Hart’s History of the World War suggests that it was luck that saved Verdun.20 All the German 17-inch howitzers were destroyed by French long-range guns and 450,000 ready-fused artillery shells in a German artillery park near Spincourt blew up. Others say Verdun was saved when Haig’s attack on the Somme diverted German resources. In France General Henri Philippe Pétain was given the credit for stopping the German advance at Verdun in 1916. He was hailed as the saviour of Western civilization. Doubly so when in 1917 he used his reputation and personal pleas to quell the mutinies that threatened the continued existence of the French army.
Until 1914 Pétain had been an undistinguished lecturer in infantry tactics at the Ecole de Guerre. Then General J. J. C. Joffre, who had been appointed commander-in-chief despite entirely lacking staff experience, remembered Pétain, his old teacher, and thought he might prove useful if employed on his staff. So when, after the war, the government wanted a soldier’s opinion about permanent defences, Pétain, now inspector-general of the French army (and designated C-in-C in the event of hostilities), was an obvious choice. He had a theory about ‘battlefields prepared in peacetime’, a line of defences along the western bank of the Rhine, and to Thionville on the Moselle. The line would not be strongly fortified, neither would it continue along the Franco-Belgian border. Pétain believed that that part of the frontier could only be defended from inside Belgium.21 From this time onwards it became a fundamental part of French strategy that Belgium remain an ally of France, and that the line of fortifications inside Belgium was a de facto part of French defences.
Some believe that the Maginot defences were deliberately positioned so as to ensure that any German attack would have to go through Belgium and bring Britain and the Dominions into the war as it had done in 1914. To the south, the main defences of the Maginot Line were built to include the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.
These provinces had been a part of Germany until 1918. The people there had grown up under German rule but the Maginot fortifications told them unequivocally that France would not allow this region to become German again. Thus the siting and building of the Maginot Line took political as well as military ideas into account.
The northern provinces provided special problems. The low lands flooded every winter, as had been discovered by the wretched front-line troops who served in waterlogged trenches there in the First World War. An urban-industrial region straddled the Franco-Belgian frontier and was growing as Europe recovered from the war. It would be difficult to build fortresses amid factories and houses. Any construction along the French side of this border would be a declaration that France would abandon Belgium in the event of war.
For all these reasons, and many more, the Maginot Line was not a continuous series of fortifications. It stopped and started; and in any case it was designed only as a barrier which would enable France to spread second-rate troops thinly behind the forts, and concentrate its best units elsewhere. Many people, including Winston Churchill, agreed that the small population of France, compared with that of Germany, made the construction of the Maginot Line a sensible precaution.
That the Maginot Line ‘was an astounding feat of twentieth century engineering’22 can be seen still today. It was designed however before the use of armoured mobile columns changed the textbooks. When the Maginot Line was being planned, whole armies of tracked and wheeled vehicles were no more than theoreticians’ dreams that few soldiers took seriously.
In the long run the Maginot Line had more effect upon the French than it had upon the Germans. It lulled them into a false sense of security. When war began, at a time when the German army was fully occupied in Poland, the French had a wonderful chance to use their fortifications as a base from which to strike against the Rhineland. They did not do it. The ‘Maginot mentality’ – added to its political confusions and Hitler’s fearsome propaganda – had hypnotized France and made it into a victim waiting for an end that many considered inevitable.
Neither did the magic of Maginot totally fade in 1945. At war’s end, the French army immediately occupied and reconditioned the Maginot Line. It kept it maintained until 1964. Now its mouldering turrets and weedy entrances are to be found by curious holiday-makers who wander off the highways.23
Peace is better than war, because in peace the
sons bury their fathers, but in war the
fathers bury their sons.
Croesus to Cambyses (son of his enemy Cyrus the Great)
It was not only the ‘Maginot mentality’ that rendered France so vulnerable in 1940. Although the generals failed to equip France’s army for modern war, the nation itself during those interwar years became ever more demoralized and divided. Political extremists of both left and right had a powerful influence upon French society, as did the widespread corruption that so often procured fat government contracts. The French aircraft industry provided an example of the crippling effect of political theorists. In 1936 all the well established French aircraft manufacturers were nationalized by the Communist air minister Pierre Cot. The effect upon production was devastating, and the resulting chaos was still being sorted out when the Germans attacked in 1940. France’s relationships with the rest of the world suffered as a result of its own dissensions. Although the French had remained Britain’s close allies since before the First World War, the ties between the two countries had grown more and more uncertain. Even in November 1938 – after the Munich agreement – the British prime minister thought it necessary to ask the French whether they would support Britain if it became the victim of German aggression. In the same cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said he had been assured that France was not proposing to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany that would rule out help to Britain.1 These were chilly words about Britain’s closest neighbours immediately prior to a life-and-death struggle with a well armed and determined enemy.
Hitler’s New Order
In the eyes of many people, Adolf Hitler’s regime was a success. Everything seemed to have improved since the waves of economic depression that rolled over Europe in the 1920s. Germans were thankful for the way Hitler’s coming to power stopped the vicious and extensive street battles which were a regular ending to all Communist and Nazi political rallies. But the Nazi way of restoring law and order was to execute or imprison without trial all opponents. Equally drastic was the way Hitler reduced unemployment by means of massive public works projects and rearmament. In 1935 conscription was introduced. All German youth was called to serve twelve months in the armed forces following a term of manual work in the RAD, the State Labour Service. In September 1936 Hitler was able to announce to a party congress that the jobless had fallen from 6 million to 1 million. A strictly controlled economy caused living standards to rise sharply, so that Germans soon enjoyed the highest living standards in Europe.
The Nazi propaganda machine brought the arts, theatre, cinema, newspapers and radio under the direct control of the artful Joseph Goebbels. Parades with flaming torches, vast uniformed rallies on monumental stages and stadiums, massed flags and columns of searchlights had made Germany into a political theatre watched by the rest of the world.
As part of the rapid expansion of the German army, during training and exercises it employed motor cars fitted with flimsy wooden superstructures to represent
