WATER DEFENCES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 23, 27 January 1940, Page 24

WATER DEFENCES

FRENCH PLAN PERFECTED

The French assert: that they have perfected a water defence system, similar to the flooding preparations made by the Netherlands and Belgium, desighed to trap the mechanised forces of Germany should they attempt a sudden thrust through France's neutral neighbours, says a United Press message to. the "New York Tunes."

The new French system, explained to correspondents by the highest French commanding general in the area, has been so arranged that low, flat terrain through which an enemy would have to pass could be flooded from rivers and canals in little more than three minutes while guns of the Maginot Line laid down a crossfire of shrapnel and machine-gun bullets calculated to wipe: out whatever attackers were not drowned.

The French plan, developed on a much greater scale than the Netherlands and Belgian scheme, is thus the third water barrier against invasion by tanks and mechanised armies. In three hours, it is asserted, more than half of the Franco-Belgian border could be inundated.

Designers of the new border defence contend that it could hold the Germans back indefinitely. They point to the Yser floods in northern Belgium that halted.the Germans for more than four years in the World War as proof that water is the most effective barrier against armies that move on wheels.

The French water defence plans are being kept as secret as possible. Nothing relative to them is visible to persons travelling through the area. The German General Staff, it is believed, has no inkling of where the floods w6utd; beloosed; or how extensive they would be, or how deep;

In places both sea water and fresh water would be diverted over the lowlands. The French have not tested their water defences, as the others have, because the countryside already offers ample evidence of their effect.