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France believed in it defensive fortified places, and strategy to keep the Germans out of France. They had lost so many lives, so many brave soldiers fighting the Germans in one war after another. France had lost so many of her young men, her future, that France was unable to field any large sized Military Army force for at least an entire generation into the future.The valiant Victor of Verdun. Henri Phillipe Petain. Marshal of France.Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain (24 April 1856 – 23 July 1951), generally known as Philippe Pétain (/ p eɪ ˈ t æ̃ /, French: [filip petɛ̃]), Marshal Pétain (Maréchal Pétain) or The Old Marshal (Le Vieux Maréchal), was a French general officer who attained the position of Marshal of France at the end of World War I, during which he became known as The Lion of Verdun, and in World War II served as the Chief of State of Vichy France from 1940 to 1944. he is dis hounrably now remembered due to his complicity and calaborationsit German Vichy pro biased regime that once controld Southern France and North Afrikan territory.Beginning the war as an obscure 58-year-old colonel in command of an infantry brigade, Pétain rose quickly in rank, assuming command of the Sixth Division in September 1914, the Thirty-third Corps in October, and the Second Army in June 1915. From the start, he distinguished himself by his meticulous attention to detail, his careful preparation, and his reliance on artillery. His talents became most apparent when his Second Army played a large role in the September 1915 offensive in Champagne. The French failed to break through German defensive lines, but Pétain’s after-action report identified shortcomings in French methods and provided important ideas about future operations.On 25 February 1916, the day Fort Douaumont fell, Pétain became commander of French forces at Verdun. In the terrible destruction of what the French soldiers called the “furnace,” he finally succeeded in halting the Germans. Though the French suffered huge losses, Pétain’s careful husbanding of his troops avoided even greater bloodshed. Among his innovations, he introduced the noria system, which rotated divisions in and out of the trenches without permitting them to become ineffective in combat. (The noria system was named after a device used to raise water from a well, which consisted of a revolving chain of buckets that filled at the bottom of the well and emptied at the top.) Despite Pétain’s success and his concern for his soldiers, General Robert Nivelle was chosen to replace General Marshal Joseph Joffre as commander of French forces; Nivelle then brought France to the edge of disaster with his ruinous offensive in April 1917. Though highly successfull with his tactics on a SMALLER Scale, General Nivelle did not prepare to have enough troops to exploit any breakthrough. With much of the army in mutiny, Pétain replaced Nivelle in May. Neville was branded a dangerous fanatic and discredited.Some other means of defence for Frances future had to be found, and quickly before their old enemy attacked again….German War leader Erich Von Falkenhayn.This was because during the “Great War”, (World War One) France had lost the “cream” of its manhood and educative, Academic and Military manpower, killed like cattle on Flanders fields.Above. Verdun. France stopped German Imperialist Armies, but it came at the attrition of a very large number of Frances manhood. France was unable to Field a large army again for AT LEAST one or more generations, so another defencive method HAD to be found.Epinal Alsace De Lorraine.Image Epinal produce historic Imagery, including Frances Armies, and other European soldiers.Montenegro, Serbias allie in WW1.German General Von Falkenhayn had vowed to “bleed the forces of France White” and so he had done; he also bled England white at the same time.Frances fortified underground Military Organisation was felt to be so large, and so vast, as to be impregnable.Hundreds of Miles of concrete tunnels, narrow gauge railways and gun emplacements, canteens and sleeping areas, control rooms etc, stretched right across France.Impressive underground defensive works still survive from the Maginot Defensive Line even today.The Fort De U+xegeney near Epinal in Alsace Lorrainne still survives, and so to does part of the narrow gauge railway that supplied it.The renovated fort's garrison comprised 15 officers, 36 non-commissioned officers and 416 enlisted men.In 1914 a further project to add two 155mm gun turrets in a separate armored battery was proposed, but was canceled by the outbreak of warThe fort was situated at an altitude of 379 meters above the valley of the Aviere with the mission of controlling the Épinal-Mirecourt axis, the Épinal-Nancy railway and the canal Dl’ Est The fort was laid out in a pentagon, surrounded by a ditch. Construction took only two years (1882–1884). The fort includes fortified barracks, storage facilities and magazines, and shelters for troops. The stone buildings of variegated cut stone were built in the open, then covered with earth from the excavation of the ditch and the leveling of the natural terrain. The initial garrison comprised 287 men, and the construction cost of the original fort amounted to about 1.7 million francs.. The principal armament consisted of five 155mm and five 120mm de bange or Lahotolle guns on the three forward-facing walls of the fort, in the open air on platformsUnderground secret Military organisation of the Maginot was Frances pride and defensive strategy between wars.Cross section of typical Maginot gun emplacements.Model showing Maginot Gun Turret interior.Frances Maginot Defence line was not in fact, the historical “failure” that other nations sometimes like to try to say.Like a disjointed, moss-covered, concrete serpent, the Maginot Line snakes some 800 miles, from the Mediterranean border with Italy northward, until it disappears near the North Sea. The serpent’s blank, unseeing eyes—from which the barrels of cannon and machine guns once unblinkingly stared toward France’s traditional enemy—today gaze across a bucolic landscape that gives little hint of the historic events that transpired along its length over six decades ago. The serpent, constructed over a period of 11 years at a cost of some seven billion prewar francs, was France’s last, best hope to avert another German invasion, another devastating war. The serpent is the largest remaining artifact from World War II. It is the Maginot Line. Considered by many to be an expensive failure, a symbol of French passivity and retrenchment, of her “bunker mentality” and unwillingness to boldly face the growing Nazi menace in the 1930s, the Maginot Line was an incredibly costly and highly controversial project. In one sense, however, it did exactly what it was designed to do: It forced the enemy to invade France at a different place.France studied her Military pas experiences with Germany, and came up with the best then way to try to prevent yet another German invasion of her territory.To prepare for the future, the French looked to the past. Stoutly constructed, fixed fortifications have existed since ancient times, reaching their pre-Maginot apogee during the reign of King Louis XIV in the late 17th century, when the brilliant army officer and engineer Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban designed and oversaw the construction of a series of fortresses that admirably defended French interests. Vauban’s ingenious creations protected some one hundred towns, villages, and other places of importance, including Tournai (Belgium), Briançon, Ypres, and Strasbourg, to name but a few. Despite their enormous cost and susceptibility to conquest, fixed fortifications remained for centuries the best defense against an attacking force, and the French were among the masters at building this type of fortification. Not the Germans after all.La Ligne Maginot was born out of France’s deep-seated fear of another invasion by her neighbor and longtime foe, Germany. Except for a few rivers and the gentle mountains of the Vosges, there are few natural barriers to invasion. Thirty times over the centuries, Teutonic warriors marched virtually unimpeded into France and, five times during the 19th century alone, German guns imperiled Paris. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which was still bitterly recalled by the French generals and political leaders in 1914, brought home how utterly defenseless France was in the face of determined aggression.Such continued to be the case even as late as the Great War of 1914-1918, where the thick concrete walls and deeply buried fortifications of Verdun proved to be very hard nuts for the Kaiser’s forces to crack. One of the huge Verdun forts, Douaumont, was pounded by thousands of shells, up to 420mm in caliber, yet only five of its 30 casemates fell to the Germans in a battle that lasted 10 months and resulted in unimaginable casualties on both sides.“You Compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere”.This reality, combined with another very salient factor, led the French to believe that their future security lay in ferro-concrete. The other factor that inevitably turned France toward fixed fortifications was the tremendous slaughter of her sons during World War I; it is estimated that 1.2 million Frenchmen lost their lives during that conflict. As a result, there were 1.2 million fewer potential fathers coming home from the war, and France’s birthrate fell precipitously after the war. The declining birthrate augured a severe shortage of future soldiers to guard the nation, which meant that other means for the defense of France needed to be found.To some experts, the Great War proved that fixed fortifications had no future. The next war, these experts contended, would be a highly mobile affair. The advent of the dirigible, airplane, and tank meant that fortifications on the ground could be easily bypassed. Fixed fortifications, the critics argued, were as obsolete and extinct as the dinosaurs. Some brought up Karl von Clausewitz’s postulation: “If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere.”The men charged with France’s defense were not swayed. Since fielding a large standing army was impossible for at least another generation, a line of fortresses, each at least as strong as Douaumont, was seen as the primary means of keeping the invading Huns at bay.France had another reason for embracing the idea of fixed fortifications. Following the Armistice of 1918, the Americans and British, shocked at the war’s cost and carnage, refused to guarantee that they would come to France’s aid should she ever be attacked again. Feeling betrayed by her allies, France realized she must look inward for her future survival.1930″s post WW1 Defence Doctrine was still very much “Defensive” based. this is reflected in the super human massive construction of Frances “Impregnable” maginot Defence line across the country between France and Germany.Germany has invaded France in sveral wars, not just in WW2 or WW1 but the Franco Prussian War as well. In fact Bismark encircled and laid seige for some time Paris.Alsace Lorrainne has changed hands several times in its history with France and Germany. Long ago it used to be German territory. In fact, the laws in Alsace De Moselle are still based around German laws not old French ones. A survivor from the old days.There are Historically MORE castles, chateauxs and Fortifications in the region of Alsace than in many other parts of France for these reasons historically.French strategy after so many German invasions and incursions, was to build a massive heavily fortified place, all along the German border to stop future German armies.But it did not succeed in fact, the defensive line had not been fully completed in some points, and Germany broke through a gap between two large French Bunkers, using flame throwers and poison gas, in the Belgium Ardennes in 1940.The days of fast, mobile armies, and of mobile fire power had arrived, Frances defences , and England’s so called “expeditionary Force of fifty percent of England’s own army, were quite frankly simply not prepared or equipped for this kind of fighting at all. they had come to the second world war, militarily prepared and equipped for the FIRST World war, not the second more modern one.This cost the French their country, and finished in a humiliating retreat by England’s armies who fell back on the Belgian Port of Dunkirk for entire evacuation. French troops defended the perimeter at Dunkirk, but were left behind when England did not send any boats for them. In fact, what boats came back were blown up and sunk to form a blockade of the port to hinder German use of it quickly. Around a few hundred thousand French soldiers were evacuated with the English troops, many of who RETURNED to try to fight on against the fascists.The days of fortified places and heavy immobile clumsy gun emplacements and giant artillery barrages had ended in 1918. The era of Mobile firepower and modern warfare had begun and new tactics and new equipment from America finally won the day and along with the Russian allies fighting in the East, the German fascist juggernaut was finally smashed and defeated in 1945.NATO and the WARSAW PACT now arrived, and the Dawn of the so called Cold War, an iron curtain descended over Europe until 1989 when the Berlin wall, a giant Communist show piece frontier across Europe in Germany, finally was toppled, and finally the bitter legacy of World war two in western Europe was resolved.German developed Mobile warfare in the Blitzkrieg in 1939. Russia used 94 thousand General Motors army trucks to “bus” red army troops down from Russia into East Prussia and then Nazi Germany, useiing new found rapid Mobility combined with large armoured tank formations, on which 64 thousand Guards army tank riders also hitched a ride down to Germany. Forward elements of the Soviet Red Army were very advanced technologicaly. Mobile warfare methods It has since been used in different ways by other military leaders, including Chairman Mao of China.Mobile Warfare phrase forMao Zedong’s 's main military methods. For the general topic of military mobility.The achievements of Mao and the Communists in the Chinese Civil war are normally referred to as guerrilla warfare, though he himself made a distinction between Mobile Warfare (运动战; yùndòngzhàn), Positional Warfare (阵地战; zhèndìzhàn) and guerrilla warfare (游击战; yóujīzhàn).Mao had a regular army that was far too big to hide, but made a point of conceding territory and avoiding battle until he was ready to fight.The most notable example was the Long March a massive military retreat in which Mao marched in circles in Guihzou until he had confused the vastly larger armies pursuing him, and was then able to slip through Yunann and Sichuan , although the retreat was completed by only one-tenth of the force that left for the Long March at Jiangxi. A sensible comparison would be Robert E Lee’s s surrender at Appotomax Court House in the finish of the American civil warfare, , though he was never outnumbered to the degree Mao regularly was.These military methods were part of the military-political strategy of “peoples war” which aims to win the support of the local population.The Chinese Peoples Volunteer Armies first five campaigns in the Korean War were Mobile Warfare, in which the PVA encircled the enemy through manoeuvr’s and sought to annihilate the enemy. Then it entered a stage of Positional Warfare, when both the PVA and UN forces fought to a stalemate along the 38th Parallel North.America was defeated and lost control of North korea when General mc Arthur repeated his second world war “success” when he lost the pacific command to Japan.mr Arthurs tactics, like Frances, sadly had become quickly outdated by more modern methods of warfare.“I will return” General mc Arthur as he boarded a fast torpedo boat to escape the rapidly advancing Japanese armies. And so he did…..But tactics, not just soldiers, need to change the way wars are decided.“The Art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.” So begins The Art of War, a meditation on the rules of war that was first published in China.Sun Tzu said, that each battle was already “decided” before ever each sides armies left their castles or barracks, decided by the thinking, ideas and internal planning of their generals, and not the soldiers courage or ability to fight.Feng Shui was also a ancient Chinese battlefield strategy, long before it developed into an income producer for the “west” to sell and promote. One of its first users and developers, was Chinese general Kwan.General kwan. Battlefield founder of the Chinese “Art of Placement” or “Feng Shui”.