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Subject: Dutch Courage
SYSOP    4/25/2012 5:44:04 AM
 
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Clydwich    ineffective defense?   4/25/2012 6:19:40 AM
Well, not according to the Wehrmacht itself. Planning for "Fall Gelb" was a swift one day campaign in the Netherlands, which was strung out to five days, and only ended after what amounted to a terror bombardment on Rotterdam took the fight out of the High Command. Recruits and Depot troops drove the elite Fallschirmjäger from an airfield and took most of them prisoner.
And the vaunted Belgian army, which was three times as big, did not last that much longer, even against comparible troops.
According to some reports the SS "division" fighing in the Netherlands even resorted to driving POW's in front of them to get to the dutch fieldworks, because the SS had so much trouble trying to break through it....
Sorry for the rant, but this always gets my hackles up, beeing dutch and all that...
 
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bikebrains    Something to remember   4/25/2012 9:28:55 AM
"But with their forces out of Afghanistan, there is little opposition to more cuts, bringing defense spending to less than one percent of GDP." On April 13, 2012, NATO issued a press release called Financial and Economic Data Relating to NATO Defence .  In Table 3 of the the report, defense expenditures are compared to GDP.   Almost all countries in NATO spend less than two percent of GDP on defense.   The United States spends 4.8%.   I can understand not wanting to go into Iraq but not supporting the WoT in Afghanistan will be remembered.    The NATO information is available at NATO.INT and can be downloaded as a PDF.       
 
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