There are not too many blogs that remind Americans every year of how France had the largest land army in the world in 1940 yet was beaten in six weeks by the German Wehrmacht and capitulated on June 22, 1940. This blog does for a reason. Being champion in 2008 does not mean you will be champion in 2009. Admiral John Jellicoe was criticized for not being more aggressive at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, but he responded that he was the only man who could have lost the Empire in a day. Such is true for the President of the United States, not that we think in these terms very often.The only way to be strong is to plan according to your opponent's capabilities, not as you think he will likely attack. 9/11, as Thomas Friedman said, was a failure of imagination, not intelligence.
So today I remind the world through my little broadcast here into cyberspace that big fools lose big. Our nation is not defended by cliches about world peace, but armed vigilance.
UPDATE: The Maginot Line was a tremendous public investment, not unlike the security gates in gated communities that are not effective unless people actually know their neighbors and watch their doors. Its construction marked not only a major strategic mistake, but it memorialized military thinking frozen in the tactical holocaust of the Great War as well as the end of creativity in French culture and life. Perhaps I'll draw a negative comment, but the Maginot Line was to French military doctrine what nihilism was to French philosophy. Both are fortified prisons in which your enemies can trap you, suffocate you, starve you, and force you to surrender or die.
2 comments:
The reason the French lost in 1940? Two words: "Maginot Line."
A reliance on fixed fortifications in a world of Stukas and Panzers was a receipe for national defeat. It is a lesson our own leaders would do well to learn.
Absolutely not. The French did not lose because of the Maginot line. It (the Maginot line) did not cost the French in 1940 no more the the Atlantic war costed the Germans in 1944. The line served exactly its purpose. The Germans never broke through it. The French lost because of fatal armor tactics. They dispersed their armor and used it to solely support their infantry. Concentrated mechanized divisions sliced through the infantry like hot knife through butter. If the Allies did not dismiss the Ardennes woods as impassable to armor and had concentrated their armor 1940 would surely have been different.
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