Sowell uses faulty logic to explain France’s fall

Sowell uses faulty logic to explain France’s fall

EDITOR:

Normally I ignore Thomas Sowell’s screeds, but the one beginning “The Fourth of July is a patriotic holiday” was a little too much.

Verdun was a great drama of a heroic stand by the French against the German troops, but there was much more to the story of the Western Front than Verdun. Bluntly, that history was a record of French troops under the command of incompetent, glory hunting, generals being chewed up by the Germans until, in the late spring of 1917, Gen. Micheler refused to obey an order by Gen. Nivelle to send his troops on yet another futile attack, after which P ®tain replaced Nivelle. Not only that, the French people found out that their government had been lying about how well the war was proceeding — that the situation was much worse than they had admitted. The British weren’t doing any better. (Suggested reading; John Mosier’s history of the Western Front, “The Myth of the Great War,” and be absolutely sure to read the Preface and Introduction.) The French people were there. They saw what really happened.

There is a peculiar fact mentioned in the book. Germany was the last to issue a mobilization order in WW I.

Scroll ahead to 1940. On May 10, 1940, after the Phony War, or Sitzkrieg, of 1939-40, German troops swept through the Low Countries. Strong British and French troops joined with Belgian troops on a line between Antwerp and Namur in an attempt to block the Germans. The Germans forced crossings of the Meuse River, and an army of tanks burst out of the “impassible” Ardennes Forest. Then the Belgian Army surrendered, leaving the flank of the British and French almost fatally exposed. They retreated to Dunkirk. As for the rest of the French army, their best troops had been lost in Belgium, and their air force had been almost wiped out. They formed a line of 66 divisions on the Somme and Aisne rivers, but the Germans sent 120 divisions against them, and broke through, shattering the French divisions.

There is much more to both stories than there is space for here. It is enough to say the French army disintegrated in WW II because they, and the British, were outgeneraled, outflanked, outmaneuvered, and outnumbered, not because of any schoolbooks or schoolteachers in the previous 20 years. Mr. Sowell’s anti “liberal” screed is a blatant use of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.

JEROME K. STEPHENS

Warren

It was Madison, not Monroe

EDiTOR:

Mr Feulner, in his July 8 essay, “A champion of freedom,” attributed primary authorship of the United States Constitution to James Monroe.

This is not so.

James Madison, another great Virginian, was the primary author of the Constitution.

FRED BOWEN

Cortland,