America, in line with the New York Occasions, has a Maginot Line downside. Within the first in a collection of articles castigating the twenty first century U.S. navy for allegedly failing to adapt to trendy navy know-how, the editorial board raises the specter of Monsieur Maginot’s notorious namesake fortification.
“It’s an historic and acquainted sample,” the editorial board laments. The French in 1940, ensconced safely—in order that they thought—behind their elaborate frontier wall, totally failed, in contrast to the Germans, to concentrate to the brand new verities of armored warfare and airpower and paid the penalty in a catastrophic six-week defeat. The picture of overconfident safety is straightforward to understand. The issue is that it has little to do with what actually occurred in 1940.
That is hardly the primary time that L’Étrange Défaite (“the unusual defeat”) of France in 1940, as historian Marc Bloch dubbed it, has been cited in U.S. punditry as emblematic of a profound societal failure to understand the realities of the current when existential stakes are on the road. The so-called “Maginot mentality” epitomized, so it’s routinely stated, France’s incapacity to study the correct classes of the 1914-18 battle. Within the phrases of U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Leah Amerling-Bray, that lesson was “to understand modifications within the conduct of conflict and to adapt
Daniel J. Mahoney writes that the marketing campaign “was a direct results of this failure to regulate to the necessities of warfare within the age of the interior combustion engine.” Sheltering behind a fortress wall “to cease a German assault that by no means got here whereas failing to anticipate the one which did,” in Thomas Wright’s phrases, the French ceased to innovate whereas their enemies developed weapons and doctrine for a brand new epoch of conflict.
Within the severest interpretations of this argument, France’s navy myopia within the Nineteen Thirties was merely symptomatic of a deeper civilizational trough, what Mahoney calls a “spirit of palpable decadence and decline that permeated the environment of public life.” French troops, sapped of the need to withstand by nationwide demoralization, supposedly “took to their heels or meekly surrendered within the face of German assaults,” Niall Ferguson writes. Cue The Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie’s taunt that the defeated of 1940 have been “cheese-eating give up monkeys.”
A lot of the inspiration for this initially got here from the French themselves. Within the instant aftermath of the German victory, Marshal Philippe Pétain—the brand new chief of the collaborationist Vichy regime—blamed his nation’s current defeat on the religious décadence of the prewar years, an ethical rot that he claimed may solely be arrested by a politically conservative, reactionary Catholic and unabashedly antisemitic nationwide revolution.
Throughout the English Channel, Charles de Gaulle’s Free French motion endorsed a narrower criticism that the Third Republic’s generals had been responsible of making an attempt to refight the final conflict. This was an accusation that had explicit attraction for Gaullists as a result of it appeared to substantiate the warnings contained of their chief’s 1934 guide Vers l’Armée de Métier (The Military of the Future). After the conflict, the cost of obsolescence caught.
But the fact of French technique in 1940 has little to do with these politically handy caricatures. Take the much-disparaged Maginot Line first. Opposite to loads of trendy assumptions, it was by no means anticipated to defeat a German assault by itself. The purpose of the Maginot Line was to not cease the boche of their tracks, however to channel any future westward offensive away from the French industrial heartland—which had been so devastated within the First World Battle—and towards the Low International locations, notably Belgium.
There, the French floor forces may meet their enemy on a usefully constricted battlefield that will have the inestimable benefit of being in another person’s nation. On this, the Maginot Line completed precisely what it was designed to do. The Germans by no means efficiently took it by frontal assault, and a few of the French garrison troops held out doggedly till early July 1940, weeks after the armistice. The Maginot Line value rather a lot lower than the modernization of the French battle fleet within the Nineteen Thirties, which, because it turned out, made not a single contribution to the nation’s protection. If the French misplaced the battle in Belgium, that was not the fault of the Maginot Line’s architects.
So why did they lose that battle? At this level, a pointy distinction is historically drawn between the ossified French Military of 1940, clinging to the outdated verities of trench warfare, and the German Wehrmacht, with its embrace of state-of-the-art armored combating strategies. However the French have been hardly unaware of the significance of tanks. Not solely did they’ve extra of them in 1940 than the Germans did, however they have been additionally extra closely armed and armored—and sometimes higher organized, too.
The three French Divisions Légères Mécaniques (“quick mechanized divisions”) have been extra successfully balanced in gear combine and drive construction than the German Panzer divisions that they confronted. The French commander in chief, Maurice Gamelin, was a passionate believer within the centrality of the tank in future battle and had been one of many principal voices throughout the French Military arguing for quicker mechanization within the Nineteen Thirties. He seen the Polish marketing campaign in September 1939 as illustrating “the penetrative energy of speedy and hard-hitting German armoured formations and the shut co-operation of their Air Power.”
The French weren’t taken unexpectedly by blitzkrieg; they’d been interested by the right way to defend towards such an assault for years. And in precept, at the least, they’d found out the right way to cease it. Subject workouts confirmed that even a strong tank advance might be halted by a well-prepared defense-in-depth utilizing minefields, anti-tank weapons, and cellular reserves for counterattacks.
These have been precisely the identical ways that will be used efficiently towards the Germans later within the conflict in North Africa and Russia and are the premise for anti-tank warfare at the moment. The French had a wholesome respect for the Wehrmacht, however they rightly understood that there was nothing invincible about it and that there was no motive to assume that it couldn’t be stopped by a sound, well-organized protection.
The place the issues began to creep in have been assumptions about precisely the Germans would strike. Gamelin assumed, moderately sufficient, that Adolf Hitler would ship his tanks to good tank nation—that’s, to the Gembloux Hole, a 25-mile plateau in central Belgium between Wavre and Namur. This supplied an ideal unimpeded route for the Panzers to advance towards Paris. Unbeknownst to him, the chief of employees of the principle German military group, Erich von Manstein, had efficiently persuaded Hitler that the principle thrust ought to come additional south, by the thickly wooded Ardennes area.
The choice would have struck Gamelin as loopy—simply because it did numerous German generals—as a result of it might create an enormous weak site visitors jam within the forest roads as 1000’s of automobiles tried to make their method westward. Alas, for all his wonderful martial qualities, the French commander possessed a sure stubbornness of thoughts that meant that even when proof started to mount that the Germans have been certainly taking the Ardennes route, he refused to simply accept that they might ever do one thing so militarily silly.
Even this is able to not essentially have been deadly on that day had Gamelin not additionally determined on the final minute to vary the disposition of the French Seventh Military, considered one of his best-equipped and educated formations. As a substitute of retaining it in place simply behind the entrance line as a strategic reserve to answer an surprising Wehrmacht transfer, he ordered that as quickly as any German assault within the west began, it ought to sprint towards the border with Holland to hyperlink up with the Dutch Military.
Gamelin’s second-in-command, Gen. Alphonse Georges, warned his chief that this “Breda variant” to the unique plan uncovered the French to pointless risks. Ought to the Germans resolve to return by a shock route, like—only for instance—the Ardennes, he informed Gamelin, “we may discover ourselves missing the mandatory means for a counterattack.”
Gamelin was once more unmoved. Within the occasion, Georges’s concern proved catastrophically prescient. In Could 1940, simply 4 days into the marketing campaign, the Germans emerged on the far aspect of the Ardennes, crossed the River Meuse at Sedan, and struck deep behind the Allied traces with no robust French reserve accessible to cease them. Had the Seventh Military remained in place and never rushed pointlessly to Breda, it would fairly simply have pinched shut the slender German bridgehead throughout the Meuse and introduced the entire blitzkrieg offensive to a halt.
As contingent on these errors because the German victory was, none of that is to disclaim that the French Military had its issues in 1940, a few of them critical. Heavy reliance on short-term conscripts and reservists meant many troops lacked the coaching for versatile, cellular operations. French doctrine emphasised rigorously deliberate, firepower-intensive methodical battles that required intensive preparation between every part of advance; a gradual French decision-making loop resulted in essential delays in responding to enemy actions. Air energy was poorly organized, and air-ground cooperation was poor.
However then, the German Military had numerous issues, too. Opposite to the blitzkrieg legend, roughly 9 in 10 Wehrmacht troopers marched into battle on foot. The military’s logistical equipment nonetheless relied on horse-drawn wagons. Half the troops have been middle-aged; most had had a number of weeks’ coaching. Even the vaunted Panzers have been largely small, thinly armored Mark Is and IIs with cannons or machine weapons as armament. There was completely no motive to assume that Hitler’s unexpectedly scraped-together military had some robust inherent benefit over the French.
As a result of the “unusual defeat” of France in 1940 was so surprising and had such profound penalties, there has at all times been a temptation to assume that it should, subsequently, supply some profound lesson concerning the nature of conflict. Truly, all it provides is the less-than-spectacular recommendation to maintain an open thoughts, not have a nasty plan, and never be unfortunate.
Banalities about supposed Revolutions in Navy Affairs excite tech disruptors, however historians and strategists ought to be cautious of them. Truly, any actual lesson to be drawn from 1940 is about German failure. Having—to their very own amazement—defeated the French, the Germans had no concept what to do subsequent. Stumbling alongside for a concept of victory, they first fought and misplaced the Battle of Britain, then launched into a grandiose and doomed invasion of the Soviet Union. Operational success, it seems, avails you little within the absence of strategic imaginative and prescient.
