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Posted on 12/18/2025 8:34:02 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The United States, according to the New York Times, has a Maginot Line problem. In the first in a series of articles castigating the 21st century U.S. military for allegedly failing to adapt to modern military technology, the editorial board raises the specter of Monsieur Maginot’s infamous namesake fortification.
“It is an ancient and familiar pattern,” the editorial board laments. The French in 1940, ensconced safely—so they thought—behind their elaborate frontier wall, utterly failed, unlike the Germans, to pay attention to the new verities of armored warfare and airpower and paid the penalty in a catastrophic six-week defeat. The image of overconfident security is easy to grasp. The problem is that it has little to do with what really happened in 1940.
This is hardly the first time that L’Étrange Défaite (“the strange defeat”) of France in 1940, as historian Marc Bloch dubbed it, has been cited in U.S. punditry as emblematic of a profound societal failure to grasp the realities of the present when existential stakes are on the line. The so-called “Maginot mentality” epitomized, so it is routinely said, France’s inability to learn the proper lessons of the 1914-18 conflict.
In the words of U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Leah Amerling-Bray, that lesson was “to perceive changes in the conduct of war and to adapt.
Daniel J. Mahoney writes that the campaign “was a direct result of this failure to adjust to the requirements of warfare in the age of the internal combustion engine.”
Sheltering behind a fortress wall “to stop a German attack that never came while failing to anticipate the one that did,” in Thomas Wright’s words , the French ceased to innovate while their enemies developed weapons and doctrine for a new epoch of war.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
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I always thought the French needed 2 lines. The one they had on the German border and a second line along the Belgium border. And of course the French needed lots of tanks and a massive amount of war machines.
paywalled
In reality, the French assumed a dense forest north of the Maginot live was impenetrable by armored forces, or at least that they would have to go very slowly, giving the French army plenty of time to stop them. They were wrong.
They also assumed that Belgium and The Netherlands fortifications would be able to make things difficult for German forces. Wrong again.
A book on Rommel I read said he told his tankers to shoot off the treads on the French tanks after German gunners found their small cannon shells bounced off the French armor and to hoist white flags and drive through the Maginot Line.
The French knew what the Germans had done to Rotterdam and didn’t want to see Paris bombed to ruins.
The British weren’t willing to send the RAF to defend Paris at the expense of London.
The USA needs drones and lots of them. And every type of applications for land, sky, and underwater. And lots of nerds with joy stick video game knowledge on how to destroy the enemy. A drone attack could take out an aircraft carrier. Especially if there was a 2 pronged attack from the air and from under water.
The ISW may be right about the Russians lacking a hold on Kupyansk.
Some drones, but lots of smart artillery and mortar shells.
And lots of ~200 rounds per minute anti-drone guns.
The Russians are using fog to advance.
RE: Why waste time with an article you can’t read to completion at the site?
OK, this is the central point of the article ( see EXCERPT below ). Tell me if you agree with it:
[EXCERPT]
The French were not taken by surprise by blitzkrieg; they had been thinking about how to defend against such an attack for years. And in principle, at least, they had figured out how to stop it. Field exercises showed that even a powerful tank advance could be halted by a well-prepared defense-in-depth using minefields, anti-tank guns, and mobile reserves for counterattacks.
These were exactly the same tactics that would be used successfully against the Germans later in the war in North Africa and Russia and are the basis for anti-tank warfare today. The French had a healthy respect for the Wehrmacht, but they rightly understood that there was nothing invincible about it and that there was no reason to think that it could not be stopped by a sound, well-organized defense.
Where the problems started to creep in were assumptions about exactly the Germans would strike. Gamelin assumed, reasonably enough, that Adolf Hitler would send his tanks to good tank country—that is, to the Gembloux Gap, a 25-mile plateau in central Belgium between Wavre and Namur.
This offered a perfect unimpeded route for the Panzers to advance toward Paris. Unbeknownst to him, the chief of staff of the main German army group, Erich von Manstein, had successfully persuaded Hitler that the main thrust should come further south, through the thickly wooded Ardennes region.
The decision would have struck Gamelin as crazy—just as it did lots of German generals—because it would create a massive vulnerable traffic jam in the forest roads as thousands of vehicles tried to make their way westward. Alas, for all his excellent martial qualities, the French commander possessed a certain stubbornness of mind that meant that even when evidence began to mount that the Germans were indeed taking the Ardennes route, he refused to accept that they would ever do something so militarily stupid.
Even this would not necessarily have been fatal on that day had Gamelin not also decided at the last minute to change the disposition of the French Seventh Army, one of his best-equipped and trained formations. Instead of keeping it in place just behind the front line as a strategic reserve to respond to an unexpected Wehrmacht move, he ordered that as soon as any German attack in the west started, it should dash toward the border with Holland to link up with the Dutch Army.
Gamelin’s second-in-command, Gen. Alphonse Georges, warned his chief that this “Breda variant” to the original plan exposed the French to unnecessary dangers. Should the Germans decide to come by a surprise route, like—just for example—the Ardennes, he told Gamelin, “we could find ourselves lacking the necessary means for a counterattack.”
Gamelin was again unmoved. In the event, Georges’s fear proved catastrophically prescient. In May 1940, just four days into the campaign, the Germans emerged on the far side of the Ardennes, crossed the River Meuse at Sedan, and struck deep behind the Allied lines with no strong French reserve available to stop them. Had the Seventh Army remained in place and not rushed pointlessly to Breda, it might quite easily have pinched shut the narrow German bridgehead across the Meuse and brought the whole blitzkrieg offensive to a halt.
As contingent on these mistakes as the German victory was, none of this is to deny that the French Army had its problems in 1940, some of them serious. Heavy reliance on short-term conscripts and reservists meant many troops lacked the training for flexible, mobile operations. French doctrine emphasized carefully planned, firepower-intensive methodical battles that required extensive preparation between each phase of advance; a slow French decision-making loop resulted in critical delays in responding to enemy movements. Air power was poorly organized, and air-ground cooperation was poor.
But then, the German Army had lots of problems, too. Contrary to the blitzkrieg legend, roughly 9 in 10 Wehrmacht soldiers marched into battle on foot. The army’s logistical apparatus still relied on horse-drawn wagons. Half the troops were middle-aged; most had had a few weeks’ training. Even the vaunted Panzers were mostly small, thinly armored Mark Is and IIs with cannons or machine guns as armament. There was absolutely no reason to think that Hitler’s hastily scraped-together army had some strong inherent advantage over the French.
Because the “strange defeat” of France in 1940 was so unexpected and had such profound consequences, there has always been a temptation to think that it must, therefore, offer some profound lesson about the nature of war. Actually, all it offers is the less-than-spectacular advice to keep an open mind, not have a bad plan, and not be unlucky.
Banalities about supposed Revolutions in Military Affairs excite tech disruptors, but historians and strategists should be wary of them. Actually, any real lesson to be drawn from 1940 is about German failure.
Having—to their own amazement—defeated the French, the Germans had no idea what to do next. Stumbling along for a theory of victory, they first fought and lost the Battle of Britain, then embarked on a grandiose and doomed invasion of the Soviet Union. Operational success, it turns out, avails you little in the absence of strategic vision.
The French did not use the Maginot Line as it was meant, a buffer to allow forces to rally. They were out drinking wine and eating croissants instead of being ever vigilant.
I found no stunning new insights in the article.
“Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.” - General George S. Patton
The British were supposed to hold the Belgian border and the northern flank. They fled the battlefield. Probably a smart move to save the BEF for the defense of England. But it gets old to hear them slander the French Army for the surrender when they fled the Battlefield at Dunkirk, and surrendered to a Japanese force a third their size at Singapore.
Fact is, the Brits and French were simply outsmarted by the Germans in 1940. The Brits lost 11k dead. The French lost about 75k dead in that 6 week battle (for perspective we lost 58k in Vietnam) German wartime estimates of their dead were about 45k and they lost about a third of the Luftwaffe.
The Battle of France in 1940 was a short and very violent battle. The Germans and Hitler well-learned the lessons of WWI and had a new approach that nobody was ready to deal with. They won... the Brits and French fought bravely. The Brits retreated, the French left behind were defeated and surrendered.
It’s a shame to hear modern people slander the French in that battle.
Does the article say anything about how the US defense today is comparable to the Maginot line?
France lost because it abandoned its allies first in Czechoslovakia and then Poland. By doing so, it lost the ability to but Germany in the vice of a two front war, and went into a turtle defense. The French generals refused to listen to the Poles, who escaped through Romania, about what the German tactics would be, and how to counter them. Tanks were first developed in WWI, but it was in the Polish-Russian war in 1920 that Charles De Gaulle saw that tanks were the future of warfare. The French did not create tanks as armored calvary, but had them in smaller numbers to supplement the infantry units. The French tanks were better than the German tanks, but not massed into a calvary, and thus ineffective.
France lost because they didn’t fire on the Germans when they marched into the Rhineland in 1936, from that point on, Hitler knew they were pussies.
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