Moulins, Jean-Jaques/Truttmann Ligne Maginot du Désert. La défense du limes républicain. La Ligne Mareth, sud-tunisien 1934-1943

Unlike the Maginot Line, the Mareth Line is a very little known French fortification. Located in southern Tunisia, at the level of Mareth on the latitude of the island of Djerba, it was planned from 1934 to protect Tunisia, which was then a French protectorate, from a sudden attack from Libya (Italian colony). It is based on the course of a wadi whose steep banks have been built as an anti-tank barrier and includes a belt south of Gabes, but above all it is based on 49 fortified bases on both sides of Mareth, with a total of 124 concrete structures of all kinds stretching over 35 kilometres from the Matmata mountains to the sea.

In addition, there are the defences of the border town of Ben Gardanne and installations to prevent a western bypass near Tatahouine, Ksar El Hallouf and Bir Soltane (west of Medina). The facility was built on the initiative of Commander Rime-Bruneau and constructed by the pioneer force with the sole energy of military manpower and modest material resources, but was nevertheless well thought out. Since it was functional but not attacked by Mussolini's fascist troops in 1940, the fortified line was demilitarised. It was to be rearmed and fiercely defended a few years later by Axis troops fighting the British 8th Army. After 12 years of intensive exploration, Jean-Jacques Moulins and Michel Truttmann, two specialists in fortifications, have meticulously recorded the positions still visible in the terrain, despite the lack of accurate up-to-date maps and the vagaries of trekking in the Sahel. In addition, after patient research in the military archives, more than thirty families of contemporary witnesses to the planning, construction, occupation and defence of this fortified line have added great richness to this book, especially through amazing testimonies and unpublished photographs. Reportages by amateur and professional photographers such as André Papillon or Victor Sebag are shown, but also photos of a family related to the writer Elsa Triolet. Thus it was a whole tribe that, answering the call of the desert, left Paris, lived near Mareth amidst the troops and, after the surrender of the Axis powers, took possession of the battlefield again. Undeniably, this book brings much that is new! It will encourage everyone to better understand this little-known period in the history of the Second World War, or to visit the battlefield of that time for themselves.