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War
전쟁(戰爭)
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| The Technology of War |
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| 3 MODERN WEAPONS AND WEAPON SYSTEMS |
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Fortifications are military positions
that have been strengthened against attack. They are usually of two types:
permanent and field. Permanent fortifications
include elaborate forts and troop shelters; they are most often erected in times
of peace or upon threat of war. Field fortifications
are constructed when in contact with an enemy or when contact is imminent. They
consist of entrenched positions for personnel and crew-served weapons, cleared
fields of fire, and obstacles such as explosive mines, barbed-wire
entanglements, felled trees, and antitank ditches. Both field and permanent
fortifications often take advantage of natural obstacles, such as canals and
rivers, and they are usually camouflaged or otherwise concealed. Both types are
designed to assist the defender to obtain the greatest advantage from his own
strength and weapons while preventing the enemy from using his resources to best
advantage. |
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This section discusses military
fortification since the introduction of rifled artillery and small arms. For
discussions of fortification up to the modern era, see above Military
technology before the modern era: Antiquity and the
classical age ;
The age of cavalry ;
and The gunpowder revolution
. |
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In the American
Civil War, field fortifications emerged as an essential of warfare, with
both armies employing entrenchments to an extent never before seen. Troops
learned to fortify newly won positions immediately; employing spades and axes
carried in their packs, they first dug rifle pits and then expanded them into
trenches. Early in the war, General Robert E. Lee
adopted the frontier rifleman's breastwork composed of two logs on the parapet
of the entrenchment, and many of Lee's victories were the result of his ability
to use hasty entrenchments as a base for aggressive employment of fire and
maneuver. Two notable sieges, that of Vicksburg,
Miss., in the west, and Petersburg, Va., in the east, were characterized by the
construction of extensive and continuous trench lines that foreshadowed those of
World War I. In the Cold Harbor, Va., campaign,
when General Ulysses S. Grant sent his troops
against Confederate earthworks, he lost 14,000 men in 13 days. Field mines and
booby traps were used extensively, and trench mortars were developed to lob
shells into opposing trenches. (see also Vicksburg
Campaign, Petersburg Campaign) |
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The lesson taught by accurate,
long-range fire from entrenched positions in the American Civil War was lost on
European commanders. Even the bitter experiences of appalling losses in the
Crimean, Franco-German, and South African (Boer) wars failed to lessen an ardour
for the theory of the offensive that was so fervent as to leave little concern
for defensive tactics in the field. Few took notice of the immense casualties
the Turks inflicted from behind field fortifications in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, and even though the Russo-Japanese
War soon after the turn of the century underscored the lethal power of
the machine gun and breech-loading rifled artillery, most European commanders
saw the increased firepower as more a boon to the offensive than to the
defensive. |
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The fallacy of the faith in offensive
firepower was soon convincingly demonstrated. Once the French had checked the
German right wing at the Marne River, the fighting degenerated into what was in
effect a massive siege. For 600 miles (1,000 kilometres), from Switzerland to
the North Sea, the landscape was soon scarred with opposing systems of zigzag,
timber-revetted, sandbag-reinforced trenches, fronted by tangles of barbed wire
sometimes more than 150 feet (45 metres) deep and featured here and there by
covered dugouts providing shelter for troops and horses and by observation posts
in log bunkers or concrete turrets. The trench systems consisted of several
lines in depth, so that if the first line was penetrated, the assailants were
little better off. Rail and motor transport could rush fresh reserves forward to
seal off a gap faster than the attackers could continue forward. Out beyond the
trenches and the barbed wire was a muddy, virtually impassable desert called
no-man's-land, where artillery fire soon eliminated habitation and vegetation
alike. The fighting involved masses of men, masses of artillery, and masses of
casualties. Toxic gases--asphyxiating, lachrymatory, and vesicant--were
introduced in a vain effort to break the dominance of the defense, which was so
overpowering that for more than two years the opposing lines varied less than 10
miles in either direction. |
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During the winter of 1916-17, the
Germans prepared a reserve trench system, the Hindenburg
Line, containing deep dugouts where the men could take cover against
artillery fire and machine guns emplaced in concrete shelters called pillboxes.
Approximately two miles behind the forward line was a second position, almost as
strong. The Hindenburg Line resisted all Allied assaults in 1917, including a
vast British mining operation under the Messines Ridge in Belgium that literally
blew up the ridge, inflicting 17,000 casualties at one blow; the advance failed
to carry beyond the ridge. |
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Most defensive thinking on the eve of
World War I was reserved for the permanent fort, which was designed to canalize
enemy advance and to afford time for national mobilization. The leading
fortification engineer of the time was a Belgian,
Henri Brialmont. He placed his forts, built of
concrete, at an average distance of four miles from a city, as with 12 forts at Liège,
and at intervals of approximately 2.5 miles. At Antwerp
his defense system was even more dense. He protected the big guns of his forts
with turrets of steel and developed disappearing cupolas. Some forts were
pentagonal, others triangular, with much of the construction underground. |
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In building defenses along the frontier
facing Germany, French engineers emulated
Brialmont, with particularly strong clusters of fortresses at Verdun
and Belfort. So monstrous were the forts of the
time that they were known as "land battleships." But by marching
through Belgium with a strong right wing (the Schlieffen plan), the Germans
circumvented the powerful French fortresses. Passing between the forts at Liège,
which Brialmont had intended to be connected with trenches, they took the city
in only three days, then systematically reduced the forts. Namur,
also heavily fortified, resisted the powerful Big Bertha guns for only four
days. The concrete of the Belgian fortifications crumbled under the pounding,
but the French forts at Verdun, of more recent and sturdier construction, later
absorbed tremendous punishment and served as focal points for some of the war's
bloodiest fighting. |
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In the interval between world
wars, several European countries built elaborate permanent
fortifications. The largest was the French Maginot Line,
a system of mammoth, self-contained forts stretching from Switzerland to the
vicinity of the Belgian frontier near Montmédy. The reinforced concrete
of the forts was thicker than any theretofore used, the disappearing guns bigger
and more heavily armoured. Ditches, embedded steel beams, and minefields guarded
against tank attack. A large part of the works were completely underground.
Outposts were connected to the main forts by concrete tunnels. But, because
French and British military leaders were convinced that if war came again with
Germany the Allies would fight in Belgium, the French failed to extend the line
to the sea, relying instead on an outmoded system of unconnected fortresses left
over from before World War I. It was this weakness that the Germans subsequently
exploited in executing a modified version of the Schlieffen plan, cutting in
behind the permanent defenses and defeating France without having to come to
grips with the Maginot Line. |
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The Germans confronted that portion of
the Maginot Line facing the Saar River with fortifications of their own, the
West Wall. Later extended northward to the Dutch frontier and southward along
the Rhine to Switzerland, the West Wall was not a thin line of big forts but a
deep band, up to five miles thick, of more than 3,000 small, mutually supporting
pillboxes, observation posts, and troop shelters. For passive antitank defense
the line depended upon natural obstacles, such as rivers and lakes, and upon
"dragon's teeth," five rows of pyramid-shaped reinforced concrete
projections. |
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The Germans did not rely on the West
Wall to halt an attack but merely to delay it until counterattacks by mobile
reserves could eliminate any penetration. The value of their concept remains
undetermined; the line was not attacked until late 1944, after the German armies
had incurred severe defeats and lacked adequate reserves. The West Wall
nevertheless forced Allied troops into costly attacks to eliminate it. |
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Elsewhere in World War II many
fortifications similar to these two basic types were built. The Italians
constructed a series of new fortifications and modernized existing World War I
defenses along the country's mountainous northern and northeastern frontiers;
the Finns maintained a World War I defense facing the Soviet Union, the Mannerheim
Line (named after a Finnish marshal and
statesman); the Soviets built the Stalin Line facing Poland; the Czechoslovaks
constructed what became known as the Little Maginot Line to oppose Germany; the
Greeks built the Metaxas Line facing Bulgaria; and the Belgians erected a series
of elaborate forts along the Albert Canal. German capture of the most elaborate
and allegedly impregnable of the Belgian forts, Eben
Emael, in a matter of hours in the first two days of the campaign against
France and the Low Countries in 1940 startled the world. Arriving silently on
the night of May 10 in gliders, troops landed atop the fort and began
systematically to destroy turrets and casemates. Soon after daylight they were
joined by 300 men arriving by parachute. Around noon of May 11 the 1,000-man
garrison surrendered. (see also Russo-Finnish War,
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, , Greece,
ancient) |
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Despite at least comparable surprise and
the same so-called blitzkrieg methods, the Germans required more time to
penetrate the more dispersed forts of the Stalin Line in the Soviet Union. The
delay gained two months of invaluable time for the Soviet troops, without which
they might well have been unable to stop the Germans at the gates of Moscow. |
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The Germans employed Fritz Todt, the
engineer who had designed the West Wall, and thousands of impressed labourers to
construct permanent fortifications along the Belgian and French coasts facing
the English Channel; this was the Atlantic Wall. The line consisted primarily of
pillboxes and gun emplacements embedded in cliffsides or placed on the
waterfronts of seaside resorts and ports. Included were massive blockhouses with
disappearing guns, newsreels of which the Germans sent out through neutral
sources in an effort to awe their adversaries, but the numbers of big
blockhouses actually were few. Behind the line, in likely landing spots for
gliders and parachutists, the Germans emplaced slanted poles, which the troops
called Rommelsspargel (Rommel's
asparagus), after their commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Embedded in the
sand of the beaches below the high-tide mark were numerous obstacles, varying in
shape and depth, some topped with mines. Barbed wire and antitank and
antipersonnel mines interlaced the whole. On the French southwestern and
southern coasts similar, though less formidable, defenses were erected. |
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When the Allies landed in force on the
Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy on D-Day--June 6,
1944--they found the defenses far less formidable than they had anticipated.
This was attributable to a number of reasons. The Germans had constructed the
strongest defenses in the Pas-de-Calais region facing the narrowest part of the
English Channel and had stationed their most battleworthy troops there; demands
of other fighting fronts had siphoned many of the best German troops from
France; the Germans lacked air and naval support; Allied airpower was so strong
that movement of German reserves was seriously impeded; landings of Allied
airborne troops behind the beaches spread confusion in German ranks; and the
Germans were deluded into believing the invasion was a diversion, that a second
and larger invasion was to follow in the Pas-de-Calais. Only at one of the two
American beaches, given the code name Omaha, was the success of the landing ever
in doubt, partly because of rough seas, partly because of the chance presence of
an elite German division, and partly because of the presence of high bluffs.
Paradoxically, the Allies had less difficulty with the highly publicized beach
defenses than they had later with field fortifications based on the Norman
hedgerows, earthen embankments several feet thick and five feet high that local
farmers through the centuries had erected around thousands of irregularly shaped
little fields to fence their cattle and protect their crops from strong ocean
winds. (see also Omaha beach) |
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At the close of World War II most
military theorists considered that permanent fortifications of the type
previously employed were economically impracticable in view of their
vulnerability to the incredible power of nuclear explosives and the methods,
such as vertical envelopment from the air, that might be employed to reduce
them. Important exceptions to this generalization were the reinforced concrete
and deep tunnels used to protect strategic-missile launch facilities. The United
States, the former Soviet Union, and (to a lesser degree) France, Great Britain,
Israel, and China invested heavily in such defensive works. Probably the most
important and most characteristic of these works was the missile silo, a tubular
structure of heavily reinforced concrete sunk into the ground to serve as a
protective installation and launch facility for a single intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM). These silos were "hardened" to resist
a calculated amount of blast and shock from a nuclear detonation. Launch crews
were protected in similarly constructed underground bunkers nearby. Elaborate
calculations on the number of ICBM warheads needed to destroy a hardened silo
with a given degree of certainty became an integral part of the strategic
calculus in the 1960s. In this way, permanent fortifications resumed their
previous place of importance in strategic calculations. |
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Of particular concern to strategists of
the United States and the Soviet Union was the vulnerability of land-based ICBMs
to preemptive nuclear attack. Elaborate defensive works were proposed to protect
them. One basing scheme involved a network of fortified missile shelters
connected by roads or railroad tracks. Huge, closed missile transporters would
shuttle the missiles from one shelter to another in such a manner that the enemy
would not know which shelters were occupied and which were empty. An even more
extreme plan for protecting the U.S. land-based ICBM force was designed around
fratricide, the theory that multiple nuclear explosions cannot occur at the same
time in close proximity to one another because the first detonated warhead
triggers low-yield partial explosions in the others. The proposal, called dense
pack, would exploit this phenomenon by packing a large number of super-hardened
ICBM silos closely together in a single location. |
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Other permanent fortifications of the
nuclear age were designed as headquarters sites or command and control
installations. For example, a joint U.S.-Canadian project, the North
American Air Defense Command (Norad), included a series of radar posts
across northern Canada and Alaska to provide early warning of the approach of
hostile bombers or missiles. The system and the aircraft and missiles supporting
it were controlled from a vast underground complex embedded in the rock of
Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo. |
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(W.H.B./
C.B.MacD./J.F.G.) |
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