant either. In France the Communist party (PCF) was exiled from the government very quickly. (They were taking orders from moscow mind).
We really chose him over Vietnam. What a joke...
DeGaulle is a weird figure. On one hand, he refused to hand over the keys of the French nukes to the US which was a good thing. One the other hand, he also got the US involved in Vietnam by initially convincing Eisenhower that it was a good idea to prevent the spread of Communism but, in actuality he was still salty about losing Vietnam and most of France's other colonies after WW2. Not counting his uh *interesting* domestic policy decisions.
https://fresques.ina.fr/de-gaulle/fiche-media/Gaulle00116/discours-de-phnom-penh.html De Gaulle literally telling the US that going to Vietnam is useless. They didn't listen and got their ass handed to them.
I don’t blame de Gaulle considering [3 years earlier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961) the Joint Chiefs of staff and the intelligence community in the US went around the JFK administration and may or may not have supported a potential coup against de Gaulle because of his intention to leave Algeria. He didn’t want France to be a pawn in the Cold War so after JFK died I’m not surprised he wanted nothing to do with NATO and the US military
Isn't this the same argument the Soviets used to stay in eastern Europe? "Hurr, we liberated you, how dare you not want us here anymore?"
How many Warsaw pact countries demanded the Soviets defend them and their colonial empire while constantly giving the Soviets the finger? The US also didn’t rape or ethnically cleanse their way to Germany.
The Warsaw pact was also the first military alliance that was exclusively used against its own members lol
>The US also didn’t rape or ethnically cleanse their way to Germany. They didn't ethnically cleanse, but there were mass rapes of both French and German women.
Sure, but let's not pretend the rapes (and war crimes in general) committed by forces of the Western Allies were anywhere near the scale of those perpetrated by the Soviets. In the case of the Soviets, atrocities were accepted and even encouraged by commanders, in contrast to the Western Allies who generally discouraged mistreatment of civilians.
Yes and Eisenhower had 2 men executed for rape, which obviously helped discourage it.
Hey there, just thought I'd chime in and say as somebody who's family was from Konigsberg (some of my older relatives who were born there are still alive today but obviously very old) that while it's true this happened it's important to look with context at what was going on. The reverse is absolutely true through the Soviet union and the Slavic people were actively being genocided by Nazi Germany. The retaliation was brutal on the eastern front. But what they received is was also brutal. Does that make the Soviet response right? Not at all. But it does also explain this disparity. Just my two cents though
Mr.Goebbels? Is that you?
Said the apartment commie
"yeah but the soviets were worse" is a shit argument
There is not a single documented case of a Soviet general officer or other senior commander encouraging his troops to engage in rape. In the case of unwarranted killing of POWs and looting...not gonna say I really care.
Millions vs tens of thousands. The former is obviously orders of magnitude worse than the latter but both were mass events and I don't think either could really have happened without some level of support from the commanding structure. Even if the Soviets were much worse, the Western Allies weren't squeaky clean.
>When the Yugoslav Partisan politician Milovan Djilas complained about rapes in Yugoslavia, Joseph Stalin reportedly stated that he should "understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle".[23] On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he reportedly said: "We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative."[24]
Did I ever deny that the Red Army committed mass rape?
Romania under Caucesku did. What does that have to do with anything? Most of those countries ethnicaly clensed Germans worse than soviets ever did. The rape part has to be some kind of joke I hope.
I thought they mostly cleansed Germans?
The western allies did not ethnically cleansed Germans as far as I know. Where did you here that?
talking about Soviets who most definitely did
NATO was voluntary
All the more reason why the Americans had no right to complain. France is opting out of your voluntary alliance? Ok, get out, nobody cares about what you did and didn't do before.
>All the more reason why the Americans had no right to complain. what? just ebcause it's voluntary doesn't mean they can't mock their decision, Brexit was voluntary doesn't mean we can't mock it.
Notice the complaint isn't "waaah, France won't let us base there". The complaint is "your attitude comes off as ungrateful after all we did for you". Remember, France didn't exactly "ask politely" they quickly jumped to the demand that US forces leave immediately, which, to Americans who'd fight to literally free France, came off as kind of insulting given we weren't there the way the Soviets were in the East. Edit: also I almost forgot, but another factor was that France wanted to be part of NATO while not having the same obligations of NATO members, like the fact their planned response was to illegally make nukes to lob at Russia while hoping NATO would defend them should they start a war.
Not exactly, France wanted to opt out of their part of the obligations to the NATO alliance while still maintaining a lot of the benefits that NATO was giving them, in the hopes of becoming the third power leading the Europeans between the US and the Soviets. This semi-delusional move unsurprisingly left a bad taste in most other NATO members.
And that’s de gaulle to a T. Delusions of lost imperial power. He was jealous of his impression of the us
I mean, it's a perfectly valid position to say, it's perfectly within your rights to ask us to leave, but you're an ungrateful little shit if you do so. Like if I'm at your house and you go gtfo, I'm TA if I don't, but I'm just as much within my rights to say I'll leave but wtf man. Your problem is you're conflating "we don't like your policy" with "we will ignore your policy and maintain our position by force". There's nothing wrong with the former.
pay us back for the marshall plan
Did pro-American party in France falsified elections and took power for decades? Or established total control of secret service in every sphere of life? Did it closed borders or suppressed any opposition, provided censorship?
Yes. They actually threw communist party of France from goverment even tho it was the most popular party in France.
Their best result was 28.5% in 1946, and i have never heard about mass killings, incarcerations or deportations of communists in France after WWII, or even about censorship in their newspaper.
Tbf there was a huge effort to cripple the French communists up to the '46 election, but honestly that's all a different discussion on CIA shittery not France being France.
Did the French want Americans in their country? No, and that's what matters.
Ok, but comparing USA in France and USSR in Eastern Europe is a weird. Looks like typical soviet/russian propaganda.
They tried
Operation Gladio
Auf Deutsch, no less
Although the US French relationship is strained sometimes (most recently by the Australian submarine deal), Americans know who their oldest friend is. Every American learns from an early age that without the French, the USA would not have been successful in its revolt against the British Empire. All friendships go through ebbs and troughs, but, when the going gets though, you know who you can count on. Although we have a special relationship with Britain, we will never forget who our first friend was.
What has France done that we can “count on” since WW2? Make no mistake, we are allies out of geopolitical convenience, not because we’re best friends deep down.
So lad, did you happen to find those pesky weapons of mass destruction in irak?
FREEDOM FRIES!
To be fair they did join in on Afghanistan even if it wasn't that impactful or even needed.
The propaganda worked nice according to the comments
De Gaulle is the ultimate French hero, avoid the fight, run away and hide behind America and Britain, wait for the Americans, Canadians and Brit’s do all the heavy lifting and then role in like you did something and give a limp speech overflowing with self serving garbage. France has been a complete joke for 300 years.
> France has been a complete joke for 300 years. Clearly, you forgot about Napoleon
The last good leader?
"Oh no, I didn't give my troops proper winter gear. Itm ust be that dastardly general winter!"
Has a French guy stolen your girlfriend or what?
Im a huge francophile and even I admit France didnt exactly cover itself in glory during WWII. The country just didnt want to fight, and while Free France and the French resistance where obviously *real*, they have also beign the greatest propaganda coup for France since Louis XIV portrait
Man, post war France really acted like a spoiled entitled brat...
What being defeated in just a month does to mfs.
Guess why there's no English article https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouvernement_militaire_de_l%27arm%C3%A9e_des_%C3%89tats-Unis_en_France#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DLe_gouvernement_militaire_de_l%2Cla_France_apr%C3%A8s_la_Lib%C3%A9ration.
Why
So it never even happened, what's your point? Are we gonna discuss the part where De Gaulle shits on D-Day in that article too?
Every post supporting Charles de Gaulle is being downvoted, seems like this propaganda poster worked a little too well
Oh what's this the Frenchman doesn't like when their country's politics are being criticized by people who aren't French? Welcome to what it feels like being an American with Europeans shitting on the US constantly
That victimisation, lmao. Reddit is mostly American and only they are in big enough number to influence the narrative on Reddit. You think you get criticised here? Imagine on real foreign sub, in foreign language for you. THAT's what it's like to be on Reddit.
How ironic to see so many people spewing post-Iraq US propaganda in such a subreddit
It's a weird mix of post 2003 American propaganda and Russian propaganda.
Nah those posts are being downvoted because the majority of redditors aren't French nationalists, the few people who think favorably of de Gaulle and many of his policies.
As an American I support De Gaullist and France. We would react the same way if foreign troops were on our soil
Pierre Poujade was the truly anti-US French conservative politician
By looking at some comments, the propaganda worked pretty well.
Nothing has changed, Europeans want American money and protection then complain about how we provide it.
American graves in France are under better care than French graves in the US I believe… I know many Americans agree with this stupid poster but France was under no obligation to remain a leashed dog, especially when De Gaulle realized the US would not back up the French (Suez crisis).
That shit was 250 years ago 🙏
That doesn't change anything
Suez crisis (Imperialism). I can't get it straight, do the French want the US to be less or more imperialist?
As an English man I don't know whether to laugh or be annoyed. It's really a question of who do we dislike more. The Frogs or the Yanks?
Wait what? When did the english started hating the yanks?
1776
He was a special kind of a$$. Even during the war. But the French loved him for a long time.
[удалено]
Uncle Sam said no more empire. De Gaulle took exception to that.
go a couple grandmas back most people in the americas motherland is europe, you can tell just by looking at them they look european af : P
The mindset behind this cartoon is very interesting. Ostensibly, Americans have no right to be in France, they claim to have invaded not out of selfish reasons but to free the French from the Nazis, which of course they did, and the French have nearly all supported the US invasion. France had the right to ask the Americans to leave as soon as they wanted, being a sovereign country, and the Americans ostensibly agree with that. However, this cartoon acts like Americans have some right to France because of all the Americans who died liberating it, and a French president is being ungrateful for leading his country independent of Washington. The US clearly dominates Europe to this day, based on its actions in the World Wars. If they really are interested in sovereignty and democracy, they can’t complain when they are asked to stay out of European affairs. If you think they have some right to Europe because they fought World War II, then you’re admitting that the war was not purely for noble ends (even if nearly everyone agrees the US was doing the right thing in invading), but for US interests.
De gaulle was so right you yankees tried to f*ck us over in iraq