On Feb 29, 8:16*am, "Steven P. McNicoll"
wrote:
"Phil J" wrote in message

...



Yeah, the collaboration is part of it. *But I think the French had an
extra-embarrassing surrender because they had invested so much in
their "impregnable" Maginot line. *When the Germans simply went around
it, it really made the French look like fools.

Why does that make the French look like fools? *If the Germans had gone
THROUGH their "impregnable" Maginot line the French would surely have looked
like fools, but forcing the Germans to circumvent the line was one of the
reasons for building it. *The French expected the Maginot Line to be
bypassed and had therefore massed the majority of their army on the Belgian
border. *The Germans rolled over those troops rather easily. *The few
Maginot fortifications which were actually attacked by the Germans held up
rather well.

The purpose of the line was to prevent the Germans from invading
France, or at least hold them back long enough that the French could
mobilize their army to repel them. The line did succeed in forcing
the Germans to move some of their invasion force through Belgium. But
the French didn't believe the Germans could invade through the
Ardennes forest, so they left a gap in the Maginot line there. The
Germans sent a majority of their invasion force through that gap,
which allowed them to swing north and flank the French defenders
massed on the Belgian border. Because of this the Maginot line is
generally considered a failure, and leaving the Ardennes gap is
considered a huge blunder by the French. Obviously, this is all 2020
hindsight.

Phil