Why does history say the Maginot line was a failure?

[Flandrien]

Originally posted by orange
The good thing about being Belgian is, you can pick and choose who you want to be associated with. When the Germans are up, you're German. When the French are up, you're French. When Holland legalizes cannibis , well hey you're Dutch then too. It's a win win win situation.

Don't be silly.
We didn't choose them.
They chose us !


By the way, I don't know much about the Maginot line.
Only that the Germans took Eben Emal by surprise with a paratrooper attack.

[reds4ever]

Originally posted by Frogger
Because static defenses were conclusively shown to not be worthwhile in the age of mechanization of warfare. Whether or not the defense was tactically sound is a less important question.

in fact the writing was on the wall when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in the 1400's

[James Adams]

Maginot line was failure as it did not stop the German armed forces, I would have been a success if the line had cover All of French's Northern borders!

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Originally posted by orange
When Holland legalizes cannibis , well hey you're Dutch then too.

Aren't we all?

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by notyoueither
All true from the Horse, except...

A majority of the French mechanised force was commited to the advance into Belgium, as well as all of the BEF.

When the Germans struck through the Ardennes and broke out at Sedan, they quickly split the best of the Allied forces from their lines of communication and supply. That, combined with a painfully slow reaction to the German thrust (the French command never gained a solid grasp of the situation) led to the destruction of the only well equipped forces to face the panzers almost by defualt.

where does that vary from what I wrote?

[chequita guevara]

Actually, none of what anyone wrote was the real problem. The real problem was the hole that the Allies left in their lines. Marshall Petein (sp?) once wrote that, "properly defended, the Ardennes is impassable to armor." At some point, they forgot the properly defended part, and just decided the forest was impassable to armor.

The Germans couldn't believe their luck when they emerged from the forest having met no resitence and expected a trap. Guderian was held up three days by Hitler when he probaly could have prevented the BEF and some French forces from escaping.

The above is all according to B.H. Liddle Hart.

[Dan Severn]

Originally posted by reds4ever


in fact the writing was on the wall when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in the 1400's

The defensive mindset of the byzantine greeks had a lot to do with their eventual death as an empire. For the first 400 years, Rome was constantly expanding. When they stopped, their momentum was lost and they set up a defensive ring. Unfortunately, they had no internal reserves, and any time barbarians slipped through they were free to settle without much fear that the romans could get them. Thus died the west.

The East survived, mainly because the Black sea was easy to defend from barbarians. To the east they had the persians, but centuries of war had pretty much dulled the edge of their sword. However, when a new power, the arabs, flew in from the desert, they quickly gobbled up syria, palestine, and egypt, leaving the greeks asia minor and macedonia. The turks came into the anotolian region, and bit by bit pushed the byzantines back. There was no good way of defending the terrain, so they were eventually jammed against the western shore. The crusaders sacking constantinople did not help matters, but merely served to quicken the demise of the empire. Meanwhile, the byzantines were fighting terrible wars against the Bulgars, who eventually pushed them south until they controlled only modern-day greece and bits of Turkey. When the turks gained a foothold on the European continent, Constantinople was all but done for.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Germany came from Belgium the first time, so France decides to build a wall on the Franco-German border?

A monument to stupidity.

[Lefty Scaevola]

The maginot line was very succesful in its purpuse of defending thoses avenues of attack on which it was built. What was a failures was the French distribution of forces, and their flawed advance into Belgium; Their strategy failed. There were also well as inheirent defects in organization and tactics. Theey had some deficiences in equipment, but so did the Germans, but the Germans were much better at adapting to and using what they did have (also much of the lack which they had in common was in defensive equipment, and the Germans were attacking). Their only strong equipment disadvantage with respect to the germans was in aircraft, which was partially made up for by RAF contribution to the battle.

[faded glory]

My point is

The failure wasnt in the wall. The wall is a scapegoat for historians. The line served its purpose in Alsace-Lorraine, had it been built in northern france as planned theres a really good chance the BEF and French armies could of repulsed any german breakthroughs and slowed the german advance to a crawl.


"Army group "C" penitrated it in two days during phase II of the battle of France. "

Near the Swiss border. I think (im not sure) is what your talking about. This happened during Dunkirk and the french were desperately sending every armored vehicle they could find up to protect paris.

The whole idea behind the line was to slow the german advance, and counter attack at any breakthroughs. This could not be achieved when the entire army was in peril in the north and alot of the armored formations that were orignally behind the wall were sent north.

Not to mention during this whole process the entire French Airforce was destroyed by the Luftwaffe.

My point was simple, The line served its purpose for the most part in protecting from Rhine crossings. Had the wall been built to the channel, the germans probably would have slowed to crawl.


"Agree. Faded Glory should be President! Then all conflicts could be solved through a decent CallToPower MP game. "

Now.....now.....Ive built some very formible fortifications in that game. One of the more infamous was 6 Block forts on an inlet seperating me and blackice supported by 5-7 Machine gunners in each and 2-4 Howiters. Plus I had 6 Marines in a city nearby to counter-attack, and several tanks ready and a pretty damn big airforce. Although we fought for about 20 turns, he wised up and sent a navy and like 30 transports around it. Kind of like the Maginot I guess.

[Chris 62]

The cost of extending it to the channel would have bankrupted France.

It was penitrated in a number of points, and at no time were vehicles being sent to Paris, Weygand had no intention of defending Paris, it was declared an open city.

[Arrian]

Good points by Horse, Che, and others.

Faded, the Maginot Line is kinda like the German Fleet from WWI. They spent all this money building a fleet to compete with Britain... and used it only once in a stalemate battle. The ships were good, and they worked fine, but they helped Germany not at all in the war.

-Arrian

[pchang]

And don't forget that building the Maginot fortifications meant you were not using those resources to build more mobile forces and further train your troops.

[- Groucho -]

Originally posted by orange
i disagree. France was in no shape to fight World War II, not after what they went through in World War I...

Germany seemed able to get into shape ...

[Saint Marcus]

Well, the blitzkrieg took the Dutch by suprise, so they never had the opportunity to open the floodgates...

Oh we did open the floodgates alright. Too bad the world had changed in the 2 centuries we last used it. The Germans had planes, and simply flew right over the Waterline to bomb Dutch troops and cities.

you sure? The point was to flood the lowlands so that the german army would be mired in the mud...

Yes, but it failed.

As I recall the Dutch had a series of fortresses along the German border however the Nazis used a surprise airborne invasion thus doing an end room around the forts.

No, those were Belgian forts in the Ardennes. In fact, the Dutch didn't had any forts on the German border. The length of the border, combined with the landscape would make forts undefendable and a huge waste of resources, that's why they were never build. We did in fact had several lines of defense (3 in total I believe, divided in several sub-lines), but those were little more than WW1 style trenches and foxholes. They did hold out better than expected though, and the Waterline (flooded land with defensive positions on the other end) could not be broken by German ground forces alone. But, as said, the Germans used aircraft.

[Dr Strangelove]

If you will check a detailed history of WW2 you'll find that the Germans actually did penetrate the Maginot line in several places right about the time that the Panzers were racing towards Dunkirk. The great flaw of the Maginot line was that it was completely contained. The defense particularily relied on howitzers protected by too few anti-tank guns and machine guns. There were few troops deployed above ground to reconnoitwer and to repell sorties by engineer troops. he machine guns were palced in parapets which reduced the field of view of the crews and limited traverse of the guns. There was inadequate provision of guns with redundant zones of fire such that when one machine gun went down its zone was defenceless.

The Germans concentrated on certain vulnerable points at which they used artillery to knock out the machine guns, then sent in engineers to destroy the tank obstacles and traps. Then they employed similar tactics to those used in Belgium: A prepatatory precision artillery and Stuka strike to cordon off the zone of attack and reduce the enemies artillery defences, then a dash through the line by tanks and halftracks to seize points of advantage.

[Alexander's Horse]

The Maginot Line "might" have been useful if the French forces had been organised along modern lines. If their tanks had been organised into tank divisions and deployed to defend or indeed attack through Northern France then they would have stood a better chance. The Maginot Line could have acted as a defensive bulwark for the industrial regions behind the southern part of the line. The Germans certainly had no desire to take the Maginot line on in a frontal assault.

If the French had formed tank divisions they would have had at least 15 -20 of them, in other words parity with the Germans. They in fact had more tanks than the Germans, from memory about 4000 to the German's 3000. The battle for Belgium and Northern France could have been a tank battle to rival Kursk.

The French were actually moving to re-organise their tanks in the light of lessons of the Polish campaign and had 3 tank divisions in 1940 but too little too late.

[orange]

Originally posted by Arrian
Good points by Horse, Che, and others.

Faded, the Maginot Line is kinda like the German Fleet from WWI. They spent all this money building a fleet to compete with Britain... and used it only once in a stalemate battle. The ships were good, and they worked fine, but they helped Germany not at all in the war.

-Arrian

Well, not exaclty. The idea behind that wasn't necessarily to compete with Britain, but rather, to make the cost of going to war on the seas so great as to deter Britain from joining.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

It was always my understanding that the reason the French lost in 1940 was not a lack of tanks (they had more) or having too many troops in the Maginot (I gather it was only 1/5 of their army), but because the Germans were better organized. They used radio communications better, had a more efficient chain of command, concentrated their mobile forces where needed, and were more adaptive to a changing situation.

The French didn't have worse troops or equipment, it was just that the war was moving too fast for their commanders. The Maginot, effectively, was an attempt to slow the war down to a pace the French generals were comfortable with. Even if it had been built to the Channel, it could have been pierced and then the same thing would have happened... not due to a fault in the fortifications themselves, but due to faults in the generals and the system that built them.

[Boris Godunov]

Germany also inflicted more damage on the Brits at Jutland than the Brits did on the Germans, IIRC. It was a stalemate because the Germans chose to withdraw so as to not further damage their fleet.

[Alexander's Horse]

Quite right - if the Maginot line had been extended to the channel it would have just sucked more French troops into pointless static defensive positions.

The Germans fell for the same thing in 1944 with their Atlantic Wall. As soon as the allies landed they should have got most of the troops out of those beachside bunkers along the Atlantic coast and sent them to Normandy but they didn't.

These kinds of fortifications cause a kind of bunker psychosis.

[Arrian]

My point about the WWI fleet was a very loose analogy. I was basically getting at cost-benifit analysis. Like Maginot, that fleet cost a lot of money which could have been spent elsewhere. Maginot was a more extreme waste of time, money and manpower, but that's why it's a loose analogy.

-Arrian

[Ned]

I can hardly imagine the thinking of the French to declare war on Germany and then WAIT for the inevitable German invasion.

[orange]

they thought they had a better shot playing defense, I suppose

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Ned
I can hardly imagine the thinking of the French to declare war on Germany and then WAIT for the inevitable German invasion.

You have to factor in France's suffering in World War I. They were on the winning side but the country was bled white. Verdun was World War I's Stalingrad. They did not want to go war with Germany again. The Maginot Line was in large part an reaction to their huge losses in World War I. Just keep them out.

Even travelling through France today you cannot help but be struck by the long lists of dead from World War I in every little French village and town.

I recently saw an interview with a French survivor of Verdun, now over 100 years old, who wept uncontrollably when he recalled how all his friends died at verdun, he was the only survivor, and the only thing that kept him going was the image in his mind of his mother's face.

[Ned]

AH, If the horror of WWI was so fresh in the minds of the French, then why did they declare war on Germany? The government of France must of been out of their f***ing minds.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Ned
AH, If the horror of WWI was so fresh in the minds of the French, then why did they declare war on Germany? The government of France must of been out of their f***ing minds.

France and Britain felt they had no choice when Hitler ignored their security guarantees to Poland after he had broken the Munich deal over Czechoslovakia.

Neither country declared war with much enthusiasm and that's why you had the 8 month "phoney war" between the Fall of Poland and the invasion of France when they did nothing much. They were hoping for a negotiated settlement.

Ironically, in 1936 when Hitler re-militarised the Rhineland and in 1938 when Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, the German army had plans to overthrow Hitler if the West intervened militarily. This of course didn't happen.

When Germany attacked Poland, they left themselves wide open to an attack from the West, the relevant defences didn't even have sufficient ammunition to repel an attack from France, but Hitler gambled, correctly, that France and Britain woud do nothing.

[Ramo]

Why does history say the Maginot line was a failure?

Basically, the fortifications became obselete due to the tank.