Originally posted by zraver
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It should also be noted that - unlike what's sometimes portrayed, a bit oddly mostly in anglophone literature - the Maginot line was not some line drawn across the countryside with fortresses. For heavy fortifications it factually consisted of a single heavily fortified strategic region covering (12 gros ouvrages in a front-facing 15 km radius semicircle built around three reused pre-WW1 German fortresses serving as artillery forts, themselves in a semicircle around Thionville), as well as a grand total of four sets of mutually-supporting dual gros ouvrage forts separate from that (one to the west, three to the east - a fourth to the east was planned but never built).
Structurally only the gros ouvrages were built to sustain artillery barrages - they were fully intended to shell each other to clear off any attackers, and did so with some shrugging off tens of thousands of friendly-fire impacts. The 500 petit ouvrages and casemates and the 5000 blockhouses that formed the vast majority of bunkers the Maginot line had about 2.0-2.5 meters of front-facing reinforced concrete. While that could stave off infantry and tank and field gun attacks, they did not fare well under sustained artillery fire of a few thousand 150mm shells, and - other than the petit ouvrages - were not intended to anyway. The intention behind these were to delay the enemy for a concerted withdrawal of troops before the artillery forts and mobile artillery would lay that entire sector under fire.
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