The second line in the final paragraph of http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmaginot.html
said something to me-- that in 100 years, the Maginot line will became an urban legend among English speakers.
Because they’ll call the Maginot line the Imagine-Not line, instead of using the proper French pronounciation…
Okay, it was wittier when I first thought it.
Or perhaps “imagine … no!” . When I first read of the French concept of their “barrier” (back in middle school history class) to the invading German army, I thought it might work if the invaders decided to just attack the interconnected forts and neglect to cut off the supply line to the forts.
I also thought, the invaders could just go around one end or the other of the line of forts and move right on into town. Which is more or less what the Nazis did. Some French companies that made little flags probably made a pretty good dime, since in the old news reel stuff where you see the Germans driving their half tracks full of soldiers through the streets of Paris and all of the folk on the street are madly waving their Nazi flags.
My understanding was the Maginot Line would allow the French to more easily match the greater manpower of Germany - a small portion of the French Army could man the Maginot Line, holding off a much larger number of Germans, while the bulk of the two armies duked it out on equal terms on the Belgian plain. The actual deployment of the French Army in '39-40 didn’t match the plans.
Why wasn’t the line extended to the English Channel when it was first constructed? The French had just been attacked through Belgium in WWI and had to realize that it might happen again. The article mentions a military alliance with Belgium, but what difference would that make? Of course Belgium would fight alongside the French if Germany attacked through Belgium, but WWI experience had shown that Belgium couldn’t hold off the Germans for more than a few days.
Budgetary considerations, mostly, IIRC – which were tied in with political perception: as in, with France “safe” behind fortifications south of their border, the Belgians would perceive their “ally” as not too motivated to save Belgium, and thus become themselves less motivated to play their role as first line in the alliance. The official strategy of the 1920 F-B alliance was for France to move into Belgium at Brussels’ call for help and defend at the Belgians’ lines. Then Belgium ditched the common-defense treaty and declared itself “neutral”. France had to do a rush job at a time when drive to continue with this huge project had ebbed.
Belgium HAD significantly improved her own defenses, that could have allowed them to buy time – had the Wehrmacht moved how the French/Belgian/British military establishment expected (or rather, hoped for); and had Belgium NOT attempted “neutrality” and thus allowed the French (and Brits) to deploy in force to Belgium itself BEFORE the attack.
It’s worth mentioning that there was a precursor to the Maginot line built by the French after their disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
It too was a non-continuous line of fortresses, with one of its strongpoints being located around the town of Verdun. In 1916 the Germans chose to attack this, the strongest part of the entire French line. It held through nine months of the bloodiest battle ever, largely through the efforts of soon-to-be Marshal Petain.
Interestingly, by 1916 the French were unconvinced as to the utility of the fortresses, and removed virtually all of the artillery from them for use elsewhere, and kept some of the fortresses dangerously undermanned. The entire fort of Douaumont was essentially “captured” by a single German combat engineer, who stopped in the middle of his one-man assault to eat a dinner left behind by French officers, who had fled. See, Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory.
I’m curious to know how Petain could take such bloody and embarassing lessons and apply them to a monolithic concept like the Maginot line. Have any of his justifications been translated into English?
Well, the Maginot line was not nearly as idiotic at the time as 20/20 hindsight has made it out to be. The first reason was what MMI said. The Maginot Line was not just a string of fortresses, but also a transportation corridor complete with fortified rail. This would allow France to be able to maneuver their troops quickly to where they were most needed instead of having maximum manpower along the entire border.
The second thing to consider is geography. It was believed that the geography of France left her vulnerable to attack straight across. The Pyrenees and the Alps provided natural defenses to the south and southeast. The Rhine and some other rivers prevented quick passage in the northeast and the Ardennes provded an obstruction through Luxembourg. The only real open place to make a fast drive through was right on the Franco-German border. Hence, the Maginot Line was built there to ensure that the attack was not made through Lorraine. It succeeded wonderfully in that regard.
Anyway, the gist is not that the Maginot Line was designed to restrict French defensive strategy but to provide flexibility and match Germany in a war of maneuverability. In fact, that was part of the reason why the fortifications were not extended along the Belgian border. The French military wanted the Germans to attack along the Belgian plain where they would have maximum maneuverability.
Anyway, let’s stop this talk of the Maginot Line being some sort of boondoggle or failure. It did exactly what it was supposed to. The French lost because they believed so much that the main thrust would be through Belgium that they comletely discounted the possibility of them going through the Ardennes. Plus some major miscommunications with the people the French thought would be guarding the Ardennes.
Diplomatic issue. Belgium was extremely reluctant at the idea of France fortifying its border with Belgium, since it wouldhave meant that France could have decided to stay safely behind this line instead of defending Belgium in case of German invasion. AFAIK, along with the cost, the Belgian insistance was the main reason why the Maginot line wasn’t extended.
Anyway, even as it was, the line greatly limited the German options in case of war and, limiting the number of soldiers necessary to defend the eastern boundary, allowed to mass much more troops where Germany could still attack : in the north, through Belgium.
It was a boondoggle.
The same ammount of money put into modernizing weapons systems & improving training–the traditional way to defend a nation–would have provided much better results.
An Air Force equipped entirely with then-modern monoplane fighters would have made a huge difference all by itself.
But they squandered all the dough on concrete. An already discredited idea, as Sofa King pointed out.
The chief failure of the French defense strategy was in understanding the role of tanks. The secret of success in all the “Blitzkrieg” was in concentrating the thrusts of their attacks around armour, using it to punch holes in the opponent’s defense through which regular troops could pour. This worked brilliantly in Poland in 1939, but the French didn’t learn from that. They persisted in scattering their thousands of tanks (in which they easily outnumbered the Germans) over the hundreds of kilometers of the Maginot Line. In doing this, they lost the ability to counter the German mobility, allowing them to circle around behind the Line and take it from the rear, while all its guns were stuck pointing the other way.
<< The same ammount of money put into modernizing weapons systems & improving training–the traditional way to defend a nation–would have provided much better results. >>
Heck, the same amount of money put into reseach and they might have developed the atom bomb, and think how different history might have been…
Ummm…I was specifically referring to traditional solutions, ** C K Dexter Haven.
Possibly an anachronistic statement there. At the time the Maginot Line was conceived, tanks had not been proven in modern warfare and B. F. Liddell Hart’s Plan 1919 had been largely forgotten or ignored in the West because it never was attempted. In contrast, the horror of trench warfare and Verdun were fresh in the minds of not only of the military leaders, but also of the political leaders, the artistic community (Remarque, Dadaism, etc.) and the general public.
The French Army was not ignoring the lessons of Poland when it constructed the Maginot Line 10 years before. (another anachronism)
As John Corrado states, when the campaign in the West began, the French dispositions were faulty in leaving the Ardenne covered by weak forces, but they were not “scattering their thousands of tanks…over the hundreds of kilometers of the Maginot Line.” Most of the French first-line divisions (and the BEF) were on the Franco-Belgian border, and were cut off from reinforcement and Paris by the Meuse thrust of Army Group A. The Maginot Line itself was detailed to second-line infantry units. True, the Germans understood concentration of armor much better than either the French or the British doctrine. For instance, Army Group A was assigned 7 out of the 10 available Panzer divisions.
As to learning the lessons of the Polish campaign, after Poland, the French Army still could rightfully think that their army would be a better match for the German army than the Polish. Just before the opening of the Battle of France, the German Army had 136 divisions available. The combined French, Belgian and French armies had 125. The number of tanks was (about) 2500 to 3250. The quality of some French tanks was actually superior to the Panzer II’s and III’s which formed the bulk of the German armor.
Finally, the Maginot Line did what it was supposed to do. It funnelled the German attack north. The fact that Manstein’s plan through the Ardenne was not forseen by Petain is not a weakness of the Maginot Line itself. One can argue, as Bosda does that mobile armies would have better served the same purpose, but one cannot say that the fortifications failed in their design purpose.