Slashdot Mirror
Giant Predatory Worms Are Invading France (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: In a Peer J study published on May 22, "Giant worms chez moi!" zoologist Jean-Lou Justine of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, entomologist colleagues, and Pierre Gros, outline a discovery that "highlights an unexpected blind spot of scientists and authorities facing an invasion by conspicuous large invasive animals." About 100 citizen scientists ultimately contributed to the assessment of this alien invasion, identifying five giant predatory worm species in France that grow up to 10 inches long. The study relied on contributors' worm sightings, reported "mainly by email, sometimes by telephone." Researchers requested photographs and details about locality. In 2013, the Washington Post reports, "a group of terrorized kindergartners claimed they saw a mass of writhing snakes in their play field." These were giant flatworms! The study concludes that the alien creatures appear to reproduce asexually. They prey on other, smaller earthworms, stunning them with toxins. "The planarian also produces secretions from its headplate and body that adhere it to the prey, despite often sudden violent movements of the latter during this stage of capture," researcher note. In other words, the hammerheads produce a substance that allows them to stick to victims while killing them. The study points out that invasive alien flatworms have been spotted in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and Australia. But the five species of hammerhead flatworms invading France are giants, growing up to 27 centimeters.
Get a french chief, give him Armagnac, and then tell him that the worm tastes just like ortolan bunting.
Issue solved.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Stop talking crap and trying to rewrite history.
America was actively working WITH the Germans until it got forced in to the war (thanks mostly to the Japanese).
US companies were supplying Germany with war materials, helping run factories, and supplying critical fuel additives.
Once the tables were turning (mostly thanks to the Russians, and the russian weather..) the Americans certainly
got involved..
No one says American help was not needed, but it is VERY interesting just how long it took to arrive...
And no, America didnt 'Invade Europe' either, they were involved, but most certainly not single handed.
So why dont you just Fuck Off already.
I wonder just how well The NAZIs would have done without US fuel (specifically TEL addititives) and US trucks for their troop movements..
The French were weakened by WWI, but had rebuilt quite a bit. The German army had taken heavy damage from the invasion of Poland and other battles. Hitler's top military commanders told him they couldn't invade Belgium and France until they had about two years to rebuild their strength. By the numbers, the two sides were roughly matched in the Battle of France:
Germany: 141 divisions
7,378 guns
2,445 tanks
5,638 aircraft
3,350,000 troops
Allies: 144 divisions
13,974 guns
3,383â"4,071 French tanks
2,935 aircraft
3,300,000 troops
The French expected a German assault would be much slower, with Belgian resistance giving the French time to prepare before the German army could advance through Belgium to France. In fact, the Luftwaffe were able to defeat Belgium very quickly, so things were not going the way French leaders expected when Germany was suddenly near their border. Since things weren't going according to plan, there was confusion and disorder in the French military in the first few days. Some French commanders and soldiers fought the best they could, without much national leadership.
Rather than taking charge and getting a new plan organized and in action, two days after the Germans attacked French prime minister Paul Reynaud called Winston Churchill and said "we have been defeated". The Germans had barely entered France when Reynaud gave up. Shortly afterward, the French leadership fled the country. After the leadership fled, the individual military units didn't (couldn't?) mount an effective defense acting separately.
The French people as a culture may not necessarily be cowards, but certainly Prime Minister Reynaud and other leaders behaved very cowardly and ineffectively.
In contrast, even after France was in fact occupied by the Nazis, Charles De Gaul refused to give up, urging resistance by individual French people within the occupied territory and organizing units of French people from outside France to join the allies in a campaign to liberate France from the Germans. Had de Gaulle been Prime Minister rather than Reynaud, the history of WW2 might have been very different, and the French might have a very different reputation today.
"Without even a token resistance"
https://www.quora.com/Were-the-French-involved-at-Dunkirk
"The French army (and navy, which sent nearly as many ships as Great Britain), were the Allied resistance at Dunkirk, with some minor assistance from the British and Belgian forces. The French fought bravely - and well - to secure the safe evacuation of so many Allied troops"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32956736
"The fall of France 75 years ago is conventionally seen as a moment of abject national disgrace. But today some insist the French military has been wronged - and that the hundreds of thousands of French troops who fought in the Battle of France deserve to be honoured, rather than forgotten."
"About 360,000 French casualties, including between 55,000 to 85,000 dead and 12,000 missing."
https://www.quora.com/How-many-French-soldiers-died-during-the-battle-of-France-in-1940
In 1940, France was attacked by Germany and Italy at the same time (Total population twice bigger or more). UK had a natural shelter and could evacuate somewhere. Not the French who were attacked by Italy in the South. USA, due to its size and Atlantic Ocean natural barrier, never had to face this situation.
And also, German industry got a little help:
https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/ford-and-the-third-reich
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm
https://libcom.org/library/allied-multinationals-supply-nazi-germany-world-war-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Use_of_forced_labor_during_World_War_II
http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-american-companies-that-aided-the-nazis.php
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/general-motors-and-the-third-reich
Uh... no...that came out 17 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Tremors 6 came out a few few weeks ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So the next movie will be Tremors 7.
The US government was seeking to aid the UK. Some individual US companies aided Germany (but very few). After WW2 a US company successfully sued the US government for bombing its fighter plane factories in Germany, and was awarded compensation.
In terms of the USA keeping the UK free, Germany had failed in the Battle of Britain before Lend Lease started. Before then the UK bought arms for gold. The USN and USAAF did start protecting convoys before December 1941, and that and Lend Lease kept the UK effective at countering Germany in the Middle East , and tgen later Italy and Western Europe. Germany had lost WW2 by the middle of 1942 if not earlier.
US trucks pretty much kept the Soviet logistical train working in 1943, which locked in Germany's defeat.
The West doesn't like to admit it, but the Soviet Union played a huge role in stopping Hitler. After he steamrolled Europe, he got cocky and invaded Asia. The Soviets threw bodies at him (soldiers were frequently sent in unarmed and told to pick up a rifle from a comrade who'd been killed) and eventually managed to stop his army and starve it during a brutal winter. Look at the Allied military casualty figures from WWII.
U.S.: 407,300 killed, 671,800 wounded
UK: 383,700 killed, 376,239 wounded
France: 210,000, 390,000 wounded
Soviet Union: estimated 8.6 to 11.4 million killed, 14.7 million wounded
And no it wasn't because the Soviets were incompetent. Other Eastern European countries which were overrun (Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary) also suffered casualties on par with the U.S., UK, and France. And the Latvian countries lost over 10% of their total populations. If you look at German casualties, the Germans lost more than 8x as many soldiers on the Eastern front than it did on the Western front. The vast majority of the fighting happened to the east of Germany.
Yes D-Day gave the Allies a crucial Western foothold turning Europe into a two-front war (technically three-front since Italy had been invaded the previous year). But if the Soviets hadn't been keeping Hitler busy on the Eastern front, most of his armies would've been on the western beaches, and D-Day would've been a massacre.
As Solandri already stated Germany was beaten by sheer manpower, but also a lack of resources.
Germany was always low on fuel. They produced fuel and plastics out of coal in more expensive processes. The Ardennes ambush was only possible because they conquered fuel depots of the Americans to supply their tanks.
The Me262 engine had to be replaced every week because Germany did not have access to the metals needed for heat-resistant alloys.
The Russians just built much more tanks and planes (the planes were powered by American enignes). And the Americans were just producing more ships than the Germans could sink with their subs. Oh, the Russian T34 tank was also superior to anything else when it arrived, the Germans had to construct stronger tanks to keep up with that.