Honestly. how the fuck did they think this was a good idea?

Because it was. Alsace-Lorraine was never threatened by an attack from Germany ever again.

>>3022188
It boggles my mind that France didn't bother to annex parts of Netherlands and Belgium in the interwar period in order to strengthen their defences, like the Soviets did with numerous countries.

>>3022188
>The location of the line
Most of the French Border isn't GREAT for attacking; there's the Alps in the south, The Jura and Volges in the North. So it was very, very obvious that any attack against France would come through the low countries. The Maginot line was meant to protect France's greatest vulnerability, the exact same place the Germans came from last time.

>The line itself
The line was meant to be manned by conscripts so that the Standing Army could be freed up to fight an offensive war of maneuver in Belgium and the Netherlands. It was meant to be insurance that would catch the German counteroffensive. This was the plan in 1938 when Gamelin wanted to invade Germany if it threatened Czechoslovakia, and this was the original plan for 1939 before he got spooked the fuck out and wussed out.

>The weak part
Belgium naturally wasn't happy that France was building their impregnable line BEHIND them. It doesn't say an awful lot about how much France valued Belgium as an ally. As a result, the rest of the line was hastily built up, and not nearly in the same quality as the rest of the line.

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>>3022214
>>3022188
>muh blitzkrieg, tanks and planes
Airborne munitions in the early war were not nearly powerful enough to destroy reinforced concrete bunkers such as those of the stronger parts of the maginot line. Indeed, Allied bombers had similar issues against German submarine pens and underground fortifications up until the development of Grand Slam/Tallboy/Earthquake bombs. As for Tanks, the Germans actually used parts of the Maginot to defend against the Western Allies after Normandy, and they were quite capable of holding up American and British armor.
>paratroopers
a common argument is that the Germans could just land fallschirmjägers behind the wall, but it's important to note that even Hitler realized that doing so without armor support was far too deadly after experiences in the Netherlands and Crete. And that was where the Germans had air superiority. In the battle of France, French pilots had a superior kill:lost ratio to the Germans; a mass air attack would be incredibly deadly, especially as the Germans did not develop the means to develop even light vehicles (as the US did the impotent M22) to support these units.

>muh wasted money
The Maginot consisted of some 5% of the French Military budget, and there were times where budgetary allocations were returned due to lack of use. The wall was one of the few things the leftist French Government was willing to support, because it could only ever be used for defense.

There was also the concern of arming TOO early and ending up with obsolescent equipment. To note, both Germany and France entered the war with obsolescent tanks; Germany the Pz I and II, and France the Renault R35 and old World War I FT-17s which it had in ridiculously large amounts. Its air force was also similarly slightly obsolete and was heavily aided by the delivery of US Curtis Hawks. Even if that 5% annual budget had been spent on tanks and planes in 1930, the planes and tanks built would have been just been coffins.

>>3022268
It should be noted that the failure of the Fall of France lay not in the failure of the troops stationed in the Maginot Line, but in the standing army and mobile units that had moved way too far north. The Ardennes were only protected by hastily erected fortifications, yes, but this speaks less on the part of the Maginot being unnecessary than it is on the part of the Maginot being insufficient.

The soldiers stationed on the Maginot were generally one-year conscripts, considered subpar and unreliable by French High Command, but even they held against a few probing German attacks. Similarly, the far less advanced Little Maginot stood up to Italian infantry, artillery and air attacks up until the end of the war.

>>3022208

>It boggles my mind that France didn't bother to annex parts of Netherlands and Belgium in the interwar period in order to strengthen their defences

Anybody looking at the situation in 1939 would have concluded that Hitler would be an absolute fool to even attempt an invasion of France. On paper, the French military was vastly superior to what Germany had at the time. French overconfidence that the Germans wouldn't dare attack them directly was what let to their downfall. Keep in mind, the German generals tasked with planning the invasion weren't very confident either. Most were telling Hitler that it was a terrible idea to invade France, but Hitler simply couldn't be dissuaded. Nobody thought it would work. Not the French. Not the Germans. None except Hitler, and it just so happened that on this matter, Hitler was right.

>>3022208
Invading a neutral country to get to another country didn't work out so well for Germany in the last war...

>>3022280
>French overconfidence that the Germans wouldn't dare attack them directly was what let to their downfall
Not him, but you get the opposite in the actual military. French (erroneous) belief in the overwhelming material superiority of the Germans drove a lot of the operational choices in May of 1940. http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977623/1/Parker_MA_F2013.pdf

>>3022299
This. The Germans were pulling some neat tricks - for example, when a British military inspector toured Germany in the mid 30s, he was driving from airport to airport and the Germans were flying the same fucking planes to whichever airport he happened to be at and simply repainted the insignia, and the guy actually fell for it and believed them to be different airplanes and the Anglos were outright shocked that Germany is producing new weaponry at such a fast rate.

They could've easily stopped him during the re-militarization of Rhineland, which was also something to make Germany look stronger than it actually was, most of the German troops taking Rhineland weren't even supplied with guns and ammo. But it somehow worked and the Frogs shat their pants.

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>>3022188

When I was younger, I had this weird impression that the Maginot Line was like a massive fortress, covered in gun turrets like you'd find on a battleship, but instead of being attached to a battleship, the turrets are built onto fortresses, hills, and mountains, with field of fire facing the enemy. Like a massive continuous line of battleship turrets built into the earth.

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>>3022363
This isn't....terribly off the mark. At Toulon, the French employed old Battleship turrets as coastal defense guns.

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>>3022363
Another Fort that did this was Fort Drum in Manila, which was basically just a huge slab of concrete with holes and battleship turrets.

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> ywn be a young lad in Gaul at its historical peak
> ywn serve out your conscription chillin' in a gigantic cave with your garçons
> ywn gun down waves of mindless Huns with no chance of losing
> ywn hold them off until the Allies arrive and give the Hun a good thrashing
> ywn demobilize and read news of a decisive victory at home
> ywn be part of a unified, proud west ready to smack Stalin's ass if he tries anything
> you will get to live to see yourself a minority in your own country