The First World War left France dispirited and depleted in manpower. By 1939 there were 300,000 fewer men to defend France than had been available in 1914. Missing were the unborn sons of the men who had died assaulting the German lines. So the French built an elaborate chain of subterranean forts. It was, by any standards, a considerable feat of engineering. Almost all the official visitors compared the installations with those of battleships.
The casemates were carefully sited to provide extensive fields of fire, and provision was made to shoot at the neighboring casemate should it fall into enemy hands. Still to be seen along the frontier, overgrown with weeds and stained by sooty rain, these massive buildings—none of them with less than 3.5 meters of concrete as a roof— are almost indestructible. Each casemate is a two-story block with metal observation cupolas (and in some cases retractable artillery cupolas) on top. The upper floor was given over to guns; below were sited the generator and ammunition supply, with troop accommodation and stores alongside. Usually such casemates are protected by tank traps and anti-infantry ditches. Sometimes there are underground tunnels to connect to a neighboring casemate.
At certain places along the line there were built big forts ipuvrages). Such enormous underground works were photographed in the 1930s for the newspapers and are what most people think of as the Maginot Line. Here were the underground railways, cinemas, and recreation areas. Here soldiers were photographed having sun-ray treatments, sitting down for lunch, or riding on the electric trains. The air was conditioned and slightly high in pressure to keep out enemy gas. The fuel supplies were held in massive underground reservoirs and the water tapped from deep wells. There were automatic fire doors and cross-connected power lines that could feed extra power to nearby forts. Some of the forts accommodated 1,000 men. Everything had been carefully thought out. The propaganda said that soldiers manning the forts could stay inside indefinitely.
In fact, the underground works were not the paradise that propaganda depicted. The living quarters were extremely cramped and men slept on narrow three-tier bunks. The glare from the light bulbs hurt their eyes, and men complained of deafness from the echoing sound of the generators and other machinery. Even worse was the drainage; septic tanks were not specially ventilated and the stench in some of the forts was overwhelming. Still worse, damp proved such a problem that the equipment had to be regularly damp-proofed and the men had to be moved out of the subterranean dwelling and put into tents and later huts. Eventually they only went into the fortifications when on duty.
Whether the Germans would have been unable to invade France by direct assault on the Maginot Line is still debated. However, in 1940 they did not have to do so, for the fortifications protected only the central part of France’s northeastern frontier. The frontier from Basel, Switzerland, to Haguenau in the Vosges followed the river
Rhine. Defense depended upon this river obstacle, and the Line was less formidable there than along the next section, from Haguenau to the corner of Luxembourg at Longuyon.
Everyone who looks at the map of the Line asks why it did not continue west all the way to the sea, especially since this flat area of the northwest had always been the route of the invader. Here France had fought for her life since the Romans and the Franks. Spanish armies from the Low Countries, Marlborough, Prince Eugene, Wellington after Waterloo, and, in 1914, the Kaiser’s armies had all come this way. And Paris was a temptingly short march from this frontier.
So why was it not heavily fortified? Certainly this lowland region would have required special engineering, and any deep fortifications would have had to be constantly pumped to keep them habitable. But the deciding objection was the closeness of French industry to the border. The Maginot Line could not be run north of the French industrial region without crossing the Belgian frontier; it could only go through the industrial region or pass south of it. In the case of war, and particularly in the case of the 1914-1918 style of war the French envisaged, the alternative seemed to be having the industries pounded to pieces in the fighting or abandoning them to the enemy before the fighting started.
World History
