Among today's Internet military fans, the "milk law" has become an Internet culture. Not only in China, foreign netizens also like to ridicule the French army, such as calling baguettes as French ammunition, raising their hands as a french military salute, and calling the white flag a French flag.
The reason why the French army has become the object of ridicule by netizens is that they performed too badly in World War II. As the first power on the European continent, France, which was known as the world's first army power at the time, surprised the world by announcing its surrender after only 44 days of resistance with Germany in 1940.
The French were still an "iron-blooded power" in World War I, engaged in fierce trench warfare with Germany, suffering heavy casualties. But in World War II, France did not have much will to resist from top to bottom, and the French army wanted to block the German army by the "Maginot Line" in the east. Unexpectedly, when the German army detoured through Belgium and pointed at Paris, France directly announced that it would not fight and began negotiations.
The Maginot Line was a pain point in France's World War II, a fortification that began in 1928 and stretched for 400 kilometers until 1940, when it was not completely completed. It protected Alsace and Lorraine in France and was the strategic center of gravity of the French Army. If history could be repeated, if the Germans and French really fought on the Maginot Line, how long would this line of defense be able to resist?
<h1 class = "pgc-h-center-line" > conservative army powers</h1>
The real France in history can be described as "iron blood" before World War II.
During the bloody battle between France and Germany in World War I, the French army was still a cavalry era of thinking, advocating rapid attack, so that soldiers began to charge death in the face of the German Army's Maxim. France suffered more than 6 million casualties in World War I, and an entire generation dried up in blood. After World War I, France failed to dismember the German Empire as it wished, and it was also seriously injured in four years of fighting. At this time, the Tactics of the French Army began to take a 180-degree turn, and the French Army changed from an iron-blooded army that advocated honor and encouraged attack to a conservative army that focused on defense and fought position warfare and fortress warfare.
Thus, the defensive faction within the French army gained the upper hand in the decade after World War I, summing up the experience of World War I and arguing that large-scale, field artillery and infantry-based trench warfare would be the main form of future human warfare. Marshal Pétain, France's hero of the First World War, once shouted: "Tanks and aircraft cannot change the war, they cannot shake the status of the fortress". So at the end of 1929, France began to build the Maginot Line in the east of France on the French-German border. The name of Maginot is the name of the French Minister of War "André Maginot" who presided over the construction at that time.
The first phase of the Maginot Line, which was extended on the basis of the Alsace and Lorraine fortresses, was completed in 1936 and was 390 km long. The line stretched from Belfort to Longiyong, with more than 5,000 ground fortifications on the front and more than a dozen bunker fortresses per kilometer. The fortifications are not arranged in a single line, but are distributed over a depth of 5-10 km, echoing each other. The second phase of the Maginot Line was intended to stretch all the way to the Belgian border, but was not completed until the outbreak of war in 1940.
The bunkers of Maginot Fortress are large and small, and the small bunkers accommodate squads, and are machine gun bunkers or flat-firing cannon bunkers made of concrete on the ground. The larger fortress is simply an underground city, and the Hackenberg Fortress is its representative. These huge fortresses hollowed out the ground or mountains, and in addition to heavy artillery and machine guns, there were warehouses, power stations, weapons factories, hospitals, underground stations, and kitchens that could feed thousands of people at a time.
The French were very thoughtful, these fortresses could radiate all the bunkers around them, supply ammunition and other supplies, and were completely self-sufficient, even if surrounded by Germans. The weapons inside the giant fortress are mainly heavy artillery, which can cover all targets within ten kilometers.
Along the Maginot Line were a million French troops, the French Army, then known as the "First Army of Europe", with 2.5 million men and more artillery and tanks than the Germans.
The French army is equipped with more than 3200 tanks, mainly B1 heavy tanks, H39 tanks, S35 tanks, as well as the world's most advanced AMC34 tanks and AMC35 tanks. The B1 heavy tank was superior to the German No. 3 and No. 4 tanks, and had achieved a miracle of 1 against 10 on the battlefield. In addition, the French army also had more than 10,000 heavy artillery, and the German army only had more than 7,000 heavy weapons, which could have organized a powerful armored assault force, but they were useless under the backward tactics of the French army.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-center-line" > second, the "palm method" that falls from the sky</h1>
Maginot's defenses were indeed impeccable on paper, and if the fortress had appeared in World War I, it might have completely changed the tide of the war. But at this time it was already World War II, and the Germans had already carried out equipment innovation, and this huge fortress was very chicken in World War II.
The tactics implemented by Germany during World War II were blitzkrieg, using armored units and aircraft as a precursor, penetrating the enemy's defensive lines with large and deep penetrations, so that the enemy could raise his hand and surrender before he could carry out a general mobilization. In the Battle of France, Manstein bypassed the Maginot Line and attacked France from Belgium, and France surrendered directly. But in fact, against the Maginot line, Germany already has its own tactics.
The thousands of fortresses and fortresses of the Maginot Line were indeed difficult to deal with, and attacking one by one using the tactics of the First World War and pulling up strongholds was not only time-consuming, but also very deadly.
In the German Army Staff, the fortifications of the Maginot Line had long been formulated, that is, heavy weapons "attacking the top". During World War II, the Germans made air-dropped heavy bombs specifically for fortresses, as well as train guns of different calibers, ranging from 200mm to 800mm, the largest of which was the 800mm caliber "Gustav cannon". The Stuka Heavy Bomb and the Railgun were first planned to be experimented on the French Maginot Line, but both came in handy in the Soviet-German War.
German heavy bombs were prepared for ordinary bunker fortresses, and were accurately dropped by the "Stuka" dive bomber, which could crush ordinary bunkers with a single shot. In the face of large fortresses with cement poured or hollowed out mountains, the German railgun was their doom. The 800 mm Gustav cannon appeared in the Battle of Savastopol, a normal shell weighing 7 tons and an incendiary bomb weighing 4 tons, which could penetrate the permanent cement fortifications buried in the ground with a single shot.
In the face of such a heavy weapon attack, the best way seems to be to take the initiative and push the enemy's front line beyond the range of the heavy weapon attack, but the French tactics cannot achieve such a goal.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > three, chicken rib Maginot</h1>
The tactics of the French forces were very backward, and they used advanced tanks as auxiliary firepower for infantry, scattered in infantry divisions to coordinate operations, rather than as a rapid burst of armored torrents. As a result, although the total number of French tanks was large, they were always unable to concentrate their advantages in the face of German armored forces, and were broken by German tank units.
Moreover, the French Army did not train large corps to break through and cooperate, only to train around the defense near Maginot and play a defensive counterattack. The whole of France fantasized about the French army "waiting for work", the German "labor expedition", and finally the French army leisurely drank red wine to defeat the Germans. However, this conservative tactic of the French Army could only be exhausted under the coordinated operation of the German Army and the Air Force, and the German airborne troops could land at will behind the French defensive line to carry out decapitation and sabotage; Manstein's armored forces were fast and flexible, and could quickly gather superior forces at any location to annihilate the enemy.
If the Germans really couldn't think of a decisive battle with France on the Maginot Line in World War II, the war would probably last for about a year. The Germans had to destroy French forts with heavy weapons first, citing the famous Sevastopol Fortress during the Soviet-German War, which had the advantage of terrain and fought with the Germans for 250 days.
The attack on the large fortresses of the Maginot Line was used as a reference, and the Germans could gnaw down these bones in a year' time. However, the Germans were not blocked by this line of defense, and after destroying the defenders with bombs and heavy artillery, the main German army could still drive straight into the main French army for a decisive battle.
Apparently, the defeat of the French Army in World War II was the product of a combination of training, tactics, and morale, it was like a fat giant, wearing a heavy protective gear called "Maginot", but when it met a superb boxer and was targeted at the weak ribs, then the opponent could KO it with a heavy blow.
Text/Shogakuno
Resources:
1. The Tragedy of the Maginot Line, Kuang Ji
2. "The Giant of artillery - Train Cannon Gustav", Ma Xiaorong
3. "On the Reasons for france's surrender during World War II", Li Lianbo