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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

I've not been to Albania yet, so I can't comment from observation, but I'm surmising that most all off these bunkers would be pretty useless militarily anyway.

A bunker, by itself, is not much of a defense. It kinda advertises the defender position. Without writing a paper on the subject, the short version is that they're useful as part of a defensive plan, occupied by troops trained in their use.

Having a random bunker, unsupported, in the middle if nowhere is not useful from a defensive point of view.

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Most bunkers were in line of 5, and connected by ditches/trenches. So, they almost were never by themselves (unless in some isolated aerea), but in lines, and connected to a network of trenches. As the war in Ukraine shows, trenches are still useful.

There was also communication lines, (hard telephone lines), in ditches about 1m deep, in order to survive nuclear / emp attacks.

When I was a little kid, we'd play hide and seek in those bunkers, or we'd play 'castle take over' with self made wooden swords, romans vs illyrians as kids. (Or Albanians vs Turks). Which team conquered the most bunkers, would win.

They were fun as a kid, but we had to watch out for wild animals (or snakes), take refuge on those bunkers.

Now most of them are being scraped, to recoup the metal, so there are few left.

Are you sure? I just spent two months in Albania and there are bunkers literally everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. I must’ve counted thousands.

yeah, I get that 'you see them everywhere', but almost 2/3rd of them have been scrapped, and only the large ones remain, and some left in tourist areas.

So, you are really seeing the 1/3rd left. The bunker built out during communism, was truly crazy.

> It kinda advertises the defender position.

Which can be a point. What do you do if you're a foot soldier and such a bunker is on your way? First, you stop. Maybe your platoon tries to find a way around it, maybe you call reinforcements (direct fire) to take it out, maybe you set up a heavy machine gun to suppress it while you cross it. But all of this takes time, which is one of the main purposes of such defensive structures - to slow the enemy down. Interestingly, such a bunker will partially work in this role even if it's unoccupied, since making sure it is in fact empty will still take time. Now consider that there's almost a million of such bunkers slowing you down. You also have to consider the era, today they'd be an easier target than in the 1970s.

If it's just a random box you move left or right and keep going. Sure there might be a conversation, but frankly it's not gonna slow the army down more than a smoke break will.

The density of these things needs to be seen to truly grasp the scale.

Assuming they were actually all manned and able to provide interlocking fire as designed (a large assumption) - there would be no moving left or right. There would simply be another bunker or three in your next chosen path.

I've visited Albania and their placement seemed quite random to me. Possibly there was some system in place which I didn't notice (I didn't go to study them specifically). They made up their deficiencies in numbers, but it's a question of how many would be manned and supplied in case of war.

I've also visited one interwar Czechoslovak fortification complex, and these were completely different beasts with an elaborate design (network of connected fortifications, vast underground spaces/infrastructure...). But they were also much more expensive to build than the rudimentary Albanian designs.

> interwar Czechoslovak fortification complex

Got a pointer/URL ? Sounds interesting. Czech design always stands out.

Here it is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_border_fortific...

Sadly it was never used. Czechoslovak politians just decided to give up to Hitler

> Czechoslovak politians *just decided* to give up to Hitler

"I think you will find it's a bit more complicated than that".

Sir is falling into the trap (alarmingly common in the USA) of simplifying history to the point of meaninglessness. Indeed, you would do well to understand why the UK and France ceased their support for Bohemia in an act of appeasement; an act that certainly wasn't taken lightly and was itself done for complex reasons, partly arising from the trauma of the Great War that was still fresh in many minds.

The clueless downvoters are out again!

If you bypass a fortification, you just earned yourself an attack behind the front on your supply lines. The seems unwise.

This is the secondary point of a fortification (unless something has drastically changed since I was taught these matters).

> would be pretty useless militarily anyway

There's the commonly shared story about them that it turned out soldiers can't shoot from the smaller ones without going deaf, even when using ear protection.

I don't know if it's true or not, but having been in one of them, it seems likely. A concrete dome is pretty much the perfect shape to reflect all the sound waves right back at you.

Today bunkers could be operated remotely (using deeply buried optical fiber) or they could be even autonomous, so this would no longer be a problem.

The opinion among the few Albanian history nerds in Albanian that I know is that the bunker project was really about diverting the country's resources into busy work to keep the population occupied, instead of investing in intellectually stimulating pursuits that could result in a threat to Hoxha's control.

Give me a single example of a useful bunker in the history of war. With my modest knowdeldge, from the Maginot line to the Atlantic Wall, none. They're pretty much like locks. Can be cracked with a cocktail of goodwill and *time*.

Ok, but wouldn't that be also true if you substitute every "bunker" and "defence" word with "tank" and "attack"?

I don't see a goal of your comment.

Tanks, unlike bunkers, can move. Fairly quickly, in fact.

They can move. They can be repositioned. They can congregate to provide mutual support.

More significantly they can be used in attack as well as defense.

Right, "able to operate in territory you didn't control yesterday" is a pretty big offensive bonus for tanks relative to bunkers.

Sure, but my point stands. It still has to be occupied by trained troops to make sense, just like those bunkers. Both had to be used smart, both can be misused.

That doesn't make them pointless, it makes their use cases narrow. Hence a coffee shop in one of them.

Counterexample: The swiss defense plans

But the random alpine bunkers are not so random, as they are part of a National Redoubt strategy (doctrine?) that's a bit less paranoid than what Hoxha conceived. Reading the actual page let me know that Albanian Partisan had similar idea to the Swiss (mountain-based guerrilla warfare), but Hoxha just said no.

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