Had French Military Intelligence known there were absolutely no panzers facing them, the situation might have been different. Not only was there no German tracked armor west of the Rhine, the Wehrmacht possessed no anti-tank weapons capable of defeating invading armor. Germany’s strongest defense proved to be blitzkrieg newsreels that intimidated and duped French Intelligence.

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Contrary to Nazi propaganda that alleged unlimited military potential, the German army lacked fighting equipment. Its units were drastically short of machine guns, machine pistols, artillery and tanks. The vaunted panzer force numbered a mere 200 Mark IV medium tanks–the most modern armor in the German inventory–which were armed with low-velocity 75mm guns. The remainder of the force consisted of hastily produced Mark II light tanks with 20mm cannons and turret-mounted machine guns and even more of the lightly armored Mark I, mounting only two machine guns. At best these light tanks, originally relegated to training exercises until heavier tanks became available, were suitable for mechanized reconnaissance. By the time armored units could be shuttled quickly to the Western Front, the French might already have occupied the Rhineland.

Germany’s scarcity of motor transport resulted in the Wehrmacht’s last-minute procurement of vehicles of all shapes and descriptions. The German army’s hasty acquisition of an additional 16,000 civilian vehicles added to its maintenance burden. Many of these vehicles came from recently acquired Austria and Czechoslovakia. The problem of getting spare parts for trucks exceeded nightmare proportions, as there were 100 different types of trucks in army service, 52 kinds of cars and 150 different sorts of motorcycles. As a result, many of the Wehrmacht’s reconnaissance troops rode in motorcycle sidecars painted in brilliant civilian paint schemes.

Taking a calculated risk, Hitler stripped the Western defenses in an attempt to guarantee overwhelming victory in the east. What remained west of the Rhine would have hardly sufficed to hold off a determined enemy attack. While battles raged in Poland, 43 diluted German divisions stretched the length of the western German border from Denmark to Switzerland. In the Saar, German First Army commander General Erwin von Witzleben counted 13 hollow divisions under his command.

The threat of an aggressive French offensive plagued the First Army commander daily. Witzleben, who had actually retired from the service some years earlier, was hardly suited to a field command. The general consistently found himself in uninspired assignments, and the Saar posting was no exception. Witzleben’s defense was hampered by a lack of anti-tank guns and artillery and the fact that his infantry divisions were of low quality and equipped with machine guns of World War I vintage. Opposing Witzleben were 10 fully equipped French divisions anchored in the formidable defenses of the Maginot Line.

Named for André Maginot, a war veteran and the French minister of war until his death in 1932, the Maginot Line was the most elaborate and expensive string of fortifications ever built. The French had studied the feasibility of a permanent defensive barrier facing Germany after the end of World War I, using Verdun fortresses as models. The first payment on the $500 million project was approved by parliament in 1929, and work began in 1930.

Construction of the fortified line was not just a result of the post­World War I uneasiness the French felt for their eastern neighbors. In 1928, Germany and its impotent 100,000-man peacetime army, the Reichswehr, posed little threat to France; nor could the Germans force French, British and American armies from the occupied Rhineland. French domestic issues also prompted the region’s militarization. In 1928, France’s Alsace-Lorraine provinces–which had been lost to Germany in the peace treaty that ended the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and had been regained by France through the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I–now petitioned to become autonomous regions. The thought of these resource-rich provinces–so recently gained at an incredible cost–leaving France again was intolerable. Maginot directed the construction of the line as a permanent concrete reminder of the area’s allegiance. Indeed, most of the proposed line lay in a region of France inhabited by nearly a million German-speaking Alsatians.

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