Thanks!

Indeed so. The varied content on BOTR is one of its best features.

Thanks for your kind words!!!

@Cumberland Sausage We know the area relatively well as we're in Swindon. It's landowner permission for firing and filming that we need.

as a kid i did enjoy clambering around atlantic wall bunkers.

@@Erpyrikk I can say that in the 1970's, the custodians were not to thrilled with me and my cousins playing on the reconstructed ramparts at Andersonville. Still have pictures of us straddling a canon.

Oh yeah, I was elementary age during the US CIVIL WAR centennial and living in the mid Atlantic states, I climbed many a cannon and breast work as the family explored the battle fields. Other era forts too, from Ft Ticonderoga down to York Town. Thanks Mike.

@@Erpyrikk so i did!

@@Erpyrikk We have got castles smartened up in Victorian times and holes in the ground made by bombers directed off course. The holes are easier to play in.

Typical Swiss aggression against peace loving neighbours.

@@davidbrennan660 They do occasionally invade Leichtenstein by accident

Another known troublemaker of Europe.... mind you the Red Army avoided the place in 1945..... that must mean something.

@@davidbrennan660 Yeah, we're unconquerable. Mostly because Schaan is fuck-ugly and our accents sound even worse than most Swiss German ones.

@@arsenique6478 E...d...e...l - wait a minute! EDELWEISS! BRILLIANT USER NAME!

Oh, Richard Holmes. RIP. Class act.

Thanks! I just manage to hide most of the cuts, lol!

Yes

Probably quite effective against any attempts just to march through, but once the mass of the artillery came up the Swiss would have been thumped cos they weren't provided with large numbers of modern pieces. But ultimately they'd just have ended up fighting alongside whoever didn't invade them first once

Major difference between WW1 and WW2, and I think I need to nail this point home in a later video: WW1: aim is to try to hold back either side trying to outflank the other through the Swiss central plain. WW2(early): aim is to stop the Germans outflanking the southern end of the Maginot Line through the Swiss central plain. WW2(post-Fall of France): Switzerland itself is the target, and the aim is to discourage the Germans from trying to conquer it.

@@BlokeontheRange From one of your earlier videos, I was under the impression that Germany saw no need to conquer Switzerland when it could dominate it via the threat of blockade.

@@DavidCowie2022 True, but bear in mind that WWII was a national/ideological war. If one of Germany's goals is to unify all German people under one government, and Switzerland is 70% German, then that is a good reason to invade and conquer Switzerland.

Thanks!

I find it very visual and tactile :) Not the first time I've used it either, and it won't be the last!

@@BlokeontheRange They make such a distinctive noise when touched, too. For some reason the sound of you running your pointer along it gave me distinct memory flashes of grade school in the late '70s.

Yup. Full mobilisation could only be sustained briefly at moments of highest risk, since it takes most able-bodied men out of the economy. So you've got it in 1914, 1939, 1940 and 1943 off the top of my head and without consulting a book (the "March Scare" of 1943 is a fascinating one, but it'll take us a long time to get there!!! In brief, it seems that the Germans knew that Swiss intelligence had a source highly placed in the German hirearchy, which was true, and that they wanted to confirm this)

I'm glad someone else saw it, for a moment I though I was hallucinating back in time for a decade or so! Homestarrunner.com!

Before I was Bloke... Haven't been back for a while.

Well prussia nearly invaded because they wanted the canton of Neuchatel back.

Thanks - since they're not very deep, I suspect if they were hit with a large shell it'd have made a complete mess... There's a place in France with deep fortifications in similar soft rock, and that survived very well (the village that was on top was completely obliterated) cos the soft rock absorbed the blasts very well, but they were much, much deeper than these.

I suspect that, like the much later US brick coastal fortifications of the early to mid 1800s, the soft coquina stone of that St Augustine FL fort would have fared very poorly against even early black powder explosive shells; despite being excellent against solid shot. (Absorbing a shell it exactly what you don't want to do if it's going to explode; because that magnifies the effect of it's explosives). And similarly this Swiss fort in WWI fort I tend to think wouldn't stand up for very long against any kind of delay fuzed high explosive shell. But it'd provide still wonderful protection from machine gun fire (whether direct or indirect), or from shell fragments, and probably give reasonable protection for a while against artillery using non-delay explosive shells (especially from smaller artillery like the iconic French 75).

I suspect so... They were not lavishly provided for on the artillery front...

In the UK it would be full of rubbish and would have been used as a toilet...

Same here in Australia. . .

Well, back in the mid 90s Switzerland was basically just the same - growing opiate problems and drug related crimes in the urban places like Zürich in particular... then they started pioneering treatments to get people off opiates, including actual Heroine distribution. When I last visited Bern, there were quite literally junkies sitting in the well-visited park area about 100m from the national parliament, overlooking the river Aare and shooting up openly in the evening sun, "normal" families walking by within a couple meters - for me it was a clear "WTF" moment, someone would have immediately called the cops to "remove these unwanted elements" where I was from. My swiss friend explained to me that they are in fact provided with clean drugs, places to sleep and helped into jobs at a nearby center, so they are basically thought of as hospital patients - if they don't misbehave, they have just as much right to be there, even use their prescribed drug just like every other visitor to the park who might be a diabetic in need of an insulin shot. So why would they go and live in a damp historic fortification out in the woods instead? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ecmfZ6WFkrGoe2w.html

Yes - and quite reasonably priced too.

@@BlokeontheRange Where did you go? 😉😀

You'd think there was some link, wouldn't you? :)

@@BlokeontheRange you mean they named a font after an iron age people? Wow, I never would have thought of that. You truly are one of the great geniuses of our time. 😜😂😂 (in case it wasn't clear, this was meant in good humor)

A photo of the m/c gun squad?

but Canton de Ticino/Kanton Tessin is surounded on 2 sides by Italy and is the only primarly italian speaking canton

Dont think would have withstand a bombardment,not just large rocks peeling off the ceiling,but the dust would be suffocating and blinding.Even with a mask.

Well if you shoot into water,sand mud it will not be very effective. Armor isn't really about being as hard or strong as possible but to absorb alot of energy. I don't say that this would be very effective but it was probably the best option...I guess.

@@Slithermotion You're right, that is the defence that castles used against cannon. Build a thick earth wall 100 metres back to prevent direct cannon fire but slope it lower on the attacker's side to deny them cover. The seige cannon does not have a direct sight to the door but the defender can shoot down.

You should see what the Dutch had and were even fielding as late as 1940 iirc... screw-breech, non-recuperating ancient

@@BlokeontheRange yep just checked they still had 108 84 mm field gun [8-staal] from 1881 in May 1940. Love the Swiss military history videos so please keep up the good work and I'm looking forward to more in the future.

Yes. There were a number of shoot-downs of German aircraft early in the war (which pissed the germans off mightily), then again of some US aircraft late war when they refused orders to land and fired on the Swiss. RAF aircraft were usually in Swiss airspace at night and the Swiss had no night fighting capability. It's a topic that I collabed with Military History Aviation on a while back, and it's one where I'll look at some of it in more detail on BotR, particularly the day when the Germans actively picked a fight with the Swiss.

Bloke on the Range I look forward to seeing your post on this subject. I was friends with an 8th Army pilot whose B24 , severely damaged aircraft was shot down by the Swiss. He was a POW in Switzerland for almost two years. He knew that he was near Swiss airspace but tried not to cross over. Before his passing he wrote about how he and another crewman survived but suffered ill treatment in captivity. To be fair, some pilots tried to land in Switzerland to get out of the war. I can see both sides of this issue but there are many questions yet to answered.

Did your friend end up in Wauwilermoos for trying to escape? Interned Allied airmen were given pretty free reign to move about, provided they didn't try to leave the country (the Swiss were paranoid about the Germans thinking they were assisting Allied personnel to get back to their units and using that as an excuse to squeeze them on top of the other reasons they already had). There's no excuse at all for what went on at Wauwilermoos, and Béguin should have been prosecuted for war crimes, but bad treatment wasn't the rule at all. Also, a US investigation showed that the trope about pilots flying to Switzerland to get out of the war was basically untrue, by the way.

Bloke on the Range, that investigation also discovered that the rumor of Allied pilots often tried to escape to Sweden or the Irish Free State was baseless. Oddly large numbers of allied aircraft were found in Sweden and Ireland. If the aircraft were damaged no charges were brought against the crews. The Irish shot up the allied planes to protect the crews. It was a sensitive in the US until,the 1960s. My friend Capt Abe Gorden thought it was because he Jewish. He said the problems began when he inquired about his crew. He wrote letters to his crews families and tried to post them first through the Red Cross then through the Swiss Post. He was jailed for the duration for these infractions.

@@BlokeontheRange I can vouch for the "pretty free reign" part for Allied airman. My uncle and his crew were shot down and bailed out, landing in Switzerland. He had (until his passing) photos and cuttings from Swiss newspapers about the "Britsh aircrew" walking about the town. Unlike evaders who had crossed the border on foot to escape capture (another one of those "we don't want to piss the Germans off" moments), he and his crew were permitted to wear their uniforms when out and about, which attracted crowds and attention wherever they went.

"Lines and lines and lines and lines" Then she's hit by a train. It's the start of the 3rd series of the League of Gentlemen.

the military history of Liechtenstein is rather uninterresting with them not having any military, defense is instead carried out by the Swiss Army

They're also the wrong side of the Rhine so would have been left completely in the lurch had anyone come from that direction.

...so poor that people even ditch an "e" from it's name 😉

@@nirfz fixed

@@kingerikthegreatest.ofall.7860 👍

Climing up the north face of an Swiss alp, just pain, until You are up.