I was watching this video on the Battle of the Bulge and they noted several times where Germans were able to capture bridges (sometimes they failed). This is one example but there were many others during the war.
My question is, how did the Allies ever fail to blow a bridge (or Germans)?
It was no surprise the Germans were coming (usually). They needed to slap on some explosives and hit a button. One would think you could do that in a few hours. Heck, even damaging the bridge could be sufficient to stop heavy tanks and supply trucks from moving over.
So why did armies seemingly have so much trouble doing this?
Because the Allies wouldn’t be able to use the bridge? A bridge is a valuable resource for both sides. It is unclear why they couldn’t trap the Germans on the bridge and quickly destroy them. The bridge forces the Germans along a specific path that the allies should have be able to contain. Easier said than done?
The British attempt to destroy the Tragino Aqueduct by explosives in 1941 failed - such structures proved more difficult to destroy than had been anticipated, and some of the explosives had gone missing in the parachute drop. The damage was soon repaired.
I think both sides hold on to the hope they can use them. This might depend on the alternatives - if used solely as a defensive measure, what are the disadvantages? (As an offensive measure, one presumes some effort is made to protect them but obviously this ability can be limited.)
Before you blow a bridge, you want to retrieve as many of your retreating forces from the other side of the river as possible. As long as you have soldiers on the other side, you will delay until the very moment the enemy arrives. In a case like that, you don’t have a second chance when things go wrong.
Also remember that a bridge to carry fully loaded truck traffic (or tanks) is pretty solid. The key with any explosive action is to consider what the blast wave is supposed to do based on shape and location, and ensure the explosives are placed so as to do maximum structural damage. In a war, the side who needs to blow a bridge may not have the time or necessary amount of explosives to guarantee the necessary damage.
Well, this might be the problem here. You CAN’T just slap on some explosives; they have to be rather carefully planned out. They also can’t just be any explosives.
Bridges are, of course, designed to be extremely tough. If not made right, they’ll collapse all on their own. They’re things we’ve spent millennia figuring out how to make them resistant to wear, weight, water, seismic events and wind shear.
Well…I would think if my job was to protect bridge(s) in a war I would be super keen on how to demolish them and plan for and practice for it. That may not always be possible but the soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge had been there for some time and not just arrived minutes before the Germans showed up. And whatever shortages there were in the war, explosives were not one of them.
Some bridges were demolished. We know the Allied soldiers could do it (and Germans too if the need was reversed).
I’m reminded of this scene from Force 10 from Navarone,
The trick isn’t the amount of explosives, it’s knowing exactly where to put them.
While you’d expect the folks tasked to ‘blow that bridge’ to know this, reality often fails to live up to expectations.
You can’t really practice blowing up a bridge. Sure, you can practice setting explosives, and you can study structural engineering so you have a general idea of where to place a bomb to do the most damage, but every bridge is unique, and I don’t think the Allies had access to the schematics for most of them. The guys wiring the bridges had to use their best guess as to how much explosive to use, and where to put it, and they’re not going to know if they calculated right until the Germans show up, at which point, it’s too late to do a do-over.
This isn’t the problem. @Whack-a-Mole’s basic assumptions are wrong.
His assumptions are:
it’s trivial to blow bridges
armies should have always known that the enemy was coming
armies should always be prepared to blow up the bridges
explosives are used in war so there should always be some around to use
Blowing bridges doesn’t require building diagrams. There are general principles and adding more explosives should generally work.
The problem with blowing up bridges in the Battle of the Bulge was mostly because the Allies were caught by surprise, and that is really beyond the scope of this thread.
The US had combat engineers whose jobs included demolishing bridges, but they were not positioned by bridges before the German offense started. The German offense was much stronger and of a far greater scale than anticipated so they weren’t prepared. Had they been prepared, the would not have had as many problems.
The explosives used to demolish bridges or other obstacles for offensive operations are managed by the combat engineers and not by the normal infantry troops.
The failures they had on blowing bridges had less to do with incompetence of the combat engineers and more to do with the leadership not recognizing the potential for a German offense.
Right… generally when you occupy a bridge crossing, your goal is to cross and secure the area for follow-on forces to use.
It’s true that explosives are all around in war, but not the specific ones you need for bridge-blowing. You can’t just cannibalize artillery shells and grenades to use the explosives inside them, or rig a detonator out of things lying around.
If you’re thinking of blowing a bridge, that means your plan has gone to hell. That means you’ve been surprised. If you’ve been surprised then there’s a good chance that your logistics and ground lines of communication have been disrupted, so you can’t easily take delivery of specialized demolition charges, and the equipment that makes them work, and the folks who know how to set them.
This reminded me that the military DOES sometimes get to practice blowing up bridges. For example, about 35 years ago a reservoir was built (OK…I guess a dam was built) near our city. The new lake would cover several miles of an old state route which included a few bridges. They weren’t big bridges, but they were solid and well-used bridges. A fairly large contingent of US Army personnel came up from a nearby base precisely to practice blowing up bridges prior to the completion of the dam.
In the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans were the ones attacking so they already held the bridges in question.
The OP doesn’t seem to appreciate the difficulties involved. Here is from the offical Army report on the battle.
As is mentioned by another poster, keeping bridges intact was a major goal. Blowing them was a last resort, and in the fog of war, it wasn’t as easy as one may assume, especially under enemy fire, which doesn’t seem to be appreciated.
The scope of the German offense wasn’t understood at first, and the Allies were scrambling to contain it. They didn’t know the direction the offense would go and there was considerable confusion on how and where to respond with which forces.
The decisions to allow the bridges to be destroyed actually came later than it should have, and had the Germans been able to keep their schedule, things could have been worse for the Allies, although in the end, the counter offense was doomed from before it began.
Another point is that most of the combat engineers’ experience after Normandy was blowing up Nazi obstacles and pillboxes. They weren’t used to blowing up bridges as the Allies were on the offense.
when retreating from Lyon in’44, the Germans blew every bridge on the Rhône and Saône rivers…except for one, an ancient medieval-era bridge that resisted the detonation for the most part.
You can see that each bridge is different in structure, range, materials,etc and so needs a carefully planned explosion to truly destroy.
And sometime you need to take a bridge intact: at Remagen you had:
the German retreat and the US try to bomb the bridge to cut them.
the US enter the town(so stop the bombing) and the German try to blow the bridge (but fail)
the US manage to seize the bridge before another German attempt.
the German bomb the bridge with V-2, Arado bombers and divers while the US cross with everything they have.
While I never did work on demolitions for maneuver denial, the Army Combat Engineers do, and have publications on it. Part of the work was determining the weaker points on a bridge to affect the system rendering it either unusable, or a resource-sink to repair. The other side of this is that the more explosives you have to use, the more labor and prep goes into placing and priming said charges, which might not be the easiest/safest to do (as in, how do you sling charges underneath a truss) all while possibly being shot at. Controlled demolition for effect is part science, part artistry, but it is a hella-long lead time to set up effectively.
Sure you can crater an abutment, but those are quickly backfilled. Drop a span on a causeway? Engineers can lay bridgework to cover that span–minor inconvenience. Cut a main cable on a suspension bridge? You’ve permanently taken that bridge out of the war for both sides as long as hostilities endure.
Tripler
Explosives are also budgeted–it’s not like Comp B grows on trees, ya know.
When Mr VOW was Sgt VOW, his combat MOS (his job in the Army) was 12 Bravo: Combat Engineer.
He learned how to blow up stuff, like bridges. In order to do that, he had to learn about all types of bridges, where their stress points are, how their load is carried.
Had he ever gone into battle, he would have had to carry an extra pack containing 40 pounds of dynamite.
(I get to interject “Thank you God” because after he busted his collarbone, he was placed on a medical hold so he did not deploy to Vietnam)
So, along with blowing up bridges, and any other structure labeled for destruction, Combat Engineers also build bridges! There is one really really cool bridge that is essentially folded on top of a huge tank-like vehicle, with treads. There are pontoon bridges that come in sections that are snapped together like Legos to create the length needed.
I’m sure there were plenty of failures in WW2 where bridges didn’t get blown up, or where the Germans destroyed a bridge on a main thoroghfare, and Allied forces were stuck. Rest assured, valuable lessons were learned, which were funneled into training future Combat Engineers. And way cool equipment was invented to allow troop movement across waterways where previous bridges once stood.
Today’s warfare is sophisticated, complex, and the servicemembers get continually updated training, so that the mission can be completed.
