Some people have accused the most lame hero in the history of the war, the Maginot Line can be said to have been sprayed not lightly, in order to build this line, France can be said to have exhausted its national strength, but in fact, when the German mechanized troops quickly bypassed the Maginot Line, it is equivalent to saying that from the beginning of construction, this line did not play any role at all, but what people did not expect is that Hitler, who has always prided himself on the rapid attack of mechanized troops, also built such a defense line.
This was later trumpeted as the "indestructible" Atlantic Barrier, a military facility built by Germany during World War II to defend the Western Front, of course, when this plan was first proposed, its scale was far greater than that of the Maginot Line, because the Total length of the Maginot Line was only 390 kilometers, but the length of this Atlantic Barrier was 2700 kilometers, so it was once considered to be comparable to the size of the Great Wall of China.
In fact, since the outbreak of World War II, the traditional mode of relying on trench warfare as the main mode of operation has changed, especially the continuous progress of naval, land and air force technology and equipment, the use of trench warfare has been transformed into relying on mechanized troops to rapid assault, especially after the German blitzkrieg against Poland, this concept of short assault has been deeply implemented, but in 1941, Hitler suddenly announced that a strong barrier would be built to support the battlefield of the Western Front.
At that time, the war between the Soviet Union and Germany had already broken out, and as the German army gradually deepened, Hitler was determined to allocate troops from the Western Front to the Eastern Front, so in order to protect the defense of the Western Front, he used some of the bunker buildings previously built to expand into a dense fortification from northern Norway to the Spanish coast, and on such a long defensive line, a dense fortification was built to prevent the British commandos from landing and buy time in order to preserve the Western Front battlefield.
After the official start of construction, from the spring of 1942, Germany mobilized 250,000 people, including prisoners of war captured on the battlefield, which, according to Hitler's request, had to be completed in May of the following year, these laborers had to work for 12 hours a day, without rest, to build this line of defense, and in order to build this long bunker line, Germany spent more than 1 million tons of steel and poured 20 million cubic meters of concrete.
However, in fact, by May 1944, the overall completion of the project was not even 50%, and because of his huge consumption, Germany was also a little stretched, although Hitler and nazi propaganda minister Goebbels declared that this was an "invincible defense line", and some senior German generals did not look favorably on this line, including the supreme commander in the west, Field Marshal Lundstedt, and the former commander of the Afrika Korps Rommel. As a result, the fortress did not play a role at all, it was breached during the Normandy landings, of course, there are many theories of the attack, such as the different quality of the German army, the bunker is not complete, but the root cause is that as early as 1942, the construction drawings of the Atlantic Barrier had been stolen by a French painter and handed over to Germany, and this fortification later became a transparent presence in the eyes of the Allies.