Purposes
The Maginot Line was built to fulfill several purposes:
- To avoid a surprise attack and to give alarm.
- To cover the mobilization of the French Army (which took between 2 and 3 weeks).
- To save manpower (France counted 39,000,000 inhabitants, Germany 70,000,000).
- To protect Alsace and Lorraine (returned to France in 1918) and their industrial basin.
- To be used as a basis for a counter-offensive.
- To push the enemy to circumvent it while passing by Switzerland or Belgium.
- To hold the enemy while the main army could be brought up to reinforce the line.
- To show non aggressive posture, and compel the British to help France if Belgium is invaded
Read more about this topic: Maginot Line
Famous quotes containing the word purposes:
“His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding ev’ry hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flow’r.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“Since [Rousseau’s] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)