June 16, 2005
Tour the Maginot Line.
Early 20th century France's precursor to our Missile Silo fortification system.
More underground coolness, this time with some nice flash animation.
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There must be a joke in here somewhere about German tour parties skipping this and going straight on to Paris. Nice link though.
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Maybe I didn't understand the diagram, and I'm certainly no military strategist, but these seem incredibly poorly designed even if the Germans hadn't gone around. What was supposed to stop an attacker from simply bottling up the entrance and leaving the soldiers inside to stew? Did French military's strategic blindness extend that far? Great place to wait out an apocalypse. Bad place to try and defend a country from?
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The thing about the Maginot line that people tend to forget is this: it worked. The Germans took one look at it and turned their attention to figuring out a way around it. The mistake the French made was not in building it, but in not completing it. As the Germans showed, the Ardennes was NOT impassable, and you can't count on the niceties of treaties to preserve the neutrality of small countries.
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Nal: The vast resevoirs of supplies. What are you going to do, tie down your whole army in a siege for months? While the French roll up their own tanks and artillery to fall on your encampment?