The world’s greatest defensive works range from structures that can be seen from space to mere ditches. Only one of them remains a military bastion – though a watery one. The others are obsolete or simply erased. We cover China’s Great Wall, WWI’s Western Front, Pearl Harbor, and flying fortresses. Marvel at them all. Wonder at a world that needed them.
The strangest — to me — is the “Western Front” of World War I. Over 100 years ago, the reality was that the front was multiple, parallel lines of trenches hiding millions of soldiers. To raise your head over the parapet of the trench invited a bullet from an unseen rifleman. It seemed the battlefield was deserted… and what a battlefield. It extended some 400 miles from the North Seashore in Belgium to the Alps. These lines crossed France. For their entire length, just being there invited death — imagine, trying to cross.
Generals tried to pierce the lines, attacking with hundreds of thousands of soldiers after shelling the “enemy” with millions of artillery shells. These were the western-front battles of WWI. You know the poem, “In Flanders Fields”. The four battles there — in four years — cost some two million casualties — all on a battlefield about as big as the island of Manhattan.
This is just one of the “forts” we cover. BTW, sadly, trench warfare has returned in Ukraine.