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LINE IN THE FOREST
By Bill Fawcett
The enemy rarely acts as you expect, much less as you want them to.
Here is something that will surprise many readers: the Maginot Line worked exactly as planned. There was never an expectation that the German general staff would be stupid enough to attack it frontally. It was never intended to stop any attack completely, but to channel that attack to a location where it could be met and defeated. The Maginot Line was not a mistake—certainly not the mistake that cost France the war. This mistake, which doomed France to four long years of Nazi occupation, did not happen anywhere in France; it happened in Belgium.
There were a number of reasons why the Maginot Line stopped halfway to the Atlantic. One was cost. What had been built already had put a severe strain on France’s military budget. Partially because of this, the French were slow to modernize in other areas, such as aircraft and antitank guns—a lack that cost them heavily when the Germans invaded. France simply could not afford more fortifications. Another reason was to not antagonize Belgium, which was expected to fight with them—although, in 1935, Belgium declared itself neutral in the vain hope of avoiding a German invasion. Perhaps more important was that, by the 1930s, the line was not expected to reach all the way to the Channel. The Maginot Line was designed to accomplish a few specific and important things, and these it did.
One of its purposes was to keep the industrial areas of northern France from being invaded as they had been in WWI. This it initially accomplished. In fact, a large part of the French army was concentrated in northeast France, with its back to the Maginot Line, when the nation surrendered. The Maginot Line was also supposed to free up troops for the defense of those areas it did not extend into. Again this it did accomplish.
Perhaps the main reason for the fortifications was to have the Wehrmacht do exactly what it did—attack through Belgium. Yes, the French general staff expected this and planned on it. The bulk of their army was in place and did move to cover an invasion through Belgium. The real war-losing mistake was that they moved to defend the wrong part of Belgium. This was because the French expected that the German attack would follow the same route as it had in WWI. After all, that had been a near-run thing, with “the miracle of the Marne” needed to save the country. Here you have a classic case of preparing to fight the last war instead of the current one.
The assumption that led to the disastrous deployment of the French army and British Expeditionary Force was that the area of southern Belgium known as the Ardennes Forest was so dense with trees and thinly crossed with roads that it was deemed an impossible route for any major invasion force. The area had been thoroughly surveyed, with this in mind, by the French, and all agreed it was impossible to launch a major attack through, or even for a major army to traverse, the Ardennes in less than several weeks. This gave plenty of time to react. That left only northern Belgium and the same route as Germany had taken in the last war. The historical reality is that it took the main German thrust much less than a week to cross through the Ardennes Forest.
Assuming that the Ardennes could basically “defend itself” and that the Maginot Line would do what it did, this left only an invasion route through northern Belgium. So, a large part of the French army and all of the BEF deployed in the north, ready to repel the enemy at the only place where the Allies felt the main German thrust could be made. This meant that when the Germans smashed through the lightly defended Ardennes to their southeast, the bulk of the Allied mobile forces were north and west of the breakthrough. This allowed the panzer divisions to turn west and cut off much of the French army, and the entire BEF, from France. The best units of the French and British armies were caught facing the wrong way and their lines of supply and communications severed in a matter of days. To modern armies, that situation is a disaster. Ammunition, gasoline, and food are consumed by the ton by a modern military unit. These could now be supplied only by sea, but the dominance of the Luftwaffe over the battlefield made this difficult as well. Combined with tactical mistakes, such as not concentrating their tanks effectively, a lack of antitank guns large enough to stop the panzers, and a failure to train their mobile infantry in modern tactics, it was enough to cause France to be completely defeated within a shockingly short time. The best of the French army and the entire BEF were caught out of position and effectively surrounded within days. All because of making an incorrect assumption about attacking through the Ardennes Forest.
Had there been sufficient forces facing the Ardennes Forest, or even if the bulk of the mobile French army and BEF had not surged into upper Belgium, WWII would have been fought very differently. If the attack in the Ardennes had been blunted, then once more the two sides would have been slugging it out. Had the Blitzkrieg not been aided by this major strategic mistake, Germany would not have been able to sweep across France and, perhaps, not even been able to knock that nation out of the war. With the French army intact and the BEF in a position to be used effectively, the price of a German victory would have been very high. This might have once more sparked a revolt by the German generals. A higher cost against a united Allied army would also have meant no invasion of Russia a year later. If France had managed to hold out, as it had in WWI, then trench warfare might have reappeared. With the Maginot Line, that would have favored the French. There could even have been a negotiated agreement, when the cost of a victory became apparent to the Nazis. Perversely, it might also have forced a peace, or at least a truce, that would have left Hitler in power.