fortification

The American Civil War

In the American Civil War, field fortifications emerged as an essential of warfare, with both armies employing entrenchments to an extent never before seen. Troops learned to fortify newly won positions immediately; employing spades and axes carried in their packs, they first dug rifle pits and then expanded them into trenches. Early in the war, General Robert E. Lee adopted the frontier rifleman’s breastwork composed of two logs on the parapet of the entrenchment, and many of Lee’s victories were the result of his ability to use hasty entrenchments as a base for aggressive employment of fire and maneuver. Two notable sieges, that of Vicksburg, Miss., in the west, and Petersburg, Va., in the east, were characterized by the construction of extensive and continuous trench lines that foreshadowed those of World War I. In the Cold Harbor, Va., campaign, when General Ulysses S. Grant sent his troops against Confederate earthworks, he lost 14,000 men in 13 days. Field mines and booby traps were used extensively, and trench mortars were developed to lob shells into opposing trenches.

World War I

The lesson taught by accurate, long-range fire from entrenched positions in the American Civil War was lost on European commanders. Even the bitter experiences of appalling losses in the Crimean, Franco-German, and South African (Boer) wars failed to lessen an ardour for the theory of the offensive that was so fervent as to leave little concern for defensive tactics in the field. Few took notice of the immense casualties the Turks inflicted from behind field fortifications in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and even though the Russo-Japanese War soon after the turn of the century underscored the lethal power of the machine gun and breech-loading rifled artillery, most European commanders saw the increased firepower as more a boon to the offensive than to the defensive.

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Architecture: The Built World

The fallacy of the faith in offensive firepower was soon convincingly demonstrated. Once the French had checked the German right wing at the Marne River, the fighting degenerated into what was in effect a massive siege. For 600 miles (1,000 kilometres), from Switzerland to the North Sea, the landscape was soon scarred with opposing systems of zigzag, timber-revetted, sandbag-reinforced trenches, fronted by tangles of barbed wire sometimes more than 150 feet (45 metres) deep and featured here and there by covered dugouts providing shelter for troops and horses and by observation posts in log bunkers or concrete turrets. The trench systems consisted of several lines in depth, so that if the first line was penetrated, the assailants were little better off. Rail and motor transport could rush fresh reserves forward to seal off a gap faster than the attackers could continue forward. Out beyond the trenches and the barbed wire was a muddy, virtually impassable desert called no-man’s-land, where artillery fire soon eliminated habitation and vegetation alike. The fighting involved masses of men, masses of artillery, and masses of casualties. Toxic gases—asphyxiating, lachrymatory, and vesicant—were introduced in a vain effort to break the dominance of the defense, which was so overpowering that for more than two years the opposing lines varied less than 10 miles in either direction.

During the winter of 1916–17, the Germans prepared a reserve trench system, the Hindenburg Line, containing deep dugouts where the men could take cover against artillery fire and machine guns emplaced in concrete shelters called pillboxes. Approximately two miles behind the forward line was a second position, almost as strong. The Hindenburg Line resisted all Allied assaults in 1917, including a vast British mining operation under the Messines Ridge in Belgium that literally blew up the ridge, inflicting 17,000 casualties at one blow; the advance failed to carry beyond the ridge.

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World War I

Most defensive thinking on the eve of World War I was reserved for the permanent fort, which was designed to canalize enemy advance and to afford time for national mobilization. The leading fortification engineer of the time was a Belgian, Henri Brialmont. He placed his forts, built of concrete, at an average distance of four miles from a city, as with 12 forts at Liège, and at intervals of approximately 2.5 miles. At Antwerp his defense system was even more dense. He protected the big guns of his forts with turrets of steel and developed disappearing cupolas. Some forts were pentagonal, others triangular, with much of the construction underground.

In building defenses along the frontier facing Germany, French engineers emulated Brialmont, with particularly strong clusters of fortresses at Verdun and Belfort. So monstrous were the forts of the time that they were known as “land battleships.” But by marching through Belgium with a strong right wing (the Schlieffen plan), the Germans circumvented the powerful French fortresses. Passing between the forts at Liège, which Brialmont had intended to be connected with trenches, they took the city in only three days, then systematically reduced the forts. Namur, also heavily fortified, resisted the powerful Big Bertha guns for only four days. The concrete of the Belgian fortifications crumbled under the pounding, but the French forts at Verdun, of more recent and sturdier construction, later absorbed tremendous punishment and served as focal points for some of the war’s bloodiest fighting.