Sorry but I really can't give you a full reply now. Perhaps later (?). I hope you'll admit that my contributions to this thread ar fairly long and voluminous already - some people certainly are going to add "awfully long and boring, terrible".

To answer the above question I can tell you :

(1. about myself and my nickname) that virtually everybody here, except perhaps the most recent "members", knew at once that my real name is Yves Michelet. A few short remarks or "smileys" added by some other guys show this fairly clearly. I could have replied that Grozibou, "Big Owl" or even "Fat Owl", is the most dignified and accurate name I could find. A lot of people here use far less transparent nicknames including such monsters as "dr9dong" or some. Why not ABC or XYZ. Nobody ever protested this anonymity. Once more I am unique (I am used to this) insofar as in some people's eyes I am the only person not authorised (at least by you) to use a nickname instead of his own one. "Brian" is not that clear either, Mr. Brian Cull. There are lots of Brians so you could be anybody. I saw one in (I think) the first "Police Academy" film, a young schoolboy who refuses to go to school and a horrible brat : Brian too. Luckily police officer Tuckleberry (?) knew how to deal with him and he went to school all right. You ought to do the same thing : you'd learn a lot of useful stuff.

(2. about << other 'historians' whose names are not revealed, "cowardly, disgusting, dirty and inaccurate?" >> ) Firstly, it was ONE historian not "historians". Let us be exact please. Yes I confirm my opinion entirely. I criticised ONE such filthy fellow, only ONE, whose anonymous statement was printed in your book "Twelve Days in May". He who insults a whole category of soldiers from a certain country - here French fighter pilots - in a hypocritical, cowardly way ("It seems...") - without having the guts to sign his own statement is a coward. He who reproduces this in a "historical", serious-looking book (I don't know who it was, there are 3 names on the dust-jacket) is unserious and dirty himself because it is dirty to wholesale insult other people anonymously. Everybody who is even just a little aware of history knows perfectly well that such wholesale judgements and insults ALWAYS are totally wrong, including "All Germans are Nazis". A few real cases, IF ANY, are not a rule and don't justify such dirty statements, which meant even the 195 or so French fighter pilots (Paul Martin's figure of 186 in his 2nd edition, plus a few others from local "chimney flights" etc.) who lost their lives fighting nazi Germany. With the exception of the Poles they were the very first to do so - but the Poles had been attacked so they fought back (gallantly), whereas the French, who were not involved in the Polish war, declared war on Germany because it had attacked Poland : there is a difference. Almost all of them (about 160) were killed within 5 weeks of fighting during the French Campaign in May-June 1940. At this rate they all would have been dead by September. Had RAF Fighter Command been exterminated by September 1940 yet? I never heard such a terrible thing (thanks God, Dowding and Park!). We already had a similar discussion, here at TOCH, on unclever and inaccurate wholesale insults aimed at a certain category or nationality, like (in the preceding thread) Italian soldiers, who "were the bravest I had under my command", or something of this kind (general Erwin Rommel's opinion).

Besides, the mentioned, dirty, anonymous statement - "... it seems that French fighter pilots did not press home their attacks with every ounce of energy" is particularly stupid and it was a serious error to print it except, of course, if it expressed your own opinion but in this case you ought not to have hidden behind "an historian" (Mr. X). It is stupid because, as I underlined often already, including in this very thread, RAF pilots had exactly the same number of people killed during the BoB, taking the different duration into account. Nevertheless RAF fighter pilots were twice as numerous as their French colleagues and brothers in arms, so that the French KIA-rate was twice as high as the RAF one. So : who was not brave enough? Who was not eager to fight? Certainly not the French! Not the Britishers either : they fought for their country too, they obeyed orders too and they often lost their lives.

I would particularly like to draw your attention on the fact, an INDISPUTABLE fact,

that I often wrote on these questions, including in two books I published on WW II : "Les premiers et les derniers", by Adolf Galland (I translated it and added 100 pages of annexes, explanations and comments), in English "The First and the Last" (a very poor English translation, by the way), and "Invisibles vainqueurs" on the French Air Force 1939-40, by Paul Martin and myself; being the publisher I didn't mention my name as a co-author (50 % of the contents plus obviously the flamboyant title!) too,

BUT I never retaliated in kind - in fact I never even THOUGHT of doing so - after all the criticism and the incredible insults hurled at the French for nearly 70 years by mainly British, or rather English, people, like world-star Peter Townsend, a princess' dream, who had become a real cover-boy in France, where he lived (Paris-Match, Historia and many more popular magazines-covers). So I never even suggested that RAF fighter pilots or other aircrew, or other British soldiers including infantrymen, were chicken, were cowards etc. even though they took to their heels at Dunkerque and elsewhere, all along the French coast down to the Spanish border in the South (and the dumb French helped them as best they could and always were the rearguard making these reembarkments possible in the first place, including at Dunkerque). Never ever. Quite on the contrary I underlined at every opportunity that they were "brave" and "as brave as any" and I am still of this opinion.

This is one of the few things which make the difference between myself and an average English author (some are perfectly all right). According to Peter Townsend in his modest book "Duel of Eagles", published in France (in Paris I think) there were no brave Frenchmen 1940 (only roughly 90,000 were killed in 6 weeks, three times the WW I-rate, as compared to approx. 3,000 British soldiers, 30 times less) . Townsend certainly knew what he was talking about : he never took part in the fighting over "the continent" in May-June 1940 so he obviously was an expert at French fighter pilots (whom he libelled very heavily) in particular! He had been spending these months -as a fighter pilot - at a safe place, far beyond the sea, in England, and never heard or saw any Me 109-cannon fired in anger - and never experienced any Flak-fire - before the BoB so he was the most competent man in the world to write on what happened in and around France in May-June 1940 and hurl wholesale insults at the whole French nation and population. Many French people dislike or even hate the British, yes (there are ALWAYS such problems between neighbours, like Mexico and the USA, Germany and Poland, Italy and France, England and Scotland, Poland and Russia etc.), but I never read or heard one single French statement on the British as insulting as millions of British statements on the French. Clearly the British "race" (!) is vastly superior, which gives its members a special right to insult others.