Fort Eben Emael- Fortress or Folly?
I’d never heard of Fort Eben Emael either until research for Souvenirs turned it up. It was an incredible example of WW1 thinking in a world that had moved on.
Fort Eben Emael stands on the Belgian border just 28km from Germany. From the surface it looks like a ploughed field. The only obvious giveaway is a steel mushroom in the middle of the field.
Construction began in 1935. The military complex was excavated from a marl hill and covered with three metres of concrete. Below are 5 miles of tunnels and a complement of 1200 men. The floor plan is a triangle with a base measuring 750 m and a height of 950 m. The total area of the military site is equivalent to 150 football pitches and the fort itself the size of 11. What were they thinking?
Fort Eben-Emael is strategically located between Liège and Maastricht, on the Belgian-Dutch border, overlooking the bridges spanning the Albert Canal, a wide shipping waterway that stretches 130 km from Antwerp to Liège. The fort was designed to defend Belgium from German attack across the narrow belt of Dutch territory in the region. The Belgian plan was to use Fort Eben Emael and its guns to knock out the bridges across the canal at the first sign of attack, leaving German attackers stranded in Holland.
The Belgians considered Fort Eben Emael impregnable
On May 10th 1940, the phoney war ended and the German invasion of Belgium ww2 began. Hitler’s panzers rolled across Holland with the initial aim of securing the Albert Canal bridges. How did the Germans manage to capture the Belgian Fort Eben Emael before the Belgians could destroy the bridges?
As the tanks began to roll westward, German commandos turned up in gliders and landed on the roof of Fort Eben Emael.
A DFS 230 glider on display at the fortress has mainly been put together from parts reclaimed from the wreckage of three original gliders.
The attackers quickly sealed the defenders inside and used hollow charges, a new invention to put the fort’s guns out of action and seal the entrances. With the defenders sealed inside, the Germans took control of the fort in two hours. With Hitler’s panzers rolling westward across Belgium, unhindered, 36 hours later the Belgian defenders surrendered.
The Belgian government urged young Belgian men to walk westward, hoping to stay out of Germany’s clutches. The attack on Fort Eben Emael forms an opening chapter in my book Souvenirs, based on the true story of Jacques Schuermans, a young man in 1940, one of the Belgian refugees, who ultimately became a war hero.
Fort Eben Emael is still there today and has become a tourist attraction, complete with re-enactments of the attack, as you can see by following this link.
https://www.fort-eben-emael.be/en/discover/
There’s a good re-enactment of the attack that I used as the basis for the Eben Emael story in my book.