British Invasion of Madagascar

[herosrest]

Operation Ironclad





www.nww2m.com/2012/05/operation-ironclad-the-battle-of-madagascar/

[yanmacca]

A sad state of affairs HR, the vichy French caused a lot of unessesary casualties for the British even when we were at our weakest.
Add Syria and others to that list and you see how unbelievable this all was.
Jesus, the French was once our allies and they fight against us and aid their German occupiers.
Only the French could do such a thing.

[herosrest]

Well, Hastings/Senlac and Agincourt in truth, come to mind - and the Norman subjugation of the North after Hastings was utterly brutal rape, pillage, slaughter, burning of homes and destruction of crops. There really is something quite odd about the French but of course in 1940, they were conquered by the Germans and answered to Hitler, Himmler and those wonders in black - the SS. Very different attitude to that of the Dutch in Java but ultimately imperial occupiers in empire, all and ourselves included albeit that the British Empire has been the World's most civilisin influence to date when we aren't drawing lines on maps  or upsetting the Irish, Scots or Welsh. Don't mention Vikings  Anyone for tiffin & tea?

[yanmacca]

I remember studying about the French army in 1940 and they had quite a lot of troops based in North Africa, now NA is not that far from southern France and I don’t know why they couldn’t re-enforce with everything they had and make the Germans pay in blood. lets face it we are talking about a complete take over here and subjugation by an evil invader. But the French seemed to lose heart once they knew that Paris was going to fall, they certainly never fought to the death like the Poles did a year earlier.

I would like to think that Britain would have fought like Poland did and yielded nothing to the Nazis. We did have defensive lines drawn up from the southern coast right to the north, so if looked like we where going to make a fist of it and not simply roll over and die like the French and Czechs did.

I really don’t know what you mean about ‘upsetting the Irish, Scots or Welsh’, now it has been over 45 years since I had a history lesson on early British history, but as far as I can remember, Britain was a Celtic nation until the Romans came and many of these Celts fled England to remote places in Wales. Scotland and Ireland where Celtic too and the English Celts probably took refuge in these countries, remember the old joke ‘The Welsh are the Irish who couldn't swim’.

The Welsh and Scottish did raid England on a regular basis, Hadrian’s wall was built for a purpose you know and later the English had to fortify large towns on the Scottish border like Carlie and Berwick.

Irish pirates used to raid the north coast of England in the same way as the Vikings did before.

I will spare you the data on the Romans, Vikings and Normans for another date.

But what happened in Ireland was also down to the Irish themselves, many of the big landowners were Irish royalty or rich people and these used to treat the lowly people with distain, I not sure if these landowners forced the workers to keep growing potatoes year after year on the same patch of ground until the potato blight took hold. Many Irish came to England and settled here so we must have saved thousands by giving them refuge.

Scotland on the other hand, was its own nation until 1707 when it joined the UK, this merge was in Scotland’s interest because it was bankrupt due to the Darien Scheme. So basically, they joined England mainly for a cash bailout.

Anyway enough of my ramblings, we are what we are and the past is the past, I hope our noisy neighbors knock those chips off their shoulders and be thankful that they had a great standard of living.

BTW; the IRA scum have owned up for sending five parcel bombs sent to addresses on the British mainland yesterday.