I always wondered why the military that exploited the weaknesses of the Maginot line would themselves use an "out-dated" strategy.

It would have worked remember Dieppe, another thing Rommel wanted to send his heavy panzer in, as soon as he found out about the invasion. Hitler gave orders he wasn't to be wakened from sleeping, if he had done this D day would have been different.

@@fucker1714 Hitler liked to think of himself as a talented military tactician, which he wasn't, and his megalomania wouldn't let him defer to the expert career generals in his High Command. They learned to tread carefully when attempting to advise him uninvited or ameliorate his positions because they didn't want to trigger his wrath. We're very lucky that no-one was successful in assassinating him, since his own unforced errors probably knocked a year or two off the duration of the war.

They done a lot of building for a 5 yr war ...is BS

@@RichWoods23 he also thought he was a classical portrait painter.

what ship? the endurance?

@@vocalthrower448 yes, they found it

Ig their making a documentary for nat geo that’s coming later this year which is kinda disappointing🤷🏽‍♂️

Indeed, we really need it

I just saw it on the news. The Endurance is in remarkably good condition 10,000 feet down.

What a missed opportunity for this channel! Posting a pre-packaged video instead of the breaking news after all the build up on the Shackleton story???

Money talks and BS walks. 😏😖 No different to any other money hungry channel. 🤷‍♂️ C’mon Dan, be nice! 🧐

Well, the facts weren't quite accurate, alas. It's the usual overemphasis on the importance of the Western Front. There was no intent and no reason to "turn the focus back to the west" once the Soviet Union had been vaniquished. The only intent was to keep the Allies out of Europe. Even the oft-discussed Operation Sealion never had the intention to conquer the UK, but to knock it out of the war. Likewise, if there was a singular fatal blow to Hitler, it's called "Stalingrad". But the failure of Case Blue pretty much nailed the coffin already.

maybe write a book on those stories, keeping them alive for generations to come

@@CarbiesChronicles I don't think they would believe those.

@@cyankirkpatrick5194 Does that matter? If you think they are true, stand by them.

RECORD AS MUCH AUDIO AS YOU CAN WHILE YOU CAN!!! Regardless of truth, it's your elder patriarch, record while you can. You will regret not doing it when he is gone. Don't tell him though, he won't tell you anything. Trust a old grunt, I wish I would have recorded my veteran elders of my family, unfortunately we all got PTSD, including myself.

@@forcesightknight dad has been gone since 2002 I just got the stories with me

I think the Nazis just ran out of concrete for that part

As walls ain’t roofs,disagreed.Don’t take my word for it.Go to wikipedia.org & find “wall” & “roof”.

The maginot line was designed to buy time for France to properly mobilise, it was not supposed to be impregnable. There was also a lot of cost cutting which made them far less effective in combat.

The maginot could have worked if the Belgian king would have allowed it to extend into Belgium, also the German advance through the Ardennes could have easily been stopped with planes but the french refused to believe their recon

There was a wonderful commercial for the History channel. Scene opens with a mum and a giggling toddler play on a Normandy beach. The scene slowly fades to combat footage from the same location, then fades back to the original mother and child. Very powerful stuff.

They didn't think it would hold. They _knew_ it wouldn't hold. The Nazi leadership was into big lies, and this was one of their biggest. The Atlantic Wall can't be compared to the many orders of magnitude more sophisticated and effective Maginot Wall. As they say in the video, one important goal when building fortifications is to dictate where the enemy can attack. The Maginot Line prevented the Germans from taking the quick and easy route to Paris and forced them to go through the Low Countries, where the French believed that they, the British, and the Belgians could defeat them. They thought wrong, but the Maginot Line fulfilled its purpose, and nearly five years later fulfilled its purpose again when the US Seventh Army rode out the Nordwind offensive thanks to it. As the Seventh's war diary put it: "[it] showed what a superb fortification it was".

I hear you, but what other choice did Rommel have?

They got around the line. The allies were going to have to go through theirs (and from the sea, which since Gallipoli didn't seem possible, with contested amphibious landings viewed as suicide).

@@Riddim4 I was just meaning that very few walls have ever really worked like they were supposed to. People will find a way. I guess the Berlin Wall held better than any and that was just because it was small and well guarded against unarmed civilians. And yet even then people found a way through that bastard

Except it missed one key point: The wall succeeded admirably in making its breaching incredibly expensive in terms of men and material.

Fixed fortifications are a perfect solution, right up to the time they meet the enemy.

Patton didn't set foot on the beach untill thousands of grunts made bloody mud out of the sand. He didn't have to overcome much, personally. Sure, he was a bad ass, but almost every grunt is that manages to keep their shorts dry.

Patton was a tactical genius and a strategical idiot. That you can overcome an obstacle in theory is a non-issue. The question is whether the price you'll have to pay is in any way commensurate with a)the strategic value and b)what folks back home are willing to accept.

@@laner989 : What was then in wwl? The frontlines had been, with exeption of Alpine Front, two opossing lines of fieldfortifications.

@@brittakriep2938 The allies developed a method for effective mobilisation, the Germans were defeated shortly after.

It would have been better for smaller guns and more of them.

maybe, but the counter point was the coastal defences were not supposed to overturn the allied attack on thier own, but hold it up and slow it down enough for the mobile forces in france, some 11 divisions of panzers and panzer-grenadiers, to counter attack and thrown them back into the sea. In other words, they WERE planning to use mobile forces to counterattack. A key assumption of the german defence strategy was that the allies would NEED to capture a port facility in order to properly supply their troops, so defences were concentrated around ports like Cherbourg, Calais, Dunkrik, etc. agian, the difficulty in supplying troops over open beaches would slow the allied build up and give the germans more time to mass and counterattack. However, the allies knew this, and made extensive efforts to destroy the transport links up to the theatre, as well as using extensive roving air patrols to shoot up everything that drove in german rear areas. the net result was that the germans struggled to bring thier panzers up to the front, having to road march, and then only at night, and by the time they could get to the front the allies were ashore in strength to great to dislodge. Rommel, having fought under allied air superiority in north Africa, understood how oppressive it was, but his superiors, used to the eastern front where the soviets could at best contest the airspace, did not. If those divisions had been forward deployed into normandy and calais, they might have had more of an effect, but its unclear, and not certain. the allies would doubtless have changed their plans somewhat if the pazers were concentrated in northern france, by launching the southern France invasion first to try and draw some south, for example. The allies had also invested HEAVILY in amphibious technology and equipment, stuff like landing ships, the higgins boat or especially the DUKW that could deliver goods form offshore transports directly into supply dumps inland, all of which invalidated the german assumptions about what could be supported over open beaches.

Well the theory is that by merit of the defenses being there as to being absent, the allies would be forced to funnel their invasion to a limited number of landing sites, which could be targeted by entrenched troops(and the limited number of reserve divisions spared the Eastern Front), and that would negate their numerical superiority in an amphibious landing. And it did, for a little while. No defenses means they can pick the nicest beaches all the way up the coast and land at their leisure, the defenses resulted in the invasion happening later since they had to be accounted for. Some weapons don't need to be used to be useful. Look at nuclear weapons, their mere existence renders their holders basically immune to invasion, nobody wants a nuke in their face, and so they don't engage at all, and the weapons aren't used at all.

Seems the Germans had the best engineering but the worst resource management. Take the incredible Gustav gun. Impressive in every way but, as I understand it, it took thousands of men to lay track, assemble, and defend it, to say nothing about the time required. How many fast, light tanks could have been fielded with those resources? How much more support materiel and food could have been sent to, say, Stalingrad were it not being diverted to the Gustav guns? Imagine if those resources had been dedicated to the Luftwaffe and more accurate, albeit smaller, bombs? I guess it's lucky Hitler was not dissuaded from his apparent bigger-is-better attitude in favor of more efficient plans.

That's what I always believed was the strategy, too. Slow them down, slap them with the SS panzer groups. Fortunately, Allied airpower and resilient ground troops made the SS think twice.

The rest were in Russia

When High Command asked that Hitler would release the Panzer tanks to counter-attack the Normandy invasion they were told that Hitler was sleeping and could not be disturbed. As one German General remarked at the time - 'we are going to lose this war because Hitler must not be disturbed'.

@@itsonlycapnkirk You'll lose a war even faster by not sleeping

@sewagii : I am not to familiar with english language, so i thought a wall is in english a ,Mauer' made of concrete, stones or bricks, while a ,Wall' made of wood , earth , sandbags or ,unglued' stones ( don' t know english word for Mörtel) is a rampart . ls this wrong?

@sewagii : I am german, so i know, that in case of Westwall or Atlantikwall no Mauer is meant, but a line / system of obstacles, field fortifications and stone/ concrete fortifications. The difference between Mauer and Wall in german (my) language i know, but i was wrong about english language.

Bullshit whoever gave you that information was not at Normandy beach And you should double check your facts instead of falsifying history And discrediting the men that fought And died there My own grandfather at Juno(mike section) They had a 1 in 2 chance of living in the first hour However into the 2nd hour they were pushing into Bernières And by mid morning it was fully ours ..........And the Canadians found weapons not used Crates of ammo of all sorts. And faced Tanks with shells and Machine guns And members of the SS squadrons under heavy fire And losses was the first to complete all of its objectives .........Further inland was Andaines forest in Normandy Where the Germans had a Fuel/Ammo/Food dump storage for the Juno section with Trucks and trailers Being only 1 hr away at 71kms a hr ..Do you still think my facts would be wrong to say...Hmm the Germans pretty much knew the allied ships were coming And already had More than 2 hours worth of ammo? Because i know having a few thousand rounds You will still need to change out the barrel And have fresh troops take over the dead ones ...They were simply over run

Very good point, a gun is useless without ammo

Nope, Cherbourg was properly destroyed by the Germans. The first deep sea port that got operational was Antwerp. But Montgomery failed to make the liberation of the shipping lane towards Antwerp a priority, allowing the Germans fortified that region. It was taken months later and at a very heavy cost to the Canadians. That is the second major blunder by Montgomery that lengthened the war by months. A man who is given much more credit than he is due.

Expensive

And it has little benefit. By now they are effectively just big rocks lying in the beach. So there kind of is nothing to clean up.

a lot of them have been removed as well. take a look a Dutch coastline. Deltaworks, Maasvlakte Rotterdam port area demanded big interventions in landscape

Not a proper comparison as the Germans also fortified Belgium, something the French neglected.

Could have been the Netherlands as well

WW1 trenches weren't completely overcome

There are castles both medieval and ancient which have never fallen to assault. Some did fall due to betrayal or a surrender obliged by defeat in the wider war, or starvation and disease after anything up to twenty years of siege, but there are still a handful which never fell.

@@RichWoods23 OK since the invention of gun powder (very few) fixed fortifications have not been defeated in one way or the another. See The Maginot Line The West Wall Etc. Happy now?

@@fasthracing Yeah, pretty much. Ta!

Ironically "Todt".

Right, it isn't like the Allies invaded ITALY or anything in 1943. Saying that Normandy was the second front is almost as cringe as saying it was the beginning of the end. I'm pretty sure that Germany failing in Operation Barbarossa was a beginning to the end. Everything the Western Allies did shortened the war but Hitler was going to lose. Russia was bleeding Germany dry of men and resources.

Around the 12 minute mark. Basically the wall was too long and the defences not deep enough

@@kevingarrett2559 And what is new about that? The Nazis and the Allieds knew that from the start.

@@bernardfrederic6535 you asked. I answered.

Trump's wall couldn't even stop the wind. LOL

@@timothyhouse1622 -- but I thought he was an expert. lol

That's a bizarre claim to make.

So you would have preferred the Nazis WIN?