School of War - Ep 260: Kevin Passmore on the Maginot Line and the Battle of France

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

Kevin Passmore, professor of History at Cardiff University and author of The Maginot Line: A New History, joins the show to talk about the most elaborate fortification system of the 20th century and why it failed. ▪️ Times 02:03 Attacking the Maginot Line 05:53 Fortifications and Warfare 11:48 Flexibility vs Depth 15:38 A Total Commitment to War 19:49 French Defensive Concepts 22:42 Living in the Line 27:31 Decision in Belgium  36:22 Breaking the Enemy’s Will  39:36 Ukrainian Fortifications Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

The Maginot Line, the extensive fortification system the French built on their frontier with Germany in the lead-up to World War II, has long been a byword for military foolishness, a massive series of forts that, when the day of decision came, were simply bypassed as the Nazis drove and flew swiftly to the sea. The reality, of course, is more complicated, as our really interesting discussion today reveals, and involves all kinds of strategic and even moral questions about the value of the offense versus the three. The defense, for example, that remain relevant today. Let's get into it. but you'll never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today.

Kevin Passmore. He is Professor of History at Cardiff University. He is the author of several books on French history. The most recent is The Maginot Line, a new history. Kevin, thank you so much for joining School of War. It's a great pleasure to be with you. I wanted to start as sort of really big picture and set the scene almost literally for the history of the Maginot Line.

Just the question of the defense of France and its front of you, from the Franco-Prussian War on, could you sort of describe to a listenership who probably know a fair amount about World War I and World War II, but also probably a few of them, if any, have ever thought professionally about what it would mean to defend or attack

through the French frontier. What does this problem look like for it or a defender or an attacker? Like what are the different zones? What are the considerations? Well, if you can imagine the French border, it goes from Belgium in the north through Luxembourg,

then down to Germany, then further down to Switzerland and then to the Italian border. Now, the historic route of invasion was largely actually through Belgium, because that border is difficult to defend because it has river valleys which lead directly into France. Not only that, but because France is a centralized country in which all roads lead to Paris, centralisation meant that the border needed to be defended everywhere because once Paris was taken the war could not be continued basically now so the Belgian border was always considered the most dangerous

and that never changed the German border was the most direct route to Germany so that was also dangerous the Furch had always fortified that border they fortified in 1870 the French were defeated in a war against what was then Prussia

and that led to the foundation of the German state in 1870 to 71 but France as a result of that lost the province of Alsace-Lorraine and if you can imagine the French border in the east it's like a kind of arrowhead pointing into Germany that's the current border

and on that border are the two provinces really of Alsace and Loren what the French now call the Moselle, the Germans call it Nutringen. So that is the area that became, after 1919, and the victory in the First World War, the French got Alsace-Lorraine back. And that became a major political priority to defend it. And so the French built fortifications there,

but they built them in the knowledge that building them actually made it even more likely that the Germans would attack through Belgium, the difficult to defend Belgium border, which is why, in the language of the French military, they aim to neutralise the German border so that it was impossible to attack, or at least without huge resources and plenty of warning, so that the Germans would attack through Belgium.

And the Germans and the French cited their best troops on the Belgian border to meet a German attack, there, hopefully, in Belgium. Yeah, among the things I really like about your book is, one, the way in which you get into the political dimensions of all these various issues you just took us through in the last minute or two, which seemed like they could be purely strategic conversations, but they had major political weight throughout the interwar period.

And then, you know, of course, in a way, the whole book is about how the sort of demotic, common understanding of the failure of the Maginolian that they built this big fortress where they hoped the Germans would invade, and then they invaded somewhere else. And it was kind of a big whoopsie. You showed it obviously be a little bit of a lot of a, a lot of bit of a, it lacks nuance. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's completely wrong that view. Okay.

Let's, well, we'll come to that. So coming out of the First World War through the 20s up to the decision to actually start building this complex, what is the evolving, well, I was going to say French attitude, but I'm sort of curious about the global state of the art in terms of thinking about war. but the attitude towards fortifications as a way of making war. Well, the First World War was, as everybody knows, a trench war, but it wasn't necessarily always defensive because trenches can also be used as a way of kind of sapping forward prior to an attack. Trenches can be built, can be dug very quickly. When a force attacks, it will often dig trenches to consolidate its gains.

So simply trenches on their own were not necessarily connected to defence. That's one thing. But the French High Command was always divided between advocates of attrition in the sense that you wear the enemy down first in your own defences and then attack, or the search for the breakthrough. Initially, at the beginning, in August 1914, the French thought that they could just simply break through. through the Ardennes, ironically, and into Alsace.

After that, that proved to be a disaster, but they still didn't give up the offensive for a very long time. And Marshal Fosh, who became the Allied Supreme Commander, he was always an advocate of manoeuvre, and he thought that, well, fortification was okay, but it had to support manoeuvre. So that could mean field fortification, what the French call campaign fortification.

Marshall Paitin, on the other hand, believed in kind of echelon defence, you know, deep defence, which is still with us the idea that in successive lines of defence you wear the enemy down. So that was the legacy. Péthéth was, after the war, was in command of French forces, but his views were never unanimously accepted. So that's what the war, that's what the war, that's what. what the war left to the French. There was also the possibility, there's also the possibility of building new permanent fortifications.

Now, that's a problem for the French because they would need to be built in a different place because they had recovered Alsace-Lorraine. The fortifications that the Germans had built and the French had built before 1914 were on the old border. The border between Alsace-Lorraine and what's now the Vos and the Muz kind of

areas. So the question now, do we build new fortifications on the border with Germany, which means partly the Rhine, but also where the French border leaves the Rhine at a little town called Lauterburg off towards Luxembourg. It's a kind of hilly, often hilly, wooded, forested, sometimes flatter border, which was more open. And it did have a direct route into France, actually. through the towns of Tienville, Meuse and Nancy. So it was always considered a very dangerous area there. That's the Moselle River, in fact, Moselle River Valley. So that was the problem that they were confronted with after 1919.

Lots of options. But the other thing is that the French did occupy parts of Germany in 1919. What's now the Palatinate or Phalps, as the Germans call it, the Rhineland? And they occupied that. The Germans had a very small army without planes and tanks. And the French plan then was to, you know, if war happened, that they were going to invade Germany with the help of the Czechs and hopefully others and break Germany up.

Yeah, and that seems of a piece with the desire to fight in Belgium and Holland. That is to say, if you could avoid it, fighting on your own frontier, if you could avoid it, it seems like something worth avoiding. You want to buy some depth by pushing out, which of course in 1940 they attempt to do in Belgium, but I suppose things have long since gone awry in terms of fighting in the Rhineland itself. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Rhineland, the French, because the Germans proved cooperative eventually and did pay reparations as they were supposed to, although not as many,

the French agreed to evacuate the Rhineland early in 1930. It was supposed to remain demilitarized. But unlike other demilitarized zones around the world, Hitler re-militarized it in 1936. And so German troops were right on the border, you know, in the shadow of the Maginotinolein forts, actually. So, yeah, and Belgium. Obviously, the idea of fighting in Belgium wasn't popular in Belgium. One of the really interesting things about the argument you make is sort of you knock back and forth between these two related debates. One, a sort of broader debate, these are all debates amongst military professionals, but the broader debate debate about maneuver versus positional warfare, the superiority of defense during the interwar period.

But then there's this other debate within the question of defense, which you just alluded to in terms of Fosch versus Patan, which is this question of, well, what kind of defense? Do we want to, as it were, front load everything into big, massive positions on the line of contact, or do we want something more flexible, more, more. of a defense in depth. Share a bit about how these debates evolve, how they relate to one another. We talked a little bit. You should have mentioned the latter one, but just give us a sense of how both these conversations

evolve in the interwar period. Well, I need to start a little bit with the First World War because that's where it evolves. The French were committed for a long time, well into the 1970, into the disasters of 1917, to still to all out attack, although the methods evolved.

The Germans, on the other hand, hand adopted a largely defensive strategy on the Western Front until, apart from Verdun and 1918, but the Germans developed this method of defence in depth of having a lightly defended first line and then

retreating to that. And of course in those days it took a long time to bring up the artillery to breach a second line and have a new attack, by which time you built a third line. So after everything, after French attacks had failed the French basically turned to defence in depth,

which Peyton had advocated to some extent even before the war, but really copied it from the Germans. And in fact, you know, a kind of linear defence in depth. The idea of that became the orthodoxy in many ways, and in the first plans for the Maginot Line, the first instructions, because Peartin was the head of the army after 1919, most of the instructions reflected his views. But he found it very difficult to impose his views

because the general staff were not, strictly speaking, responsible to him, but to the ministry. Other members of the Supreme War Council, like Fosch and others, again, had enormous prestige. And it was very difficult for Peyton to actually impose his views. And so there was another school of thought that said, well, the lesson of modern warfare is that it's a total war.

You have to mobilize all the forces of the nation, so you can't afford to cede any territory, and so you need a very strong line on the frontier itself, built of permanent fortification of these huge Maginoline forts, which listeners may have visited themselves. That was the alternative, and the great battle was between Paitain, who wanted defense-in-exempty.

depth, largely constructed actually on mobilisation of trenches and trenches and blockhouses that could be built quickly, maybe a few blockhouses and command post built in advance. But the other school of thought led by various people who are now forgotten, who wanted these huge forts. Eventually they did win out over Pétin, but Paitan retained quite a lot of influence, and he, along with actually left-wing politicians in a kind of unholy a lot of because Petan certainly wasn't a man of the left, they managed to add an element of field fortification to it, of lighter fortification. So the whole thing actually wasn't what anybody really intended. It wasn't simply a line of huge forts on the frontier, neither was a defense

in depth. And in fact, it had very little depth, which turned out to be a problem. Yeah. We recently had Julian Jackson on the show to talk about Payton, so listeners should be well aware of the way of which you're not a man of the left. And I want to get to the political valences of all this here in a second, but you know, my naive response to the way you just framed it is to response. It's not, it all clear to me how a defense in depth can't also involve a total commitment of society to war, how the total commitment of society to war is somehow summarized by, you know, by, as it were, putting all of your tactical eggs, operational eggs in one basket. No, that's absolutely true. And that that point was made.

The problem was that Peyton's own plans for defence in depth meant having the main, what they called the resistance line, where they would actually stop and fight, in France itself, which meant abandoning the whole of Alsace-Lorraine, which was simply politically impossible. And even in the First World War, actually, the second line was usually cited about eight kilometres back, but many generals rejected the idea of a very,

withdrawing from territory of even eight kilometers, which had often been one at huge cost, you know, or defended at huge cost. So it was, it was partly a political, partly a political thing. So talk about these political dimensions. So there's this question of unwillingness to surrender any land at all. But there's also sort of a left, right flavor to a lot of people. Talk us through that. Yeah, there, there is. That changed substantially over time, because in, But so I'm going to say before 1936, on the left were the communists who were anti-militarist, and they only admired one thing militarily, and that was the Red Army. You know, they said quite openly, if we go to war, we're going to encourage the troops to go over to the side of the Russians.

So the socialists, on the other hand, they inherited a tradition of what's known in France as Jacobin patriotism, which is the defense of the Republic in danger. It goes back to the French Revolution. and it's often strongly anti-German, but they weren't in favour of aggressive war and conquest, but they absolutely were in favour of defensive war. And they believed that, they believed in a kind of Swiss militia system, actually,

where the whole population is, the whole male population is totally trained for war in a short service, as in Switzerland, but you remain in the reserve for many years afterwards, which is why the French mobilised so many older soldiers, was actually in 1940. So that was the kind of left-wing view. And they believed also in cheapness.

They thought field fortification was cheaper. But also, the left was quite strong in the veteran movement, which kind of idealised the kind of resistance of the Republican soldier who fought just with their chests through their passive courage. in the trenches. And they associated large fortifications, firstly with danger,

because conditions in Verdun were so terrible and these large forts they thought attracted artillery fire. They thought the best way to remain safe was to hide, you know, as the origins of modern warfare,

I guess, in many ways. But, and the other thing is that they thought that these forts were a kind of upper class, kind of top-down equivalent of the modern corporation which kind of oppressed the workers and treated them like appendages of the machine.

So that was the left view of it. The right on the other hand was pretty divided actually. Some of them fought in terms of defensive warfare. Usually they favoured large permanent fortifications, these huge underground forts, They favored them. And one of the major reasons is that they were considered to guarantee hierarchical command. So what were the capacity, what was the capacity of these forts as they actually came to be constructed?

Maybe paint a bit of a picture for us. The decision is made to proceed with this to neutralize Germany's opportunities on the actual German frontier. What is the actual defensive concept of the Maginol? On that arrowhead pointing into France, that's where. where the Maginot Line proper is, there and on the Luxembourg border and a tiny bit into Belgium. On the south-facing part of the Arrowhead, that's the Rhine. And there they built machine gun Kazmats. Not a huge number of them, and they were later supplemented with smaller blockhouses, which proved totally ineffective, in fact. But on that the real part of the Maginot Line is

from the Rhine along the wooded border with Germany, along the Luxembourg border and just about into Belgium. And there, with a couple of gaps, there are a string of individual forts either with artillery or with infantry weapons. The biggest forts,

it's worth understanding an individual force. Some of your listeners might have visited one because they are now hugely impressive tourist attractions. But they're basically situated underground in hills. So you would go in through an entrance block, which itself would be a huge block of concrete with anti-tank weapons and machine guns, but not artillery. A railway line would lead straight into there.

Men and equipment would go in and out, and it would lead down a slope or down a lift, deep under the hill. The deepest one is 80,000. meters underground. And then these tunnels would fork out to individual so-called combat blocks. And these, again, were individual blocks of concrete on the surface. So you reach them by going up a shaft into the combat block. And the combat blocks had turrets for artillery or machine guns or how it serves or grenade throwers. But they also had.

casements or casmats for artillery as well you know casement as something where the artillery actually fired directly out they incidentally proved very vulnerable so that's what they were like they were crewed if they were artillery forts they had our they had a majority of artillery off troops plus some engineers and some infantry if they were infantry forts they only had infantry and engineers and and how were these manned you know talk us through the rotational system of peace time or the system of peace time, and then, of course, when the phony war begins, so this is this period from September of 39 through to May of 40, where Germany is invaded Poland, but not yet invaded to the West. How is it that these things are actually filled with troops, and what

is it like for the troops that live in them? Well, the French formed a large number of so-called fortification regiments. Plenty of other armies had them, but they included most of the troops in the fortification regiments actually didn't serve in the, in the fortifications proper, but in the intervals, in trenches or little blockhouses or in advance posts. But they had to, they did, they developed specialized companies which manned the individual, individual forts, which had crews of company strength, up to battalion size really, so up to a thousand people living underground. In peacetime, people were rotated in them for short training periods,

but they were after 1936 permanently manned. So they weren't suitable for long-term occupation. They quickly realised that. As you can imagine, living for long periods without natural light, above all with damp, because the fortifications were not built in the water lake table, unlike the Furer bunker in Berlin,

which was built within the water table, but they were still damp. partly because of condensation in the combat blocks which were near the surface, but underground, there were a lot of underground springs which leaked into the galleries and there wasn't enough money to face them all with waterproof coatings or even fine concrete.

So they were pretty damp and often cold. They did install central heating and air conditioning, but it was never suitable for long-term occupation During the phony war, of course, the war was declared at the beginning of September. There were eight months before Syria's action began on the Maginot Line, at least on the Maginot Line proper. And so conditions within the forts themselves became very, very difficult. And morale did suffer. The intention with the Maginot Line had been to build conditions which would sustain the troops' morale.

But that's one of the ways actually in which they failed because it was not a pleasant experience to live in them. The rest of the fortification troops, they endured the harshest winter on record. You know, months of snow and freezing rain and very, very low temperatures where everything froze and some of the forts were inaccessible, in fact. So that's what it was like to live in them. and you can imagine that relations amongst the troops were not always good. Meanwhile, the Germans are watching all of this, you know, through the debates about constructing it, to the thing itself, to their own war planning in the 30s, and how do they account for this system in what will eventually become case yellow, right,

the plan to invade to the West? Hitler originally was obsessed with the Maginot Line and probably remained, a bit so. He remained in many ways a man of the First World War and he believed in the power of defensive fortification. He was very interested in artillery and constructing artillery able to defeat the Maginot Line. The German general staff concluded that they would not be in a position to assault the Maginot Line until 1941 or 42. They didn't have heavy tanks. They didn't have sufficient heavy artillery with the correct type of shells and their troops were not sufficiently well trained yet

so that's why they that's why they opted ultimately for the Belgian solution the French concluded much the same actually that they would be ready to assault the German fortifications at about the same time and they did plan to do it because the French had fewer options because they couldn't politically in invade Belgium. It seems like a dumb question to me, but wouldn't you always plan to go through

Belgium? I say once the Maginot Line is up and running, even if it gets to 1941, 42, and you have the kind of well-trained assault troops and heavy equipment that you would need to even make it loosely plausible that, you know, some sort of series of front-on assaults could succeed against this line. Wouldn't you always seek out decision on that northern plane? One might think so, and there were debates on it. One of the reasons why a large part of the German general staff was opposed to the invasion of France because they thought, well, even if it succeeds operationally, it will be a strategic failure. And it's often a criticism of the German army that it sacrificed operational success to strategy. And, you know, they thought, well, our great mistake in World War I was to invade through Belgium and bring the British in. So that was to them a... That's why you would prefer before the Brits are already in because of the invasion of Poland. Pre-September 3.

I get it. That makes sense. There was a battle in the German, in the German staff involving Hitler and various other people's people about what to do. That makes excellent sense. Okay. So nevertheless, Britain's in the war after the invasion of Poland. And K. C. Cielo evolves through that winter. What is the actual battle plan for the invasion of France, which,

which in the end, I mean, it does a couple of things. I mean, it lures the French and the British into this trap in the north. It succeeds through this thrust in the middle. And meanwhile, the Maginolam becomes victim to, you put it this way in the book in a way that really stuck with me that is actually one of the great encirclement battles of the war, even though I don't think I'm sure others, I've never personally heard it describe that way. That was a really clever way of thinking about it. Well, I can't claim credit for that because it came from a,

military historian called Roger Bruges, who wrote these massive volumes, a veteran himself and a journalist. But he said that, and his stuff is very, his work on it is very, very good. Only available in French, unfortunately. But yeah, the initial German plan

was to attack basically through central Belgium and to get to the sea and possibly threaten Britain. But there was this battle between various factions of the German and staff, particularly, names just gone out of my head, the very famous German Manstein,

who came up with this plan to instead concentrate therefore to have a faint attack, a dummy attack in central Belgium, lure the French and the British into central Belgium, but then to attack further south through the den and then head for the channel

and cut off the troops in Belgium. Because they kind of that the French would support the Belgians. They had some intelligence. The French played into their hands and made it much worse than it even might have been because their plan was always, they expected a German attack into Central Belgium

and they always planned for that. They worsen the situation for themselves because they decided that it would be a good idea to send troops beyond Central Belgium into the Netherlands where they represent. in fact a potential threat to the German flank. So they would actually have gone in advance of what's known as the Albert Canal line

and threatened German forces that were wading into central Belgium. That quickly turned out to be an underpowered attack anyway, the Netherlands wing of it. In central Belgium, the French did hold off the Germans in two battles. first of all an armoured battle and then the next day a kind of artillery infantry defence against Hupner's pancers

but it was a Pyrrhic victory because the French attack because they were obviously under great danger of being encircled and they very quickly realised by the 14th of May that's four days after the Germans

crossed the frontier that things were pretty serious. I mean, arguably, the battle was lost in four to five days. And what leads to the relative complacency regarding this thrust through the Ardennes? Is it just that the Ardennes is such difficult terrain and not a traditional march rat? Or what is it? Well, it's not true that they thought that they thought that the Germans wouldn't attack there, but they thought that they would have time to bring up their reserves. They didn't have time to bring up their reserves. They didn't have time to bring up their reserves. And there were a couple of reasons for that.

One is that they had a fantastic mobile reserve, but they'd sent it into the Netherlands. That's the 7th, 7th Army, where it was completely disorganized and played consequently very little part in the battle. The other armoured divisions were in central Belgium. Their strategic reserve consisted largely of heavy tanks, of which the Germans didn't have any,

which proved to be incredibly non-maneuverable. They needed to be transferred around on transporters. They broke down. They had a very limited range. And they were really designed for a much slower attack. The French did have the fast tanks, but they'd used them for a fence, but they should have used them for defense.

And then down in the forts, comparatively out of action through most of this, What is the experience of the Battle of France and how does it end? Well, for the first few days, the Germans probed the advance troops, the advance posts on the Maginot Line, which had actually seen action through most of the phony war. They, in order to divert attention away from the planned attack in the Ardennes, they keep the French confused. After that, for a few weeks, the Maginot Line troops basically did very little. the French form after the evacuation at Denkirk

as soon as that was over on the 30th of May the French by then had formed a new line from the mouth of the Somme across France and including the Maginot Line the Germans attacked it and by the 10th of June they had broken through and they were heading south and they encircled the Maginot line

and they also broke through a couple of gaps in the Maginot line as well so the forts on the Maginot Line were basically surrounded. One of the really interesting things about this account is the way in which the defense sometimes or the offense and the other they take on these not just political but almost moral valances. That is to say, you know, at the start of the First World War, the notion that we would just dig

in and entreat the enemy from our fortresses seems somehow ungallant. Absolutely. We have the cult of the offense. Of course, the pendulum swings and that a few years later seems murderous. and, you know, haughty chateau generals throwing their, you know, the working man into the jaws of war with no consideration for human life. And so the defense now seems moral in the office immoral. And then, of course, I grew up at a time in the U.S. military when the pendulum had sort of swung back, largely as a consequence of 1940, honestly, where attritional. And on some level, the American experience of Vietnam, which is obviously less about static versus maneuver, but more about.

attrition versus a more conceptual concept of maneuver which is sort of a related idea this notion that there's something about attrition and positional warfare even though those are two different ideas that that's immoral and actually what you need a decision quickly and pursuing a decision quickly is your is your moral imperative as a military officer and it's kind of fascinating yeah the way in which what you know it's easy to say sitting here recording a podcast a little harder when you're actually in the business yeah absolutely what ought to be dispassionate analytical, it's all killing and it's all human will and whose will is going to break first. And

there ought to be an analytic, dispassionate effort to try to figure out how to kill so as to break the enemy's will and everything else is sort of noise. And yet how rarely that actually seems to be the case. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there were always political, cultural elements to this. And one of the things that I found in the Maginot Line is how unpopular fortification service was because it was seen as unmilitary. You know, people who graduated Bottom at Sansier, the French Military Academy, they were the people who served on the Maginot Line, you know, or people who committed disciplinary offenses. People who came top, they chose perhaps the colonies for armored regiments. People like to goal, for example. He always idealized

armored warfare as a he was not that strong on technical matters in fact, but he saw it as a kind of revival of the old chivalric, chivalrous warfare of knights in armor, and that's the language

he uses to describe tanks. And he saw that as the antidote to static defensive fortification war, but he wasn't against fortifications completely. But you're absolutely right Exactly. I'm aware of a lot of the military history of the Maginot Line in 1940 was written partly out of that American and, to some extent, British,

turned towards kind of Alfred's tactic and so on. I don't really say this so much in the book. It was one of the things that suffered from the cuts. But it came out of that period. The historian Robert Doughty, for example, He was a tank officer in the 60s and 70s, I think. And it did reflect. You're absolutely right.

It kind of came around again. And there was a kind of admiration of German tactics in World War II. And if anything, I see a swing back now. I mean, we could talk about Ukraine and the questions of fortifications there. I've had David Betts on the show a couple of times to talk about them. It's really interesting. but a sense that it was foolish, which I think is actually pretty strong claim, but in addition to foolish, immoral, to encourage the Ukrainians to do their 2023 counteroffensive

and actually positional warfare. It's the nature of the tools. The tools and the balance of power such as it is, is that positional warfare is where you're at. And indeed, you have, you know, we're recording this here towards the end of December 2025. You know, you have these negotiations going on right now about a peace settlement in which the existence of these Ukrainian fortifications in Denez, are at the center of things. You know, Putin, obviously,

but it seems like the Americans to an extent want to encourage Zelensky and the Ukrainians to give up these fortifications in return for, you know, a list of things. I don't want to sort of set aside political questions here. I mean, we could argue whether those things are worthwhile or not. But the point is, so the Ukrainians don't want to give up those fortifications

in which they feel tremendous value. Yeah, no, I was aware of that. And the parallels with the checks and the Sudeten where they had their fortifications in a German minority zone, the equivalent of Densk, a kind of Russian minority zone, their parallels are very, very strong. Yeah, and the Ukrainians are not, as of today, they're not letting it go. They're refusing to make that concession. Yeah, you can see their points.

It sounds like you add a lot of nuance to, but you don't entirely reject the McLean family view of the Maginot Line, which before we started recording, I'm joking with you that, let me, let me, Let me explain real quick for listeners. So before we started recording, I was joking with you, Kevin, that growing up, my dad, who was a veteran of the war, would invoke the Maginu Line as a symbol, not of morality or immorality, but of just dunderheadedness, just like the best example of military silliness,

where they build this massive expensive set of forts, and then, I believe, his exact words were. And then the Germans may have occasionally been the crowds, jumped right over them. And that was it, and that was the end of the story. It's not completely untrue because it did have weaknesses. and they did breach it at some point, actually. It's true that the French had withdrawn a lot of their supporting troops,

but the Germans broke through with second-rate troops, often with virtually no training. So it did have its weaknesses. It's interesting, however, that the Maginot Line forts, because there's a difference between the artillery forts, which were very strong, and the infantry were forts, which were less strong. and American forces confronted a batch of three forts near the town of Beach, which is in Moselle,

particularly the fort of Shisek. And there's a very good account, actually, from the American side of how difficult it was to assault it. And can you say specific timing and units to the extent you recall off the top of your head? So this is a fascinating kind of afterlife for the Maginau. Sorry, I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I need to look back at my nose. If I'd been aware of that, I would have given you chapter. personal. Sorry, no, I only ask out of personal curiosity because I'm curious if the third infantry

division was involved at all. Yeah, yeah. I don't know which troops were involved, but I cut it from my book, unfortunately. These editors, man. It was a lot longer before it was published. Kevin Passmore, the book is called the Maginot Line, a new history, really interesting conversation, really interesting book. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thank you so much for your questions.