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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

You see pillboxes all over the place in England. I guess they are just too much effort to get rid of.

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.

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If the Luftwaffe had air superiority, the Royal Navy was in big trouble. Big navy warships are extremely vulnerable to air attack. Plenty of examples in WW2.

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.

>Big navy warships are extremely vulnerable to air attack. Plenty of examples in WW2.

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.

A Stuka sank a Soviet cruiser with one bomb. The Bismarck was crippled by one torpedo fired by a stringbag.

Besides, I never heard anything about the British defenses against an invasion. The D-Day shore defenses were epic, but breached in a day.

There were pillboxes, tank traps, barbed wire and minefields. Both on the coast and inland. For example there were defensive 'stop lines': https://www.hiddenwiltshire.com/post/wiltshire-walks-along-t...

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!

In addition to the Stop Lines the other poster has mentioned, there were a number of Auxiliary Units set up. These were undocumented groups with their own arms bunker storing 'terrorist' and assassination weapons whose job was to cause chaos and disruption should we be invaded. These were dotted all over the country, including up in Scotland.

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...

https://www.staybehinds.com/

There was a recent history hit podcast about this. Apparently their first job on invasion was to assassinate anyone who knew where their arms were stored, including local British officials and ex-members of the unit.

Given how secret it all was, I wonder how many of their arms and explosives caches are still hidden in the British countryside.

Rommel's Afrika Korp did very well against the British and the fixed defenses the British had built. The Korp was supplied entirely by sea and air.

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.

> I guess they are just too much effort to get rid of.

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...

> 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.

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.

Still pretty terrifying and you're not going to hear the second one falling in after your eardrums are gone from the first bang in such an enclosed space :(

First I heard of this. Is it a common feature in British pillboxes?

Apparently some of the German pillboxes/bunkers had a fake ventilation duct. If you put a grenade in, it appeared back at your feet!

From memory, it wasn't so much that they were fake ventilation ducts, but that they were plumbed in a manner that dropping a grenade in them at the upper level caused them drop out at your feet. Kind of like how flushing your toilet doesn't cause water to flow up from your shower drain.

The initial landing would have been successful, assuming German air superiority and an actual will to execute it, of course. There's simply not enough time for the Royal Navy to interrupt the landing unless they're already assembled so close to the beachhead that they'd risk getting taken out before D-Day by the Luftwaffe. Also, the landing would have involved plenty of paratrooper and airborne infantry as a first wave.

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.

> You see pillboxes all over the place in England. I guess they are just too much effort to get rid of.

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.

In theory. You're meant to have your mortars sighted in with a danger close fire mission right in front of your forward defensive line to avoid people getting that close. And stacks and stacks of razor wire. It's kind of crazy this sort of fighting is happening right now around the world.

Where I lived in (western) Germany, there were still loads of pillboxes and bunkers from the war. The ones they did have to destroy often required ridiculous amounts of explosive to have any effect. I went on a tour of the area once and the guide mentioned how they had needed to flood some of the bunkers with water first to increase the efficacy of the explosives.

I recently reread The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's really worthwhile and there's a lot of stuff people have forgotten.

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.

> 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.

Things in Russia could have gone the other way, and I believe nearly did due to Stalin's paranoid purges of the officer corp and his unhelpful interference in military matters.

Also 'lend lease' was a big factor in Russia's victory (in addition to Russian bravery and their climate and geography).

I think my comment about lend lease isn't controversial. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease :

"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."

So I assume I am getting downvoted because I said the Russian were brave in WWII? That is hard to deny, isn't it? Lots of German accounts praise the near suicidal bravery of Russian soldiers in WWII[1]. But I get that isn't a very popular thing to say given the monstrous war crimes that the Russian state is currently committing.

[1]Admitedly some of this bravery may have been due to NKVD stationed behind them with orders to shoot retreaters.

It’s not commonly remembered that the Soviets, with Allied assistance, are who really won WW2- the Germans had something like 90% of their forces in the East.

Given the current war I’m unsurprised you’re getting downvotes for anything that may be understood as pro-Russian.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am 100% rooting for Ukraine. But I don't think we should write out of history the sacrifice Russian solders made in beating Nazi Germany, just because Stalin was a monster and the current criminal regime.

I upvoted. Their bravery in WW II is a fact. Yes, they were forced into it, but "battling for Mother Russia" was a powerful motivator, too. Also, the fact that the Nazis literally wanted them all dead or slaves.

But the second world war did end in a decisive victory? Hitler simply bit off more than he could chew by making war with pretty much everyone else, more or less the same mistake Napoleon made.

"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.

I would have said Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq all ended with decisive victories - there is no South Vietnam, the Taliban rule in Kabul, and Saddam Hussein was hanged.

>The staff battles were about the width of the beachhead.

There were similar arguments about how many beaches they should attack on D-Day.

As an aside, the various sources I've read have indicated that in the event of Sealion, both combatants had plans to resort to poison gas.

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