by Bill Fawcett
The original need for armor was to assault the fixed defenses created by trench warfare in World War I. By 1944, the need was the same but the location had changed. Tanks were now needed to come ashore with the first wave landing on the defended beaches of Europe to help break through another set of fixed defenses, the Atlantic Wall. But how to get the tanks to the beach? Any boat capable of carrying the heavy armored vehicles was too large to get close to the shore. The solution was basically to put an inner tube around the tank. These Sherman tanks were modified to have a duplex drive (hence the DD designation) that meant they had both normal treads and also a propeller. This meant the tank could move through water toward the beach and be dropped off far enough out that the boats could take them there without hitting bottom. There was of course another problem. Tanks do not float and are not submarines. It was decided that a flotation screen could be put all around the tank, acting basically like an open-topped life vest, and this would keep the tank dry and floating. The problem was that the flotation devices did not work except in the very placid waters of the lakes where they were tested. They were simply not strong or high enough to resist or keep out waves of any size. These same waves or current also made them nearly impossible to maneuver in the water. The Normandy landings were made when the sea was still rough due to a storm the day before. Many DDs did not survive entering the water when being deployed and those that did were quickly swamped. None made it to shore.
“War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.”
—Georges Clemenceau (but it became apparent, not to the French government either…editor)
The Line Must Be Drawn Here
Jaki Demarest
The Maginot Line, which has become synonymous with the notion of ludicrously ineffective protection, was supposed to render France all but impervious to invasion in World War II. The theory was classic. “If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere” (Carl von Clausewitz).
Oh, stop laughing. This really did look good on paper—sort of. Parts of it did, anyway. No, really.
Named after André Maginot, the French Minister of War whose political weight pushed the plan through a somewhat reluctant legislature, the Maginot Line was an extensive and interconnected series of concrete fortifications that France built along its borders between 1930 and 1940. It was built in two sections; the line facing Italy was referred to as the Alpine Line, the line facing Germany was the Maginot, and the name “Maginot Line” was also used to refer to the entire series.
There were initially no fortifications placed along the border with Belgium, as Belgium was assumed to be a staunch and reliable ally with whom the French had signed a treaty in 1920. The Forest of Ardennes in particular was believed to be so dense as to be impassable by a conventional army, a natural fortification of its own with no need of further protection.
This blunder in the initial conception would prove to be the Line’s rather rapid undoing.
In 1936, when France failed to challenge Hitler’s refortification of the Rhineland (in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles), Belgium decided France was unreliable and abrogated the treaty, declaring its neutrality. France hastily extended the Maginot Line to try to cover as much of the Franco-Belgian border as possible. These fortifications couldn’t be built to the standard of the rest of the Line as the water table in the region was high, so underground passages had a tendency to flood.
There was one last massive push to finish and improve the Line in the last two years of its initial construction, 1939 and 1940. It was impressively strong in the industrial regions of Lauter and Metz. If it had been remotely feasible to fortify the entire border to that standard, the Line might well have held. As it was, sections were strong, sections were weaker, sections were wet, and the Line couldn’t possibly live up to its own hype.
The Line boasted 108 large forts (ouvrages or gros ouvrages) at 15-kilometer intervals, each of which housed over 1,000 soldiers, with several hundred smaller forts (petits ouvrages) spaced between, housing between 200 and 500 soldiers apiece. Fortresses of the Line were connected by about 100 kilometers of underground tunnels.
Between the forts were interval casemates built to supplement the forts’ defenses, manned by crews of 20 to 30. Between the ouvrages and casemates, there was a redoubtable barrier of anti-tank and barbed wire obstacle belts. This “line of principal resistance” ran about ten kilometers inside the borders. It was surrounded before and behind by border posts, armored cloches, outposts, shelters of interval, quarterings of safety, ammunitions dumps, and observatories, forming a defensive bulwark that was a good 20 to 25 kilometers thick in places. Everything was linked by underground high voltage lines and a telephone network, for steady power and rapid communications.
The gros ouvrages in particular were among the engineering marvels of their age. (No, seriously, they really were. This is the part that looked good on paper.) The walls were steel-reinforced concrete, 3.5 meters thick, capable of withstanding tremendous punishment. The larger forts were six stories deep, vast underground mazes, sections of which could theoretically withstand the not-yet-devloped atomic bomb.
Go ahead, reread that, I’ll wait. Now think about it and admit it’s a thing of weird beauty. Someone drops an atomic bomb on you, and you get to come swarming up out of your underground fortresses as soon as the air’s cleared a bit, pissed off and loaded for bear. Or, okay, if you’re French, you get to smoke a thin black cigarette, curse the triune God, and contemplate the nothingness of being. To each his own.
Propaganda circulated about the Maginot Line was intended to reassure Allied citizens—and it did. Illustrations showed impenetrable multi-story anthills of interwoven tunnels, underground railways, even cinemas. Malls with balls. The propaganda was, naturally, a fair bit better than the reality. Even where the Line was fully constructed, it had weak points that would prove vulnerable to German assault. Ten petits ouvrages were captured by the German Army before the Armistice was signed on June 22, 1940, and four more fortresses, including two gros ouvrages, were abandoned by their crews, and France’s borders were far from completely fortified. But the building of the Line was absolutely consistent with the hard lessons veterans had learned in World War I, in which static entrenchments and defensive combat were the order of the day.
You strategize for the version of warfare you know. Military history is full of examples of strategists, competent or incompetent, who failed to correctly gauge what changing technology and innovation would do to warfare as they knew it. And so it was that World War I veterans, led by André Maginot, one of their own, placed their faith in a static line of fortresses, the strongest they could build. It was enough to convince the French government to spend ten years and around three billion francs making the Maginot Line a reality.
The Maginot Line wasn’t without its critics, even in its initial stages. Paul Reynaud and Charles de Gaulle, among a minority of modernists and visionaries, favored investment in armor, aircraft, and mechanized warfare. De Gaulle’s tactics were heavily influenced by the lessons of the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921), in which tanks had made an excellent showing, whereas long lines of static entrenchments had proven disastrous for the Poles. The tide of warfare was changing again, but as usual, those with the shrewdness to interpret the rising trends correctly were in the minority. History, and the dark days ahead for France, would bear them out.
When the Germans finally moved to invade France on May 10, 1940, the necessity of marginalizing the Maginot Line factored heavily into their Fall Gelb and Fall Rot battle plans. A diversionary force was sent against the Line, while larger forces of ground troops skirted the Line altogether, crossing into France by way of Belgium and the Netherlands, and the supposedly impassable Forest of Ardennes.
Within five days, the Germans had made substantial progress into the French interior, having managed to bypass the Maginot Line almost entirely. The Line, naturally, couldn
’t move with them. The war hadn’t come to the Line, and the Line couldn’t go to the war.
A substantial number of French forces had been committed to the Line and were now stuck there, pinned down by the German diversionary forces and entirely cut off from the rest of France in a matter of weeks. By June 22, despite the fact that the Maginot Line was still in the hands of French commanders who wanted to hold out, and the Alpine Line had successfully repulsed the Italians, France signed an Armistice at Compiègne. The French Army was ordered into captivity, forced to abandon their positions within the Line for POW camps.
The unconquerable Maginot Line hadn’t been conquered. It had simply been invalidated.
Nor would it prove a particularly strategic playing piece in the Allied invasion of June 1944. The Line, now held by German defenders, was largely bypassed once again; only the fortifications near Metz and in Northern Alsace saw any military action whatsoever.
In the years immediately following the war, the French re-manned the Maginot Line and continued to modify it. The late 1960s saw the Line finally abandoned, as France first withdrew from NATO’s military component in 1966, and then developed an independent nuclear deterrent in 1969. The rules of warfare had changed yet again, rendering the Maginot Line more or less completely obsolete. The French government auctioned off sections of the Line to the public, and left the rest to rot (editor).
The End of the Line
“The bayonet has always been the weapon of the brave and the chief tool of victory.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte
A Sword for the Masses
Bill Fawcett
It was not only modern France that has found itself enamored of useless weapon systems. In the era of the French Revolution and the First Empire all men were suddenly equal. In a prior age one of the signs that you were of the better classes was to wear a sword. Perhaps this is why the French Army spent millions of francs to supply the infantry of its army with a short sword called the sabre-briquet. The sabre-briquet was short, less than three feet long, and simply made with one slightly curved cutting edge and a point. The expected use for this small sword was to give the ordinary French soldier an advantage in hand to hand fighting. And, perhaps arming hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens with even a small sword appealed to the egalitarian instincts of the ministers.
The reality of this weapon was quite different. To begin, the entire concept of carrying a sword into battle had been made obsolete by the bayonet. Itself more than half the length of the sabre-briquet, the bayonet served equally well in hand to hand combat. Further the heavy musket each man carried also served as an effective club and, when the bayonet was attached, as a small pike. There simply was no need for a sword as well. One of the first rules any infantry commander learns is that men discard what they do not need. The Napoleonic French army marched, often very quickly, everywhere it went. Two more pounds of weight in the form of a sword that banged against your hip and had no real use in a fight was just an annoyance. Officers struggled to keep the soldiers from discarding the sabre-briquet and often failed. Finally, in 1807, the weapon was abandoned. But even then some of the regiments retained the sabre-briquet until 1815. The sabre-briquet also looked good when worn by the troops marching in a parade; at least it did to their colonels. And it was useful for chopping firewood if kept sharp.
“In a man to man fight the winner is the one who puts an extra round in his magazine.”
—Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
Too Good for Its Own Good
Bill Fawcett
The Germans had their own contributions to absurd ordnance forced on their armed forces. It is normally considered a good thing when a weapon has a high rate of fire. If there is anyone who likes good things in modern weapons it has been the Germans, and the Mauser Company has tried to supply them. So at the end of the nineteenth century, automatic weapons were the cutting edge of military technology and everyone strove to have the fastest firing machine guns and even pistols. But this was the rub, where a machine gun fires rapidly it has a large quantity of ammunition available. Most machine guns are also heavy enough to deal with the constant and strong recoil that firing quickly causes. A pistol has neither of these advantages. But since this was the era of faster firing is better, the Mauser C/96 (1896) “Broomhandle” was created. This is a well-constructed pistol except that it literally fires too fast, expending a clip of six, ten, or twenty rounds almost the moment the trigger is pulled. This meant stopping to reload every time. Another complication was that the fire was so rapid the user was unable to correct his aim while shooting. You could not walk the bullets up to the target, as is the practice with most automatic weapons. Finally the Mauser was light, which made it good to carry, but meant that the rapid fire guaranteed that the barrel would ride up during the burst. Altogether you had one shot, could not correct it, and could not keep a point of aim. This was a wonderful pistol that did everything right—except allow the user to hit anything—and so was near useless in combat.
“The enforcement mechanism for the rules of war is usually more war.”
—Solomon Short, a cartoon character created by R. Crumb
Sneaking in the Front Door
Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.
By 1941, the submarine had long proven itself an efficient, relatively inexpensive, and terribly lethal weapon of war. In addition to the full-size U-boats that the Germans were using to terrorize the convoy routes of the North Atlantic Ocean, small versions of these stealthy attack vessels were employed by several nations for specific, specialized missions. Most famously, the Italian Navy (which had an almost total lack of success employing its powerful surface fleet) sent a midget submarine mission into the heavily defended British Naval base in Alexandria, Egypt. There, these little ships wreaked great havoc by firing torpedoes into British battleships resting at anchor like sitting ducks.
By the summer of 1941, the Japanese had concluded that war with the United States had become inevitable. Imperial Japanese Navy Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto conceived of the strategic strike to commence hostilities: a surprise attack against the United States Navy Pacific fleet, which was likely to be found at anchor in Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The attack was to be made concurrently with a declaration of war delivered to the American government.
From the beginning, the attack against Pearl Harbor was primarily an air attack. Japan had developed a fleet of fast, modern aircraft carriers, and equipped these ships with some of the most lethal airplanes the world had ever seen. The naval aviators who flew those planes were highly trained combat veterans (of the war with China), and were eager to prove the worth of their new weapons. Yamamoto was more than willing to give them the chance.
At the same time, however, there were officers in the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) who were firmly convinced that the submarine would be the decisive naval weapon in the imminent war. With the efforts of the German U-boat campaign as an example, as well as the Italian midget subs in Alexandria, Yamamoto agreed to give this new and revolutionary weapon a chance to strike a lethal blow.
The idea was not exactly embraced by the fliers, who were—presciently, as it turned out—concerned that the submarines might be discovered as they approached the harbor. They feared that the element of surprise could be lost, and the whole attack jeopardized, by a gamble that offered no solid prospect of success. The submariners replied that the midgets stood a good chance of sneaking into the harbor, and that they could launch torpedoes with about twice the explosive power of an airplane-launched torpedo.
In the end, Yamamoto authorized five midget submarines for the operation. Each small craft would be transported to Hawaii underwater, lashed to the deck of a full-sized fleet submarine. The midgets were operated by two-man crews, each armed with two powerful torpedoes. The tiny subs would be released before dawn on December 7, 1941, as near to the mouth of Pearl Harbor as the mother ships could safely approach. They intended to penetrate the harbor, lau
nch their weapons against capital ships—preferably battleships or aircraft carriers—and then sneak back out to sea during the post-attack confusion to a rendezvous point seven miles west of the island of Lanai.
It seems clear that the men who crewed the midget subs did not really expect to survive their mission. They carried pistols and swords, and spoke—and wrote in letters—about landing on Oahu and engaging in glorious last stands of gunfire and hand-to-hand combat. But none of the ten men displayed any reluctance to embark on what was almost sure to be a suicide mission.
The mother submarines all reached positions off Oahu by the appointed time. Between 0100 and 0330 on that fateful Sunday morning, all five of the midgets were released—including one with a broken gyroscope, rendering it almost impossible to control underwater. One by one they approached the harbor mouth, which was anywhere from five to ten miles away from their launching points.
Despite the peacetime conditions and almost scandalous lack of readiness against an air attack, the Pacific Fleet had not entirely neglected submarine defense. A boom with a heavy antisubmarine net protected the narrow mouth of the harbor. The net was some 45 feet deep in a channel that was 72 feet deep at its lowest point. The gap under the net was too small for a standard submarine to pass, though the midgets, with heights of only 20 feet from keep to conning tower, could conceivably squeeze through. A more likely tactic, one that was employed by all of the midget subs accounted for on that bloody day, was to try to follow a ship through the harbor mouth when the boom was opened to allow a surface vessel to pass. In fact, because of morning traffic in and out of the harbor, the net was open for a stretch of more than four hours before and during the air attack.
