Quote:
Originally Posted by Avatar47
I agree with you Asterix, I think I'm just much more critical of the French High Command. They had plenty of time before the war to make preparations. They could have sent a few, umm...spies, to see how far the Siegfried line construction had gone, and quickly realized there was not much to see. Maybe they should have prepared stockpiles essential to immediate offensive operations before the war even begun. No mine detectors somebody said? Well, umm.... why? Doesn't an army, umm, need those things? I bet that was only 1 of many items that they were lacking. I'm going to also put forward that the french command was incredibly overconfident in their defenses.
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Yes, I agree. Any improvement on their intel agencies and spy networks could only have benefitted them. I'm sure they had their sources, but were they compromised and fed false information themselves, or were they killed or bought-out? I don't know too much about this so I cannot say. As for the lack of mine detecting equipment, I have no idea why they didn't have any for those troops entering the Saarland. I vaguely recall reading somewhere (a long time ago) that they did have some, but that were in the colonies in North Africa. Why? Maybe they thought the desert was more the terrain for land mines than densely forested hills.
Again, I agree with you on the high commander's overconfidence of their defense networks, especially knowing that by it's original design, it was essentially incomplete.