Comments by "Black Cat Dungeon Master\x27s Familiar" (@blackcatdungeonmastersfami5311) on "The 80th anniversary of D Day; why the French hate Britain so much for what we did during the war" video.

@FredScuttle456 That's pretty typical when a country gets occupied. You could say the same for Ukraine or Yugoslavia or Belgium or Netherlands or Norway. The SS recruited divisions from all of them but also in all of them there were partisans fighting the Germans. Just the reality of war.
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Tens of thousands of French civilians especially in the north were killed by Allied, mainly British bombing in 1944.
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In all seriousness, the best outcome by far would have been to stay out of it. The Germans would have fought the Soviet Union and they would have exhausted each other. A lot of the reason Britain fought Germany was the fear that Hitler wanted the colonies lost at Versailles back. But without a huge navy which he didn't have, he had no means of getting them. We lost our empire anyway so it wouldn't have mattered if we'd given him some bits of Africa.
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You do know that the British fleet attacked the French fleet and killed thousands soon after the Vichy surrender right?
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@silversurfer640 When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, there's pretty strong evidence the Soviet army was deployed to attack Germany, part of the reason for the high Soviet losses in the first month. e.g. European gauge tracks laid, large supply dumps close to the front line, forward airbases full of aircraft. A defensive deployment would have been quite different. From the archives the Soviet thinking in 1939 was that the West and the Germans would exhaust each other in prolongued First World War style attrition.
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@jonathansimmons5353 That's ridiculous. You can learn a language in a few weeks if you're in total immersion. Two years is enough to learn a language to a very high level if you're studying it in addition to merely speaking it. But twenty years living somewhere might not be enough if you speak to eveyrone in Englisha and you make no effort. Look at how the Jehovah Witnesses train young Americans for their prosoletysing in different countries: intense immersion but quite short. Even for hard languages for an English speaker like Korean.
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We didn't drag the French into war in 1939. Most of the French cabinet (except Georges Bonnet) wanted the war as much as the British cabinet. Obviously they wanted the Poles to do the fighting rather than to do it themselves but they had the opportunity to tell the Poles they planned to keep out of it in the days before the war started just as Mussolini told Hitler he planned to keep Italy out. The French had a military commitment to launch a major attack on Germany by day 15 of the war - which they obviously didn't do. No country (including the USA) comes out of this without blame.
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@Censoredbyfscists Whose fleet was it then genius?
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@candy-le4nh The point is, the French did nothing. Maurice Gamelin had a commitment to the Poles to launch an invasion of Germany with the majority of his forces on day 15 of a war. He obviously lied, hoping the Poles would take the brunt of the German effort and wear the Germans down. Obviously things didn't work out like that, the Germans were stronger and the Poles were weaker than anyone (Poles, French or German) expected - but that was the plan. Also the Poles expected heavy bombing of the Ruhr from the start of the war. Instead the RAF and the pretty large French airforce dropped a few propaganda leaflets.
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@simonmilligan7497 We could have just stayed out of it. In the days before the war, Britain wrote a blank cheque for Poland much like Germany did for Austria-Hungary in 1914. As a result the Poles wouldn't negotiate at all with the Germans even when they knew the Germans had a non agression pact with the Soviet Union obivously aimed at Poland. In fact, Britain actually sabotated any Polish/German negotiations (see Schulze-Rhonof the War with Many Fathers). Britain had good reasons for this of course but it wasn't the only option and in retrospect wasn't the best option.
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I'm Scottish and speak French (badly) from what I experienced, people were really friendly in the north (Normandy, Brittany and Picardly), more hostile around Nice and in Paris. I wasn't long in the far east (the annexed Germany bits) but people there seemed pretty friendly too. Might depend a lot where you are.
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@simongarthwaite7695 Sure but it was obvious to everyone good relations between Germany and the Soviet Union were temporary. Even if they never gone to war, they were balancing each other. As in forcing each other to keep large forces dedicated to defending against an attack by the other. This would have held German expansion in check without the necessity for Britain to go to war.
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@vincekerrigan8300 The point is it explains why a lot of French people aren't going to thank Britain for kicking the Germans out.
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"didn't go down well" LOL
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@felicitysparrowhawk The mainly territorial 51st Highland division wasn't taken off at Dunkirk, they fought until destroyed further south. There was massive resentment in Scotland about it because Churchill sacrificed them to try to convince the French to stay in the war.
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@jonathansimmons5353 That's ridiculous and I can prove it. Intelligence agencies train operatives to be good enough to impersonate a native speaker in a foreign language through study, immersion and tutoring. It might take as long as a year but you're claiming five years. You're massively overestimating how long it takes at least some people to learn a language. I speak French and have dabbled in Italian and Spanish. I went on holiday to Portugal without speaking any Portuguese but over a week I read Teach Yourself Portuguese and by the end of the week I could have a pretty decent conversation with people. That's not even immersion, that's just pretty casual. Likewise I picked up Afrikaans over a month to the point where I could have a decent conversation, my starting point was Dutch. If you're actually getting lessons you can make rapid progress. If you're getting 8 hours per day immersion you're going to learn in no time if you're of at least average intelligence. Yes a lot will depend on the language. Learning Russian is harder than Portuguese and Chinese is going to much harder still.
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@28pbtkh23 Yeah that's how it looks from the British point of view. If you were French, you'd see it differently., You'd find such an ultimatum from your so called ally outrageous and you'd know that if you just handed your fleet over, the Germans would take reprisals on the remaining parts of France.
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@011258stooie Roosevelt and his ambassadors got leaked the secret clause of the Ribbentrop/Molotov Pact and deliberately didn't tell Poland - the only explanation can be Roosevelt wanted to prevent the Poles from backing down i.e. he wanted to bait Germany into a war.
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@djscoah8037 No, the majority of British people are pretty craven if we're honest. Look at how there's no opposition to mass immigration and how people were banging pots for the NHS and calling to be locked down harder.
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@THX-ic8yw In the immediate aftermath of the bombing the panicked police had no way to do anything better than guess. Police are notoriously bad at even guessing the size of a crowd let alone the numbers killed in a city in ruins.
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@FredScuttle456 I regard people like him as much worse. The Vichy police were trying to protect traditional French society from the left. France before 1939 had similar but milder problems to Spain, there was poltiical violence and extremism. Modern British police are the left.
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Most of the bombers which destroyed Normandy were RAF bombers. Maybe that's part of the reason.
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@Toyotaamazon80series The biggest rapists in Western Europe were the Maroccans in the Free French army. Obviously few French people wanted to be occupied by the Germans. But any time your country or town is fought over, your friends and family get killed, you have a year of starvation and you have to rebuild your home afterwards.
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I doubt that's the real reason. It's more just geopolitics. The Common Market was a joint project dominated by France and Germany by which Germany subsidised France. Once Britain joined, French influence was heavily diluted. De Gaulle also saw Britain as too closely aligned with the Americans - one of biggested economic and financial rivals of France.
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eh? what? er ... no
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@colinbirks5403 LOL learn some history yourself. That wasn't early in the war, that was after the collapse of France and most especially, after the RN sunk the French fleet. And no, Vichy France didn't side with Germany. Vichy France sided with France. After the collapse, they tried to stay neutral as long as possible.
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