Tales of Swiss Neutrality: Mont Vully Fortifications (2/2)
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- Опубліковано 6 вер 2024
- The tour of WW1 military emplacements remaining on Mont Vully in Switzerland continues! Ultimately there's one that was missed, but maybe some other time!
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World War one
World War 1
bunkers
trenches
These videos are fantastic. How can you beat the gorgeous scenery, mixed with history I've never really heard of before? It's a peerless learning experience, presented by a wonderful host!
Thanks!
@@BlokeontheRange Thank you. It's not something you learn in textbooks in school.
I would be very interested in seeing those other positions. I really enjoy these videos exploring Swiss defensive positions during the World Wars and how they've improved over the years and thus the more the merrier.
I like this kind of content. I find military history of all kinds fascinating. I would watch more.
Switzerland is the origin and instigator of all major wars and of the secret societies used to manipulate what needs to be affected.
'Swiss neutrality ' is an obscene oxymoron, when they are as far away from being neutral as it is possible to be. They are the location for world government, in the Bank of International Settlements.
The Swiss have the most gun ownership of any nation on earth. That's not what the media present of the little milk-maid girl, yodling...
On this episode of Bloke on the Range, we see a bloke in the woods braving deer ticks to educate us on Swiss fortifications from the time of World War I.
Great 2 vids, as a Brit never knew how Switzerland protected it's neutrality but I had always wondered.
Very well done mate.
No better way to start the day. Love these historical tours of Switzerland.
Love seeing the fortifications that were never used. The Swiss are awesome, pray for peace but prepare for all out war.
More explorations of things like these please! Especially interested in the Redoubt and the associated defensive locations.
Very interesting Bloke - only just catching up with this now. I visited some French WW1 works when looking for the place my wife's great uncle was killed near Flirey in 1916. In what could have been a quiet backwater of the war both sides took to digging mines under each other's trenches, and poor old soldat simple JC Berne was blown to smithereens on February morning. The craters are still visible. One has to admire the Swiss's determination to remain neutral. I'd certainly welcome more of this sort of thing.
Another terrific instalment in this series. Please keep them coming when time permits. Cheers, b.
Made my night man!!!! Thank you for making another one!
I have a problem, every time I watch a Bloke on the Range video I start thinking that moving to Switzerland looks better and better.
I think the hole in the MG post floor must be a water tank for the MG-11's cooling jackets.
Very interesting.
For a comparison you can visit the Cadorna line, built by Italy in 1916/17 to stop a feared attack across southern Switzerland by the central powers; it run from lake Maggiore to lake Ceresio.
@M M -
No one intentionally attacks the Templar Deep State (Switzerland + Lichtenstein + Vatican) since centuries ... only USA bomber crews accidentally bombed northern Switzerland in WW2 (while Switzerland was hiding all the gold the Axis powers stole & smuggeled goods for the Axis powers & did more ... Switzerland was even kind enough to let Italian Holo... trains trough to Nazi-Germany).
Good Job. Very interesting and gives me a better idea of what went on in Switzerland.
Would love more, and the video duration is not an issue whatsoever!
Thank you for these videos, it just makes me wish even more for the chances to travel the world and visit sites such as this all over Europe.
Absolutely would love a look at that last position.
Thank you sir for your efforts.. I've been fortunate to have visited Switzerland a couple of times but never knew these historic treasures existed.. again, thank you for sharing them.
I have this memory that Sappers were formed as specialist units, and thus, to only Battalions, and not Regiments. As the Battalions would all be attached to some other unit. And, in many nations, "ordinary" Engineer Companies were part of Regimental order.
In the British Army they called all Battalion sized units a Regiment, like the French did.
But yes, Engineers or Sappeurs/Sappers are formed as Battalions, but in Germany we also have the Spezialpionierregiment 164 ( 164 Specialized Engineers Regiment) which has one HQ Company, 6 Feldlagerbetriebskompanien (Field Camp Maintanance Companies) and one Company of Pipeline Engineers.
In Germany we have six Engineer Battalions for each of our Armoured and Armoured Infantry Brigades.
One of them, 130 Armoured Engineer Battalion was redesignated as 130 Multinational Amphibious Bridging Battalion includes one Squadron of British Army Engineers, operating the M3 Amphibious Bridging System.
We also have three Independent Engineer Companies, two of the (260 and 270 Airborne Engineer Companies) support our 1st Airborne Brigade, while 550 Armoured Engineer Company is Part of the Deutsch-Französische Brigade (French-German Brigade).
And with 6th Flight our Objektschutzregiment der Luftwaffe (counterpart of the RAF Regiment), the German Luftwaffe have their own Engineers, specialized in construction, repairing and maintanance of Air Fields.
Really enjoy this type of content, but I could say that about any of the content you make. Of course chap in the workshop is the best, but bloke in the trench is good too
Great Vid Bloke, but you made are very tiny Error, The Infocard in the beginning says (1/2) instead of the (2/2).
My bad! :D
So well preserved could still be used
Great videos Bloke! Switzerland is such a beautiful country. I hope I can visit it next year, was going to drive down there with the family this year to visit some friends... but then the pandemic threw a wrench into the works. Greetings from Germany!
Glad you did it, another position not necessary! Geoff Who notes modern fortifications are different.
Thank you, lam enjoy the videos of your ramblings
Very interesting. Please keep making these kind of videos. [It's interesting to imagine how the Swiss might defend against 21st century threats to their neutrality/independence. Would they fortify the lowlands... or cut off foreign internet? Would they shut off their electrical grid altogether? That would certainly thwart a modern adversary. Just speculating...]
The Swiss certainly wanted to make it very painful for anyone who tried to cut across their patch
There's really nothing like this in the USA. Particularly the West Coast. It's just not old enough to have many layers of history represented by structures of differing ages, and anything like pillboxes or bunkers are largely filled in, blasted, or simply gated off and festooned with threatening signage put up by the local authorities.
And yes, used as latrines or illegal dumping sites.
These little romps are always interesting.
Great videos. I would have never been able to explore stuff like this when I was in Switzerland. We had little enough time as it was and my wife (although a history lover) has zero interest in military history.
Yes I'd be interested in seeing all of it, I'm interested in going there seeing it myself too.
Very cool. Thank you. 😁😁😁😁
Loved the video, I want to take a train to Switzerland and see this. But probably no need to do the last little bit. You can leave that part a mystery.
Absolutely stunning scenery
Yes, the wire at 5:40 is unlikely to be military wire. Military wire would have barbs that catch on the clothing of anyone trying to get through it and prevent such passage. This was a notorious horror of WWI, hence the song, "Hanging on the old Barbed Wire." See:
ua-cam.com/video/_K1BdDVvV9Q/v-deo.html
Not all military wire is barbed wire for the purposes to which barbed wire is put, dude... There are other types of wire for different uses...
@@BlokeontheRange True. For example, signal wire for use in field telephones. However, the image shown in the video sure looks to me like fence wire. Since you have actually handled it, I will agree with your assessment in the video.
I have fond memories of using field telephones during my 16 years in the Canadian Army. They were extremely reliable, using plug board technology straight out of a 1920's telephone exchange. The official reason for not using electronics for switching was to render the system immune to the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear weapon. Nothing to do with being cheap, of course. :)
Fast Show reference..... Niiiice
Those bunker roofs look pretty thin in terms of their ability to withstand artillery. 12 to feet above the concerts is what I seem to remember being needed during WWI, else it all just collapses when the shell goes deep then detonates. Good thing no one ever tested that there.
Oh, none of them would survive a direct hit. They're more shelters that protect from shell splinters and near-ish hits.
I'm always interested in the history!
Many thanks for doing this. :-)
Just walking around those places is interesting enough, and we get military history too...
Thanks for the video, very informative.
Would be interested in seeing the others!
haha cool to watch, i'm living at Murten/Morat ^^
So this is what Switzerland would look like if people stopped farming it. 48 men is indeed small for such a position. Could 48 be the permanent embodied troops making and maintaining the position but they would be reinforced by local militia in the event of action. Hence Sapper inscriptions on an infantry position? My grandparents came to Geneva as refugees in 1914. Should have stayed.
The Sapper inscriptions are cos that's who built it. There would also have been less fixed positions around the place too.
Both surprized and pleased that The Wizard of Oz phenom is more than just American. Thinking on it, wasn't the author British? Yeah, as always, enjoyed the video and thanks for the tour.
The author was American, but the film was a staple of Christmas Day TV in the UK for decades.
Do you think the sapper's left their info out of pride or was it a official practice in case of a failure due to poor construction?
Out of pride
Now can you get in a more modern post WW2 ones
You could have a chat with Indy Nidell(currently on the WW2 channel, formerly on 'The Great War') about doing a colab on this kind of thing
Well, you say that, but when the WW2 channel was going to be a multi-channel collab, we were in on it. But we pulled out like almost everyone else did for the same reasons.
@@BlokeontheRange ah well. It's not a well covered area, Swiss military responses to the WW conflicts and is incredibly interesting! Thank you for doing them and please keep them coming as time, plague and weather permits!
@@MortRotu Why? What happened? Just the Coof?
The pil of burning stuff worked well in Somalia they burned tiers as signals
It may seem odd to us that the Swiss feared French invasion however it was only a hundred years since they'd thrown off Napoleon's yoke.
In WW1 they feared either side cutting through.
@@BlokeontheRange Yes, you explained it nicely in part 1. The threat of threat of using the valley behind the Jura reminded me of the Shenandoah in the American Civil War.
Can someone explain to me why often bunkers are designed like the one shown at 2:40?
It has the door pointing in the same direction as the only window. I would expect the door to be on the backside, so that you can get supply in and out during the battle. With the door pointing to the firing direction, you are basically trapped inside. Under fire, the opening restricts the save motion inside massively and the enemy can predict that not a lot of man can be inside.
That one's just a shelter bunker rather than a fighting one. But you see a lot of proper bunkers which have the loophole protect their own front door - resupply during a battle isn't really a consideration, they'd be absolutely stacked with ammo and would fight until destroyed or the ammo ran out.
So... where is the promissed link for the wall ? I love this kind of stuff
Oops. Forgot it. It's there now. Thanks for the heads-up!
Very interesting indeed!
Right! Search the thicket!! 😺
Not gonna lie, i was really hoping for an added jump scare in the recap
Wot...no snow !
No, it would be highly unusual to get snow that low down in October...
@@BlokeontheRange So that was quite a long time ago.
Fortress Switzerland.
Did they use these positions in ww2?
I don't know enough , i'm sure Bloke On The Range knows. They probably got manned, but never fired a shot in anger. It was a neutral country. However both Allied and German airplanes often violated Swiss airspace. They sometimes got shot down. They sometimes even mistakenly bombed Swiss towns.
Answered at the end of the video
20:58 At least I know aggression from the French and Germans would be attack on Swiss neturallty.Swiss would have be mobilised.
What elevation is this position?
The highest point on Mont Vully is 651m
@@BlokeontheRange thats much lower than I had thought. You did say it was the planes
Lake level is 429m for reference.
@@BlokeontheRange 222 meter hill, funny how that worked out
Machine pistol gallery
Is there anything lft where the Western Front hit the Swiss Border?
Yes. have been planning on going up there for about 3 years. We'll manage it some time!
@@BlokeontheRange Excellent.... I have seen photos on the net, but always wondered about it
NEUTRALITY...LMAO!!!
What, like British cement shipped to Rotterdam ending up being used in German bunkers on the Western Front in WW1? That kind of neutrality?
@@BlokeontheRange Dude, 🇨🇭 = home of the devil.
Speaking of tics: is alpha-gal allergy a thing is Switzerland? You don't want that.
Sadly yes.
" neutrality "
Think if Germany invaded the Swiss France would invade in kind
There was a plan that whoever didn't invade first got invited in. All arranged with bilateral agreements.
@@BlokeontheRange Which is precisely what happened in Belgium. As soon as the Germans violated Belgian neutrality, the Allied powers were invited in.
Neutrality? Hmmm.. That's debatable
Interesting tour tho :)
I'm actually intrigued as to in what way you think that Switzerland in WW1 infringed on its duties under Hague Convention (V) 1907, which is the applicable international law regarding neutrality. Please cite specific specific examples in respect of the articles of the Convention.
@@BlokeontheRange None that I'm aware of.
@@CathodeRayNipplez but you just said it's debatable that Switzerland was neutral?
@@jamietus1012 Yes. Save me much typing have a quick google into the Swiss practices of the time that kept them from being invaded and 'neutral'.
@@CathodeRayNipplez neutrality doesn't mean that you are unarmed. What you're saying doesn't make sense?