Читать книгу Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II - Len Deighton - Страница 49

While the French generals still regarded attack as the secret of success in war, plans were approved for a mighty series of fortifications along her frontier with Germany. This was not incompatible with the military policy of attack; it would provide time for the reserve to be mobilized and for a naval blockade to be established. Attack, using the best forces, would follow.

The ‘Maginot Line’, as it came to be known, was born out of the mighty battles that had raged round the French forts at Verdun. These forts had been a part of the defences built after the 1870 defeat. For ten months in 1916 the French and German armies stood toe-to-toe there and countless men died. Almost every French soldier served at Verdun at some time or other. Every family in France had cause to curse its name. After the war it became a shrine and a place of pilgrimage. Still today the echoing footsteps, and whispered words of school parties, can be heard in its monolithic blockhouses which even 42-cm Krupp shells failed to raze.

Liddell 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