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Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting theory. How do you square that with France not joining the war until more than halfway through, and only after the Americans started winning major battles at, e.g., Saratoga?

There's no doubt the French were instrumental in, par exemple, Yorktown. But my admittedly not well-informed view is that "crushed" is a significant overstatement.

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> How do you square that with France not joining the war until more than halfway through

Going by your logic the US involvement in WWII wasn't significant because it didn't started with the war. History manuals are saying otherwise though.

Of course their involvement was significant in how things played out. But your analogy would like be saying the USSR would have been dominated by Germany without the US entering the war with a Europe first strategy. It would have been a strategically worse situation, but it's really not clear if that would have made Germany successful on the eastern front.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

Those are the site guidelines. If you want to truncate quotes so you can attack a straw man, go somewhere else. (x & y) and (x) dont mean the same thing and you know that.

Roderigue Hortalez and Company (aka: France) started giving USA arms in 1775, at least a year before the Declaration of Independence (but after the "Shot heard round the world" / Battle of Lexington).

Without those guns and support, the revolution would have been dead before it even started.

> How do you square that with France not joining the war until more than halfway through

because you don't set up a massive expedition like that from one day to another, especially in the 1700s. I know we are all used to Amazon-speed these days but just even knowing WHAT was happening on another continent took months at the time.

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