Interesting 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Reminds 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.
How 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.
A 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.
They 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.
A 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.
At least some of the German 'bliztkrieg' tactics were based on the work of a British soldier and military theorist, Fuller. he found the Germans were much more receptive to his ideas than the British Army. He was an occultist and fascist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._F._C._Fuller
> 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,
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.
FWIW, it’s worth digging into other sources when it comes to Guderian. His postwar memoirs were notoriously self-aggrandizing.
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.
I'm not fully certain, but didn't Germany and the Soviets worked together when developping the maneuver doctrines they would be using in WW2, with German officers training in tank usage in the USSR (since they weren't supposed to have tanks)?
They 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.
It'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.
Tragic 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
I’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.
these 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.
The 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.
The 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
Sorry 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?)
More 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.
It 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.
As 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!
