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A Brief Introduction to Military Pillboxes
- Blackthorn 3y agoHow useful would they have really been? #2 seems to imply it's to defend a road or transit point, no? But it's hard to see what a single pillbox would do against a column.
- shaftoe444 3y agoThey were usually placed along with anti tank defences and/or natural barriers. In truth any land fighting in England would have been a desperate last ditch defence after air and sea defences had been overwhelmed.
- newsclues 3y agoLook at what’s happening in Ukraine, a trench with logs and sandbags is a serious fortification. 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.
- Modified3019 3y agoThey absolutely make assaulting the location harder, forcing the enemy to bring to bear the correct tools and tactics in order to take them out if they don't want to take exaggerated losses. This slows down the enemy, buying time. 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.
- ranger207 3y agoA single pillbox would cause the column to fall out and go into battle formation, taking time and energy, and would likely be able to call in the column to headquarters to bring in artillery, airstrikes, or reinforcements. Even if it's taken out, single pillboxes are uncommon, so the enemy column would need to scout for other pillboxes nearby. Pillboxes deployed in groups would have overlapping fields of fire that would make it difficult to isolate and destroy any single pillbox, requiring more effort and inflicting more casualties on an enemy column.
- mandevil 3y agoA pillbox by itself is not worth much. A pillbox is, however, a key part of a network of defense. 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.
- vkou 3y agoIt's not going to stop a column, but it's going to delay it, prevent freedom of movement unless destroyed, and allow defenders to maneuver around a delayed enemy.
- shaftoe444 3y agoFunny I wasted a few hours today on this map of Second World War defences, pillboxes and all. https://edob.mattaldred.com/map/ https://edob.mattaldred.com/map/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Xiol32 3y agoThe part of my town where I grew up was built on the grounds of a WWII ordnance factory. Used to walk past an old pillbox daily on the way to school. http://www.2eimages.co.uk/places/birchwood/rof/remnants.htm http://www.2eimages.co.uk/places/birchwood/rof/remnants.htm
- shaftoe444 3y ago> ROF Water Supply Reservoir Number 2. The romance of history! That's an interesting page though I love how much of this stuff is documented.
- chris_st 3y agoReally wish they'd photographed people next to these... I can't guess how large they are.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seabass-labrax 3y agoAbout as tall as an ordinary storey of a house for the larger ones, and has short as stooping height for the shorter ones, in my experience.
- hermitcrab 3y agoIt varies. But typically 3 - 5 metres in the longest dimension, and not high enough to stand up in. The smaller they were the cheaper they were to make, the harder to see and the harder for artillery to hit.
- paulcole 3y agoMy brief introduction to military pillboxes came by playing Bolo.
- chrononaut 3y agoI can't imagine what it would be like to discharge a firearm without hearing protection in one of those.
- ch4s3 3y agoDeeply unpleasant, but far superior to the other available defensive fighting positions.
- sobriquet9 3y agoThe muzzle is outside the enclosed space, so I don't think it should be particulatly bad.
- swayvil 3y agoNo eyeball bleeding per se but yes, I predict that you would definitely sustain a significant amount of hearing damage. My dinky 9mm leaves my ears ringing shooting it just once, without protection, in a grassy field. So I'm drawing from that experience.
- 01100011 3y agoReminds me of the fortifications you still find all over coastal WA state which were built to defend the waterways during WWII from a feared Japanese invasion. I loved running around them as a kid. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/camp-hayden-abandoned-wwii-bunker https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/camp-hayden-abandoned-ww...
- evil-olive 3y agomany of the fortifications date back even farther, to the late 19th century Triangle of Fire - The Harbor Defenses of Puget Sound (1897-1953): https://www.historylink.org/file/7524 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.
- swayvil 3y agoI would totally live in one of those. Do you think they have a vibe? Haunted?
- hermitcrab 3y agoThe vibe is small, dark, damp and with a strong smell of urine. Each to their own!
- hermitcrab 3y agoBTW Any self-respecting British ghost hangs out in a castle. Not a pillbox.
- Fluorescence 3y agoAs a British kid who would play around such things the vibe is crack-den / toilet. Expect graffiti, ancient garbage, drug remnants, poop. The ones in the link are like the stately homes of pillboxes!
- hermitcrab 3y agoYou 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.
- WalterBright 3y agoIf 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.
- hermitcrab 3y ago>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.
- WalterBright 3y agoA 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.
- jeffrallen 3y agoLots of Swiss pillboxes are still visibile on the Toblerone line: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toblerone_line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toblerone_line There's one with 2 dramatic sightlines down a country road outside of Bassins: https://maps.app.goo.gl/8MvLfAEJkt5vW9ak6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/8MvLfAEJkt5vW9ak6
- _xnmw 3y agoThese are on almost every road in Ukraine, manned and stationed. Can’t speak to its effectiveness, but wouldn’t want to be without any.
- hermitcrab 3y agoTragic that pillboxes are still being used in 2023. “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.
- sillywalk 3y ago"Concrete military bunkers are a ubiquitous sight in Albania, with an average of 5.7 bunkers for every square kilometer", with 750,000+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania
- hermitcrab 3y agoThat is a crazy statistic. Imagine if they had put those resources into something more useful, like housing or hospitals.
- theoldlove 3y agoI’m surprised how many of these pillboxes are scheduled monuments (i.e. preserved for historical value). Seems like it’s worth keeping one or two around, but I’m not seeing the historical or aesthetic value in preserving many of them in perpetuity.
- bman_kg 3y agothese pillboxes are very interesting thing, why to destroy them. Instead they should exist as they are, they serve as remainder of past history for coming generations. My grandfather was from Soviet Army, he went till Berlin. He was wounded to his leg...unfortunately very little information left about him and his military history. Maybe one can find information about him from archive. Often case old Soviet documentaries portray USSR as victor of WWII, I think that can partially true. Thus, I was wondering whether any one of you could suggest documentaries on WWII, so called Western view of the war, I would appreciate it. I can find documentaries by myself, but often war connaiseurs know best docs on this topic.
- hermitcrab 3y agoThe BBC 'World at war' is an absolute masterpiece. A contender for greatest documentary ever made. It is obviously UK-centric, but well worth anyone's time to watch.
- klelatti 3y agoThe World at War is fantastic, but it wasn’t made by the BBC. Rather it was made by one of the companies, Thames Television, that owned one of the UK’s commercial franchises in the 1970s and broadcast across the ITV commercial network. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_(TV_series)
- hermitcrab 3y ago>but it wasn’t made by the BBC You are right. My mistake.
- klelatti 3y agoSorry for being a bit pedantic! Just think it's interesting that ITV did some good stuff in those years. TBF I think the BBC showed it later on (in the 2000s?)
- jlengrand 3y agoInteresting to see it focused on England. As a kid, I was very used to seeing them in Northern Normandy as well as North of France. Moving to the Netherlands, I also saw them a lot in the fields, much further away from the see. It's only when I traveled to the North of Norway that I realized how gigantic of a front WW2 was, and the sheer amount of land to be protected. Just like anthills being connected to each other across countries, pillboxes are a huge, cross-country remnant of our common history.
- dotancohen 3y agoMore interesting than the pillboxes is the coastal erosion in some places on which the pillboxes once stood. It looks like some places have experienced ten or more meters of erosion since the pillboxes were built eighty years ago - thats over 10cm per year.
- mackrevinack 3y agoyou can find some of them on openstreetmap by searching for "bunker_type=pillbox" https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1Cno https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1Cno