WW1 trenches near Switserland and the sea?

Factual Questions
1

Dear forum members,

My question is about the edges of the trench lines in WW1. I understand that the purpose of a long trench line is that an army cannot be passed from the side and then be attacked from the back. So what did the trench lines at the sea and in Switserland look like? Did they go all the way to the beach in the west? And even more intruigingly, what happened near the Swiss border? Did the trenches just stop at the Swiss border posts? And was there never a temptation for any of the armies to send a couple of soldiers through Switserland to attack the enemy from the back?

Thanks,

Steven

2

No military experts here?

I’m pretty sure it’s not common knowledge, because I’ve read quite a bit about this war, and have never come across any information about this topic.

3

This site on WWI history has it that the trench lines stetched 400 miles, from Switzerland to the North Sea, by the end of the war, with “no way round”. I’m not sure where to find details as to what the trenches looked like at either end from online sources tonight, but there are books available on the topic, I’m sure.

4

>> I understand that the purpose of a long trench line is that an army cannot be passed from the side and then be attacked from the back

I do not think this is really correct. A trench protects the guys inside it from enemy fire. In any situation you want to avoid being surrounded by the enemy but a trench is not especifically built for this. And any fortification which is a long line will have an end and the fact that it is the sea or something else matters little.

I know it’s not a good answer but I guess what I’m trying to say is that I believe your premise is flawed.

5

I’m not a military expert, but as I understand things, a big part of the trench system was to protect interior territory. So for example if the allies were to break through at one point, they could march to Berlin and end the war.

In any event, I’ve wondered about this question myself. I’m kinda speculating, but part of it might be that northern Switzerland was so mountainous that it would be difficult to send many men through without being stopped by the other side. One can imagine that the trenches would be extended a bit parallel to the Swiss border to prevent such incursions, anyway.

Similarly, on the beach, one could set up mines, guns, etc. to prevent the other side from circumventing your trenches. These defenses could be extended a bit along the beach as well.

Again, I’m just speculating.

6

one of the reasons for trenches being dug with protected ends was to prevent what is known as an “enfilade”.

That is a maneuver which places an enemy fire capability at the open end of a trench with the capability to fire straight in to the trench with no possibulity of return fire.

That is also the reason why long trenches were not straight-----to prevent massive losses in case an enfilade occured.

A long straight trench was a turkey shoot for a machine gun.

7

As I usnderstand it, it would have been impossible to walk from Switzerland to the sea below ground. To begin with, it was impossible to dig in some swampy areas (those areas were covered by above-ground fortifications.

The lines were never built as an intergrated system and so where one unit joined another the linkage was haphazard at best. There were gaps in the system (but not in the fire provided by the fortifications).

As for what happened at the seashore and the Swiss frontier, I dunno, you would think there must be at least one neato photograph somewhere of it.

8

I asked this same question on my first post to the board a couple of years ago. From what I can remember from the answers is that at the Southern end the Swiss army had a strong presence on their border and would not allow any incursions into Switzerland . This was not flat land here but the foot-hills of the Vosges Mountains and so a trench system was not viable anyway , just fortified positions and outposts. At the northen end the wire streached out to sea and both sides had gun boats to prevent incursions.

9

Thanks Rayne Man, and others.
Your thoughts have cleared a lot up. Especially about how sometimes digging a trench just wasn’t possible, and about how things were at the northern end.
Only I’m not too sure about the presence of an army at the Swiss border. I thought the Swiss never had an army? Or perhaps they had then, but don’t have one now.

10

“Only I’m not too sure about the presence of an army at the Swiss border. I thought the Swiss never had an army? Or perhaps they had then, but don’t have one now.”

The Swiss are fairly highly militarized. I believe that all able-bodied male Swiss citizens must go initial military training and some period of service and that they then train on a regular basis until they are old. I think they keep at least some of their weapons at home. And some proportion of private single-family residences (1 of 3?) have underground shelters with blast proof doors and stores of food and water.

Arnold?

11

On a related note, I’ve seen pictures of the sea end of the Great Wall of China. At land’s end there’s a cause way that extends several hundred feet into the sea. The wall is extended out on it and there’s a large tower at the end. So any Mongols trying to outflank the wall would have to swim hundreds of feet to get around. I believe the site is a major tourist attraction in China.

12

The Swiss do not like war, they are totally against war(they havent had one for hundreds of years) and will not permit nor tolerate other armies from entering or using their land or airspace. The Swiss people are probably the most heavily armed citizens in the world, even more and better armed than the Americans or Isralies and are fully prepared to successfully defend themselves against any country, and no one in Switzerland has the power to surrender, so if you were to fight Switzerland, you would have to kill them all. It is suicide for any army to enter Switzerland.

13

I have heard it said that even today the Swiss have mined their most important tunnels and bridges so that , in the the event of an invasion, they can detonate these and impede the enemy forces. In WW2 the Swiss shot down several Allied and Axis planes which had strayed into their territory .

14

Switzerland’s voters recently voted to keep its armed forces.

I think one reason Switzerland has been safe from European wars because it is valuable as a listening post and neutral talking ground. Subjects arise that need talking about on the part of the opposing sides, even during a hot war. For example, the status of nationals who were trapped in the enemy country by the onset of the war.

15

Susanann wrote:

“…and no one in Switzerland has the power to surrender…”

Is this really true!?!?

16

There are 2 good books that docuement the military strategy of Switzerland:

“Target Switzerland” by Stephen P. Halbrook

and

“Total Resistance” by Major H. Von Dach

They both document the absolute total resistance of all Swiss citizens and the total lack of any surrendering authority. During world war 2, all Swiss were reminded over and over again, that surrender is not an option, and if any Swiss citizen was told of a surrender, to not believe it.

No Swiss general, nor the president of Switzerland has the power to surrender. Any and every invading army, knows they will have to fight and be shot at until the very last Swiss citizen is dead.

The Swiss defense and reliance upon its militia, which has worked for over 400 years, depends on a “no surrender” policy.

17

That is absolutely true.

The Discovery channel has shown this, as well as the Swiss underground fortifications. Not only “important” bridges and tunnels are mined, but all passes and all bridges and all tunnels will be blown up.

Anyone who invades Switzerland, not only has all of its citizens shooting at them, but Switzerland becomes worthless to the invaders since the entire country becomes impassable.

Switzerland will no longer become strategically important if invaded, just a bunch of mountains full of armed citizens who can shoot straight, and who will never stop shooting at you until they are dead, or you are dead.

The Swiss policy is that the country will become worthless, and you will also be shot at by every Swiss citizen.

18

This sounds like utter BS to me and requires proof. I searched the Swiss Constitution and found nothing supporting this assertion. Taking into account that susanann has a habit of just disappearing from threads when asked to support her assertions I am not going to waste any time trying to debunk it. I say it is just more of the usual BS.

19

In the late 80s, the Scottish author William Boyd published a not-bad novel called The New Confessions, in which the main character is a filmmaker with a Rousseau obsession whose life covers much of the 20th century. At one point during the First World War, the character is stationed at the sea-end of the line. I’m fairly sure that I’ve seen evidence that this has to be explicitly impossible, in that this stretch was never manned by a British unit, though I’m not sure offhand whether Boyd acknowledged this by coming up with a fictional explanation for the discrepency. For what it’s worth, as I recall, Boyd’s description of the end of the line accords with what lucwarm and Rayne Man suggest.

However, the more direct representation of the sea-end that I’ve seen is in a reprint of a book whose name I, unfortunately, cannot remember. This was an unofficial postwar (?) volume consisting of a single metre-or-so-long diagram giving a “panorama” of the entire Western Front from an impossibly birds-eye viewpoint. The style was somewhat newspaperish, in that it was meant to be both a map-like representation on one scale and to suggest the local features by drawing these on a much larger one. Having read Boyd, I specifically looked to see what happened at the sea: basically, it had the wire running out to sea and particularly heavy fortifications on both sides beside the beach. The book had been reprinted relatively recently in a cheap edition.

20

Read the entirety of both above mentioned books for all you want to know about Swiss.

I will not post the entirety of this, but I will post as much as possible, and more than usual, since some people as shown by the previous post, are not able to link to other sites to read information from other sites, nor read the original material.

Thus, for those people who cannot read books or link to other sites, here are various excerpts from Stephen P. Halbrook’s “Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II.” and from “Total Resistance” :

http://home.earthlink.net/~founders/switzerland.htm

"A 1940 Newsweek magazine article characterized Switzerland as the world’s oldest and purest democracy where, in three cantons, government was still conducted by a show of hands in public squares at the Landsgemeinden. The militia had no officer higher than a colonel in peacetime. “Even when there is no European war on, every member of this militia army of some 500,000 keeps his gun, ammunition, and equipment at home making the Swiss Government the only one in Europe which trusts such a large proportion of citizens with arms.”

What this meant to the Nazis was that they would have to conquer Switzerland right down to the last man. And many of these men would be sniping from steep, hidden Alpine positions at German troops with rifles which were accurate at long ranges.

There would be no surrender.

The April,1944 issue of American Mercury magazine included an intriguing article by Edward Byng entitled “If Switzerland is Invaded.” In that event, warned Byng, demolition would begin in seconds “Terrific explosions [would] rend the air all along the Swiss frontiers, as if hundreds of avalanches were thundering down the mountain slopes of the land.” All bridges over the Rhine would collapse, and mines would await invaders who tried to cross by rafts or amphibious tanks. The Simplon and the St. Gotthard tunnels would be destroyed. Roads, railways, bridges, power stations and air fields would be blown up. Camouflaged tank traps and electrified barbed-wire fences would stop many panzers and infantry."
http://home.earthlink.net/~founders/switzerland.htm
http://i2i.org/Publications/IP/Other/Target_Switzerland.htm

"In World War II, the Swiss had defenses no other country had.

When the German Kaiser asked in 1912 what the quarter of a million Swiss militiamen would do if invaded by a half million German soldiers, a Swiss replied: shoot twice and go home.

Switzerland also had a decentralized, direct democracy which could not be surrendered to a foreign enemy by a political elite.

Some governments surrendered to Hitler without resistance based on the decision of a king or dictator; this was institutionally impossible in Switzerland.

If an ordinary Swiss citizen was told that the Federal President–a relatively powerless official–had surrendered the country, the citizen might not even know the president’s name, and would have held any “surrender” order in contempt.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Swiss feared an invasion and began military preparations like no other European nation. On Hitler’s 1938 “Anchluss” or annexation of Austria, the Swiss Parliament declared that the Swiss were prepared to defend themselves “to the last drop of their blood.”

When the Fuehrer attacked Poland in 1939, Swiss General Guisan ordered the citizen army to resist any attack to the last cartridge. After Denmark and Norway fell in 1940, Guisan and the Federal Council gave the order to the populace: Aggressively attack invaders; act on your own initiative; regard any surrender broadcast or announcement as enemy propaganda; resist to the end.

This was published as a message to the Swiss and a warning to the Germans; surrender was impossible, even if ordered by the government, for the prior order mandated that any “surrender” be treated as an enemy lie."

http://i2i.org/Publications/IP/Other/Target_Switzerland.htm

"When the Germany army, the Wehrmacht, attacked Belgium and Holland, it feigned preparations for attack through Switzerland. Like actors on a giant movie set, divisions moved toward the Swiss border by day, only to sneak back again by night and repeat the ruse the next day. Both the Swiss and the French were tricked into thinking that concentrations of troops were massing to attack through Switzerland and into France. Swiss border troops nervously awaited an assault each time the clock approached the hour, for the Germans were punctual in lauching attacks on the hour.

When France collapsed, detailed Nazi invasion plans with names like “Case Switzerland” and “Operation Tannenbaum” were prepared for the German General Staff. They only awaited the Fuehrer’s nod.

A fifth of the Swiss people, 850,000 out of the 4.2 million population, was under arms and mobilized. Most men were in the citizens army, and boys and old men with rifles constituted the Home Guard. Many women served in the civil defense and the anti-aircraft defense.
http://i2i.org/Publications/IP/Other/Target_Switzerland.htm

Hitler banned the play William Tell. He called the Swiss “the most despicable and wretched people, mortal enemies of the new Germany”; in the same breath he fumed that all Jews must be expelled from Europe. His plan to annihilate the Jews would have faced a special obstacle in Switzerland, where every Swiss Jew (like every other citizen) had a rifle in his home. "

http://i2i.org/Publications/IP/Other/Target_Switzerland.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1885119534/independenceinstA/103-8288286-5187800
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/spytechagency/11628.html

http://hallbiographies.com/index.php/Mode/product/AsinSearch/0873640217/name/Total%20Resistance/browse/916942/page/1

http://home.earthlink.net/~founders/switzerland.htm

"In response to the invasions of small neutral countries, Switzerland issued its “directions concerning the conduct of the soldiers not under arms in event of attack.” Intended as a warning to Germany, it was pasted on walls all over the country. It prescribed the reaction against surprise attack and against the fifth column as follows:

All soldiers and those with them are to attack with ruthlessness parachutists, airborne infantry and saboteurs. Where no officers and noncommissioned officers are present, each soldier is to act under exertion of all powers of his own initiative.

This command for the individual to act on his own initiative was an ancient Swiss tradition which reflected the political and military leadership’s staunch confidence in the ordinary man. This command was possible, of course, only in a society where every man had his rifle at home.

Under no condition, the order continued, would any surrender be forthcoming, and any pretense of a surrender must be ignored:

If by radio, leaflets or other media any information is transmitted doubting the will of the Federal Council or of the Army High Command to resist an attacker, this information must be regarded as lies of enemy propaganda. Our country will resist aggression with all means in its power and to the death.

Switzerland, in other words, possessed the most democratic system of national defense in Europe. The Nazis were well aware that invasion meant fighting on every inch of ground (much of it vertical), in every city and village, in every pasture and mountainside, right down to every man with a rifle. There would be no easy surrender made by a ruler, as elsewhere.

The Swiss policy of total resistance is further illustrated by the creation of a system of local defense, the Ortswehren. It was based on the dictum that “only a total defense can oppose total war.”

http://home.earthlink.net/~founders/switzerland.htm