Why does history say the Maginot line was a failure?

[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.