You shall not pass! - the Maginot Line.

While we were down in the Alsace area (NE France, near Bitch) my intention was to take a look at the fortifications of the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line was a series of underground bunkers and forts built by France in the 1930s along their border with Germany as their primary line of defence. The intent was - to put it in Gandalf's LOTR words - You shall not pass! However, the line was not completed and the Germans merely went through the gaps, e.g. in The Ardennes, on the French-Belgian border.

France has restored the fort at Schoenenbourg to its state at the outbreak of WW2 as a national monument and it is open to the public for 3 hours each afternoon. The entrance is tucked away in the woods of a national park. Set your car's GPS to N48° 57' 59" E7° 54' 44" to find the (ammunition) entrance.

Just outside this entrance is a war memorial, to pay your respects.

The fort of Schoenenbourg was the most heavily bombarded structure of the Maginot Line. From May 14th 1940 it was under heavy German attack. The German artillery even used a giant 420mm howitzer, whose shells weighed a ton, to fire 56 shells at it. From June 20th 1940, Stukas dropped 160 tons of bombs on it; in total over 3000 bombs and shells of different calibres were used. All unsuccessfully. Retaliating, the fort fired over 17,000 shells from its 6 combat blocks. Unconquered, the fort only surrendered on order of the French high command, six days after the armistice.

I didn't come to see the guns though, I was more interested to see the undergound infrastructure. This is half of the hospital ward, next to an OP room.

All of these rooms and corridors are about 30m (100 feet) underground. This picture below shows the main kitchen with its 3 huge cooking pots.

Outside the kitchen, the menu board shows what was being served to the soldiers on sunday 24th september 1939. Pork chops and beans, mmmmm :-)

The sleeping quarters showed hot-bunking, three shifts of soldiers sharing the same beds for 8 hours each. Reminded me of my submarine days :-)

The power plant had two 160 hp diesel generators with a 400,000 liter fuel tank.

The whole tunnel fort was kept above atmospheric pressure to keep any poisonous gases out. These brown round drums are air filters, to remove any mustard gas, chlorine etc the Germans might have used (but didn't) from the air drawn in. Active charcoal filters can be seen in the cut-away drum.

The personnel corridors are two miles long, narrow, with just enough room for a narrow gauge railway. At the end of each section is a guard room with a machine gun pointing along the corridor to defend it should the enemy get into the tunnel system. That dark square at the end of this tunnel is the machine gun post.

At the tunnel entrance is a plaque honouring the soldiers who manned the fort.

The main corridor has storage space and train tracks for taking the ammunition to the main guns under the hill 2 miles away from the infrastructure stuff shown above. The cables transmit 22kV AC and 800V DC (for the train) from the generator shown above. Other, smaller, wires are telephone cables.

Huge 50cm dials show the voltages and airflow, visible along the main corridor.

This cross-section sketch shows the combat stations inside the hill 2 miles away from the infrastructure quarters. They contain four 75 mm model R32 guns, two 81mm morters, four 47mm model 34 anti-tank guns, ten 50mm model 35 grenade launchers, two retractable grenade-launcher cupolas, nine 7.5 mm Reibel machine guns and four chutes for lobbing hand grenades.

I spent a couple of hours exploring the fort; impressive indeed.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on October 10, 2019 permalink Comments Email

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