GERMAN PLAN OF INVASION

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 364, 19 February 1937, Page 8

GERMAN PLAN OF INVASION

France to Increase Maginot Line

250 JO 600 MILES

* PARIS, Nov. *8? A sensational document, discovered by the French Seeret Service, and giving' details, it is alleged, of Germany’s plan to invade France through Swiss territory, as the reason behind the decision to increase the “Maginot line’ ; of fortifications from 250 to 600 miles.

Fortifications now stretch along the Franco-German frontier. Soon the impenetrable line of defence will begin at the Channel on the Franco-Belgium frontier and end at Geneva. The French War Department is leaving nothing to chance. New fortifications will be built on exactly the same principles as those already completed. A million men will be able to live underground and yet withstand attacks of advancing enemy hordes. I Imve covered the ground of the existing fortifications. Around the war-scarred towns of Mulhouse, Verdun, Metz, Thionville, steel turrets peep out of hedges, fields, and even from out of ponds and lakes.

Sixty feet beneath a labyrinth of tunnels and huge chambers, housing the world’s most deadly weapons, stretch for 250 miles.

A hundred thousand men are always stationed in this underground city. Thousands more can be rushed as reinforcements within an hour of alarm.

There are magnificently equipped hospitals, vast recreation chambers, kitchens and dining-rooms, store-rooms containing thousands of tons of frozen meat and 500,000,000 gallons of red wine.

Grimmest feature is the cemetery. It comprises huge tanks of sulphuric acid in which bodies may be dissolved. At various points in the “Maginot line” are tunnels leading to the surface. They are there enable counterattacks to be made. Tanks and the rapid mechanised force can rush to meet the enemy—infantry can swiftly fob low.

| Even if all France were shattered by ' air attack the Maginot line would still stand. And should enemy storm and capture “the line,’’ the high command of the French Army would still hold one more trnmp card. A member of the General Staff would make his way to a tiny cement cottage a few miles from Paris.

Inside he would find switches and gear-levers like those in railway signal* boxes. One pull at the levers and, icores of miles *away the whole of the Maginot line would burst into the sky.