Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [6]
Pétain had been the maverick of the pre-World War I army. At that time the French had sought to overcome their material deficiencies by developing the idea that the defensive strategy employed in the Franco-Prussian War was unsuited to the French temperament. The French were used to attacking. Writers conjured up visions of the furia francese of the French invasions of Italy during the Renaissance, of the glorious attacks of Murat’s cavalry during the Napoleonic wars. French élan would carry all before it; their battle cry was Toujours l’audace!
The only thing wrong with this doctrine, which had a fatal attraction for a nation behind materially, was that it would not work. All the daring in the world produced only enormous casualty lists when tried against German machine guns. It was Pétain who realized this fatal flaw. A dour, phlegmatic man, cold and aloof, he produced his own response to the idea of the unlimited attack. He said simply, “Le feu tue.” “Fire kills.” It was a douche of cold water on the heads of the theorists. They responded by making him virtually an outcast in the army. He and his supporters found themselves at the bottom of the promotion lists. Always quoted of Pétain is the remark one of his early commanders made on his annual fitness report: “If this man rises above the rank of major, it will be a national disaster for France.”
But now World War I had come and gone, and fire had indeed killed; it had killed more than one and a half million Frenchmen, and the man who had said it would do so was the saviour of France. Where his opponents had said “attack” he had said “defend,” and he had been right. Now in his seventies—a Marshal of France did not retire—still vigorous, still commanding, he saw no reason to change his mind. He had been a heretic in 1910, but he had been right. He was the citadel of orthodoxy in 1925, and he was still right—or so he thought.
There were not too many people who argued with him, though there were some. Basically, the French Army commanders tied their thinking to the idea of the defensive. Key men in a nation that prided itself on its logic, they carried this idea to a logical conclusion. If hastily prepared field fortifications had been the war winner of 1914-18, how much stronger therefore would be fully prepared fortifications, dug in, cemented, casemated at leisure, with carefully tended fields of fire, amenities for the troops, modern communications and control systems. The French embarked on the building of a great belt of fortifications on the German frontier. They named it after their Minister of War, significantly a “grand mutilé” of the Great War, a man named André Maginot.
The Maginot Line was begun after Locarno, and it eventually grew to be a series of steel-and-concrete emplacements that ran from almost the Swiss border north along the west bank of the Rhine as far as Montmédy at the southeastern extremity of Belgium. It was billed as impenetrable, and it probably was.
The French have been accused of monumental national stupidity in that they built half a fortress and left the other half of their country completely vulnerable to an end-run around their fortified belt. In reality it was not that simple. First of all, the cost of the Maginot Line was enormous, and though the Franco-German border portion of it was pretty well finished by the early thirties, the Depression hit France before any more of it was done. More vital than money, however, was the problem of allies. In 1914, Belgium had been neutral, her status guaranteed by a treaty going back to the 1830’s—this was Kaiser Wilhelm’s “scrap of paper” over which Great Britain went to war. Throughout the war the Belgians had fought valiantly alongside the French and British; it had been their country that had been invaded by Germany in the famous Schlieffen Plan. After the war, Belgium had reasserted her neutrality and had not aligned herself with France.
Theoretically then, the French had no obligation to consider the Belgians in their defense planning.