All the threads on WWII seem to concur that the French essentially gave up without a fight? A few concede that it may have been after the weathering of WWI.
The last time I was in Europe, I visited the Maginot line, a system of impressive bunkers, automated weapons turrets, and underground railroads designed to defend the frontier against (German) incursion.
Now, to the best of my knowledge, as my Belgian grandfather claims, the Germans simply went around the line by conquering Belgium first. My Grandfather served in the Belgian anti-air artillery force, but remembers being ordered not to fire on German planes overflying Belgium. So the massive amount of effort and money poured into the defenses were wasted. It ended up serving only as a tourist attraction.
Now, my question is this:
If the Germans indeed invaded France through Belgium, it seems likely it was because the French did not reinforce the Belgian border due to the political implications.
So.
Did the Germans invade France by going through Belgium?
If the Germans had tried attacking the line head on, what sort of casualties would they have sustained? The line is impressive, but fortifying that much frontier seems hard to do effectively.
It seems that the Belgian side was “fortified” with concrete blocks and a few infantry positions in the 1920s,30s. This was apparently due to “des choix politiques et stratégiques”
I.E. Belgium will be sufficient defense, and, reinforcing the Belgian-French border would look bad.
You can see that in the site (framed) by clicking on the Belgian portion of the fortification. Here’s a direct link, but it kinda screws up the site navigation.
Here’s the basic pre-war strategy the French planned to follow:
The Germans would not be able to launch an effective attack against the Maginot line. While offensive capabilities had increased by 1940, the line was still a very strong defensive feature.
Knowing that the Germans wouldn’t attack across the line, the French anticipated they would attempt to outflank the line by invading through Belgium. The plan was that when the Germans entered Belgium the French army would also advance into Belgium to fight them. It was felt that the combined French, Belgian, and British forces would be able to defeat the Germans (who would have to divert some of their forces in the east and keep some in reserve to prevent a French attack from the Maginot line).
The first break in this plan was the unexpectedly early collapse of Poland. When the war began, the general allied assumption was that Poland would be able to hold out for several months. So Germany was able to bring more forces to attack France.
The second break in the plan was the unexpected mobility of the German army. Unlike the French and British which used their armor as infantry support, the Germans concentrated their armor in cohesive units. So while the Germans actually had fewer tanks than the French they used them more effectively.
The third break in the plan was the Ardennes forest. These thick woods were situated between the end of the Maginot line and the expected Belgian battlefields. The French believed that they were impassible to any heavy military equipment so they did not adequately guard against a German attack coming through them. The Germans however realized the Ardennes was not impassible.
So what happened was the Germans invaded Belgium as anticipated. The French and British advanced to attack the Germans. Then the Germans launched an unexpected attack through the Ardennes, overran the light French defenses there, and therefore were able to advance their armor forces between the bulk of the French army and France. The French army was undermined by being cut off from its logistic support and the French government was demoralized to realize the German army was closer to Paris than the French army was. With the speed of events, France never had time to recover the initiative and this led to the French downfall and surrender.
IIRC, France offered to help Belgium and the Netherlands build their own Maginot-like lines with their German frontiers, but they refused, since they didn’t want to upset Germany.
Part of the problem was the early surrender of Belgium by King Leopold against the advice of his cabinet. He never fully regained his popularity with the Belgian people. After the war his brother reigned as regent until Leopold finally abdicated in 1950.
For more information, read Winston Churchill’s series of books on The Second World War.
Hm. That would kind of square with my Grandfather’s recollections. I know he was pretty pissed at the Belgian government - that’s why he went to France where he met my Grandmother.
Perhaps the strategy Little Nemo so eloquently described was forced upon them by the political decisions of Belgium. Instead of fortifying Belgium, France/Britain were to use it as a battlefield when it fell.
there is a publication called Military History Quarterly, which did briefly review the effectiveness of the Maginot line. For the most part, the Germans avoided attacking it head on, which means that it worked - where it was implemented. Had there been a full line extending all the way around, it might have changed the course of the war.
Another problem was that Belgium, soon before the war, declared itself neutral. This blew a massive hole in French military plans, as it prevented French troops from moving into Belgium and occupying the frontier fortifications during the “Sitzkrieg” (i.e., prior to the German invasion of Belgium/France). The Belgian army simply wasn’t big enough to hold off Germany on its own, and as has been mentioned, France felt it a diplomatic impossibility to extend the Maginot line along the Belgian frontier.
As for the Ardennes business, there the French military was just STOOPID. I mean, the Ardennes was a FRENCH forest – why didn’t the French army just send a few tanks and artillery in to drive around before the war? Then they would have found out they had a potential problem.
Y’all sound like you know what you’re talking about. One thing I had thought - and my memory is hazy - was that the French did begin fortifying their border with Belgium, but came up against a financial obstacle to begin with; I suppose the Maginot line, very costly at its historical length, would have been really expensive to extend to the sea.
The Winter was also very cold, which made it harder to dig trenches and gun emplacements without the use of tons of dynamite. I hadn’t thought much abou the political considerations.
I think some of the Belgian fortifications (on their border with Germany) were actually pretty advanced. Fort Eben Emael had a lot of well-placed artillery and anti-tank weapons, and would have been a real problem for German tanks, with their little 20mm and 37mm guns (and stubby 75s) to reduce. Since it had little or no air defense, it fell easily to German Luftwaffe troops who attacked it with specially-designed explosive.
I think the role of German armor in the Polish and French campaigns is exaggerated. Not minor, just exaggerated. German armor doctrine was way ahead of British and French, and German tans were much faster, but they were not superior in numbers or in fighting ability to their Allied opponents. A head-on assault on the Maginot Line would almost certainly have failed, at least for several months. It was Germany’s superior use of combined arms - dive bombers, parachutists, tanks (light and a few medium), and mechanized infantry - that carried the day, with a lot of help from bad French morale. And of course, Germany’s decision to go through Belgium was extremely important.
Umm, the Germans DID try a head on assault, with some specialized big guns & everything. Failed miserably. Since it was unimportant, never written about, much.
As I recall (relatively recent article in Smithsonian mag, I believe), the Germans had to do a bit of mopping up from the French side of the line. Some of the guns couldn’t traverse to face the proper direction, and other’s weren’t able to depress far enough. However, I do believe that some segments of the line held out for quite a while.
I’d say the biggest flaw with the French plan was that it was almost completely reactive. It depended entirely on the assumption that the Germans would attack in a certain manner and the allies would be able to defend against that attack. This was based on the further underlying assumption that the Germans for some reason would be ignorant of the allied military capabilities and would launch an attack which was doomed to failure.
The truly amazing thing was that’s almost what happened. When the attack on France was being planned, the primary German plan was pretty much what the French anticipated. There was discussions of using the Ardennes flank attack but it was not going to be used. Then before the attack was launched, a plane carrying a German courier with the invasion plans crashed and the French recovered the entire set. Realizing they could no longer use that plan, the Germans switched to the Ardennes plan.
One of the great mysteries is why the french generals failed to use their excellent tanks effectively. Writers who were at the front (WWII Belgium) described how the heavy French tanks (Char-B model) took direct hits from the (german) PanzerKamfwagon MK -IVs) without any damage. The French tanks were slower, but in general were more than a match for anything the germans had. In addition-the French Armee de’le Air had more planes than the germans-they just seemed to fall apart. Of course the fact that the French C-in-C (General Gamelin) was 78 years old probably had something to do with the debacle.
Spy/technothriller writer Len Deighton wrote an unexpectedly excellent book in which he details the invasion of France (can’t recall its title right now). He points out several interesting breakdowns in command and other miscues on the part of the French.
One of the most notable was that the French air forces appear to have been bureaucratically “lost” for a majority of the battle, having been ordered to concentrate in the interior of France and subsequently issued no further orders. In the meantime, perhaps on the assumption that these units were destroyed, France appealed to Britain for additional air support. Churchill, seeing the writing on the wall, refused after a point (to the great resentment of the French). As the Germans were using a highly articulated combination of armor supported by air (instead of artillery as anticipated), it is speculated that more pressure on the supporting air units could have delayed the German advance.
What is often overlooked is the fact that after the British withdrawal from Dunkirk and the fall of Paris, the French cleaned up their act somewhat and wound up opposing the Germans (and especially the Italians) rather effectively for some six weeks after the initial German drive to the sea. German casualties in those six weeks exceeded the casualties from the first phase of the invasion, and the Italians were essentially halted with little territorial gain. By then, however, the French were strategically trumped and had suffered enormous losses among its regular units (many were surrounded and captured in the first phase of the invasion). It was only a matter of time before they were compelled to surrender. They nevertheless made quite a show of it considering the disadvantages they faced.
The Americans ran up against the extreme southern end of the Maginot line in 1944 after the breakout from the Cotentin Peninsula. Even though it was undermanned, facing the wrong direction, and hadn’t been much improved or even maintained by the Germans, it proved quite a tough nut to crack.
Poland resisted for as long as France did. In any event, Poland’s surrender in later September did not have much of a direct impact on a campaign that was launched almost nine months later, though the delay of the German attack on France from January to May did give them time to train and deploy more armored divisions.
Hardly unexpected, as that what was the post-WWI German Army was built to do. Military doctrine in both Weimar and Hitler’s Germany was devoted to developing an army capable of rapidly penetrating defensive fronts.
French tanks were excellent. The Char B was effectively immune to German tanks and antitank guns, though very slow. The Somua S35 was a very good medium tank as well.
The main problem was one of doctrine. France did not form an armored divisions until the late 1930s, 1937 I believe. Up to that time, French doctrine used tanks as infantry support weapons and were distributed among infantry divisions. French doctrine had no conception of tanks operating as a unit or how to use armored divisions in an army.
At the time of the Ardennes attack, the French had two armored divisions and two mechanized divisions, two of which were very recently formed. They were more or less in the right place, in the vicinity of Sedan and the Ardennes, but failed to fight effectively when the time came.
True enough, but the Allies were in the grips of the logistical crisis that prevented them from attacking vigorously and exploiting the breakthroughs that did occur. For the want of a gallon of gas…
Actually, the post WWI army was little more mobile than the WWI army; remember that the Schliffen Plan (which the Nazis originally were planning to follow) was a pre-WWI design; also consider that for all our talk of tanks and mechanized infantry, much of the German army at that point was still infantry slogging along on the ground.
Germany succeeded in WW2 where it failed in WWI because:
A) It attacked from a direction that wasn’t expected (the Ardennes forest)
B) The German commanders and troops were much more aggressive about grabbing territory and pushing through the French lines than Moltke had been
and
C) The French army in WW1 was young, patriotic, and determined to undo the insult of the Franco-Prussian war. The French army in WW2 was old, confused, and not feeling particularly happy about the prospects of another four years stuck in the trenches.