Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [7]
None of these was especially appealing, so the French decided on other alternatives. In the event of another war, they would leave Luxembourg and Belgium open and fight the war there. The Maginot Line was not seen anyway as an absolutely impervious barrier. It was instead a way of conserving troops; a relatively few men manning the fortifications would be able to withstand heavy numbers. This would leave the mobile masses of the French Army free to maneuver on the Belgian frontier. The Line would also have the effect of channeling a German attack into Belgium, where the French would be ready to meet them. The French therefore would not fortify the dense Ardennes region of southeastern Belgium, which they considered unsuitable country for mobile operations, and they would not fortify along the Belgian frontier. This was where they would fight their war.
There were two problems with this. One was that it required a certain degree of German agreement on how the war would be fought and where; the Germans would have to accept the French assessment of the Maginot Line and its role, and of the Ardennes and its impassability. They would have to agree to fight World War I over again. When the time came they nearly did.
The second problem was that, having built an immensely expensive fortification so that they could free a large part of their army for mobile operations, the French then lacked the money and the disposition to make the army mobile. Throughout the thirties, though they produced many fine weapons and armored vehicles in prototype, they seldom put them into production. Their military doctrine was not sufficiently well formed for them to proceed on the basis of it and produce the necessary weaponry. Basically dominated by the ideas of the defensive, paying only lip service to the idea of mobility, they were uncertain what to do about the technology that would restore mobility to war. In effect, their weapons technology was the victim of their flawed or inconsistent strategic and tactical doctrine.
The difficulty here was that 1914-18, which provided the mental set of the French high command in the years after the war, had been a predominantly defensive war. In fact, it had hardly been even that, and more than anything else it had been a siege on a gigantic scale, essentially a static war. Both sides had sought a way out of this impasse; neither had found it. Artillery, barbed wire, and the machine gun had combined to deny movement to the participants on the battlefield. This was true even in the vast stretches of the Eastern Front; it was particularly the case on the Western Front.
The weapons, or vehicles, that would restore mobility to warfare were of course used, but not in a visibly significant sense. The tank was introduced by the Allies; it was a simple concept: mount a weapon on a caterpillar tread and you can break through a defensive line. Military conservatism militates against the use of simple innovations, however, and it was not until 1918 that the tank was produced and used in numbers sufficient to demonstrate its potential as an infantry-support weapon. That it might become more than that was an idea left to a few visionaries. The Germans, thought to be the most innovative of military thinkers, virtually ignored the tank until the end of the war. Their first experience of it had shown that it was probably useless. After it appeared in numbers, they could not see how to counter it, so they tried to forget it. They also lost the war.
When the French considered the problem