Could the Germans have been beat in 1940?

>>1565013
with soviet help yeah

>>1565013
All the French had to do was bomb the Panzer group in the several days it took for them to cross the Ardennes in one long line.

>>1565013
Possibly. Best bet is to get Belgium in the Allied camp over the winter of 39-40, and dig in deep over the winter and spring behind the Dyle and Maas rivers. If that didn't stop Germany cold, it would at least seriously bloody their noses trying to push through like that.

>>1565013
Yes, literally nobody thought they would do as well as they did, Germany included

>>1565013
Yes. French had more Tanks and more advanced tanks than the Germans in the 1940's. All they had to do was use them effectively.

Germans used tanks like horses to charge from the front lines ahead of the infantry and to cut behind the enemy.

The french horribly misused their tanks as basically mobile artillery, keeping them in support behind infantry. They were fighting using ww1 tactics with modern weapons.

If the French had put their tanks at the front and cut behind German lines before the Germans enveloped them, they could have won.

French have shit tactics and no fighting spirit at all, they didn't even bother defending their capital and just surrendered it. Look at how quickly they gave up in Indochina and Algeria. French people are not fighters, they are even worse than Italians. The only time they were successful was in the Napoleonic wars and Napoleon was an Italian.

>>1565013
They could have been beat in 1939.
>Germany busy invading Poland with most of their army
>French army sits with its thumb up its ass for the rest of the year and does nothing

All they had to do was get the fucks off-balance and it would have thrown Germany's plans into disarray.

>>1565580
While this is somewhat true the Germans had a timetable for when their military would be completely ready but Hitler got impatient

>>1565592
>French have shit tactics and no fighting spirit at all
I mean, aside from being the most feared military nation in europe for a thousand years and basically inventing the concept of fighting spirit then yeah, sure

If the French had simply attacked the paper-thin German column during the decisive stage of the Manstein plan, WWII would have ended

>>1565620
Poor bloody French. In ww1 they thought it would be mobile and manouver warfare, thy got their asses handed to them when they tried to fight like that. WW2 they think, well the last war was static and attrition based, lets make sure we will kick ass in that style of war, but the germans just zoomed past and fucked them up again

Bye bye french military reputation

Maybe if the Frenchies were willing to take a black eye for the team. But in the end they chose to give up instead of risking Paris being bombed out like Warsaw was.

File: 1463279261922.jpg (23KB, 337x367px) Image search: [Google]

23KB, 337x367px

>>1565616
While the rest of his statement was incorrect, it is historical fact the French military largely collapsed in 1940. Germany should not have been successful as they were, and if the French military had any semblance of fighting spirit or tactics, Hitler's precious Blitzkrieg would have been stopped and smashed near the Belgian border. It was constantly overextended, but the French never did anything worth a damn to stop it with one notable exception.

You can defend their fighting culture before the war, you can defend the Resistance members who kept fighting, you can even defend the Free French soldiers who turned on their own government because they considered Petain's surrender illegitimate, but you can not defend the collapse of the French military in 1940.

>>1565650
Yeah of course, they fucked up spectacularly. Militaries do that from time to time and in this case it cost them the entire war

Other guy made sweeping statements about the french in general which go completely against their general historical performance. That was my only point