As a result, the Germans were able to encircle the French and their British allies and drive them back toward the coast, and then head south to Paris. As French historian Michael Bourlet explained in a 2020 interview, the Germans were able to outmaneuver the French army that had been set northward to fight them. That emboldened the German army to gamble on getting through the wilderness-and it paid off. Heinz Guderian, Germany’s top tank commander, had spent time in the Ardennes during World War I, and knew the area well enough to map out the terrain and find a way to get through, as Bevin Alexander describes in Inside the Nazi War Machine. But they counted on the natural barrier of the Ardennes, a dense forested area with rough terrain and few roads, to narrow the area that the Germans could cross.īut Lt. With the Maginot Line blocking the Germans from directly crossing the French-German border, the French military knew that the Germans would have to go through Belgium to attack. After Belgium declared its neutrality in 1936, French defense minister Edouard Daladier sought additional funding to extend the Maginot line along France’s border with Belgium, but those fortifications were never completed. While the border with Germany was protected, the fortifications stopped at the beginning of the border with Belgium, which in the 1930s was a French ally. All information, figures, specifications and statistics used here had been compiled from a variety of sources and the large, over decades collected, library of the author about military history, WW2 and weapons. “It cannot be broken at any point, except by an effort which would be enormously costly in life and take so much time that the general situation would be transformed while it was in progress.”īut despite all its steel and concrete, the Maginot Line had at least one glaring flaw. I'm in the fortunate position to combine all my interests with my work and to live on a place of my choice, on Crete. “The French front cannot be surprised,” the future Prime Minister wrote, according to Paul Addison’s 2007 biography Winston Churchill. When French officials gave Winston Churchill a tour of the Maginot Line in August 1939, he was impressed by what he saw.

On the night of the 11th /12th of February the German troops were placed in position. Heavy fortifications seemed like a good way to provide protection until manpower returned to normal.Ĭonstruction began in the late 1920s, and by 1936, the Maginot Line was largely complete. The attack on Verdun was originally planned on Saturday 12 February.

The toll that World War I had taken upon the French population meant that the country faced a future shortage of soldiers to defend the country against Germany, which also suffered heavy losses but had almost twice the population. In addition to the likelihood of a future conflict, Maginot had another very compelling argument on his side. Maginot Line Designed to Fortify France After WWI Losses

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