Darksheare ==> 
Posted on 08/19/2003 12:01:01 AM PDT by SAMWolf
Darksheare ==>
In the summer of 1940 Britain faced a hostile coast from the Arctic Circle to the Spanish border. It appeared inevitable that Germany would use its control of the French Channel ports of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk to invade Britain. That autumn, however, the Royal Air Force defeated the German air force in the crucial battle for air supremacy over the British Isles. Consequently, Adolf Hitler delayed and then shelved plans for the invasion.
By 1942, fearing an Allied invasion in the west while embroiled in war with the Soviet Union in the east, Hitler endeavoured to create the “Atlantic Wall”, or “Fortress Europe”, by encrusting the Atlantic seacoast with concrete and steel defences.
The foundations for some of the largest German coastal artillery emplacements along the French coast were laid as early as 1940 in the Pas de Calais region, a mere 40 kilometres across the English Channel from Dover. These gun positions originally were intended to support a German invasion of Britain. Subsequently, they fired on Allied shipping in the Channel and regularly shelled Dover, Folkestone and elsewhere along the British coast.
The Germans could not fortify the whole of the western European seaboard with such large and heavily-armed installations. The main portion of the Atlantic Wall stretched some 2000 kilometres from Denmark to the Spanish-French border. German military engineers built observation bunkers at wide intervals all along the coast. Lookouts in these bunkers could give warning of an Allied attack and direct naval, air and mobile land forces to the scene. Some 15,000 bunkers and other installations protected harbours and points along the shore where there were important facilities or likely landing spots. Barbed wire, minefields and other obstacles provided the first line of defence against Allied infantry and tanks. Small bunkers containing machine guns or light artillery covered these positions and protected the long-range artillery batteries. These batteries received a two-metre thick protection of steelreinforced concrete to protect them against Allied naval and air bombardment. Hitler personally Division, suffered appalling casualties in a futile attempt to storm ashore in the face of withering fire from expertly-sited German positions. The failure of this operation underlined the need for lavish fire support – from the air, from the sea, and from special armoured vehicles put ashore with the infantry – if an invasion was to succeed. On the German side, the raid spurred greater construction efforts. By 1943, 250,000 workers poured up to 800,000 tons of concrete monthly into sophisticated fortifications, some of immense proportions. In the period 1942-1944, the Germans used over 17 million cubic metres of concrete and 1.2 million metric tons of steel for the Atlantic Wall. “I am the greatest fortress builder of all time”, boasted Adolf Hitler, who never once visited the Channel fortifications.
Fortunately for the Allies, the sheer scale of the project exceeded German resources. Berlin’s other priorities, especially the Eastern Front and air defence of the homeland against bombers, siphoned off enormous quantities of material and labour which might otherwise have been used on the Atlantic Wall.
Now look at what Hitler said of the brave Canadians--a tribute to their valor from the black hole of inhumanity itself!
But when Canadian vanguards with a small English tail as appendage come to Dieppe and manage to hang on there-one may say painfully-for nine hours-to be destroyed in the end-that is an encouraging, an astonishing sign of the inexhaustible, victorious power which is the British Empire's own! In contrast to that, what is our air force, what is the performance of our infantry, what is the performance of our tank arm, what by comparison is the accomplishment of our engineers, our railway construction troops and so forth, of our whole gigantic traffic system which has opened up and re-built half a continent in a few-one may even say months? That is nothing!
The attack on the Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941 and the unexpectedly strong resistance put up by the Red Army forced the German High Command to transfer increasing numbers of troops away from the Western front, considerably weakening it in the process. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, fears of an Anglo-American landing intensified, and in the same month, Hitler reinforced his system of defence by ordering the construction of the Atlantic Wall. This gigantic project, entrusted to the Todt Organization, was begun in 1942 but had still not been completed by 1944, despite the efforts of Field-Marshal Rommel, who had been made responsible for the entire sector between the Netherlands and the Loire at the end of 1943.
The project involved building 15,000 structures along the entire coast of the North Sea, the English Channel and the Atlantic. This required the labour of 450,000 workers (both voluntary and impressed) and the use of 11 million tonnes of concrete and 1 million tonnes of steel for the reinforcing rods.
Despite the image that German propaganda sought to project, the “Wall” was not a continuous obstacle. It could basically be said to be composed of four types of structure: the fortresses, the coastal batteries, the close beach defences and the obstacles erected either on the beaches themselves or inland.
Close defensive structure overlooking Ravenoville beach(Manche)
Field-Marshal Rommel inspects a beach bristling with obstacles
Czech hedgehogs
Nutcrackers (those aren't frisbees or hockey pucks)
Placing a charge on a Belgian Gate
Tetrahedra
Antitank walls
Remains of “dragon’s teeth” on the beach at Ouistreham
In context, the Brits now ban guns and prosecute their citizens who defend themselves against home invasions.
The Canadians routinely thumb their noses at us to the point at which it is suggested Chretien and Clinton arranged the blackout.
The important Daschlesque Diplomacy of Neville Chamberlain gave the Nazi war machine the hudna or "we get strong to kill you in your sleep".
The West, ostrich-like, was in denial as the NYTimes whitewashed Stalin's slaughter of tens of millions with his engineered famine.
Roosevelt the Communist bath house towel server smiled as Hitler and Stalin signed their Friendship Pact.
Now we are racing down the bomb run of the Appeasement Theme Park--
A modest proposal: Make the heads of Syria and Iran an offer they cannot refuse.
Or we wind up having to fight a Stephen King nightmare of one Dieppe after another.
I read that Hitler speech, long winded SOB wasn't he, sort of like one of our Ex-Presidents.
My mom told me about his speeches, he was a speaker who could work a crowd into a frenzy. Great writeup and pictures of the Atlantic Wall. Fortunately, it was more propaganda than reality. Only certain spots of the coast were heavily protected. Funny that the Germans learned nothing about fixed defenses from the French Maginot Line.
"Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man."
- General George Patton Jr
Like most of the college English required reading.
On the left is Ross Munro of the Canadian Press, featured in the Dieppe raid, and for whom a journalism award is named.
On the right is Ross H. Munro, from British Columbia who co-authored The Coming Conflict With China, which I think is really smashing.
I haven't established a genealogy.
As for Hitler's speeches, he filled a nietzsche in the German psyche caused by smoldering imperialism dashed with reparations and depression.
I'm sure he was using amphetamine, and didn't need the History Channel to tell me so.
Goering was a cocaine abuser like traitorrapist42.
And like 42 Hitler was elected.
But Hitlery carried 42's juevos in the translucent plastic file cabinet.
Hitlery's propaganda was cited as classic, worthy of study, by ChiComs in the late '90's.
The Germans apparently withdrew some of their guns to the interior.
You've often cited Hitler jumping the gun before Doenitz got his U-Boats.
Apparently Speer planned a later start-date for the war as well.
Accounts of Stalin's shock and withdrawal into autistic stupor indicate he, too, was not prepared.
Hitler micromanaged the design of the Atlantic Wall according to one account--yet blitzkrieg was his success story, while Maginot West was his Achilles' Heel.
For sheer longwindedness the Cucaracha Cubana is top banana:
Reach out, reach out and touch some one. . . .
But no-o, they have to throw in all the "you know"s.
And I am sick and tired of being told I am somehow unpatriotic just because I betrayed the world's premier democracy to the Butchers of Beijing!
Who Us?
Maybe someday we can find the other version to this tune.
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