How the Nazis Managed to Capture the World's Strongest Fortress in Less than 20 Minutes

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let's get into the video in the early morning hours of may the 10th 1940 soldiers manning the belgian fortress of urban and male looked up at the sky and beheld an alarming sight nine strange slender winged aircraft descending silently towards them within seconds the aircraft skidded to a halt and disgorged 54 highly trained german airborne troops onto the fort's grass roof little could the garrison have imagined it but in less than half an hour their fortress the most modern and impregnable in the world would be brought to its knees in one of the most daring and successful assaults of the second world war to understand the importance of fortress ebenemale we must first go back to the start of the first world war the german schlieten plan called for the german army to outflank the french by passing through neutral belgium though belgium had extensive fortifications protecting strategically vital city of liege these were quickly pounded to rubble by heavy german siege guns and the german army marched right through eager to avoid a repeat of 1914 after the war the nation's bordering germany built elaborate border fortifications the most famous of which was the french maginot line between 1932 and 1935 belgium spent over 24 million francs modernizing the liege fortifications making greater use of reinforced concrete and spacing the forts further apart to protect them from artillery and the centerpiece of these modernization efforts was fortress ebb and male fortress ebony ml sits on a diamond-shaped embankment around a thousand meters long and 900 meters wide bordered to the east and west by the albert canal and greer river and to the south by a 10-meter deep anti-tank ditch atop the forts hit six reinforced concrete artillery casemates maastricht one and two in the north and these one and two in the south armed with 75 millimeter guns and canal one and two along the banks of the albert canal armed with 60 millimeter anti-tank guns these were supplemented by three massive retractable rotating turrets or coppolas couple one and two armed with 75 millimeter guns and couple 120 armed with 120 millimeter guns rounding out the fort's defenses were three more block houses mi1 and mi2 armed with machine guns and block one at the entrance of the fort armed with a machine gun anti-tank gun and a searchlight these strong points were connected by 4.5 kilometers of underground tunnels built on two levels an intermediate level for moving men and ammunition and a lower level housing the barracks kitchen infirmary and ammunition magazines garrisoned by around 500 men with another 500 kept in reserve in the nearby village of wonk the french were positioned to protect the vital bridge crossings over the albert canal and its batteries were integrated with those of neighboring forts allowing them to provide mutual fire support in case of enemy attack given these formidable defenses it is easy to see why fortress abdominal was considered virtually impregnable and why it weighed so heavily on the minds of the german high command in the late 1930s as with the schlieffen plan of 1914 full gel bore case yellow hitler's plan for invading western europe in 1940 called for the german army to outflank the maginot line by driving through belgium and the likely defended arden forest but before this could happen the army first had to cross the albert canal which meant that fortress ebert a male and its heavy guns would have to be silenced but the more german planners examined the belgian defenses the more impossible the task appeared fall girl seemed doomed to fail incredibly the radical solution to the problem came all the way from the top from adolf hitler himself if ebenemail couldn't be taken from the ground hitler thought then how about from the air though the tactic had first been demonstrated by the soviet union in 1934 the germans were the first to make effective use of paratroops or full shimyaka forming the world's first dedicated airborne unit the seventh flager division in 1936 under the command of general oberst kurt student on april the 9th 1940 the falsehammer yaga carried out the world's first aerial combat operations as part of the german invasion of denmark and norway seizing key airfields and bridges at macenado alborg in oslo on october the 27th 1939 hitler summoned general students to the reich chancellery and asked if it would be possible to take fortress air to mail by dropping paratroopers onto its roof at first students were skeptical parachute technology at the time did not allow for precision landings and required the full shimyaka's weapons and equipment be dropped separately in containers by the time the scattered paratroops had regrouped and collected their equipment they would have lost their vital element of surprise and even if the attackers could be landed quickly in a small area what could a handful of lightly armed paratroopers hope to accomplish against a fortress designed to withstand even the most powerful artillery but as student continued to ponder hitler's question he realized that germany possessed two secret weapons that just might make this audacious plan feasible after all the first of these weapons was the assault glider the treaty of versailles imposed upon germany in 1919 forbade it from possessing an air force so in order to continue training pilots the german government embraced the sport of sail plane gliding establishing hundreds of gliding schools and clubs around the country pilots trained in these establishments would form the nucleus of the new german air force or luftwaffe when the nazis came to power in 1933. in 1936 the german research institute for sail plane flight or dfs developed the dfs-230 the world's first combat glider towed into the air by a juncker's ju52 transport aircraft the dfs-230 could glide silently for up to 12 miles and deliver 10 fully armed paratroopers directly onto their target with pinpoint accuracy the second secret weapon in the german arsenal was the hollow or shaped charge this consisted of a 50 kilogram explosive charge with a conical cavity lined with copper when detonated the explosive shaped the copper cone into a high-speed jet of molten metal that could punch through 25 inches of steel or concrete together with flamethrowers for taking out bunkers the combination of glider-borne troops and hollow chargers was the perfect recipe for defeating the world's mightiest fortress within days of his meeting with hitler a student assembled a crack team of 480 full shimyaka designated storm taylon koch after their commander lieutenant colonel walter and began intensive training preparations for the assault on the fortress the plan relied on close coordination and split second timing the men of storm taylon koch would be divided into four groups code named steel concrete iron and granite steel concrete nylon would land first capturing the canal bridges veldzeldt thronehoffen and can and preventing the defenders from blowing them up then the men of granite would land atop the fortress itself and take out the blockhouses and capones so their guns could not be brought to bear on the occupied bridges all four groups would then dig in and hold their objectives until relieved by german ground forces training began in november 1939 with czech border fortifications standing in for the block houses of ebony male such was the need for absolute secrecy that the paratroops were not even told what their target was and trained in plain uniforms without insignia they were not even allowed to handle the top secret hollow charges practicing instead with concrete blocks fitted with handles meanwhile the glider pilots practiced precision landing and here they ran into a major problem the gliders took too long to skid to a halt greatly increasing the risk of a collision on the tiny fort roof after a number of experiments it was determined that wrapping barbed wire around the landing skid adequately shortened the landing distance by early 1940 the training was complete and the paratroops were moved to airfields close to the belgium border where they awaited the signal to attack that signal came in the early hours of may the 10th 1940. at 3 30 am the men rose donned their equipment and climbed into their gliders less than an hour later the ju52 towing aircraft roared down the runway and up into the morning twilight as radio signals might have warned the enemy of attack the transports were guided to their release points by a line of flares laid out on the ground below but almost immediately problems began to dog the mission due to a misunderstood signal one glider was cast off too early forcing it to make an emergency landing near durham and germany at the same time the glider carrying lieutenant rudolph witsek commander of group granite broke its toe line and was forced to land near cologne this left group granite with only 9 out of 11 gliders and 54 out of 85 men with which to carry out its attack problems continued as several gliders strayed too much over the dutch border and were fired upon by anti-aircraft guns one glider had its control cables shot away causing it to plunge 12 meters into the ground injuring its pilot and several passengers nevertheless at 5 20 am groups steel concrete and iron landed at their respective bridges the defenders at feldsell and fraudhofen were taken completely by surprise and quickly overtaken with the fraudhofen bridge barely being saved from destruction by one corporal stenzel who stormed into the bridge bunker and tore out the firing cables with his bare hands over a cambridge however group iron was not so lucky the moment the belgian defender spotted the gliders descending they immediately blew up the bridge only minutes later the nine remaining gliders of group granite descended upon the grassy roof of fort ebene mail one member of the garrison private antoine later described the scene as the morning began to dawn we heard gliding noises in the air but no engine noise we immediately gave the alarm to the senior staff inside the fort then without waiting for instructions from the inside our senior sergeant gave the order to open fire flares sprayed from the five guns but that was wasted effort several gliders actually came rushing down on us and we were surrounded one of them hit our machine gun with a glancing blow as it approached and knocked it over it is impossible to describe what happened next in chronological order as the attack took place simultaneously across the fortress but it is possible to give a taste of the chaos that unfolded over the next several minutes among the first structures to be attacked were the maastricht one and two block houses after blowing through the observation coppolas atop the blockhouses with shaped charged mines killing the gun crews inside the paris placed another mine below the guns blowing them off their mounts and opening a hole large enough to crawl through the pairs then entered the block houses and dropped grenades through the empty shafts destroying the staircases and ammunition elevators meanwhile other groups were busy trying to disable the massive gunk polars the armor of couple 120 proved too thick for the mines to penetrate but by a twist of fade the guns and ammunition elevators malfunctioned and the turret was unable to fire however a rather unusual problem soon cropped up a certain private schmidt had replaced the water in his canteen with schnapps and was now sitting drunkenly atop the store rotating turret forcing his comrades to pull him down before stuffing the gun barrels with explosives and disabling them for good copper nord and swood also proved impossible to penetrate but the paras managed to disable them by jamming the mechanism with a shaped charge and dropping grenades down the periscope hole across the fortress other extraordinary events were taking place upon landing heinelange the glider pilot who had knocked out the machine gun at the m.i nord block house with his wing rose for his cockpit brandishing a pistol and a knife the side of him so frightened the defenders that 16 of them immediately surrendered the commander of longer's assault group helmut venzel then proceeded to blow a hole in the block house and climb inside there in the smoky darkness he had a telephone ringing and picked it up hearing a voice frantically speaking on the other end he announced in perfect french the germans are here a moment later he heard the other man exclaimed moondu my god and the belgians had good reason to despair barely 20 minutes after landing the men of group granite had successfully knocked out nearly every gun emplacement and entombed the garrison deep within the fort at 5 42 am a signal was sent out by radio objective achieved everything in order deep inside the fortress the moon of the garrison could only be described as grim not only had they been taken completely by surprise but their defense had been severely hampered by a series of poor command decisions including that to garrison the fortress only with artillery troops as it was thought impossible for infantry to penetrate the outer defenses of the fort little effort was spent on defensive infantry training even more alarming am i sued one of the two machine gun blockhouses intended to defend against infantry assault was actually empty during the attack itself its crew tied up dismantling a temporary command shed by the entrance as per regulations the three gun compilers were also not provided with anti-personnel canister shot and the guns themselves could only be fired on the orders of the surrounding infantry divisions adding to the garrison's misery the blast from a german explosive charge had caused barrels of calcium chloride used to clean the latrines to burst filling the tunnels with chlorine gas and forcing the men to don their gas masks nonetheless the commander of the fort major jaw trans ordered a counter-attack and over the next six hours the men of group granite were tied down preventing a breakout by the garrison sustaining many casualties in the process then at noon a single df-230 glider descended onto the fort and fromic climbed none other than lieutenant woodsick upon landing near cologne whitsick had flagged down a passing railroad official commandeered his bicycle and ridden to a nearby town where he phoned luftwaffe high command and ordered a new ju-52 to turn back to the fort upon landin witsyk immediately took command and rallied his men pressing home the attack on the garrison and finally sealing them inside the fortress but at that moment surrounding belgian forts began opening fire on ebony male reigning over 400 shells down on the paris in an effort to dislodge them but the writing was already on the wall for belgium that evening the 51st armored engineered battalion of the german sixth army reached the banks of the albert canal and prepared to make the crossing before this could happen however the anti-tank guns of the canal nord and canal sud block houses had to be silenced so under the cover of darkness lieutenant whitsig and his men made their way to the top of the embankment and lowered explosive charges on ropes into the gun emplacements destroying them and allowing the 51st to cross the next morning then at noon on the 11th of may 1940 only 30 hours after the assault had begun the garrison of fortress ebene male finally surrendered only 42 days later the french government capitulated making hitler the master of western europe the assault on fortress ebony male was one of the most extraordinary tactical coups of the second world war and the ultimate demonstration of the german concept of blitzkrieg or lightning war for their efforts every man involved in the operation was personally awarded the iron cross or the knights cross by hitler himself all that is except private schmidt with his canteen of schnapps but it would also be the beginning of the end for never again would the vaunted full chamiaga enjoy such success as a purely airborne force on may 20th 1941 the nazis launched operation mercury the airborne invasion of the island of crete which though ultimately successful inflicted such high casualties among the airborne troops that thereafter they were forbidden from participating in large-scale operations for the rest of the war the volshamiaga would largely be used as elite ground troops serving with distinction in such actions as the battle of monte casino it would also be one of the last times hitler's intuition would serve him well with a series of increasingly poor decisions pushing germany further towards disaster and ultimate defeat but if nothing else the assault on fortress ebony mail dramatically showed how even the strongest fortifications when based on outdated concepts of warfare are no match for modern tactics confirming the old adage generals always fight the last war so i really hope you found that video interesting if 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Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 247,413

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Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know

Id: JHQ0TuF9HFg

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020