Mucinex-D said:
Excuses. It's their fault they failed to properly prepare for any type of invasion. They just let the nazis maneuver around it? And after a year of preparation they shouldn't have had too much smaller an army than Germany. I'm not saying 1 on 1 that France should have won, but as quickly and easily as they fell? And I knew about the Maginot line, but that isn't much help when you can just walk around it now is it? Yes I know it wasn't that simple but France really should have seen it coming. There's no excuse why after one year of building up defenses your country falls after 2 or 3 months. I wouldn't call the German tactics a sucker punch, I would call it common sense. Or stupidity on Frances part, you be the judge. Why pass through the enemy lines when it's easier to go around. France has been a joke since Napoleon in my opinion. They did okay in WW1 but were extremely close to falling early in the war even then.
Germany went around the Maginot line by illegally passing forces through neutral countries. An effective and clever tactic, but also one that "broke the rules". It might seem silly that wars have any rules at all, but even Germany had a tendency to uphold these sort of agreements (like refusing to fight under false flags). This out-maneuvering, which had been predicted, though the British and French forces expected an attack furhter south, allowed Germany to blitzkreig their way into France. The mobile assault by the German's worked much akin to "Shock-and-Awe" tactics - an overwhelming display of power which surprised and demoralised the Allied forces.
You talk about one year being enough to mobilise and rebuild an army - yet in the context, Germany had been rebuilding its forces for a number of years. France could not just pull together a massive, modern army even in a year's time. Britain, likewise, had undergone preperations long in advance (such as pouring funds into the airforce), but was still woefully deficient. Britain went into the war with crappy, ineffectual post WWI tanks. Had all that money not been spent on the airforce, Britain would have still been using bi-planes (the navy used dated bi-plane models throughout the war).
Why wasn't the UK and France better equipped? Well, they (like Germany) were still recovering from a serious Depression. Britain could bearly afford spending all that cash on the airforce in the first place. France had the added problem of trying to rebuild it's country, which was damaged more so than any other by the First World War. The governments of both countries would not have been able to justify building up massive forces in such an economically unstable period, especially as the concept of another war right after was abhorrant to the post WWI public. Germany however had the opposite philosophy - humiliated and crippled by WWI, the people were more than willing to "take back their land and pride". To the nazi population, military action seemed not only justifiable, but patriotic.
