Fixed Plans and Obsolescence
The story of the Maginot Line
A key feature of World War I (28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918) was the tragic perfecting of trench warfare. In trench warfare opposing sides dig long lines of trenches from which they face their enemies and periodically launch attacks. Trench warfare had been used in earlier wars, in particular the American Civil war. However, it had never been used in such scale and with so much ferocity as during WWI. In WWI, millions of soldiers faced each other across trenches that stretched from the North Sea in the west to France’s border with Switzerland east. It is estimated that 60 million soldiers fought in WWI, of which 9 million were killed.
At the end of WWI and particularly in the 1920s, when Germany began to rearm, the French became (rightly) obsessed with developing a way through which they could defend against German aggression. From 1929 onwards, the French began constructing a series of fortifications built along France’s border with Germany. This was called the Maginot Line, named after André Maginot, the French war minister in the 1920s. The aim was to slow down any surprise invasion by the Germans and provide a base from which the French could repel the Germans.
France spent an enormous amount of money on this project which took ten years to complete. The Maginot line’s greatest proponents…
