Video: was the Maginot line really a bad idea?

[Underseer]

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This guy argues that the Maginot line itself was not a bad idea. It did what it was supposed to do: make it possible for France to defend itself from a numerically superior Germany.

The French knew that Germany could simply go around the Maginot line. That's why they had an alliance with Belgium. The plan was to have the combined forces of France and Belgium defend Belgium from any German invasion. The main flaw in the plan was the assumption that tanks would be unable to traverse the Ardennes.

When Germany positioned their troops in a threatening manner along the border with France and Belgium, France did not immediately respond with force, which caused the Belgian king to lose faith in the alliance with France, and thus ended the alliance. With the alliance gone, French troops could not enter Belgium until after German troops did, which obviously hampered their defense of Belgium.

The biggest mistake, however, was the assumption that tanks could not cross the Ardennes. Had France been prepared for the possibility, they could have bombed the German tank units that crossed the Ardennes, and then in spite of the Belgium alliance getting messed up, the whole thing might have been salvageable.

So it's not that the Maginot line was a bad idea, but that the strategy around the Maginot line was flawed, particularly in the assumption that tanks could not cross the Ardennes.

 

[bilby]

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Fixed defences that can be flanked are only as strong as the defence of those flanks.

If the Maginot line had stretched to the channel, everything would have been very different. But a heavily fortified France-Belgium border would have been diplomatically problematic. And permanent French defensive positions in Belgium even more so.

The Maginot line did its job. I just wasn't built to defend against an attack through the Ardennes. Stuff that fails to do something it was never designed to do cannot reasonably be considered a 'failure'. The failure was in the misplaced confidence of the French people in the half a defence that they had built. Half of a wall is no wall at all.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Along with the misplaced confidence, missing the new developments in combined arms tactics.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, if the Maginot line was built as one part of an integrated system and the other parts of that system fell through, isn't continuing to use it as if it were still part of that integrated system just another way of saying it was a failure?

It's like if a river is about to flood and you and your neighbour get together to put a bunch of sandbags along the bank to protect your property. If your neighbour then goes and sells all of his sandbags to someone else instead and the flood waters come in from his property and put your house underwater, the fact that the river didn't top your line of sandbags doesn't make them a success. They were there to do the job of stopping your house from getting flooded and your house got flooded, so successfully doing its part of the job doesn't mean that it failed any less.

Similarly, if the Maginot line depended on a Belgian alliance and an impassable forest but the Belgian alliance fell apart and technological advances in tank design made the forest passable and the plan wasn't updated to account for those, the entire system was a failure, even though the Maginot line itself successfully stopped any German troops from going through it.

 

[Sarpedon]

There was also a political decision not to develop offensive weapons, and focus on defensive ones. Sounds good in theory, but if your security is based on a network of alliances against a more powerful neighbor, it's nice to have offensive weapons so you can go to the aid of your allies.

France prudently made alliances, but was unable or unwilling to help Czechoslovakia and Poland, which made Belgium uneasy.

 

[rjh01]

The other problem is that once those defences were breached the French did not know what to do. They did not have defence in depth.