False Sense of Security Fail: The Maginot Line

I think this link does a fine job of prefacing this post. (see here for an explanation of that if you're curious).

The Maginot Line brings us to one of the most embarrassing events in France's history. It's quite understandable, however, why they would gear up for WWII in such a dramatically dorky fashion. The interim war period of 1919-1939 was rightfully nicknamed the Age of Anxiety, as the promises of the political leaders of the time weren't coming true. Mentally and physically scarred soldiers returned home to find that the goals they thought they were fighting for were had been exaggerated and dramatized. As the scores of worksheets that AP Euro students have to fill out will tell you, Woodrow Wilson's description of World War I as a war "against militarism and absolutism" had started to wear off, and disillusionment was all over the freakin place. In France's case, this uncertainty wasn't only held by citizens. The promises of protection and alliances that the US and Great Britain had made to France weren't being kept, and every government official in France was shakin in his or her little trendy French outfit. After some panicked treaties with Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia between 1921 and 1927, France had done little to calm itself down.

So they decided to hide. Under ground. With a bunch of big forts and guns and stuff above them for protection. Embracing the outdated trench warfare tactics of WWI, they built a pretty hefty set of defenses along the French/German border, curled up into a ball, covered their ears, and waited for all the scaredy-ness to go away. A False Sense of Security Fail was surely in their midst. They didn't bother fortifying the Ardennes Forest, which was an open path into France just north of the Maginot Line, because it was impenetrable. Completely and totally impenetrable, I promise. By this point, Hitler had become the butt head that we all remember him for being, and he had different plans for this lovely forest. To keep the French busy in their little hide and seek game, he sent a decoy force to the attack the Line head on. Then, a second force skipped on through the Ardennes Forest while third a went through Belgium and the Netherlands en route to France. Less than 4 weeks later (on June 14 1940), Paris had fallen. Shucks. Then, 12 days later, France completely checked out of WWII with an armistice treaty with Germany.