A Brief Introduction to Military Pillboxes
heritagecalling.com
heritagecalling.com
Just like anthills being connected to each other across countries, pillboxes are a huge, cross-country remnant of our common history.
I think you’ll find most of those are Dutch, as a defense against attacks from land.
It must have been terrifying to be in a pillbox if the enemy managed to get close enough to throw grenades in or, even worse, if they had a flamethrower.
BTW analysis after the war showed that the Germans had pretty zero chance of a successful invasion of the UK in WWII (Operation Sealion), even if they had managed to gain air superiority. The Royal Navy was too strong and the Germans had no amphibious landing ships. They were considering towing flat bottom barges full of troops and equipment across the channel. Probably 3+ barges per towing ship, at near walking speed. It would have been suicide.
Destroying the Luftwaffe was a huge priority prior to D-Day, and they succeeded. The Luftwaffe was not a factor in the D-Day invasion.
That's true. But there were also plenty of British submarines, destroyers, gunboats, MTBs and other smaller ships. Also Germany didn't have much in the way of specialized maritime attack aircraft (IIRC because Herman Goering didn't want any competition from the German Navy).
The RN certainly would have taken heavy losses from German aircraft, submarines and naval mines (which were planned to be sown both sides of the invasion corridor). But it's hard to imagine that they could have landed enough troops and supplies against a far superior naval force without proper amphibious landing ships. Imagine trying to get tanks and artillery ashore from a barge.
Besides, I never heard anything about the British defenses against an invasion. The D-Day shore defenses were epic, but breached in a day.
But it wasn't on the scale of the 'Atlantic wall'.
Trivia fact. They removed road signs during the war, to make it harder for an invading force to work out where they were. It also made it harder for British people to get around!
They had all sorts of specialised and experimental weaponry, the links below cover some of the details. My late father was involved in their decommissioning as part of his National Service in the very late 1940s.
https://parhamairfieldmuseum.co.uk/british-resistance-organi...
http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk/other-wwii-defensive-s...
Given how secret it all was, I wonder how many of their arms and explosives caches are still hidden in the British countryside.
The Korp eventually was overwhelmed because:
1. The British were far better supplied with troops and equipment (also shipped in)
2. The Korp used Enigma, which the British had cracked. With that, the British knew where every German supply ship was and when, and sank most of it. They also knew Rommel's battle plans in advance.
The U-Boot fleet was also lost because of Enigma.
For a month or two in 1940, Hitler was pushing his military for invasion plans for England. They dutifully came up with "plans." We know it never happened, of course. There was a lot of discussion among the staff.
The staff battles were about the width of the beachhead. Too narrow and the English could overwhelm it before they could break out; too wide and the Germans didn't have the naval forces to defend and resupply it.
Eventually, Hitler decided they could starve out / bomb out England, plus he wanted to invade Russia.
Which worked great! I think WW2 was the first great example of how wars have become unwinnable; Germany had success conquering large swathes of Europe through sheer force, overwhelming odds and not enough time to prepare, but they couldn't make it to the UK, and Russia was just too large, too long a distance, and too harsh a climate to have any chances.
More recent examples; Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine. None of which ended up in a decisive victory.
"According to the Russian historian Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, Lend-Lease had a crucial role in winning the war:
On the whole the following conclusion can be drawn: that without these Western shipments under Lend-Lease the Soviet Union not only would not have been able to win the Great Patriotic War, it would not have been able even to oppose the German invaders, since it could not itself produce sufficient quantities of arms and military equipment or adequate supplies of fuel and ammunition. The Soviet authorities were well aware of this dependency on Lend-Lease. Thus, Stalin told Harry Hopkins [FDR's emissary to Moscow in July 1941] that the U.S.S.R. could not match Germany's might as an occupier of Europe and its resources."
[1]Admitedly some of this bravery may have been due to NKVD stationed behind them with orders to shoot retreaters.
Given the current war I’m unsurprised you’re getting downvotes for anything that may be understood as pro-Russian.
"Decisive victory" is a bit tricky to define; the Soviets and US has had some trouble in Afghanistan, but the Taliban won pretty decisively – twice. First in the civil war of the 90s, and more recently against the Afghan government after the US left. On the other hand all these conflicts are related, and who knows what the future will bring?
Vietnam war ended in a fairly decisive victor for North-Vietnam, the US defeated the Iraqi government without too much trouble (but then had a lot more trouble with other groups).
If we look at past wars then long-lasting conflicts weren't too rare: the Protestant/Catholic religious wars took forever, the wars of the roses in England, 80 years war between Netherlands and Spain, etc. etc.
There were similar arguments about how many beaches they should attack on D-Day.
Terrifying yes, but what this article doesn't mention is that you generally have a hole for kicking grenades into. You do this when you dig foxholes as well.
Apparently some of the German pillboxes/bunkers had a fake ventilation duct. If you put a grenade in, it appeared back at your feet!
The big question would have been resupply. Germany didn't have the mulberry harbors and thus would have been forced to capture a port and ferry supply and reinforcements through it. That's when the Royal Navy could have run interference and I have no idea how that would have turned out.
So in the end, I think that the Royal Airforce saved the island.
There's a full-ass bunker in the city center where I live. Right in one of the main shopping streets. It's the storage space for a flower shop now. The sheer quantity of concrete in these things is absurd.
To an extent - as we've seen in Ukraine, farmers know a thing or two about removing abandoned military hardware from their fields.
The costs of removing a pillbox were £40-£120 at the time (US$1572-US$4719 in 2023 $)
According to [1] after the war the military could either demolish the defences and restore the land, or they could pay compensation to the landowner. And as there was a lot of reconstruction to be done and a shortage of labour, paying compensation was often the preferred option.
[1] https://chriskolonko.wordpress.com/2021/11/19/pillbox-myth-4...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/camp-hayden-abandoned-ww...
Triangle of Fire - The Harbor Defenses of Puget Sound (1897-1953): https://www.historylink.org/file/7524
Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend is the one I'd recommend visiting if you could only see one.
The romance of history! That's an interesting page though I love how much of this stuff is documented.
Artillery is very dangerous in war and a concrete bunker enables a team to work an anti tank weapon or machine gun and hold a position.
These are not intended to be used like a video game static defense that you just plop down and it'll take care of small stuff all on it's own. They must be used in conjunction with other forces in the area.
Like all military efforts, how effective they are is based on the context in which they are used.
This really all got mapped out during the First and Second Big Mistakes back in the 20th Century. You have your individual defensive positions (a quick foxhole if you are just going to be here 1-2 nights, a wood covered, protected hole in the ground if you are going to be here a week, concrete pill-boxes like these if you are not in enemy contact and don't expect the battle lines to changes quickly). But each position- no matter what it is made of- has a limited field of view, it can only protect a certain area. So the soldiers have to rely on each other- you build a network of these positions, with overlapping fields of view/fire, and connect them via buried telephone wire to each other and to friendly artillery and reserves and you have a formidable defense network: a machine gun in this pillbox makes all of the attacking infantry hug the ground, while the pill boxes next to it keep the enemy infantry from crawling up in your blind spot and throwing a grenade into your pillbox, and your artillery behind hits the enemy infantry while they are out in the open, crawling along the ground, and then your reserves launch a counter attack and push the enemy infantry back to their start point.
The German solution[1] to this defensive network in World War One was to empower small groups of soldiers to move completely on their own, to find the dead ground where no gun could hit them, then get as deep as possible- looking to cut telephone wires, to attack the enemy artillery and command posts, and let follow-on waves isolate and destroy individual pill-boxes. As part of a network of soldiers the pill-boxes were difficult to defeat. If you could isolate them and turn them into a couple of armed dudes they can be defeated, as you note.
The Germans adopted these tactics en masse for the so called Kaiserschlact- the "Peace Offensives" of 1918 where they tried to knock France and Britain out of the war before the US Army was fully ready to fight. It failed, in part because the infantry moved forward at the rate of march, while the infantry reinforced on defense at the rate of a train, and also once the attackers went over the top they could no longer communicate and coordinate with each other. If they couldn't find any dead zone, if they were caught by enemy artillery, they couldn't get any help from their comrades- then they were just a couple of armed dudes and no longer soldiers part of a larger team. After the war ended, a German named Heinz Guderian looked at that experience and realized if he got a whole bunch of tanks and could put the rest of the army (all the different types- artillery, infantry, anti-tank guns, engineers, etc.) onto vehicles and tie them together with radios he could fix both problems, and boom, you have Blitzkrieg tactics. (He used a different term for it in his book _Achtung, Panzer!_- Blitzkrieg was more of a PR term than a term used by professionals. His word for it was some German word that literally translates to "Attacking every level of the enemy defense simultaneously," which somehow did not catch on the way that Blitzkrieg did.)
[1]: The British and French came up with a different solution, relying more on heavy planning and staff-officer work and not empowering their junior leaders as much, because of industrial (the Germans had ~0 tanks in WW1, the UK/Fr had thousands) and cultural differences between the armies.
That we knew centuries earlier. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion_fort.
The movable version probably also is way older than World War One. The phalanx is an example. Of course, that’s quite different in looks from a modern squad of soldiers, but they still make sure there are eyes and weapons directed in all necessary directions.
Also, the German term you’re looking for is possibly “Bewegungskrieg”, which translates literally to “maneuver warfare”. That terminology did catch on. Interestingly, the Soviets developed a very similar doctrine during that period and called it “deep battle”. Unfortunately for the Soviets, the general who developed that doctrine, Tukhachevsky, was executed in the purges.
Hitler and Stalin were allies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
There's one with 2 dramatic sightlines down a country road outside of Bassins: https://maps.app.goo.gl/8MvLfAEJkt5vW9ak6
“He reckons that all declarations of war ought to be made into a kind of festival, with entrance tickets and music, like they have at bullfights. Then the ministers and generals of the two countries would have to come into the ring, wearing boxer shorts, and armed with rubber truncheons, and have a go at each other. Whoever is left on his feet, his country is declared the winner. That would be simpler and fairer than things are out here, where the wrong people are fighting each other.” ― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Slava Ukraine.
My dinky 9mm leaves my ears ringing shooting it just once, without protection, in a grassy field. So I'm drawing from that experience.
It’s worth sampling if only for Laurence Olivier’s narration.
There is a similar BBC made series about WW1 which is almost equally good called The Great War
You are right. My mistake.
>TBF I think the BBC showed it later on (in the 2000s?)
Perhaps that is why I misremembered it.