Posted on 05/21/2009 5:07:58 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
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Check out the picture of General von Brauchitsch on the third image. What a happy looking guy!
They built steel and concrete fortifications across all of Europe 70 years ago, but today we can’t even put up a chain-link fence along our Southern border...
i read that the germans captured some of the forts by landing paratroops in gliders on top of them at the start of the war. i guess the french didnt plan on that.
one wonders what the modern analogy is to the maginot line? could it be our high tech defense, that might go down or rendered inefective somehow just like the fixed fortifications proved totally useless to the french?
“Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity.” - George Patton
They did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Eben-Emael
Although it was in Belgium, not France.
}:-)4
I believe the Wehrmacht opted for the high-benefit dental plan. Your teeth...or somebody else's.
Ah, the Maginot line. The Germans didn't really outflank it, at least at first, they busted through at one of its strongest points. They could do that because of diplomacy - the Belgians had declared neutrality, and so the French promise to hold the war in Belgium (they used other terms but that's about it) was no longer valid and the Line had to be hastily lengthened. And second, the French had given the Czechs the plans for the structures because for some reason those silly Czechs thought the Germans might have designs on their property. Well, OK, there was that Sudetenland thing... After the Munich agreement the Germans had a nice close look at those structures and a chance to rehearse.
The lesson is that the stripey-pants boys will give away the house for a piece of paper, "peace in our time." And then blame the guys in green pants when the shooting starts. That wasn't a lot of consolation to the poor poilu sitting safe in his bunker and hearing the enemy artillery fire...to his rear.
Then, of course, there was the impenetrable Ardennes forest, which the Germans penetrated not only once, but twice. The second time it was the guys at Bastogne who were hearing enemy artillery fire to the rear. Not a good feeling.
Airpower was completely overlooked.
Yeah, I think the idea was that aerial bombs wouldn’t get any bigger than they were during WWI. Those biplanes and zeppelins can only carry so much, dontcha know...
Then Rommel missed the lesson with the Atlantic Wall. He could fight in a desert moving but fixed forts went out with the cannon.
I dont entirely agree with you there. Rommel knew full well that the only chance the Reich had to keep the allies out of France was to keep them from getting a beachhead on the coast. Any invasion had to be repelled at the landing sites or there would be no stop to the flow of troops and equipment flowing into France.
Once he took command the first thing he did was begin to beef up the fortifications on the “Atlantic Wall” but the forts and gun implacements were only a small part of his overall strategy. He also put in place countless obsticals designed to damage and destroy landing craft and also set up machine gun emplacements that were specifically designed to create “kill zones” with overlapping areas of fire.
Considering the limited resources he had, the personnel at his disposal and the time frame he was given he came up with a very good plan for an impossible situation.
OF:"“Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity.” - George Patton
Didn't the Germans first "bust through" the Ardennes Forest, where there was no Maginot Line?
In fact, the Maginot Line worked just as intended. It forced the Germans to find a way around it. But what the French expected was Germans to advance through Belgium, just as in the First World War. So the French put their best troops along the border with Belgium.
The French did not expect a German advance through the Ardennes, and neither did the Germans, until so to speak, the last hour.
German General von Manstein figured out a way to send armies through the Ardennes, but his plan was rejected by the General Staff before Manstein could present it to Hitler, almost by accident.
Point is: the Maginot Line did what it was supposed to do, forcing the Germans to go around it. And, it took a military genius to figure out how to defeat it. The Germans had a number of these in positions of influence, where the French, sadly, had none.
Later, 1944 & 1945, when the allies went up against the German Atlantic Wall and West Wall (aka "Siegfried Line," here called "Lime Line"), it was a very different story. Unlike 1940, by 1944 the allies outnumbered Germans in both troops and guns by several to one. Plus they had absolute air domination. So major obstacles & formations were simply bombed to smitherenes.
Now it was the Germans, stuck in their fortifications, with no maneuver force to strike at canalized attackers.
Bottom line: at the time, fixed fortifications were a great idea for canalizing the enemy, provided the forts were supported by powerful maneuver forces. When they weren't, which was often the case, they became, as many have noted, useless sitting ducks.
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