The Maginot
Line was a line of concrete and steel defences that stretched between
Luxembourg and Switzerland along France's border with Germany.
The defensive system had originally been proposed by Joseph
Joffre and
was built between 1930 and 1935. It had three interdependent fortified
belts with anti-tank emplacements
and pillboxes standing in front of bombproof artillery casements.
Named after Andre Maginot, the French war minister at the time, it
cost 7,000 million francs to build and was claimed at the time to
provide an impregnable defence against the German
Army.
However,
when Adolf Hitler ordered the Western
Offensive in the spring of 1940,
the German armed forces invaded France through the heavily wooded
and semi-mountainous area of the Ardennes, an area, north of the Maginot
Line. The French military had wrongly believed that the Ardennes was
impassable to tanks. Seven panzer divisions
led by Heinz Guderian and
Erwin Rommel reached
the Meuse River at Dinant on 12th May and the following day the French
government was forced to abandon Paris.
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