WI: Maginot Line Extended Into Belgium's Border, Stopping At Netherlands?

OTL, the reason germany was able to go around the maginot was because Belgium wasnt fortified since the Belgians pulled out of collaborative plans. This, in turn, was because Belgium knew france was trying to force the combat north into belgium and avoid fighting on the homefront. But what if France and Belgium came to an agreement where, like the french fortifications, the Belgian maginot would be on the border in order to force Germany even further north? Assume that the Belgian line is of near equal quality to the proper maginot.

Would this force the nazis to go through the netherlands or would they try and brute force through? PTL, they took the netherlands, but part of that seems to be due to the Dutch not expecting it- ttl, they probably expect the Germans would see little choice. What would either result in? Could the former help Britain make a better response? Would the casualties of the latter provide the french a better scenario?
 
OTL, the reason germany was able to go around the maginot was because Belgium wasnt fortified since the Belgians pulled out of collaborative plans. This, in turn, was because Belgium knew france was trying to force the combat north into belgium and avoid fighting on the homefront. But what if France and Belgium came to an agreement where, like the french fortifications, the Belgian maginot would be on the border in order to force Germany even further north? Assume that the Belgian line is of near equal quality to the proper maginot.

Would this force the nazis to go through the netherlands or would they try and brute force through? PTL, they took the netherlands, but part of that seems to be due to the Dutch not expecting it- ttl, they probably expect the Germans would see little choice. What would either result in? Could the former help Britain make a better response? Would the casualties of the latter provide the french a better scenario?
There were fortifications along the Franco-Belgian border. They weren't nearly as strong as those on the Franco-German border, but they existed nonetheless.
 
There were fortifications along the Franco-Belgian border. They weren't nearly as strong as those on the Franco-German border, but they existed nonetheless.
i was aware, but i was referring to the german-belgian border, and with the qualifier that they were comprable to the Magino they'd be an extension of
 
OTL, the reason germany was able to go around the maginot was because Belgium wasnt fortified since the Belgians pulled out of collaborative plans. This, in turn, was because Belgium knew france was trying to force the combat north into belgium and avoid fighting on the homefront. But what if France and Belgium came to an agreement where, like the french fortifications, the Belgian maginot would be on the border in order to force Germany even further north? Assume that the Belgian line is of near equal quality to the proper maginot.

Would this force the nazis to go through the netherlands or would they try and brute force through? PTL, they took the netherlands, but part of that seems to be due to the Dutch not expecting it- ttl, they probably expect the Germans would see little choice. What would either result in? Could the former help Britain make a better response? Would the casualties of the latter provide the french a better scenario?
What you describe is exactly the reason why the border between Belgium and Germany was not heavily defended. The first alternative considered was the Meuse and the Albert canal, but that made a very long front to defend with a salient in Liège, hence the decision to go for the Dyle line.
 
Between the fall of Ouvrage La Ferte and Operation Tiger near Saarbrucken, there's plenty of evidence that the Maginot line wasn't invincible. On the other hand, more defences blocking more logistics routes can only delay the attacking German forces. On the third hand, the resources to build the line and the additional troops to man it have to have come from somewhere. If that somewhere was the French Army's OTL budget of the 1930s without significant expansion, presumably they would have less of a mobile reserve than OTL, with potentially disastrous results.

In conclusion, the German success in the Battle of France required so many things to go right that even a very small change could prevent it, especially if that change is any kind of increase in the French Army's resources prewar. However, I'm not certain that this change on its own would necessarily be enough to stop the Wehrmacht. A lot would depend on how French and Dutch political leaders react to this expansion of the Maginot line. Do the French gain to much of a false sense of security and become complacent? Are the Dutch fearful enough that the Germans might violate their neutrality to drastically change their longstanding defence plans? There's too many butterflies here for me to make any confident judgements.
 
Fundamentally, given that any judgements we make now about the cost-effectiveness or lack thereof of the Maginot fortification philosophy are based largely on hindsight, it comes down to politics. France and Belgium had different internal politics. Belgium tended more to the right, and thus would often be out of step with French policy on broad issues across the board. This in turn related to judgements about what kind and how serious a threat the Third Reich posed. To the reactionary king of Belgium, the Nazis did not seem so terrible, and the whole "Rexist" wing of Belgian politics were a bunch of Quislings. Meanwhile of course Belgium had its moderates and leftists, and I am not sure that the king was quite the scoundrel I've seen him posed as from time to time--more of a Halifax than a Haw-Haw I suppose, not an actual Nazi than.

But bottom line, we have two different nations each pursuing its different internal political revolving door and mood swings. France can control French policy, even given these unending shifts of the political wing--it has weight when a Defense minister points out that existing defensive strategy is based on a certain model and there are sunk costs, the men are trained for this and not something else, etc, all this provides momentum and continuity to a policy decided on previously. A time window might exist where Brussels and Paris see eye to eye and on paper can agree to a coordinated policy where they divvy up an agreed upon plan on a fair-shares basis, and thus pursue a joint and combined policy on the German border with a literal united front. But of course this inherently means in the nature of things, that French generals might wind up commanding Belgian units--and perhaps less likely but hardly impossible, French soldiers find themselves answering to a Belgian marshal! (This sort of windshield wiper effect happens across the Franco-Belgian border region of course).

If the two nations are pretty well joined at the hip, politically speaking, finding themselves in close concord consistently over generations and across the board, it might work well. Or perhaps an Odd Couple sort of alliance might work fine, if both members of it see the enemy they are combining against as a really severe existential threat.

But alas--the Western European nations took an awful long time to come to a consensus about the nature of the threat Hitler presented. In fact I'd say they never did come to an accurate one. The pernicious and false consensus was that Hitler was too outrageous and "silly" to be a severe threat to any major power, that the French Army was overall the mightiest in the world, that Hitler's extremism was either the ranting of an ineffectual loon or cynical hyperbole blustering in aid of getting more reasonable settlements. And of course on the right, that the fascists in general and even Nazis in particular could not be as awful a threat as the Reds, and having the fascist regimes around was a useful counterweight against the dreaded Bolshevik hordes.

With all of this stuff to cloud minds and prevent incisive thinking--and this is being generous and assuming that only a vanishingly small percentage of European leaders were downright Quisling anyway and would have been on the whole satisfied with an Axis victory as it emerged in reality OTL continuing; so I am generously pretending here that "of course" hardly anyone would be as complicit in Reich victory as that--few in any European nation were facing the Reich's threat seriously and forthrightly. To the French it was largely just a matter of playing with toy soldiers and complacently observing they had a lot of them, while nervously recalling if the limits were taken off the Germans could have a lot more. So they came up with this defensive wall concept.

The forthright way for a clear sighted leader in liberal western Europe in the early '30s way to respond to Hitler would have been to hold the Reich to the Versailles treaty, at least to the lightened version of it emerging post-Locarno, and firmly move to put down Hitler's early violations of it. In turn, while France alone could I think have shouldered that burden, the fact is the League of Nations existed, and the job should have been something the LoN resolved to undertake collectively, not just as a unilateral expression of French policy. The member nations should have issued Hitler stern reprimands, warnings, and an ultimatum, then when he inevitably defied the latter, moved collectively by prior agreement. In fact I am sure France would have done the heavy lifting anyway, but at least symbolically, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark (well not sure Denmark was in the League but I bet it was), Poland and Czechoslovakia should all have moved, at least to the point of sealing up their borders and pushing back against any incursions; Britain should have blockaded German trade, also shut off across the Low Country borders or any other neighbors. Certainly French invaders should have seen at least partial support from Belgian and Dutch ones; the Czechoslovakians would be isolated and perhaps ill suited to advance, but then again the interwar CS military was fairly strong whereas of course calling a foul on Hitler early on involves scarcely any developed Wehrmacht at all. No doubt Hitler would call up some version of Volksturm, which would be a lot more effective man for man than the late-war grandpas and teenager units of OTL because in effect it is a Nazi-party organized linkup of old Freikorpers and other Great War vets and Storm Troopers and such rival units as Stahlhelmer types--a Freikorps, but with national organization and operational experience from both the Great War and the street fighting days of Weimar, early on and just before the Nazi takeover. Against professional armies, they would perform badly on a per capita basis but there are lots of heads to recruit.

So I am not suggesting it would be a walkover, and military victory in the sense of dissecting Hitler's Reich and establishing LoN mandated martial law over all Germany, which would be moderately costly in itself, then faces guerilla pro-Nazi insurgency and general sullen resistance of a type that had demoralized French occupiers of the Rhineland before.

Against this though--if the invasion is not legally speaking a matter of Paris just deciding unilaterally that Hitler is a dog France alone shall put down, but rather a demonstration of the teeth implicit in the League of Nations charter enforcing treaty justice, and the collective LoN governance is not in fact a mere toy of French puppetry but a multinational forum where many participants have a different perspective than the French, it should be possible, after banning the Nazis themselves as outlaw treaty violators, to cultivate more valid German democratic expressions--say the LoN does not unban the Communists but does give amnesty to the Social Democrats and liberals, while banning selected right wing leaders and movements that were complicit with the Versailles violations, then Germany under League occupation can start producing civil governments that can gradually have police and other local control powers returned to them, and a dialog shall exist as to how Germany too shall solve the general crisis of surviving the Depression without going whole-hog Viking on the rest of Europe.

So the occupation forces are not entirely French, and the policies are not unilateral French repression of Germans as Germans, but a consensus crackdown on autocratic extremism in favor of liberal democracy.

This I think is a military task the League could have undertaken--one OTL argument against is conservatives fearing it would be a weakening of Europe against Soviet aggression of course. But of course until 1939 OTL, Stalin was hardly able to get away with any aggrandizing aggressions and I don't think any sensible calculation of military potential in say 1934 would argue either in the Kremlin or among the Kremlin's foes that the Reds can undertake a sudden jihad and hope to win. Nothing could make the League occupation of Germany easier than a Soviet attack on Poland leading to Geneva declaring another collective defense operation against the USSR, and (at the severe cost of stalling deNazification and leaving Germany long term vulnerable to another authoritarian reactionary regime, probably with all the racism and so forth too) call on Germans too to be amnestied and muster into new League units to stand against the Russians--on front lines generally well east of Germany! The Soviets might (or might not, given their performance in the Winter War, and that Western aka League aid to the frontline east European states would be unstinted, and in the scenario limbered up by the recent operation to crack down on Hitler) gobble up Finland, and the Baltics, and punch deep into Poland and Romania, but the latter two ought to be able to slow down a 1935 vintage Red Army even in all its numbers enough for League forces to come forward to meet them.

Hell, if the Soviets tried a stunt like that, it might wind up rehabilitating Hitler and the League reinstating him as Reichsfuerher, God help us.

What I'd count on, as a clearsighted ASB Mary Sue liberal downtimer leader, is that the Reds are risk averse and won't stick their necks out like that, and the eastern European border states can keep the watch on the Soviet border while the western great powers and medium nations collectively settle Germany's hash in a non-punitive, selective manner leaving Germany viable and stable. And that perhaps the Soviets can even be admitted to the League and mutual disarmament can at any rate cut the Soviet threat down to something manageable on modest East European defense budgets (backed up by promises of League support if needed) that don't amount to an existential threat to the Soviets either.

This is how a peacekeeping security council organization is supposed to keep peace.
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So all this dreaming of a working LoN is I think a broader and deeper illustration of why the OP is not very realistic--because fundamentally, Europe was composed of competing nation-states with separate and clashing interests, ruled by bourgeois politicians with short sighted agendas and compromised values that didn't perceive the Third Reich for the monstrosity it was. If broad consensus unity could have existed on at least the latter point, a collective agreement the Reich was toxic and had to be resisted, a combined Belgian-French policy of mutual coordinated defense might have been politically feasible--but if that consensus existed broadly, shouldn't the Netherlands be included to really close off the front and force the Germans to spend a lot of force to punch through a comprehensive wall from Alps to the North Sea?

And in fact if we have both Low Country kingdoms and France on the same strategic page--shouldn't a broad consensus have existed in the League of Nations to stamp out the Axis at the source and turn the Nazis out of power completely? I think so. That would have been far more cost effective as well as humane and successful than any degree of wall building. It would have protected not just France and Belgium but little bailiwicks like Luxembourg and Lichtenstein; it would have saved German Jews from genocide as well as the larger number of them residing outside German borders.

Given the lack of unity around the idea of collective European peace-keeping security organization, it pretty well logically follows every separate nation of Europe was left on their own to devise their own piecemeal defense policy, which inherently often would involve throwing some other potential ally against Germany under the bus. With each nation thinking they could depend only on themselves alone, Hitler was able to gobble up each of them, one by one albeit in the end in appallingly rapid sequence.
 
When the zone of fortifications was proposed in 1928 there was a assumption it would be extended north along the Belgian/German border.
What was regarded as the Strongest Fortification in the World was in Belgium. That actually extended along the Dutch-Belgian border with Germany.
It fell in a day, to a force that was outnumbered by the garrison 8 to 1.



Aside from Eban Emael five other new fortresses were added to the ring around Liege, and the older pre 1914 fortresses were refurbished. Similarly the fortresses around Namur were refurbished. Then there were a zone of border works, MG & AT gun bunkers, shelter bunkers for infantries well. Mines, barbed wire, and road block material were store near the frontier for deployment. The latter were set out by the Belgian army as it mobilized September 1939 through April 1940. Exactly why the Belgians abandoned this frontier defense zone on 10 May, the first day of the campaign I am still not clear on. The point is the Belgian still attempted to build a portion of the the 1928 proposal.
 
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