That's a FAMO, indeed, and the reason why I said there were still some (but not exactly a "Bunkerflak") in Italy, since if my memory serves me well, they were all with 26. Panzer on that theater.and well, he he
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
The French army seemed to has been 'forgotten' in the first instance by Devs till the community complains. Then, they decided to make it a DLC, pretending it wasn't an oversight, but on the contrary, planned from the beginning...
Nolan's Dunkirk = the Battle of France without the French... while, in fact, 40,000 French sacrificed themselves, fighting the Germans, to make it possible for the Allied forces to evacuate.
Last edited:
WW1 German mobile flak consisted of 75mm guns mounted on flatbed farm trucks.... which reminds that in 1940, the German had a pretty cool vehicle they didn't have anymore in 1944 (or only in Italy): the Bunkerflak!
Self-propelled armored 88mm for direct fire:
1940: 1 - 1944: 0
EA didnt decide to make a DLC after hearing complaints, it was a planned DLC all along EA isnt a company to make a game then wonder what they will do next with they have plans for the game and DLC set in stone years before the games released. they had the French DLC planned the Russian DLC planned and many other dlcs already being worked on well before release. EA does alot of things crappy but atleast they plan ahead decently (aside from Sim City). So it wasnt an oversight like you say. The battlefield one argument can defenitelly be dropped now especially since they have access to more toys everyone but Germany.
As for Dunkirk the movie seems to be a British story about British soldiers ,ma de by British producers, writers, and directors, from what ive read it seems to be focusing on one specific country like Saving Private Ryan. Wich aside from its inaccuracies is one of the best war movies around. \
French filmakers maybe should focus on making there own WW2 movies. Like maybe a Treaty of versailles were they take strip Germany of atleast 10% of its territory all most of that territory being very important to the economy of Germany aswell as taking away 7 million of its population away and giving historical and ethnically German territory to anyone who wants on aswell as causing widespread famine and not letting anyone do anything because of saltiness over a war from 1870, about then show them wondering why the Germans after artifical famines, stripping of the Germany economy, the carving up of german territory the Germans are so pissed. WW2 didny start when Poland got invaded or France got invaded it started June 28th 1919, Or starting the Vietnam conflict then talking shit to the USA about getting involved after throwing a temper tantrum when they didnt want to. Again we were soldiers didnt forget.
And no theres not a trend of intentionally leaving out France in the media Paths of Glory one of the best WW1 movies ever made is American actors. directors, and producers.
Agree, though the announcement was clumsy hence the backlash. Furthermore, WWI is very important in France, and the French are tired of hearing the Americans bombasting that they won WWI, so the backlash was inevitable.
You are right on this one, Dunkirk is about soldiers trying to survive, not the whole battle.
Hum, no. This is a common pro-German excuse, but it is irrelevant:
1) The Brits had a lot of leverage in Versailles and are responsible for a lot of border changes
2) The treaty of Versailles is nicer to Germany than the peace the Germans forced on the Russians.
3) That territory was mainly Polish, were the Poles were oppressed, their language and culture being eradicated by Germans settlers who were supposed to Germanize the East.
4) Versailles or not, there would have been a lot of revanchism in Germany. Versailles was only a convenient scapegoat. Look at post-URSS revanchist in modern day Russia. They use the Nato "Eastern Expansion" as a pretext. It is only a propaganda construction aimed at painting one's country as a victim even though he is the aggressor.
Wrong again. The French lost the war in Indochina. The Americans had no reason to come. When they did, the French explained how bad an idea it was (because they lost the war and understood what was happening). The Americans then humiliated France and explained to the French that being unable to win this war only mean that they are bad. How do you think the French should have reacted ?
Well, they said what they thought. You can't put the Vietnam disaster on the French. Considering Iraq, this means that twice, France warned the Americans that they were making a mistake, and twice they weren't listened to by. Twice they tried to prevent it and twice they were insulted, trash-talked and humiliated. And twice they were right, and never receive any kind of apology.
There is a distinctive trend that go back to Reagan and Bush Jr. Before Reagan, movie such as the one you mentioned did presented France, but the Reagan era brought a great emphasis on American heroism, while the Iraq war brought a wave of anti-French feelings and stereotype across the US.
For example, in Medal of Honor : Allied Assault, there is the French Resistance, in Call of Duty, it is gone. That seems anecdotic, however there was a time where you couldn't have a movie/game set in France during WWII without the Resistance in it. Those times are gone, thanks to Bush. This overall behaviour is the reason behind the French susceptibility over those issues.
If you really want to go with recent trends then all the armies should be composed of black women.According to the recent trend in videogame (Battlefield One) & movie (Dunkirk) industries, we've decided that if we were to make a Dunkirk '40 map, it would only feature French & German troops. Well, Poles & Canadians would be welcome too ...
2soon?
Playing the balming game, one could argue that WW2 started when Germany declared war on France on August 3rd, 1914? There would have been no Versailles Treaty then.
Or, to dig deeper into causes and consequences, blame Bismarck for the Ems Dispatch, which triggered the 1870 French-Prussian War which led to France's loss of Alsace & Lorraine, which weighed more than anything in the French hatred and desire of revanche of the late XIXth/early XXth century?
But why only blaming only Germany? Maybe be we could blame Napoleon for inflicting such a humiliation to the Prussians in 1806, one of a scale never to be seen again before France's Fall in 1940, which itself triggered Germany's hostility toward France for the next century?
...
We can go a long way like this ...
Well, France-USA relationships over Indochina can hardly be summed up in a sentence.
The American perception of the conflict changed considerably between the beginning and the end of it, shifting from outright opposition to the "evil colonial empire" (including delivering arms to the Vietminh in the last stage of WW2) to full support, including US mercenaries & pilots flying relief missions over Dien Bien Phu.
The problem is that this shift happened too late and too slowly. While the USA were starting to support France, the VM was getting the full support of Communist China in terms of supply, weapons, training, ... and even direct intervention, like when a full Chinese division penetrated in Indochina to engage and destroy the guerilla groups Chocolat & Colibri in 1952.
There was a time in the USA when the men of DBP were regarded as heroes & martyrs in the fight of communism and paraded in the street of New York like if they'd returned from the moon.
Later, when the USA were more and more involved in Vietnam with no end in sight, it became more convenient to blame or mock the French for anything, especially when they tried to give advices. For example, it took France years to develop an efficient counter-insurgency strategy, but in the last two year and a half of the war (1953-1954) it was paying off. But too late.
But the Americans would hear nothing from the French, it would have felt demeaning to them. They even destroyed the South Vietnamese Army we had built from nothing, with its first traditions, battle honors, ... to recreate one to their image and restart from scratch.
Churchill is supposed to have once said that "The Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives". That's exactly what they've done in Vietnam: they fallen in The exact same ambushes, traps, failure, and mistakes than we did, and they came with solutions too late in the war. The same solution we were trying to tell them about from the very beginning, such as the GCMA/GMI (commandos cadre training and operating with local anti-communist communities), which found their counterparts with MACV SOG and the Montagnards groups.
I suggest anyone interested on the Indochina topic to read "The Street Without Joy", by Bernard Hall. He was a French-American (hence, no bias
) journalist & scholar whom went on the ground with both French & American troops in both wars. And comapred methods. You'll see that although very critical of the French, he is even more of the American for repeating the same mistake again while they could have build a new strategy on French mistakes and had a hundred time the mean.I have lived to the day were "We were soldiers" is considered an authority on Indochina affairs ...
I could write a full page on how this movie is accumulating more historical inaccuracies in its 5mn intro than even "The Battle the Bulge" over its whole length.
No arguing that it is indeed a great movie. But have you ever bothered to look for and watch a French one?
I suggest "Les Croix de Bois" (Wooden Crosses), a 1932 movie made using mostly WW1 veterans as stunts for more realism.
Also "Un long Dimanche de Fiançailles" (A Very Long Engagement), although set in the interwar, as some quite good flashback trench warfare scenes.
Yet my favorite WW1 movie is also an American one, but set from the German point of view: "All Quiet on the Western Front", surely because the book has left its mark on me when I've read it as a kid.
You should really brush up on the MACV-SOG and CIA reports of the French before the US Vietnam War. The French were regarded as incompetent in the latter stages because they often times were. :^)Playing the balming game, one could argue that WW2 started when Germany declared war on France on August 3rd, 1914? There would have been no Versailles Treaty then.
Or, to dig deeper into causes and consequences, blame Bismarck for the Ems Dispatch, which triggered the 1870 French-Prussian War which led to France's loss of Alsace & Lorraine, which weighed more than anything in the French hatred and desire of revanche of the late XIXth/early XXth century?
But why only blaming only Germany? Maybe be we could blame Napoleon for inflicting such a humiliation to the Prussians in 1806, one of a scale never to be seen again before France's Fall in 1940, which itself triggered Germany's hostility toward France for the next century?
...
We can go a long way like this ...
Well, France-USA relationships over Indochina can hardly be summed up in a sentence.
The American perception of the conflict changed considerably between the beginning and the end of it, shifting from outright opposition to the "evil colonial empire" (including delivering arms to the Vietminh in the last stage of WW2) to full support, including US mercenaries & pilots flying relief missions over Dien Bien Phu.
The problem is that this shift happened too late and too slowly. While the USA were starting to support France, the VM was getting the full support of Communist China in terms of supply, weapons, training, ... and even direct intervention, like when a full Chinese division penetrated in Indochina to engage and destroy the guerilla groups Chocolat & Colibri in 1952.
There was a time in the USA when the men of DBP were regarded as heroes & martyrs in the fight of communism and paraded in the street of New York like if they'd returned from the moon.
Later, when the USA were more and more involved in Vietnam with no end in sight, it became more convenient to blame or mock the French for anything, especially when they tried to give advices. For example, it took France years to develop an efficient counter-insurgency strategy, but in the last two year and a half of the war (1953-1954) it was paying off. But too late.
But the Americans would hear nothing from the French, it would have felt demeaning to them. They even destroyed the South Vietnamese Army we had built from nothing, with its first traditions, battle honors, ... to recreate one to their image and restart from scratch.
Churchill is supposed to have once said that "The Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives". That's exactly what they've done in Vietnam: they fallen in The exact same ambushes, traps, failure, and mistakes than we did, and they came with solutions too late in the war. The same solution we were trying to tell them about from the very beginning, such as the GCMA/GMI (commandos cadre training and operating with local anti-communist communities), which found their counterparts with MACV SOG and the Montagnards groups.
I suggest anyone interested on the Indochina topic to read "The Street Without Joy", by Bernard Hall. He was a French-American (hence, no bias
I have lived to the day were "We were soldiers" is considered an authority on Indochina affairs ...
I could write a full page on how this movie is accumulating more historical inaccuracies in its 5mn intro than even "The Battle the Bulge" over its whole length.
No arguing that it is indeed a great movie. But have you ever bothered to look for and watch a French one?
I suggest "Les Croix de Bois" (Wooden Crosses), a 1932 movie made using mostly WW1 veterans as stunts for more realism.
Also "Un long Dimanche de Fiançailles" (A Very Long Engagement), although set in the interwar, as some quite good flashback trench warfare scenes.
Yet my favorite WW1 movie is also an American one, but set from the German point of view: "All Quiet on the Western Front", surely because the book has left its mark on me when I've read it as a kid.
I know you want to paint the French as some marytr that died on the altar as the pig-headed Americans laughed at their failure but the way they dealt with Vietnam was terrible.
The United States may have had their military falling in the same traps etc, but at least they knew how to win their battles. In the end public opinion and political turmoil ended the war (for better or for worse is not really the point I'm getting at).
When the CIA helps you build your counter insurgency from the ground up of course it is going to be good. The problem is the French took the advice far too late.
I certainly don't ... if that's how it was understood, then I've expressed myself very badly.
All I was saying is that it took France about 5-6 years of disasters, tries & errors to come up with an efficient counter-insurgency strategy, and that the Americans failed to capitalize on that and started the progress all over again, making the same mistakes to come up with basically the same solutions.
You realize that counter insurgency was built by the CIA, correct? They were observing and dealing with the French since the end of World War II. Only until shit got really bad was when the French gave in and accepted their help. They realized restoring authority over a lost colony wasn't happening and they'd rather contain with proper tactics.
I agree that America went in with the wrong mentality in fighting the war and should have gotten more aid from the CIA but they also had the tools to level the country and raze it to the ground. France didn't have this capability and the forces they sent were rather ill equipped. The only way that America was going to win that war was by glassing the north or by ignoring political pressure back at home.
Well ... no. I don't know how you came up with that idea.
Counter-insurgency tactics had been around since the XIXth century. As far as France is concerned, since the Napoleonic War in Spain, where French suffered a lot from Spanish guerilla and where Marshal Suchet (the only Napoleonic general to win his Marshal baton in Spain) understood that nothing could be done against the guerrillas without winning the civilian population first. He set the basis on which French counter-insurgency policy will be built on. Most of the officer who pacified Algeria fifteen years later were former Suchet's lieutenants, using the same methods.
What was different in Indochina and took a few year to adapt to was the political dimension of communism and the hold the party system had on the population. What was called "La Guerre Révolutionnaire". Only after a few years did we came up with ways of fighting it, but it was too late. The lessons were learned though and applied against the Algerian FLN, which was first destroyed in the countryside, forced to exile in Tunisia & Morroco or cornered in major cities, then destroyed during the battle of Algiers.
Actually, it is basically the other way around ...
France had been begging the USA to sell it weapons for the war, but the latter wouldn't hear about it, unwilling to commit the "arsenal of democracy" on the side of an "evil colonial empire". By the end of the war, the OSS had even provided Ho Chi Min with instructors (to train what would become the core of the VM army), money & modern weapons (small arms though). Up to 1950, the army got scraps of equipment, because the USA wouldn't sell any that we could use in Indochina, only for the defense of Europe and they kept a close eye on how we were using it. We had to buy British leftover from their Indian army, old 1940 French stocks, even captured Japanese tanks and planes, or XIXth century old Chinese guns. Hell, we even resorted to sending a dozen German SdKfz and (supposedly) even a Panther from France!
Things changed in 1950 because of the situation in Korea. Suddenly, we went from "evil colonial tyrants" to "frontline warriors of the war on communism in SE-Asia". We didn't care about the label, as long as we got the guns ... From 1950, cash & equipment became to arrive en masse, allowing for a standardization of equipment and procedure. But as I said earlier, as helpful as it was, it came too late and too few, for at the same time China was doing the same with the VM on much larger scale.
The CIA might have been observing all that time, but it was mostly involved in backing up nationalist Vietnamese group in their claim for independence and pushing for the expansion of Indochinese national armies. The former actions were more of a hindrance to us, while the latter was indeed the reasons of most of the tensions between the two: the USA considered that, since they paid the bill for the new Indochinese armies, they should be in charge of its organization, while French officers only wanted to be handed the weapons and hear nothing about the American advisors.
As far as I know, the SDECE (former DGSE) or its military arm the GCMA/GMI never had any dealings with the CIA, hence never received or brushed out its "advice".
You misunderstood what I said. I am not saying the CIA invented counter-insurgency but when shit hit the fan they were the ones advising and training the French on how to combat these unconventional forces they were fighting. I believe this started in 1953. The reason the US was arming and aiding nationalists in the region was because they understood the rising threat of communism to be the biggest threat in the region. The CIA noted how reluctant the French were in arming the Vietnamese army to aid them in combatting the rebels they were losing to because they thought they would then turn those guns on them in the end. The CIA kept trying to do this along with financing and training them but all it did was piss off the French. I have the direct CIA reports on my computer somewhere but I'm on my phone right now so I can't access them. It is written plain as day that their primary goal there was to quell communist control of the country by any means necessary. They weren't crusading against a falling empire in its death throes trying to restore a colonial entity.
I realize the French didn't just wanted to see the money and not hear anything in terms of advising. But in '53 they finally gave in and let the CIA start up their training and their covert operations. They were in touch regularly with the French Military. There are CIA reports that detail this that I can also provide if you need them. As to the SDECE and any interactions they had with the CIA I don't know of any either. The CIA was only advising the French Military in combatting communist forces through the use of the Vietnamese Army and their own troops.
Yes, we are on agreement about that: the American involvment, both Army and maybe CIA, was focused on building and training the new Vietnamese Army, since it was paying the bill for it. And it created much friction with the French army.
But counter-insurgency warfare in Indochina was the brainchild of Colonels Grall & Trinquier, the forerunners of the modern "French school of counter-insurgency".
They were around since 1947-48, commanding or member of parachute battalions and had had their first experiences with unconventional warfare. By 1951, when De Lattre created the GCMA with Grall at its head and Trinquier as commander of the North Vietnam (Tonkin) area, he was officializing and giving a frame to several individual attempts. They both went to great length to gain the "hearts & minds" of the Meo, Muong, ... and other anti-communist minorities. Too great a length even, as Grall organized the transport of opium by French means from the Meo country to the crime lords in Hanoï in order to secure the help of both groups!
By 1952, we already have several very effective maquis (large guerilla groups, although a maquis in French Resistance terms refers to a territory, not people), especially Cardamone, Colibri & Chocolat, on the Chinese border, which were turning the life of the Chinese-VM column into a living hell. Hence why the Chinese sent a regiment to help their VM brothers to dela with them ... but the Chinese regiment was annihilated, hence triggering the invasion of a full Chinese division to deal with the matter. From memory, only Cardamone survived. But the concept had proven very effective for a relatively low cost.
EDIT: I found that Trinquier did take part in a CIA operation in Korea in late 1951, after the GCMA's creation. So there seems to have been bridges between the two indeed ...
Whoever coined it's usage in Indochina is not really my focus though. I am saying that whatever was happening by '53 it was clear that the French themselves were struggling with fighting insurgents in the region. Their outposts were under constant harassment. I don't doubt the effectiveness of the French guerillas reaming the Chinese forces but the CIA was directly involved in updating, improving, and reinventing proper tactics for the French and to other forces in the area. I urge you to look up Lucien Conein who was with the CIA that directly trained and aided the maquis you are referring to. He was one of the lead trainers with these guerilla forces and was well respected by the French. I really do believe if the CIA had shared intelligence reports fully with the French and had ran a psyops program starting in 1953 that they could've defeated the communist threat and helped install a nationalist government.
Cool find about Korea by the way.
Well Elsaß-Lothringen belongs rightfully to Germany and you Frenchies know it.
And Germany belongs rightfully to the frankish kingdom.
Let's not forget England being just "a French colony that turned upside down" (Clémenceau). So basically, Dunkirk is a movie celebrating the desertion of our colonial troops ...And Germany belongs rightfully to the frankish kingdom.
Fixed that for you...? To quote Wikipedia: "[...] the brutality of the methods employed by the French forces failed to win hearts and minds in Algeria, alienated support in metropolitan France and discredited French prestige abroad."
And Germany belongs rightfully to the frankish kingdom.
Veni vidi vici
And to those discussing the relative merits of the American and French approaches to Vietnam, here's another good one:
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominis imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant