The Maginot Line was built between 1929 and 1940. It was built to protect France from its longtime enemy, Germany, and defend the traditional invasion routes along her eastern frontier.  The Maginot Line was built to provide time for the French army to mobilize and to make up for a potentially disastrous shortage of manpower predicted for the late 1930’s. Most of all, it was built to provide a place behind which the French army could hide, a so-called “Great Wall” of France where the nation could feel secure in taking a defensive position. This defensive doctrine became known as the “Maginot” mentality, a mental state that became disastrous during the summer of 1940. Although it has become notorious as a universal metaphor for bungling, the failure of France stemmed from poor political, military, and civilian leadership. The French psyche was incapable of the heroic sacrifices that typified their World War I activities. 

 

The line was named in honor of Andre Maginot, war hero, beloved Minister of Veteran’s Affairs, and Minister of War from 1928 to 1932. Maginot was successful in persuading the French parliament, both to the right and to the left, to allocate the money for the project.

 

The Maginot Line, some 150 miles long, was a powerful line of defense, which stretched from Switzerland to the Ardennes in the North, and from the Alps to the Mediterranean in the South. It was a vast, state-of-the art, ultra-modern defensive system, composing 50 large fortifications. Most of its components were underground, where interconnecting tunnels stretched for miles, and where beneath the earth, thousands of men slept, trained, watched and waited for an invasion that never came. Each fort was manned by up to 1,000 troops who could be transported between their elaborate barracks and heavily armed combat bunkers by trolleys. They could support life underground.

 

In the end, the Maginot Line was considered by most to be a failure. It failed to save France from a humiliating defeat in 1940. In May 1940, Hitler simply chose to ignore it. Hitler instead employed very mobile tanks to break through the Ardennes forest.  He supplemented the infantry with airplanes. The French never considered the possibility that tanks could migrate through this difficult terrain. It a series of lightening moves, the tanks got behind the French army, disrupting completely their communication. The German Airforce within the first days of fighting destroyed some three hundred French aircraft, and thereby obtaining overwhelming air superiority. The French never considered that the Germans could bomb mercilessly the fortifications. In fact, the French capitulated before the Germans tested their Airforce against these stagnant fortifications.

 

The initiative behind the Maginot line was in part dictated by stalemate battles such as Verdun where hundreds of thousands of combatants died. The French suffered the highest percentage manpower loss of any combatant during World War I. Some twenty-five percent of French males between 29-40 died during the war. Petain, the hero of Verdun, argued for the Maginot line, feeling that France could not withstand the same bloodshed of 1914-1918. Charles de Gaulle argued for a buildup of tanks and planes; however, this meant mobility and attack, and France has no stomach for that. Also, the French could not afford both the costly construction of the Maginot line, a modern Airforce, and large-scale manufacture of tanks. 

 

The Maginot fortifications would compensate for the French numerical weakness, the eventual loss of the Rhineland buffer zone, and the absolute imperativeness of holding the northern industrial regions. Belgium built similar fortifications. However, the French lines along the Belgium frontier were not as strong as the Maginot line.

 

Hitler chose not to attack directly the French fortifications. Instead, he attacked through the Ardennes Forest and neutral Belgium. My mid-June (some six weeks after the Western campaign started) the German army completely surrounded the French army in Alsace.

 

In the 1970’s the French government auctioned off most of the old Maginot fortifications. A number have been turned into wine cellars, a mushroom farm, and even a disco. A few private houses are built atop some of the blockhouses.