Posted on 05/16/2019 3:59:05 PM PDT by NRx
A look at one of the great engineering feats in military history. Lots of myths exploded here. (appx 20 mins)
(Excerpt) Read more at youtu.be ...
Peace in our time.
And ...it worked.
The Germans went through the Ardennes
Players of the SPI/AH game France ‘40 will know that the Maginot Line meant absolutely nothing.
France would have been better off continuing to build the Char B (a fine tank for the time) and beefing up their air force.
“Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity. If mountain ranges and oceans can be overcome, anything made by man can be overcome.”
General George S. Patton, Jr.
Tell that to the Germans at Stalingrad and Leningrad.
Sssssh.....don’t tell the President.
France already had more, and better tanks than Germany. However, Germany concentrated them. The French tanks were committed individually, and died individually
German tanks used radios more effectively didn’t they?
Gedarian (sp?) was Blitzkrieg’s original architect.
He was a tanker..?
No, he was a SIGNALS officer.
They pioneered use of small FM radios in tanks; no longer did tankers have to guess at one another’s actions, expose themselves to fire while giving harried, crazy hand signals to one another.
Seems obvious now, but...at the time it was revolutionary.
Tell that to Patton.
I don’t get it.
In Doulas MacArthur’s memoirs, he maintained the Maginot Line was an offensive device. It freed the maximum number of troops for the attack. In memory of the “Miracle of the Marne” attacking with elan was supposed to be how the French would deal with the Germans in the next war.
Somehow that concept didn’t work. It could have been related to the fact that of a 39,840,000 population, 4,375,000 Frenchmen ended up as killed or wounded in WW I. Today taking into account the emotional trauma to relatives, we would probably say almost the entire country had PTSD.
I read where the Maginot Line protected Germany as well as France. It made the French defense-minded and when Germany denuded that area of troops and tanks to invade Poland, the French, if the had the will, could have walked into Germany and would have snuff the whole Third Reich B/s/ (the German generals would have taken “loser” Hitler out themselves).
The mistake the Germans made at Stalingrad, was bombing the city to rubble, it actually made it easier for the Russians to defend as a result.
MacArthur bi-passed as many Japanese positions as he could manage and it saved many American lives. Thousands of Japanese corpses were found on some islands after the war. They had starved to death.
Yes, WW II was horrendous. Churchill and many of the British High Command were initially against what was to be the Normandy invasion because they were sure that trench warfare would be repeated.
The bigger mistake was not bypassing and cutting it off, but instead insisting on taking it.
Reading some books about Stalingrad. Even the women and children were forced to fight or get killed themselves. War machinery such as tanks were sent into the battlefield right when it was completed. They didn’t paint or even give last-minute inspections.
Great video...so much new information I never knew. I had no idea that the line was technologically advanced and fortified. Nor the huge scale of it.
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