World War I Belgian Fortress

Factual Questions
1

I like to think I have a good knowledge of early 20th Century history, but this one has me stumped. Last night at the weekly trivia showdown, someone said to me “Hey, you’ll know this: What was the name of that fortress in World War I that was destroyed by VERY heavy mortor fire? I think it was in Belgium.”

Well, I didn’t know it, and it’s been bugging me all day. My research has come up dry. The best thing I could find was that maybe it was at the battle of Ypres (sp?). There were three battles there, and it was described as a “Medievel town”, which could mean it was walled, and that it was damn near destroyed during the second battle. Somehow, this does not satisfy me, so I turn to the Teeming Millions.

So, to sum up: Belgian fortress, destroyed by mortor fire, world war one. Ring a bell with anyone? Anyone?

2

Not sure, but do you mean Fort Douaumont at Verdun?

3

Probably the forts around Liege, destroyed by Germany’s “Big Bertha” 420 mm siege howitzer ?

S. Norman

4

Belgian forts at Liege and Namur guarded crossings of the Meuse River. At Liege, the river runs in a gorge 135m/450’ deep. They were built 1888-1892, to withstand attack from a 210mm/8.4" gun. At liege there were 12 forts in a 25 mile circumference circle with 400 guns and a garrison of 40,000. The forts were made of concrete and armour, were mostly underground, had 30 ft. ditches around them, and soldiers were to dig trenches between the forts in the event of an attack. The forts were named Barchon, Loncin, Evegnee, Pontisse, Embourg, Chaudfontaine, Liers, Fleron, Boncelle, Lautin, Hollogne, and Flemelle. Namur was a similar arrangement of forts.

The Germans had seven Krupp 420mm/16.8" and some Skoda 305mm/12.2" guns. The 2000 pound shells took 60 seconds to traverse, had a delay fuse for penetration purposes, and were “stripping away armour plate and blocks of concrete, cracking arches and poisoning the air with heavy brown fumes.” At Fort Loncin, the magazine was penetrated and the explosion destroyed the fortress. It looked like “a miniature alpine landscape with debris strewn about like pebbles in a mountain stream…a cupola had been blown from its place…and fallen on its dome; it now looked like a monstrous tortoise, lying on its shell.” After taking Liege, it took three days of bombardment to take the Namur forts.

Other forts, at Maubeuge, Przemysl, Lemberg, and Verdun, would serve as fixed points of encounter around which battles were waged, but after Liege and Namur, there was less trust in the power of fortresses.

Thanks to John Keegan, for his book “The First World War”.

“Liege” is probably the trivia response.

5

I’d hate to see Al Zheimersgood post disappear into obscurity so rapidly so I’m bumping it.

6

Indeed. Thanks, Al Zheimers! I’ll look like I"m really on top of things when I sashay into the bar next Wednesday night and drop the science on the Leige forts. And it will all be because of you.
But my follow up readings led me to a new question, which I’m sure someone will be quick to answer. My trivia friend said that the fort (which we now know to be both plural and located at Liege) was destroyed by mortar (which we now know to be spelled with only one “o”) fire, while my reading called the Big Berthas (the Krupp 420/mm referenced in Al’s post) howitzers. What is the difference between a mortar and a howitzer?

7

This site discusses U.S. Civil War artillery, but it does a good job of showing the basic differences between the types.

Artillery Pieces of the Civil War

One significant change since the 1860s is that mortars are no longer simply massive pots of iron or steel with a small hole for the round. To most people not educated on the subject, guns/rifles, howitzers, and mortars would all look enough alike to be just called “cannons.”

The main reason that the same gun may be called mortar by one author and howitzer by another is simply perspective. They both fire a slow round in a high arch to go over walls and hills. How steeply the arch is set and the outside range of the round is the principle difference, so different authors can set the break-off point at different angles and ranges.

8

Tom - maybe that was accurate at the time, but in modern military parlence, there’s a clear difference between a mortar and a howitzer - while they’re both indirect-fire weapons, a mortar is loaded from the barrel, while a howitzer is loaded from the breach.

9

I was certainly not careful in my descripton and no one would confuse a WWII 60 mm infantry support mortar wih a cannon–or even one of these 120 mm monsters:
http://w4.pica.army.mil/voice1996/960419/mortar.html

However, some of the very large wheeled mortars used in Europe (particularly Bosnia) look (to the untrained eye) very much a “cannon”. I have no idea whether the German 420 mm gun of WWI was muzzle- or breech-loaded, but I am fairly sure that the “self-arming” mortar was developed between the World Wars.

One of the points of confusion might have simply been the mixture of guns. The 305 mm Skoda mentioned earlier was clearly a mortar. Whether the 420 mm piece was truly a mortar or a howitzer I am not sure. If the 420 mm gun was a howitzer, some authors might have simply used howitzer as shorthand for the mixed array of guns while others used mortar to describe the same mixture without getting caught up in details of how many guns were of each type.

10

The dicke Bertha was in fact breech-loading like a modern howitzer, but as you can see from the photograph on that page, it fired at a mortar-like angle. Two 420mm Krupps participated in the seige of Liege, beginning August 12, 1914.

When von Falkenhayn elected to “bleed the French white” at Verdun, a big part of the plan included a concentration of thirteen 420s. They were terrifying weapons, because the concussion from firing them was communicated through the ground to the intended victims, who then had to wait for up to a minute before the shell finally hit. Some sources describe the sound of the shell’s descent as similar to that of a rushing freight train. The detonation of course was enormous, capable of killing by concussion alone dozens or even hundreds of feet away.

To make it even more eerie, the shells were so big they could be seen in ballistic flight. As Verdun wore on, the barrels of the Berthas wore out, causing the shells to slowly tumble through the air. I remember reading one account of a tough seargeant who was considered completely unflappable because he was completely deaf, but who eventually completely cracked after watching the 420 shells tumbling through the sky.

11

As an interesting demonstration of the confusion of terms between howitzer and mortar in the WWI timeframe, Sofa King’s link refers to the 305 mm Skoda as a howitzer, yet my encyclopedia of Arms and Weapons explicitly names the Skoda in the mortar section.

It appears that between the stubby devices of the U.S. Civil War and the self-arming devices of WWII, the mortar name got used for a number of guns we would now call howitzers.

12

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by tomndebb *
However, some of the very large wheeled mortars used in Europe (particularly Bosnia) look (to the untrained eye) very much a “cannon”. I have no idea whether the German 420 mm gun of WWI was muzzle- or breech-loaded, but I am fairly sure that the “self-arming” mortar was developed between the World Wars. (emphasis mine)

Actually, according to Ian Hogg in Grenades and mortars (Ballantine, 1974), this type of mortar was developped just before WWI, in 1908, by the Germans. It was developped further during the war by the British, by Sir Wilfred Stokes to be precise, and gained its full name as the trench mortar.

Before WWI, mortars were part of the artillery siege train. After it, they were reclassified as heavy mortars and referred to as siege artillery, the largest ones being the monsters of the Thor-type (600 mm) used by the Germans during WWII.

Oh, also, 120 mm mortars are not new, both the Soviets and the Germans used them in WWII.

13

In response to the OP, you could check out “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman for an account of the seige of Liege.

As I recall, the circular arrangement of the 12 sub-forts was because Belgium was a neutral state, and therefore built its fortifications facing all directions, as even building a fort with a particular hypothetical opponent in mind might be taken as a waiver of neutrality.