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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.
A few herbs and spices, feature as a delicacy problem solved.
White flags broke out across the country.
France has fought a hell of a lot more wars than America and they didn't hang back in either WW1 or WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Here in Victoria they can grow up to 3 metres in length. 27cm worms are runts.
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
France has fought a hell of a lot more wars than America and they didn't hang back in either WW1 or WW2.
Apparently you've never heard of the Phoney War, so I'll tell you how it all went down:
Germany invades Poland and conquers it in 5 weeks. France and England largely stood by and did nothing, except for a small operation called the Saar Offensive, which officially began the Phoney War. This offensive was so light that it didn't even tickle Germany. The USSR (on friendly terms with Germany at this point) invaded Finland, and then Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. This caused France to get cold feet, so they picked up what meager forces they sent and ran home.
That is a very brief summary of what happened, and you'll find it to be accurate if you research it. Granted, I've omitted many details, obviously, because of how short I wrote it, but it's hard to overstate how little of an effort that France and England made to stop Germany for TEN MONTHS after the invasion of Poland began. Anyways, immediately after France withdrew, they assumed their WWI playbook and hunkered down in the trenches in the Maginot line. It didn't work though: France didn't bother to fortify the region near Belgium's border thinking Germany wouldn't go there, but neutral Belgium and Holland seemed ok with allowing Germany's forces to quickly shift to the west and bypass the Maginot line entirely. In spite of France having a large and well armed and prepared Army (which they never tried to use to break Polish invasion,) they surrendered in 6 weeks.
So in other words, Europe as a whole sat on its ass (except for Germany, Austria, and their allies) for TEN FREAKING MONTHS! It's one thing for a country separated by an entire ocean, but good fuckin lord, practically the only reason a European country would take action during this period was after they were already invaded.
It was only after the fall of France that a serious allied war effort actually began. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor about 14 months after that. The US was isolationist at the time because we wanted nothing to do with your kings, queens, kaisers, and fuhrers because they looked all the same to us, and still do: But the lesson we took from Pearl Harbor is that even if you don't want a war, you're going to get one anyways. This meant we had to, among other things, assist the fucking USSR that we had to go to proxy wars with while we funded Europe's reconstruction with the Marshall plan, even though it wasn't our fault that they decided to blow themselves up. Here we are, 80 years later, and one third of Europe wants to be fascist again. And that is NOT an exaggeration:
https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
Now that Europeans aren't allowed to see what today's fascists actually say because it's censored, then all they see is the mild stuff that they sympathize with, and then they start liking them. What the fuck did you think was going to happen when you banned hate speech? Just because you don't see or hear the fascists doesn't mean they aren't there (for the most part, the only fascists you actually see in Europe call themselves antifa.) Some things never change...
I don't hate Europe or Europeans by the way, just the stupid ones who think tossing dog feces under the rug makes it go away, and then proceed to tell you that their house doesn't actually smell like shit.
Yes, and we should be tolerant of their intolerance, because otherwise we would be intolerant and that would be bad since we're white.
I, for one, welcome our new intolerant overlords.
Alas, the people who complain the most about other cultures tend to have the least of it on their own. Many of them don't even read novels. It's a sad truth that you can see that everywhere.
In contrast to that, the people who actually produce and advance culture, who write books and poems, who compose music, create fine arts, and make movies have almost without exception always been international cosmopolitans. Many of them have lived in different countries during their life, and the vast majority are very tolerant. Goethe's travel diaries are a good example of that attitude, for instance, and since we're talking about France it is also worth mentioning that Alexandre Dumas was the son of a French nobleman and a black slave from Haiti.
The moral of the story is that before even starting to think about complaining about other people's cultures, you should make damn sure that you have some of your own first.
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.