Help with accessing a French World War 2 history article

@abworsham4

Cool story. Let’s hope this gets preserved.

@abworsham4

I think from the sides and back it’s possible. It just isn’t possible to armour those parts well enough against modern technology without it being too slow. So they just gave up in hope that with less armour a tank has superior mobility and can destroy the enemy before such a situation happens.

I heard that good tankers never expose the sides or back, and if that happens you deserve to lose.

@CWO:

@Narvik:

I spent some of my military service up there in the 80ties, and cant belive how Churchill in 1940 would think it was even remotely possible to walk 50 000 Brits over the mountain with no skies and no supply and no winter gear.

Churchill had a track record of cooking up grandiose flanking operations that looked impressive on maps but which were of dubious practical value, and a bad habit of giving a completely inadequate amount of thought to their operational and logistical details.  Gallipoli in WWI is the most notorious example, and the 1940 British invasion of Norway had many of the same problems: it was planned too quickly and too superficially, and like Gallipoli it was based on the premise that an amphibious invasion can be improvised by basically just loading a bunch of troops onto standard Royal Navy warships and throwing them at an enemy coastline.  As the Americans eventually learned in the Pacific, successful amphibious operations require months of careful planning and training, lots of specialized equipment, and close inter-service cooperation.  So it doesn’t surprise me that Churchill wouldn’t have bothered considering the practicality of marching several divisions of British troops through Norway’s mountains, in winter, with no special training or equipment.  Another place where he made this mistake was Italy, which was another of his pet flanking operation concepts.  His argument that Italy was the “soft underbelly of the crocodile” falls apart when you look at a topographical map of the Italian peninsula: it’s ideal country for a defender because it basically consists of narrow coastal plains (defilades in military parlance) flanking a rugged mountainous interior.  And to (literally) top it all off: where would the invading Allies have ended up if they had managed to fight all the way up to the top of the Italian boot?  In the Alps.

I think you make some very good points.

But the invasion of Africa was to secure Britains fuel links to the middle east.
Also I believe his intention was to invade Greece.

I do believe that in some ways the invasion of Greece would make some sense
as it could help with the Russians more readily once the fronts meet up.
Also a third of Germany’s oil comes from the Romanian town (or city) of Polesti

The Battle of Britain….

It is early yet Garg.
The Civil War was lost in the West, starting with Nashville and Vicksburg was a greater loss than Nashville.  I agree that a Southern victory at Gettysburg would not have equated to the fall of Washington or an armistice, despite Lee’s hopes for one.

Here is the series discussed above

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TU1dQK-j-4

I proclaim this thread Worthy.

the russian one was incrediable moslty the artillery barrage in the beginning was incrediable.