It was the French (and the Dutch) through the efforts of Ben Franklin over prototypical American weenies of Sammyg2 's like who financed our Revolution.
Not to mention the men and material lent for the cause.

WW1 - Well just read Alistair Hornes The Price of Glory about Verdun, or visit any cemetary in France. 3000 dead, EVERY DAY for over FOUR YEARS ! We come in at the end and somehow we are the ones who get all the credit ?!?

WW2 - 90, 000 French dead in ONE MONTH ! That's also 3000 dead per day. And only 24 years later.
I think the Russians also may have had a tiny bit to do with the Axis defeat.

We know here what it is like to lose 3000 in a day, Sept. 11. I wonder if we would hold up as well as the French did if that was a daily tally.
I don't want to belittle the sacrifice of our troops (my uncle with Patton's third army included) but svandamme seems to have the best perspective on it, comes with the terroir n'est ce pas ?

Predjudice is ignorance and vice-versa.

"Maybe we should have let the Nazi's keep Europe " ? ! no, not an exact quote I know but WOW ! I take it in your view the holocaust was not enough of a reason to act ?

Abu Jamal , OJ Simpson, etc, etc. There are kooks in every country attracted to antisocial lowlife murdering scum. You can choose to be either part of the prob or part of the solution.

John

They had much to lose and little to gain by fighting the entire war for America, and we'd not have done the heavy lifting we needed to do if they had.

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As far as vietnam goes, I wasn't there in the early 60's but based on what I have read the french pleaded for help constantly and didn't say "we're out of here" until the US was duped into taking their place.

No, that's not what happened. What or who, in Gawd's name, told you that lie?

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Someone suggested that them rest of the world is tired of the US being a bully? We bullied the German's into defeat in WW1.

A colossal error by an early American fascist president. If America had to choose between socialist England and France, and the monarchy of Germany, the latter would have been the far better choice, the anglophiles in the northeast be damned.

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We bullied the axis powers into defeat in WWII.

Hardly, the bulk of the fighting in World War Two was on the eastern front; and Britain and France would have kicked the Germans out of France when the Russians swept across Poland and threatened eastern Germany. Do you realy think the Germans would have remained in France with several million Russians boring down on them?

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We billied the USSR into leaving all of europe alone during the cold war.

The Soviet Union, after having been saved twice by the US government; simply collapsed of it's own ponderous self, years later than it should have. The US government lenghtened that collapse because it helped it gain power for decades.

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We bullied the north Koreans into a ceasefire,

A victory for one world government, building up the UN; a pyrrhic victory certainly.

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we bullied Iraq into giving back Kuwait.

For no known purpose, except to set up what's happening now.

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Seems like no one likes the US unless we are being a bully against their enemies, then it's perfectly OK. Like I said, we should just sit the next one out and let the cries for help from the rest of the world fall on deaf ears.

The cries for more power by the US government would be deafening, but must be resisted.

So much teaching to do and so little time.

I agree that any assistance by the French in the founding of our nation is far overblown...they were just happy to have the British empire diverted from kicking their arse for a brief period.

I guess that the best comparison is:
How many Frenchmen died in the Revolutionary war to win our freedom?

How many US Soldiers died in WW1 and WW2 to to win freedom (such as it is) for the French?

Perhaps we should try to find a notorious French murderer to name a street or two after.

That's easy to answer, none.

exactly. We didn't give a damn as a nation until we were attacked and then we went to war for us.

and prolonged the war by having extreme surrender terms and thus giving Hitler ammo for his cause during his rise...

So why, exactly are you liberals saying we entered WW1 and WW2? You are not making much sense.

WW1 , sinking of a US boat
WW2 , coz the japanese were buddies with Hitler, and started in Pearl

if it weren't for those events, the US would have limited to supplying goods and giving out loans...

So we went to war in WW1 against the Germans solely because one of our ships sank?...when there was never even evidence that it was sank by the Germans? Doesn't sound likely to me.

As far as WW2 is concerned...so you claim that being attacked by the Japenese caused us to liberate Europe? Why did we not just concentrate on the Pacific and Japan?

Economics.

for one thing the US has a tendency to see it black and white, if you are not with us , you are against us
Hitler was pro Japanese, and as such had to be set straight

for another thing, Hitler had to be stopped, because if he ever got a foothold in Europe, and time to regroup, he would simply expand even more
see the other post about the Germans develloping 2 stage rockets capable of reaching the US homeland


don't forget, technology wise, science wise, Germans were ahead of everybody else, they did not fail because of technology gaps... they did fail cause Hitler was a nutcase and screwed up strategically... nobody won the European part of WW2, Hitler lost it and to great expense of everybody axis and allies ....without captured technology and scientists, the space race would have had a totally different timeline...

By Jim Geraghty
The headline in the Economist declares the current French government as “beyond saving.” Throughout France, the public senses that their government is in disarray and their elected officials are paralyzed.
The Gallic nation has been through a tremendous amount of upheaval in the past year — the unexpected widespread rejection of the EU Constitution, the cartorching ethnic violence of last fall, the huge strikes and protests by young people opposing economic liberalization earlier this year, a growing and complicated corruption scandal, and in recent weeks, the collapse of public confidence in their elected officials President Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin are so widely disliked that they could envy Mr. Bush’s current approval numbers.

An American conservative may be tempted to smile. Since at least 2003, and perhaps earlier, France has been the rhetorical punching bag of choice for American conservatives. My National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg popularized the nickname for the French from the Simpsons (“cheese-eating surrender monkeys”); elsewhere the Gallic nation was nicknamed part of a “Axis of Weasels” or in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismissive phrase, a part of “Old Europe.”

But Mr. Chirac’s current political impotence and the foggy, gloomy outlook for his nation’s future are not good signs for Americans who prefer a hawkish and conservative foreign policy.
The France that will emerge from next year’s presidential election (tentatively scheduled for April) is likely to be very different from the France of the recent past or even today. The post-Chirac nation is likely to either be paralyzed by internal fights and ethnic rivalries or committed to a quieter, more consensus-oriented, more isolationist identity.They are likely to cease to be, well, French, at least as we’ve come to know it.

Today, many of the world’s elites — the Davos attendees,the political,academic,and media leaders in the U.S. and Europe - revile patriotism, tout cultural relativism, and embrace cosmopolitanism — an assertion of an identity as a citizen of the world. The elites as well as the common folk of France are an odd exception to that; they’re proud to be French, believe that their culture is the world’s finest, and that really, there’s not much for them to learn from other cultures.

Assimilation includes an element of welcoming immigrants, and adding a bit of their native culture to their own — creating an America where just about every town has Italian, Chinese, Mexican and Lebanese restaurants, U2, Shakira, and Sean Paul are heard around the radio dial, and your favorite NBA team’s roster looks like the United Nations. One of the reasons the French don’t assimilate their immigrants is that they don’t really want any cultural gifts from their immigrant population. French culture is already perfect; they don’t need any Algerian, Moroccan,Vietnamese or central African flavoring.

Sometimes this sentiment is expressed in an ugly manner, but more often it just reflects honest pride.Much of Europe is awash with the largely empty and dissatisfying rhetoric of multicultural we’re-all-one-world kumbaya blather; when this watery pudding of a worldview meets militant Islamism, it tends to get obliterated. France’s leaders and people have stood boldly and said,“this is our culture, and we apologize to no one for it.” It is not surprising that many of the loudest debates about the Islamization of Europe are going on in France.

In more concrete terms, a quieter, more internally divided France will mean the loss of an often-useful, if contrarian and iconoclast American ally. As often as the French disagreed with the U.S., they often inherently agreed with the same assumptions behind our policies — the need for national pride and a unified national and cultural identity, a right to act in a national interest, the justification for projecting military force in far-off locales to defend those national interests. As much as they were a pain in the derriere on Iraq, they proved themselves to be useful allies in pressuring Syria over Lebanon, as well as in the war in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and the first Iraq war.
Even today, the French are demonstrating that there are some dangerous world leaders they’re not willing to snuggle with. You’ll recall that the fight at the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war was frequently portrayed the U.S. and the United Kingdom on one side, opposed by France, China, and Russia — all of whom were frequent Iraqi business partners. Today, France is much closer to the U.S. position in dealing with President Ahmadinejad; they’ve declared the Iranian nuclear program is “military”; dismissed Iran’s claim of civilian use as a “cover-up,” and repeatedly demanded that Iran cease its unclear activity. Of course, what the French government is willing to do beyond words has yet to be seen.

The French were never as bad as the mockery suggested; but they may quickly turn into a less confident, less active, less influential state — a shadow of its former bold self.That’s bad for America, and bad for the foreign policy vision of Republicans. Looking ahead to the dangerous, unstable world of the coming years, our leaders in Washington will need its traditional ally — not a larger Belgium.
Mr. Geraghty is a contributing editor at National Review.

Too much doom and gloom from the right’s William F Buckley Jr. rag? Come on, Germany can always help the French economy get back on track.

In return, France can return Alsace Lorraine to the Germans and apologize for the imprisonment of Herr Doktor Porsche. OK the last bit was personal, since my family came to America from Alsace Lorraine via Rotterdam.

i think Germany right now is a bit preoccupied getting it's own economy back on track...

Yeah, but for Alsace Lorraine-that's gotta be worth a try.:p

First, your support for overseas military adventures puts you squarely in the American liberal camp. Only liberals entered wars for the purposes you've stated repeatedly in this forum.

World War One was to "make the world safe for democracy", which meant safe for european socialism.

World War Two was to "remove the scourge of militarism and fascism", which meant to make the globe safe for communism.

Are you starting to get the picture yet? If not, I can supply significantly more evidence.

It is not just about the economy - although that needs a kick in the a$$ too.

"The post-Chirac nation is likely to either be paralyzed by internal fights and ethnic rivalries or committed to a quieter, more consensus-oriented, more isolationist identity.They are likely to cease to be, well, French, at least as we’ve come to know it."

I believe I see lessons for we Americans in the above.

Lots of Monday morning quarterbacking there...LoL. Shoulda, coulda, woulda....for all the whining about it...it is pretty clear what really happened. Hitler did have a foothold in Europe...because he and the German army kicked the living crap out of the French...and the rest of Europe. The only reason that the entire ungrateful continent is not speaking German is because they were bailed out by the very ones whose motives they insult now.

I say keep up the French bashing. That way I might have a smaller chance of running into fat ass American tourists. Keep up the boycott as well. That way I might have a better chance of getting my share of Morbier and Mont d'Or. But best of all, it helps solidify France as one of the best countries in the world for excellent real estate values. I should should be thanking the bashers on a daily basis for big favor. So should all the British and German expatriates.