Is there too much contempt for the French from A&A players?

The French tanks were generally better than the German tanks, except for one thing.  German tanks had radios so command and control was immensely better on the German side.

You’re right. In fact, Bad communication in the French army it’s one of the reason of the French defeat in 1940.
The first reason was the incompetence of their high commands.

another problem some of the french tanks had was the commander was gunner also
the germans divided the labor making them more efficient
I agree.

putting my personal feelings about the french aside(don’t particularly care for them in general) have to agree with red harvest their leaders let them down when they needed them most
Bingo now you talk!!! Second reason why French lost the war. The french soldiers were abandoned by their superior and some opted for surrendering while the others fought till the end.

I think you need to understand, that NOT FIGHTING is COLLABORATING.
Any frenchman who just “went about his business” during World War II, was a collaborator, and a coward.
What about Norway, Danemark, Netherlands? Are they brave or coward?

I think everyone should stop trying to convince IL of anything other then what he wants to hear.

To get back to the point, I dont think France is held in too much contempt (with few notable exceptions) in terms of A&A, its just that where this game picks up France is about to fall. I dont view this as contempt, its just where France was at the historical date, and once metropolitian France falls there isnt much else for France to do so they do tend to get marganlized and largely ridiculed as a result. Looking at it objectively one can understand players looking down on France as statisticly speaking there isnt much chance (save for a wrathful dice god looking down on you) of France resisting the German invasion and after that France’s military forces can usually be counted on one hand. In a game that is the size and scope of A&A1940 the remaining French forces will never be more then a speed bump to the other players and the “contempt” with which they are held only make good sense. The remaining French force barely register as a threat to an Italian player never mind the Germans and if the allies (the UK in particular) were to place any sort of strategy on these forces it would be a blunder the likes Singapore! So I think the “contempt”, which isnt really a fair way to describe it, in terms of A&A1940 is more or less justified given the circumstance in which France finds itself. Most of the stuff we have been discussing is all pre-war and dosnt apply to the time setting of 1940. An idea to address all this would be to have an A&A game focused soley on Europe and have it start in 1939 with the Germans invading Poland, then all these things could be played out. As A&A1940 stands this sort of thing is all academic.

One could call this “unfair treatment” of the French from a historical standpoint, but from a game desing aspect it is a necessity. France needs to fall in order to drive the rest of the game forward and get to the bigger and some would say more important part of the game, the show down between the Germans and the Soviets. Given the depth of this game and the attention lavished on the eastern front portion of the map(and the huge number of changes made to the set-up and rules to make sealion more and more unfeasible) it is clear to me that this is where the game designer intended the biggest and more important part of the battles to take place. As another indication that the east front is “where its at” (ducks to dodge thrown rotten fruit) is the great length gone to in sebsequent rivisions to reduce the appeal of a Japanese strike on the Soviet union (adding in IPC penalties, changing the status of neutrals, ect) to make it a pure Soviet v German (and maybe a few Italians) fight.

To me A&A1940 kinda works like a well written story with a solid begining, middle, and exciting ending. The fall of France is like the introduction, it shows us who the main charaters are and set’s up the following chapters. The fall of France is actually quite dramatic, as the sudden influx of IPC’s gives the German war machine some serious clout and rightly put the fear of god (or more rightly fear of the Germans) in the allied, espically the UK, player(s). Now with the scene set the story beings with the Axis warmachine ratcheting itself up and positioning itself so it can best skull F the allies and the few active allied players scrambling to check them. This goes on for the first few turns but then ratchets up further when the USA and the Soviet Union get into the fray. Once this happens we have come to the middle, the meat of this story/game if you will. Now the Axis war machine has a real threat to contend with as two new players whos strenght can not only check them but have the ability to counter attack and drive them back have entered the fray. Then as the game moves forward we come to what will be a thrilling ending where either A) the Allies have worked together and wrecked the Axis forces, with Japan blockaded on its home island fotress like a classic Bond villain and the Anglo-Americans joining hands with the Soviets somewhere over a defeated Germany or B) The Germans storm into Moscow and cruch the Soviet Union once and for all after having used mechanized forces based out of central France and western Germany to crush the 7th Anglo-American attepmt to land in Normandy and Japan is poised to have a long drawn out struggle with the Americans(and a few Anzacs) in the Pacific having crushed all resistance on the Asian mainland. That fact that the games overall layout work out like this just speaks to the good design. Another show of good design is the fact that you could replace all the historical countries and weapons with fantasy elements (elves, humans, dwarfs, orcs, gobblins, dragons, ect) and still have just and exciting and thrilling game.

In the end France dose catch a somewhat bad rap but in terms of the A&A game itself this justified as they are rendered next to useless by the first turn of the game. If anything the country I think is treated with too much contempt is the Soviet Union. I can understand where this comes from a historical standpoint but in terms of a game is just seems kinda of silly. This is a game, its ment to be fun and the horrible things that actually happened during the war shouldnt really factor into the playing of the game itself.

@crusaderiv:

I think everyone should stop trying to convince IL of anything other then what he wants to hear.
yeah you’re right but he loves to play this game……

Yeah I guess, but I feel hashing over and over again why certian players dont like countries is taking away of disucssing the general vibe of the community as a whole. There are some very loud members of the comunity with very strong opinions but spending 5 pages discussing why they inparticualr have the views they do is a waste of time as it is their opinions and they are more then welcomed to them just as I am welcomed to disagree with them. What we should be discussing is Why this feeling exists, or why certian members precieve these feelings to exist, in the first place.

I think everyone should stop trying to convince IL of anything other then obvious facts that are found in books that many Francophile’s tend to never acknowledge during the period of 1870-1945.

yeah you’re right but he loves bring up those tricky “facts” that seem to get in the way of a squeaky clean French image……

I don’t see that it makes sense to condemn the French population for collaboration in occupied territory.  Collaboration is always an issue in occupied lands and trying to draw a broad conclusion based on the relative resistance/collaboration of the citizenry seems unrealistic.  Public figures/govt./military officials on the other hand are fair game!  I thought MalachiCrunch’s summary of the shift in French views on the matter was a fair one.

I can’t say that failing to resist is collaboration.  It is survival, particularly when one has family trapped there.  I try to place myself in the position of the person and consider whether or not I would be willing to risk my family (my responsibility) in a given situation.  While I’m more than willing to take personal risks, I would be hesitant to endanger them directly under a brutal regime.

The part that I really don’t understand is collaboration by military officials outside of France proper.  Seems like underlings could have done the world (and France) a favor by popping a few caps in the top brass immediately following the armistice.

@Clyde85:

Yeah I guess, but I feel hashing over and over again why certian players dont like countries is taking away of disucssing the general vibe of the community as a whole. There are some very loud members of the comunity with very strong opinions but spending 5 pages discussing why they inparticualr have the views they do is a waste of time as it is their opinions and they are more then welcomed to them just as I am welcomed to disagree with them.

But it’s interesting and fun to read - a lot of it, anyway.

What we should be discussing is Why this feeling exists, or why certian members precieve these feelings to exist, in the first place.

Seriously? Isn’t that what UN Spacy tried to do in starting this thread? You expect that people can discuss why certain “feelings” exist without a full blown subjective, prejudicial thread full of preconceived notions and hate? Dream on.

Seriously? Look at the title of the thread again. If you don’t like heated discussions about whether there should be contempt for the French, then don’t read in these types of threads/discussions.

And Spacy - what do you expect? You ask if there is too much contempt for the French from A&A players. That is effectively asking everyone to justify their contempt, which is all IL and some others are trying to do. So don’t ask an open-ended question and then just blast everyone who answers it in a way that you don’t like, because that’s self-contradictory.

:lol: Thanks everyone, for a lot of free entertainment.

Public figures/govt./military officials on the other hand are fair game!

The number of actively employed French during 1940-45 in these roles is vastly greater than those who hid in the forest and blew up trains for the resistance and were real French patriots. This population of government workers was all volunteers and actively helped the Germans round up innocent people.

@Gamerman01:

Seriously? Isn’t that what UN Spacy tried to do in starting this thread? You expect that people can discuss why certain “feelings” exist without a full blown subjective, prejudicial thread full of preconceived notions and hate? Dream on.

Seriously? Look at the title of the thread again. If you don’t like heated discussions about whether there should be contempt for the French, then don’t read in these types of threads/discussions.

Well that is kind of expected, I never said that I didnt expect this sort of thing to happen. Honestly you dont spend several years on a forum and not expect a thread like this to descend into the usual faffing about, but I think we’ve discussed the subjective individual opinions enough after 5(now 6) pages of it. Evidence has been brought forth several times about French inter-war tank designs being slightly better then the Germans, yet we are still seeing posts that say France was using the same tanks the had in WW1! I think this is a clear indication that we arent getting anywhere with this kind of stuff and its time to move on past the topical part of the issue (the boo-yucky-surrender-moneys! faction vs the Oui-oui-viva-le-Francophiles faction) and to the root of the issue.

And why dose that mean it still cant be fun gamerman? I get its fun to watch the monekys jump around the cage and fling poo everywhere but we need to move on to the other exibits and let the monekys move on to playing chess or something.

:-)
Agree the subject has been exhausted.
Have been enjoying your posts, Clyde, as much as anyone’s.

Not that I agree or disagree, but I’ve been waiting for somebody to answer the topic heading with “I think there is just the right amount of contempt”….

@MrMalachiCrunch:

Not that I agree or disagree, but I’ve been waiting for somebody to answer the topic heading with “I think there is just the right amount of contempt”….

HEY! I did just that (more or less) in my over long post near the bottem of page 5! Ok, well maybe I didnt say that there was “just the right amount” of contempt, but in terms of A&A1940 the contempt the French are held in made sense or was justified.

yeah you’re right but he loves bring up those tricky “facts” that seem to get in the way of a squeaky clean French image……

I don’t care about French image. I’m more worry about your image.

Don’t be. Siding with truth is an image that fits me well enough.

To understand history of a nation (war or politic) you have to be impartial but infortunately you’re not.

This is hilarious!  I guess that judgements of the same are impossible, thus it is impossible to get any understanding and possible to make statements like “the NAZI’s should be looked at with impartial view”.

Again this is what 20 old men said at Nuremberg in 1946…

And impartiality is essential to be a good moderator.
You point some good fact but you never admit the others ‘‘tricky’’ facts… shocked

Nothing tricky about those facts. I never once ignored that collaboration was much greater than resistance in the case of France. Further, just because you love the French in spite of whatever they do they do have a period of being really ‘tricky’ during 1870-45.

So don’t ask an open-ended question and then just blast everyone who answers it in a way that you don’t like,

And the difference obviously, is a response from peeps like you. If you don’t have issue with my points, i have no way to “blast” ( which means go back to the Historical record to draw facts about French actions, which shoots down your weak arguments)

Trick that.

That was a good post about G40 and the French, Clyde.

@Gamerman01:

That was a good post about G40 and the French, Clyde.

I guess, Im kinda hoping Kurt will swing in here with one of his trade mark over-long posts and bring everyone back to basics(also, Kurts posts are so long that any attempt to sit down and refute them point by point is a herculean task left best to people who have gone completely mad and shouldnt be left to sit at computer desks unless all the edges have been rounded off). That way everyone will just take a minute, take a step back and breath, and then maybe we can get with discussing the level of contempt of A&A players have in the context of A&A1940 and not why certian members of this community have the views that they do.

If you want to defeat Kurt Godel, in one of his posts in this thread he says the polish defeated the soviet union SINGLE HANDEDLY, which is simply a farce.

That or change the topic to the American Civil War.

For example

American Pilots flying FOR the Polish during the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merian_C._Cooper

For valor he was decorated by Polish commander-in-chief Józef Piłsudski with the highest Polish military decoration, the Virtuti Militari.

WOW!  That’s Standing ALONE alright.

Quote from: Imperious Leader
Again this is because the population had no reservations against fighting against her occupiers.

Right, so because a large part of the population was not fighting means they collaborated. Again with this “us vs. them” nonsense. Either you’re with us or against us, is that it?

NO what is true is the people and soldiers who volunteered to join the Vichy Government as police and government types and acted to aid the Germans to commit atrocities is far greater than the number of French employed as resistance fighters or Free French. Us vs. them means for you counting these people and comparing, which you don’t acknowledge. So now you know.

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How convenient to ignore days before the allies invade or after they invade.

Except they didn’t “ignore days” before the Allied invasion. As I’ve already pointed out they constantly fed intelligence to the Allies in Britain and smuggled downed pilots out of the country.

Yea more of this “they” quantitatively few compared to those who fed intelligence to the NAZI’s to aid them in rounding up people for death. Don’t let that get in the way of “they” :mrgreen:

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Compared to the systematic acts of collaboration, these acts pale in comparison.

Your point being? Still waiting on those numbers of collaboration by the way.

The point which you will never acknowledge, that for the most part French actions of WW2 are replete with aiding the Germans , not fighting them.

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And how did Yugoslavia use such excuses of physical separation? They didn’t. They fought all the way. Other nations occupied did not just form collaboration government and pretend they are ‘neutral’.

Guess you’ve never heard of Quisling. Or the “Independent State of Croatia”. Or Dutch police and civilian authorities collaborating with the Nazis (the Netherlands had one of the highest levels of collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Guess that means they’re all cowardly, incompetent fighters, hmm?) Or the Denmark “Protectorate Government”.

Because i don’t post about Quisling does not mean i don’t know about him. But i guess making the argumentative fallacy of “hey they did bad, so that means my French are not so bad”.

You’re extremely oversimplifying it. The fact that French historians to this day are extremely divided on Vichy France does not mean that “they” all just sweep it under the carpet. I’m not sure why you still think France is some big monolithic entity with a hive mind where all its inhabitants have the exact same opinions of Vichy.

That is not my position. I am counting acts of defiance vs. collaboration so you have nothing to argue about, knowing that the acts of the latter for whatever reason far outweigh those of the former.

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And again ignoring the fact that Germany was almost completely occupied before they surrendered, unlike France which falls with about 20% of their country is occupied.

Well I’m sorry that you feel the French didn’t follow in the footsteps of the Germans and throw young boys and old men after an overwhelming force even when the war was far lost.

Right. With young men and seasoned veterans, they surrendered basically when the Germans reached Sedan. Germany fought on with old men and kids and while like 90% of the nation was occupied. Who lasted longer before surrender? What are you even arguing about?

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Yes some french did decide, while the vast majority went “Vichy”.

Still waiting on those numbers–-

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They became policemen who helped Germans find innocent people

–-Oh, right! Nevermind, we have the numbers right here. According to you the vast majority of the French population became policemen. Never before have I heard of such an influx of people, millions at that, actively go out and round up people.

Those numbers outweigh the numbers of french peeps blowing up bridges….and making your argument stronger by ignoring my 100,000 quote and inserting “millions” is a masterstroke of hilarity.

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The Free French was not a “government” it was nothing but a loose collection of French soldiers that escaped Dunkirk. The “French Government” was in fact Vichy collaborating with the Germans for 4 years. The Free French was also a number of military units fighting with the allies and totally financed by UK.

Really? Just soldiers from Dunkirk? Then pray tell how it managed to grow to 540,000 by 1944, when 139,997 French soldiers were evacuated from France, a great many who eventually was repatriated?

here are some facts to ponder…

“The Free French forces were drawn mostly from the French colonial empire, rather than from metropolitan France”

“Out of about 60,000 troops evacuated from France in July 1940, only about 3,000 chose to continue the struggle, joining de Gaulle’s army in London. By the end of the year, he had 7,000 troops.”

“Until 23 October 1944,the Vichy Regime was acknowledged as the official government of France by the United States and other countries, including Canada…”

“The exact strength of the Vichy French Metropolitan Army was set at 3,768 officers, 15,072 non-commissioned officers, and 75,360 men. All Vichy French forces had to be volunteers. In addition to the army, the size of the Gendarmerie was fixed at 60,000 men plus an anti-aircraft force of 10,000 men”

“The Vichy French colonial forces were reduced in accordance with the Armistice. Still, in the Mediterranean area alone, the Vichy French had nearly 150,000 men in arms. There were approximately 55,000 men in the Protectorate of Morocco, approximately 50,000 men in French Algeria, and almost 40,000 men in the “Army of the Levant” (Arm�e du Levant) in the Mandate of Lebanon and the Mandate of Syria. The colonial forces were allowed some armored vehicles. However, these tended to be “vintage” tanks as old as the World War I-era Renault FT.”

“Besides the concentration camps opened by Vichy, the Germans also opened on French territory some Ilags (Internierungslager) to detain enemy aliens, and in Alsace, which had been annexed by the Reich, they opened the camp of Natzweiler, which is the only concentration camp created by Nazis on French territory (annexed by the Third Reich). Natzweiler included a gas chamber which was used to exterminate at least 86 detainees (mostly Jewish) with the aim obtaining a collection of undamaged skeletons (as this mode of execution did no damage to the skeletons themselves) for the use of Nazi professor August Hirt.”

“Furthermore, Vichy enacted a number of racist laws. In August 1940, laws against antisemitism in the media (the Marchandeau Act) were repealed, while the decree n�1775 September 5, 1943, denaturalized a number of French citizens, in particular Jews from Eastern Europe.Foreigners were rounded-up in “Foreign Workers Groups” (groupements de travailleurs �trangers) and, as the colonial troops, were used by the Germans as manpower .The Statute on Jews excluded them from the civil administration.”

"Vichy also enacted a number of racist laws in its French territories in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). “The history of the Holocaust in France’s three North African colonies (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) is intrinsically tied to France’s fate during this period.”

I think this is a high sign of a comming apocalypse in that both Gargantua and IL are on the same page in all this. Here are two twin antagonists in the A&A.org forums (whom I had just started to assume picked opposing sides in every argument based simply on being contradictory to whomever posted first) standing side by side, working together to make the same point, and if that dosnt scare you or give you serious reason to think that your entire universe is just the musing of an autistic child looking through snow globe, cancel your appointments because it appears you have died

@Clyde85:

I think this is a high sign of a comming apocalypse in that both Gargantua and IL are on the same page in all this. Here are two twin antagonists in the A&A.org forums (whom I had just started to assume picked opposing sides in every argument based simply on being contradictory to whomever posted first) standing side by side, working together to make the same point, and if that dosnt scare you or give you serious reason to think that your entire universe is just the musing of an autistic child looking through snow globe, cancel your appointments because it appears you have died

In the words of Admiral Ackbar, “IT’S A TRAP!!!”