Dan Snow's History Hit - Hitler's Atlantic Wall
Episode Date: April 1, 2021The Atlantic Wall is one of the biggest construction projects in history a line of formidable defences stretching from the Pyrenees to the Norwegian Arctic but how effective was it? Dan speaks to Jame...s Rogers, host of our sibling podcast Warfare, about his recent History Hit documentary In Defence of the Reich: Hitler's Atlantic Wall. They discuss how and why the Atlantic Wall was built, Hitler's obsession with it, how effective it was and whether it could have ever been successful against an allied invasion.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about Hitler's Atlantic Wall on this episode, one of the biggest construction projects in history.
A line of concrete and steel stretching from the Spanish border from the Pyrenees Mountains to the Norwegian Arctic.
A bizarre projection of Hitler's desire to render the Third Reich in steel and wire and concrete.
Perhaps that corporal never truly left the trenches of the First World War behind.
James Rogers is a historian. He is host of the history hit Warfare podcast, which we've extended now to cover military history, 18th century to the present day.
to cover military history, 18th century to the present day.
And he made a documentary about a remarkable stretch of the Atlantic Wall,
which you can find in Denmark, which has survived and is a great place to learn more about that fortification.
He and I chatted about the Atlantic Wall,
his experience making this documentary, The History Hit TV.
If you want to watch that documentary, you head over to historyhit.tv
for a small subscription.
You can go and check out that documentary and many,
many others. We've got our Women of World War II documentary doing very well at the moment.
We interviewed a series of women all in their late 90s about their wartime experiences serving
in the armed forces in the UK, SOE, Signals Interception, Bletchley Park, and also the Women's Royal Naval Service.
So please head over there and do that. Historyhit.tv, the perfect
gift on an Easter weekend for someone you love.
In the meantime, here's James Rogers talking about the Atlantic Wall. Enjoy.
James, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast.
Not a problem at all.
Thanks for having me, Dan.
So what have you been up to?
You've been on the icy cold coast of Denmark
looking at some remarkable bits of Atlantic wall.
Where did this Atlantic wall go from and to?
Is it really Pyrenees up to Norway?
How true is that?
Oh God, yeah, completely true.
It went from the Norwegian Arctic down to the French border with Spain. We're talking 3,000 miles. Hitler's plan here
was to have 15,000 bunkers. Bunkers that overlooked every square inch of sand along
the Atlantic coastline to make sure that the Allies just couldn't get through.
Dictators love gigantic
defensive building projects, don't they? We'll talk about whether it worked at the end, but it's
like an astonishingly expensive... Was this Hitler's idea? What did his soldiers honestly
think that this would stop, interdict an invasion of Western Europe? Hey look, I'm going to say that
this was Hitler's obsession, not just his idea. Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, would say that Hitler
would sit there late at night sketching out designs for bunkers and that these bunkers would
then be sent off to organisation Tote, who was the big organisation charged with making these giant
concrete projects, and they wouldn't really change the designs because you didn't want to cross Hitler. So they kind of went up without
any real strategic or military review, which left a number of Hitler's military advisors
scratching their heads and wondering why they looked the way they did and why they were placed
in the locations that they were, including Rommel at a later date, who once he had lost over in North Africa, the Desert Fox, was sent to the
blustery, cold Atlantic wall to try and get things into shape. And what he found was just a bit of a
joke, really. He didn't understand why they were so stretched out. He didn't know why they were put
in the places they were. They didn't make strategic sense. And so he tried to reorganise the lot. He created these Vidastan's nests where they'd be
clustered together along the Atlantic coast so that they could concentrate their force against
any Allied attack and defend each other as well. So there was a force multiplication happening.
And then he tried to create deeper defences so that if the Allies were to attack then they'd be able to move armoured brigades around so that they could intercept any forthcoming attack. He didn't
have enough time to do it properly though, I mean Romel only really had seven months to try and turn
this around. But all of this stems back to Hitler's obsession, pouring vast amounts of resources,
we're talking millions of tonnes of concrete, of steel, millions of Reichsmark.
He even moved resources from the Eastern Front to get to his wall to try and make it a realistic possibility.
I don't want to try and get too deep into the mind of Adolf Hitler.
I think that that's always a worrying thing to do.
But he had a kind of control over this, right? So by 1942, as things started to go wrong
in the much broader war, after those initial successes in the Battle of France, turning over
France in six weeks, Blitzkrieg, amazing successes, Operation Barbarossa in 41, 80 years ago, this year
was Barbarossa, pushing the Soviets back, marching on the gates of Moscow.
These things had gone so well, but by 1942, things had really changed.
Rommel, who had had so many successes also over in North Africa,
his lines of intelligence, which allowed him to second guess every single Allied move,
had been cut off. We're only finding that information out now.
single Allied move had been cut off. We're only finding that information out now. The fact that there was a mole inside the American defence attaché's office in North Africa that was feeding
Rommel this intelligence. Well, as soon as that was cut off, he started losing the war. He didn't
realise that there was going to be forces at El Alamein. He was turned around. And to cut that
long story short, Rommel is, of course course sent back. You're starting to see the Americans
coming into the war after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, readying up that formidable strike
that's going to come later in the war. And the Soviets, after moving all of their war resources
across the country, recruiting, regrouping, retraining, are starting to push back. And Hitler
is faced on two fronts here and so it's here that
we start to see him trying to invest more and more and more more of his time more of his energy and
more of those vital german resources into the formidable atlantic war one of the largest
building projects in the history of the world because he has to protect that flank from allied invasion it's very interesting
because hitler in his invasion of western europe and the east barbarossa they make great fanfare
of the fact that they have circumvented penetrated jumped over fixed defenses that blitzkrieg is all
about mobility and how clumsy and slow moving other forces are that depend on fixed defenses
and yet then the Wehrmacht go
and build the greatest set of fixed defences in the history of the world. Is that because deep
down Hitler's still that corporal? He's still that trapped corporal on the Western Front where,
to be fair, 14 to 18 fixed defences do work quite effectively, just given where technology was at
that time. Yeah, I think you're definitely right. I think he's probably drawing on his own experiences
as best he can. But those in the know, like Gertrude Runstead, who's commanding the Western forces there,
he's saying that this isn't going to work. This is really just a mirage of a defence. In no way,
shape or form are we any longer in an age of static defence. You're exactly right, Dan, in the fact that you need to
have depth in defence so that it can absorb the initial attack and then push forward and repel it.
And this just wasn't what the Atlantic Wall was designed for. You go down there, you go
onto the beaches of places like Western Denmark, and you start to see how these were very much
designed to try and repel the attack on the beaches. Rommel, once he started to survey these of places like Western Denmark. And you start to see how these were very much designed
to try and repel the attack on the beaches.
Rommel, once he started to survey these walls,
said that actually, due to the fact that this is what we've gone for,
this battle is going to be won and lost on the beaches of Europe.
You look back and it really was quite a strategic mistake, wasn't it?
The resources, you mentioned some of the figures
there. I mean, the steel, the concrete. I mean, were there voices in Germany at the time saying,
no, we need more tanks, we need more armoured divisions, we need to be mobile, we need to
respond rapidly to any landings? Was there much of a discussion or did Hitler just bulldoze this
through? I think that there was dissenting discussion in the ranks, let's say, but that's
not going to get back to Hitler. You disagree with Hitler and you are usually gone. So you carry on with those plans, you carry on
with those defences. And on paper, they kind of make sense. You do really have to defend
a lot of what is going on up in Norway. You need to defend the fact that the Third Reich needs to have that vital supply of iron,
of which Sweden and Norway are crucial to ensuring those resources get through and keep getting
through for the vast German war machine. And so that investment then in the steel and the concrete
kind of starts to make sense if it does work and does shore those things up. And then Denmark
itself is a remarkable history. I live in Denmark
and I've been living here for the last three years, jumping into that deep history of Denmark
and the Second World War. It was really important for Germany because it was a breadbasket. I mean,
they call it the cream front in Denmark because it was supplying all that milk, all that pork,
all that butter, all that cream straight into Germany to feed that hungry workforce and those
fighting forces. So you had to protect these things and you had to protect those supply routes.
There's also another thing which I think is often overlooked in this historiography and that's the
psychological PR aspect of the Atlantic wall. And you go back to that idea you said earlier on about the fact that
dictators or perhaps authoritarian leaders love the idea of big infrastructure projects and
some more recently, like big walls, not to call President Trump authoritarian in any way,
shape or form, but they have a certain PR element to them. And this was so important during this
time. I mean, it fed into the morale
of the troops and the morale of the German people who earlier on had been deliberately kept out of
the war. You hadn't recruited women earlier on. You try to allow the Germans to carry on
a relatively normal life. This wasn't going to affect them. Germany was going to win
pretty easily. But by 1942-43,
the German population had been dragged into this. Even more people brought into the military,
and many of which were going to be sent up to that formidable Atlantic wall that was going to
protect them. Goebbels used this all the time. He used it in propaganda all the time. And you go on
the beaches and you see these gigantic structures. I mean, some were massive command
posts and they just line as far as the eye can see, Dan, like an endless march up the coast
and down the coast. But once you actually got there and you started to look inside them as a
German soldier, you saw that they really just hadn't been completely finished. And they never were finished.
Hitler wanted 15,000.
I mean, they didn't even really reach a third of that.
It was useful as PR, not useful as a military defence, sadly.
Well, not sadly.
Yeah, luckily.
You're listening to Dan Snow's History here.
We're talking to James Rogers about the Atlantic War.
More after this.
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what did the allies make of it did they see through it do they see it's kind of like a Potemkin village nature or were they very worried about making an opposed landing against it
I think that there's one element that did work well, and that was this
idea of creating these port citadels, these bastions that would line the Atlantic coast.
So if you're looking at a Calais, or you're looking at an Ostend, or you're looking at an
Esbjerg in Denmark, then what you're seeing is the fact that they'd created more defensive buildings
than there were buildings
at these ports. They were formidable and you really didn't want to take one of those head-on.
And we'd already been bruised in places like Dieppe when we tried to take on ports head-on.
I mean, look at the casualties there. It became clear that they were well defended and you really
couldn't move through and take on those defences.
So it's here that Allied planners and offensive planners started to see that we need to come up with an alternative. We need to define those gaps in the armour. Now Hitler knew this and that's why
you had his issuing of Directive 40 and I can read you what that stated. It said that in the days to come,
the coast of Europe will be seriously exposed to the dangers of enemy landing. Disposition of
forces and improvements of fortifications are to be made so that the main defensive effort lies in
those coastal sectors that are the most probable sites for enemy landing. Those remaining coastal sectors
that are vulnerable to coup de main or even small units must be protected by means of a strong point
type of defence. And so it's here that you started to see the spreading of the Atlantic wall, that
issuing of the order for 15,000 bunkers. And I think in some ways the Allies were taken in by this. When
you do see the scale of the building projects that are going on, it's hard not to be worried
about what your forces are going to face. But we really did outthink the Axis powers. We outthought
the Third Reich because we had our Mulberry Harbours. And they were ingenious. The fact that we could have
these off the coast of any point, park up our big ships, make those landings and provide a sustained
invasion without having to go to one of those port citadels, those bastions, without having to take
an Ostend or a Calais or an Espia. And actually, when it came to trying to take those later on in the war, those were some of our fiercest battles. They were so well defended, Dan.
You've walked huge chunks of the Atlantic Wall for this project on history and for other projects.
What are they like today? Where's the best stretches that remain, would you say,
people can go and get a sense of the scale of this architectural engineering?
It's like stepping back into history.
You have so many of them so well preserved.
You take a walk down onto the beaches near places like Esbjerg in Denmark,
and it gives you a feel of what it would have been like
to have been stationed there in a harsh Danish winter.
You've got the salt and the sand kicking up with a fierce wind like shards into your face.
But you see the white sand just spreading on for miles. It's got this light dusting on the surface,
but underneath it's rock hard like concrete. It would have been perfect for an invasion.
And then it's kind of framed by these towering dunes that come from the back. And then perched on those dunes are these
bunkers. And I went up there with our producer Mark, who you know well, and the great Danish
war historian Roon Egberg. And he took us into these bunkers. And you go inside and you can
go inside. They're just there. They're just open. You can walk in. There's a few that are still on
a live Danish firing range. And we couldn't film on those because we didn't want it to be
too realistic as the shots were going over. But you can go inside so many of them there.
And there's the original paintwork. Believe it or not, it's faded, but you can see the original
numbering and lettering on the inside. You've got the pipes. You've got pretty much everything that's in there,
apart from the fact it's filled up with sand up to your waist, so you have to crawl and sneak
through at points. But as you stand there and you look through the machine gun windows and you look
through the post where those vast artillery would have put into place, and the only way I can really
describe it is like standing on the deck of a giant battleship with the gun there
looking out to sea and you can just think for a second what it would have been like for a German
soldier standing there in the depths of winter waiting for that allied invasion to come in I
mean I wouldn't have wanted to have been there Dan but I probably would have preferred to have
been there than the eastern front oh god God, yeah, tough choice, I mean. Although you mentioned battleships, big guns,
well you should have built more of. You should have listened to Scheer, built some more Tirpitzers
and Bismarcks, stopped an invasion fleet in the middle of the channel once they got on land.
That's the lesson. So you thought you looked at British coastal fortification in the 19th century,
whereas what a waste of money they were. Let's talk about when the Allies actually landed on D-Day. How effective was the Atlantic War in stopping them, James?
As effective as it could be, which wasn't very effective. I'm hasten to say it was a complete
failure because it did the best job that it could given the situation. And there are
formidable accounts of these machine gun posts
taking out vast swathes of Allied forces, thousands, until they were overrun. But they
were strategically flawed from the start. And also, I mean, the Allies had put together such
a vast, incredible preponderance of power to take that coast that really, do you think that anything
was going to stop that moving through? And then there's a catalogue of errors. That depth of
defence that Romel had tried to put in place just ends up getting cut off. You have the vast amounts
of air power that come in as well. The communication lines that are cut, the special operations executives
that had gone in there prior to the invasion, and they'd cut the rail links, they'd shut off the
roads, they'd cut the commands and the radio controls. All of this had happened at the same
time. So the generals who are in charge of this start becoming blind and deaf, unable to coordinate their attacks. And all of this
allows the Allies to move through, not easily, but overall successfully.
And I guess it's important to think that the real decisive fighting for Normandy was in the days and
weeks after that, and the appalling battles of Normandy, in which casualty rates were similar
to those of some of the big First World War battles. And actually, that's when the Allies had their
toehold, they'd landed. So I guess for future despots who want to protect their empires,
you either got to interdict the fleet at sea, or you let them land and then crush them on land,
right? So trying to stop them in the shallows hasn't really worked.
Yeah, I think static defence doesn't seem to work also don't invade russia and get
caught up in the winter i think that's probably the lesson evergreen evergreen advice for sure
man well listen thank you so much for coming on and thank you for making this show for history
thank you make a podcast i know you've got lots of plans coming up but anything you can tell us
about yes we now have the new look history hit Warfare podcast,
which I present on Spotify, Apple Music and Acast.
In fact, wherever you get your podcasts.
Each week, twice a week, I team up with historians, experts and the veterans who served
to reveal astonishing new histories of ferocious global conflict.
We stretch from the Seven Years' War, through the World Wars, the Cold War,
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And to give you a bit of a taster, we've got an episode coming up for Anzac Day
with 97-year-old World War II veteran Jim Burrows. Now, Jim was in the Australian military,
and he spent 10 months in occupied Japanese territory as a formidable
coast watcher. And what he has to say about the Pacific campaign is fascinating. So do check out
the History Hit Warfare podcast. And then we have lots more Danish history coming up. In a time of
COVID and lockdown, it just so happens that a History hit producer, Mark, and a history hit presenter,
me, are in Denmark. So we're going to make the most of it. We're going to bring you Viking
history. We're going to bring you lost hidden murder stories around bog men in Denmark. We've
got all of it. So yeah, keep your eyes and ears open. Luckily, we lock you down in a place where
there's a ton of history. Thank you very much for coming on the show, James. Thanks, Dan.
I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.
All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,
this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.
Hope you enjoyed the podcast.
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