[The Bryce]

While they're kind of funny, the thing that pretty much no American thinks about when making the "French Surrender" joke is that, were you to juxtapose France to North America and the USA to Europe in time for WW2 the US would have gotten owned just as hard (and probably harder). Nobody was slowing Germany down while they had the technological upper hand (re: country with tons of panzer tanks vs countries with nothing remotely competetive). If you look at the state of things early in the war the fact that Britain didn't issue a surrender is basically ridiculous (from a military and economic standpoint, not a moral one), and had they been a part of continental Europe the whole thing would have been over inside of a month, regardless. It's true that the US did manage to turn the whole thing around on the strength of its industrial backbone, but that they were able to do so was largely thanks to their geographical location.

Knowing is good.