I never understood making the F-35 with those possibilities at hand.
The Frenchies will never change. After the blood bath of WW1 the French damn near bankrupted their country building their marvelous, wondrous, super fantastic concrete hole in the ground called’’ The Maginot Line’’. A marvel of underground tunnels with a small electrically-powered train to move men and material about deep below the ground, large radio rooms to communicate with the world above , barracks, mess halls, infirmaries, storerooms with gun emplacements of various caliber cannon and machine guns set in concrete and steel pill boxes and revetments fronted by fields of land mines and barbed wire. No more would French soldiers be slaughtered in the open as before. Now they could sit in comfort and safety behind concrete and barbed wire while their enemies, ‘’les Boches’’, the Germans, would fling themselves uselessly against the great Maginot Line. Trouble was the Frenchies were ready to fight the last war and the Germans were fighting the new one. A mobile war of tanks and fast moving masses of troops supported by tactical air power. When war came in May 1940 the Germans didn’t oblige the French by committing suicide on the Maginot Line, they just went around it. Wouldn’t have mattered much even if the Germans hadn’t side-stepped the Line. The doddering old fools of the French High Command were miles behind the lines in an grand old chateau without even so much as a telephone. They relied on dispatch riders to ferry messages back and forth. Seventy three years later and the Frenchies are still missing the boat. And in a supreme bit of irony, the man who designed this underground fortress,World War 1 hero and Minister of Defense, Andre Maginot, never lived to see it’s completion. He died one day after eating bad oysters.
