The Festungen, Part I

Festung is the German word for "fortress". The use of garrisons in cities, whether truly fortified or not, was a common feature of German operational and strategic art during the final year of the war. Fortifications are emblematic of anything but mobile warfare, and so one must wonder how the Wehrmacht, so renowned for achieving swift victories through mobile warfare, came to rely so heavily on fixed defenses.

In truth, the bulk of the German forces were little motorized and even less armored. Very large parts of the German forces moved as armies had moved in the Age of Napoleon, that is to say, they were drawn by horse. If this doesn't square well with the popular image of Blitzkrieg, than that is because the popular image of German forces is a gross distortion of reality. By 1945, German mobility was even more constrained by vehicle shortages (SAWICKI87, p.157) and shortages of petroleum, oil, and lubricants. Faced with a lack of mobility in their own forces and confronted by enemies of superior mobility, the Germans made the conscious decision to sacrifice less mobile elements of their forces in fixed defense positions whose role was to deny the allies access to key centers of communication (cities), thus complicating unit movement and forward logistics support for the allied forces. These German formations were designated as Festungen.

To support the manning of these fortresses, the late-war German order of battle included hundreds of infantry, machine-gun, antiaircraft, antitank, engineer, and artillery battalions organized as fortress-specialists. They were organized much like their mobile counterparts, but with distinctly less motor and horse-drawn transport. While often not manned by personnel of the highest quality, these units were still capable of hard-bitten resistance, especially when fighting from within reinforced concrete bunkers. Additionally, other kinds of units were often found in fortresses - units such as Luftwaffe antiaircraft artillery (FlaK) battalions, people's militia (Volkssturm) units, ad-hoc units formed from reservists, personnel on leave, personnel recovering from wounds, etc. (Alarm battalions), and regular militia (Landesschutz) units.

Fortifications have traditionally allowed an army to exercise economy of force. Economy of force allows an army to mass its forces in areas that are critical and to man less important regions with fewer troops. The presence of fortifications, then, allows those fewer troops to manifest a more robust defense than they could otherwise.

One of the more persistent myths to emerge from the war was that fortifications were proven to be essentially useless and that their presence belonged to an earlier era of warfare. This belief is a fine example of a truism that has been unreasonably expanded to become an immutable fact. In truth, fortifications are still highly viable on any battlefield today - provided that their limitations are realized and accounted for. Fortifications cannot substitute for the presence of mobile reserves, and fortifications cannot be strong everywhere, from every aspect. The role of the mobile reserves, then, is to counter any enemy penetration of a fortified line that could potentially attack the fortifications from their weaker aspects. If a fortress is strong enough, and is backed by enough mobile reserves, it can prove incredibly difficult to take or even reduce. German mobile reserves and strong fortifications in Lorraine in 1944 combined to stop the advance of Patton's Third Army for three months - and then they fell back onto the Westwall, yet another fortified line. Patton's experience was not unique; all along the Westwall the allied forces, after an epic pursuit across western Europe, sputtered to a halt. Equally stymied was the Soviet 3rd Belorussian Front under the command of General Cherniakhovsky who assaulted heavy German fortifications in Ostprüssen (East Prussia) in October 1944. Cherniakhovsky committed no less than five Soviet combined-arms armies to his offensive, only to advance from 50 to 100 kilometers over a sixteen-day campaign that saw heavy casualties and no breakthrough. (See GLANTZ95, pp. 228-229 for more details.)

It was perhaps inevitable that the Germans would make use of fortresses while on the defensive - after all, the German Führer himself had fought for four years in the trenches on the western front of the First World War. He had directly experienced the strength that a well-organized fortified line could present, and, as strategic options ran out, he fell back on concepts that had served his First World War comrades well for years on end. His tendency to immobile defense became first apparent during the winter fighting around Moscow in 1941. German generals, shocked by the savagely cold weather and a resurgent Red Army, had implored Hitler to allow a general retreat on the eastern front. But Hitler, sensing the vaunted Wehrmacht might collapse into a rout if allowed to retreat too far, ordered the German soldiers to stand fast. The battlefield conditions peculiar to that winter allowed the German forces to survive in this fashion - and Hitler's renowned instinct for successful battlefield action soared ever higher. As the tide of war turned more and more against Germany, Hitler became ever more rigid in his insistence on "no retreat!", and what had proved applicable in the winter of 1941 became a death sentence for German forces later in the war as they were denied the advantages of tactical withdrawal and regrouping. The culmination of this tendency to rigid defense was the increasingly often heard decree that such-and-such a city would become a Festung and hold out as long as possible.

The cities designated as Festungen were many and varied. Some housed forces with a strength equivalent to a regiment, others contained tens of thousands of soldiers cobbled together from a bewildering variety of sources. I have never seen a complete list of the Festungen, and would hesitate to compose one as I'm sure I would miss many entries for such a list. However, it would be useful to mention some of them, along with a brief description of their operational or strategic role.

On the western front, certain Festungen fulfilled a strategic role - that of denying allied forces the use of key ports, in an attempt to restrict the tonnage of supplies the allies could reliably bring onto the continent. In this category fall the fortresses of Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, Dunkerque, Cherbourg, and Marseille. Some of these fortresses were not reduced and others were destroyed only after the allies expended significant effort. During and after the operations in Normandy, the U. S. Army assaulted and forced the capitulation of the fortresses of Cherbourg and Brest. Both battles were expensive affairs, and Brest in particular has been criticized as a battle that should have never happened.

In the case of Brest, senior leadership of the U. S. Army allowed itself to become mesmerized by an objective, and then rationalized that the U. S. Army could not be seen as having abandoned an objective once the army had started moving upon it. The truth about Brest is that the subsequent fighting destroyed the port that the allies desired and distracted the efforts of an entire U. S. corps during a period when absolutely every combat soldier was needed during the pursuit across France and subsequent initial assaults against the Westwall. The Germans under the command of General Ramcke could have been bottled up in Brest with much less effort and allowed to sit out the rest of the war. The actions taken against the Germans in Brittany were symptomatic of a larger allied issue and that was the planning for the Normandy landings had focused almost exclusively on the landing itself with very little thought given to what should take place once the allies advanced into the heart of France. The action at Brest alone cost the U. S. Army almost 10,000 casualties and netted a bag of some 38,000 German prisoners. Along the way in Brittany, the allies also subdued smaller Festungen at Dinard and Saint-Malo. Subsequent to the battle of Brest, the allies abandoned plans to assault the Festungen at Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, as the arithmetic of such combat had become painfully obvious to them.

Dunkerque was deemed unnecessary for the operation of allied logistics, and so the German division garrisoning the city sat out the remainder of the war while being invested by the Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade and French infantry units. Marseille represented an unqualified allied success, primarily because French General De Lattre understood the need for rapid action and shock effect. Soon after landing in southern France, De Lattre ordered the forces of French Army "B" to advance on Marseille and seize the city. This they did with admirable rapidity and thus prevented the German defenses in the city from coalescing effectively. For the remainder of the war, Marseille served the allied cause as a major supply port.

After a stunning advance across France, General Patton's U. S. Third Army was forced to reduce the tempo of its operations for lack of gasoline. While allied logistics caught up with Patton's forces, the German Ersatzheer (replacement army) conjured up a new division from school troops, stragglers, Luftwaffe personnel, and specialized fortress battalions. This new division, destined to become known as Division Nr. 462, was given the task of defending the fortress of Metz. Despite the heterogeneous character of this new division, it proceeded to defend the approaches to Metz with great energy. German forces that had been manhandled by the Third Army during the advance across France suddenly stiffened their posture and resumed their old habit of immediate counter-attacks when ground was lost. Aided by other forces, Division Nr. 462 succeeded in halting Patton's advance during three bitter months of combat that doubtlessly marked the low ebb of Third Army's operations in northwestern Europe. But from the German point of view, Lothringen (Lorraine) was German soil, and would be defended to the death - with the old forts of Metz playing a significant role. Such powerful fortifications proved practically impervious to allied airpower and artillery; even direct assaults by U. S. troops led to deadly underground engagements for which the U. S. forces were unprepared. The wettest weather in decades turned small streams into churning rivers and created a sea of mud that restricted armored operations to paved roads. It was not an auspicious period for the United States Army.

Next: The strategic role of the Westwall and Festungen on the eastern front