Farbourne said:
Well, it appears that I spoke out of turn. You have some good points (I had made the mistake of listening to conventional wisdom rather than researching some of the points myself). Still, there's no reason to be offensive. The main points that I was putting forward, relevant to the thread question regarding standing defenses, are valid.
I don't think I was really being offensive - I used mildly sharp arguments, but certainly not anything that wouldn't be acceptable in a real debate (heck, probably even in a high school debate).
True, but there were only 79 D.520's in service when Germany attacked, a small number compared to the resources of the Luftwaffe. Not enough to establish air superiority. This is one point where additional resources not spent building fixed defenses may have been useful.
Ah, yes, but my point was that without the Maginot Line, Germany would have possibly been able to attack in October 1939, when France had no D.520s whatsoever. The Maginot Line, by forcing the Germans to prepare for a far more complicated scenario, ultimately meant that bad weather was enough to delay the attack until 1940 - because driving a tank along a muddy road is one thing, and driving it through a muddy forest is another thing entirely.
Again, no reason to be insulting. And yes, some French tanks may have been better, and the French did have more tanks than the Germans, but many of the French tanks were outmoded WW1 era models. As you mentioned, tactics were the key problem, but wouldn't some more aggressive war-games and training have revealed some of the tactical problems? Another point when additional resources would have helped.
I wasn't trying to be insulting... well, ok, yes, I was - but also I'll happily admit that Heinz Guderian knew more about the topic than I ever will
.
As for tactics, they're the absolutely hardest thing to change in any army. It's not a matter of resources - France
easily had enough money and resources to build the Maginot Line with one hand and a strong, modern military with the other. How exactly do you persuade people to change their strategy, though, when they
won the previous war using that strategy?
How am I missing the point? My point was that the reason the Maginot line never saw action was that it was the strongest defensive point and therefore avoided.
...And that's exactly what the French wanted.
Hilly, densey-wooded regions are easy to build defenses in, so why didn't the French use a fraction of the money and effor they spent on the Maginot line to fortify the other parts of their boundary?
Because building defences is more than a matter of resources. It's also politics. Had France built defences on the Belgian border, they would effectively been saying that in the event of war, they have no intention of helping the Belgians. I imagine that more than a few Belgians would, in that situation, suggest that an alliance with Germany might not be a bad idea. After all, the only reason they ever got attacked in WWI and WWII was because the Germans needed to get to France. So if the French aren't going to help you deal with passing Germans, then it may be best to
let the Germans pass through. On the other hand, as long as the Franco-Belgian border was not fortified, the Belgians were French allies by default.
Worse, the Maginot line gave the illusion of security, which may have led to a false sense of security among the French command and accounted for some of their poor tactical response.
I think you're confusing the French public and the French command. Yes, the French public had a false sense of security thanks to the Maginot Line (...and I imagine this was another factor in building the Line - to
give a war-weary nation a sense of security)... but the French command certainly didn't. The reason they fought defensively and lost in 1940 was precisely because the war came at the worst possible time for them. They
knew they weren't prepared for it, and the best they could do was buy time to rearm.
Again, no reason to snipe. I agree that many of those minds were better versed in the subjects than you or I might be. And I don't believe that I ever said they were stupid--just that some of their decisions were mistakes. But it's silly to say "these people knew more, so who are we to question them. They must have been right". These people who knew so much decided that tanks were best used in infantry support. Similar people decided that battleships were far more valuable than carriers, and that torpedoes could never be used in so shallow a place as Pearl Harbor.
My point is that it's far, far too easy to criticise the defeated as being wrong. However, very often such mistakes were not mistakes at the time they were made - and similarly, in many cases such mistakes were simply the result of trying to do well in a bad situation. It's too easy to forget that what appears today as an obvious mistake may have been the result of someone knowingly choosing a bad option when the only other option available was even worse.
This, I would argue, would certainly be the case for any of the situations you cited. France in between the wars was a very, very specific nation - they had won the previous war, but paid such a heavy price that they simply couldn't afford another war. And there was
nobody in France who could persuade the war-weary public that the best way of preparing for the next war was to transform the army into a more offensive machine. Everybody had seen how huge the human losses during any WWI offensive had been, and the French simply wouldn't hear it. In these circumstances, what else could the French command do, if not prepare for a defensive war?
I'd explain how this was also the case with Pearl Harbour, but that would make this post needlessly long - all I've been trying to say here is that people arguing against static defences don't understand what the point of such defences was, and don't understand that such defences were often built as an alternative to
nothing rather than an alternative to an offensive army. I don't believe I need to deal with every mistake in human military history to get that point across
.
Note that I'm also not saying that my arguments apply to every mistake; yes, military men in history have made some genuine mistakes which should have been obvious - but this, I'd argue, was definitely a very, very small fraction of what history ultimately has come to consider as mistakes. The rest were sensible decisions made without full awareness of the situation, or equally sensible decisions where one had to choose between two bad alternatives.