[Yosy]

Fantásticas proezas de engenharia militar:

Archives > August 15, 1999

SWITZERLAND'S VALLEY OF DEATH
SARGANS, Switzerland - To the casual traveler, Sargans, a small town on Switzerland’s border with Liechtenstein and Austria, looks like just another scenic masterpiece in the world’s most beautiful country.

The bowl-shaped valley, five kms long by two kms wide, is girded by soaring cliffs and snow-capped peaks. The headwaters of the Rhine flow swiftly northwards through the narrow valley towards Lake Constance. Nearby is the home of fabled Heidi, a mecca for busloads of Japanese tourists, and further south, Chur and St. Moritz.

Sargans is the main gateway through the mountains into eastern Switzerland. Any army seeking to invade Switzerland from this quarter would quickly discover that idyllic, pastoral Sargans is also the Valley of Death.

Thanks to the Swiss General Staff, army Maj. Krebs, and my hosts from the 8th Regiment of the elite Festungswachtkorps, or fortress guard corps, I had the unique opportunity to inspect a part of the powerful fortifications defending the Sargans valley. My expertise in modern fortifications, and my schooling in Switzerland, convinced the Swiss Army to permit me a look at some of the nation’s most highly-guarded military secrets. So fanatical are the Swiss about secrecy that an officer who had been stationed in one of the forts for ten years told me he was not allowed to tell his wife where he was going each morning.

Convinced in 1940 that Hitler and Mussolini intended to invade Switzerland, the Swiss constructed the ‘national redoubt,’ a huge system of at least 70 powerful, large artillery fortresses, and thousands of smaller works, in only three years, at a cost of US $12 billion in today’s dollars. The redoubt was built in Switzerland’s Alpine uplands and high mountains, with three principal fortified zones at St. Maurice in the Valais; the St. Gothard Pass; and Sargans. It has remained a secret for 50 years.

In the event of a German-Italian invasion, Switzerland’s 800,000 citizen soldiers (out of a population of 5 million) were to abandon their families and homes, and retreat into the mountain redoubt. The rest of Europe’s professional armies might surrender to Hitler - Switzerland’s citizen-soldiers were ordered to fight to the death. There would be no surrender. General Henri Guisan commanded his troops to fight until their ammunition was exhausted, then fight with their bayonets.

On a sheer rock face overlooking the Rhine stands the mighty fortress of Tschingel, the Gibraltar of eastern Switzerland. At first, even I, a trained fortress observer, only saw a sheer cliff the height of a 20-floor floor building.

Then I finally discerned four levels of cleverly camouflaged gunports, or creneaux, behind which were long-barreled 75mm and 105mm guns, mortars, machine guns, observation posts, and huge white and infrared searchlights that could illuminate the entire valley. Like most large Swiss forts, Tschingel had a garrison of 400-500 men( but could hold up to 1,000), with supplies to last for 90-120 days of combat. Below the fort, which is reached by its own cable car, the Rhine’s banks had been mined to allow Swiss Army engineers to flood the valley of Sargans.

I visited another powerful, multi-level fort, Magletsch, dug into a mountain, and now used for training. Its three, 105mm gun turrets were disguised, a la Heidi, as small Alpine chalets. Swiss are masters of disguise. At Festung Gutsch, guardian of Gothard, the fort’s turrets are camouflaged as large boulders. At Furigen, which guards the Gothard highway at Stans, south of Lucerne, interlocking its fire with a hidden fort on the famed Mt. Rigi at Vitznau, I walked right by the fort’s trop-l’oeil creneaux without even noticing them. Similarly, all of the Swiss Air Force’s 171 combat aircraft are hidden in caves dug into mountain sides.

In 1995, the Swiss Army began decommissioning its WWII-era forts, which were increasingly costly to garrison, maintain, and heat, replacing them with more modern defenses. I was shown new, six-man ‘mini-forts,’ housing a 105mm-gun Centurion tank turret, completely hidden, but able to sweep the valley and cover the new anti-tank barrier that bars the defile.

Smaller concrete bunkers with machine guns have replaced larger works dug into the cliffs on either side of the valley. More interesting, and highly secret, however, were new twin, 120mm mortar installations buried underground on the terraced sides of the valley. Capable of rotating 360 degrees, the semiautomatic mortars can fire 20 rounds a minute, including the Swedish Stryx anti-tank round, blanketing the entire valley with deadly accurate, pre-targeted fire. The only visible portion of these mortar positions are manhole-sized thick steel covers, camouflaged by farm wagons parked on top of them.

In the heights above Sargans are 10 more major forts. Some are the new ‘Bison’ installations, such as I saw at Gothard: four, 155mm guns, capable of firing their five-clip magazines in one minute to a range of 40 kms or more, including ‘bus’ rounds carrying clouds of anti-personnel and anti-tank submunitions. The ‘Bisons’ and twin-mortars are replacing the WWII artillery forts, producing more firepower at a fraction of the cost.

Each fort is manned and protected on the exterior by units of the army’s three fortress brigades. The 400,000 -man Swiss armed forces ( recently reduced from 600,000) still relies on forts to defend strategic points, but its has adopted ‘dynamic defense’ since 1995, relying on armored brigades, equipped with 372 superb German Leopard-II tanks, and mechanized Panzer grenadiers, backed by heavy artillery.

I attended field training at Col. Rossini’s officer’s combat course at Wallenstadt, including live-fire infantry assaults and anti-tank operations. Switzerland’s male soldiers, who are better educated and more intelligent that troops in other western armies, serve annually from 20-42 years old (longer for officers). The handful of token females in service are excluded from combat and relegated to minor support roles.

Swiss citizen soldiers are highly competent, serious, deadly professional and the world’s finest marksmen. Interestingly, all Swiss soldiers keep their automatic weapons and ammunition at home. Yet Switzerland has one of the lowest murder rates anywhere.

Why does Switzerland still act as if it about to be invaded? As Machiavelli observed four centuries ago, the Swiss are ‘most armed, and most free.’

Switzerland is the world’s oldest democracy and the first nation in Europe to win freedom from feudal rule. The Swiss are fiercely independent, mistrust foreigners, and fear, with some reason, that outsiders covet their strategic nation and its vast horde of wealth. A recent torrent of false accusations that Switzerland collaborated with the Nazis, and enormous payments for World War II it is being forced to make under intense American pressure, have heightened the national sense of xenophobia.

The Swiss knew the Soviet Army planned to defeat NATO in a vast replay of the WWI Schlieffen Plan by cutting across defenseless Austria, invading Switzerland at Sargans, then advancing on a Zurich-Neuchatel-Geneva axis to erupt in east-central France near Besancon and Dijon, bypassing and outflanking NATO forces further north, then racing for Paris and the Channel. Intelligence sources in Moscow confirmed to me the existence of this breathtakingly audacious plan.

But Festung Sargans, the other Swiss forts, and a nation at arms barred the way to NATO’s vulnerable underbelly. In my view, the Red Army would have been slaughtered by the ferocious cross-fire, minefields, flooded zones, and obstacles of the Valley of Death, just as the Austrian imperial knights were in the defiles at Sempach in 1393.

Many foreigners find the Swiss mania for defense Quixotic. I do not. The Swiss, whom Hitler called ‘insolent herdesmen,’ faced down Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in military confrontation, and were ready to do battle with the armies of Stalin, who hated the Swiss for their independence and capitalist system.

Switzerland will be ready when the next threat arises. Fortress Sargans will continue its long, silent watch on the Rhine.

Vejam também istohttp://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/f/femore_fort/index.html

[komet]

Não me parece mau, mas desde que permaneçam secretos, caso contrário uma GBU bem posta toma conta do recado  

[typhonman]

Uma GBU32 ou 37

[Rui Elias]

O conceito é interessante:

Em vez de subterrânos, ou "enterramentos" como os dos iraquianos, escavam-se túneis.

Mas como disse o colega acima, só se os locais permanecerem secretos.

Aliás:

Para quando a entrada da Suiça para uma coisa básica chamada Nações Unidas?

[Pedro Monteiro]

O conceito é interessante:

Em vez de subterrânos, ou "enterramentos" como os dos iraquianos, escavam-se túneis.

Mas como disse o colega acima, só se os locais permanecerem secretos.

Aliás:

Para quando a entrada da Suiça para uma coisa básica chamada Nações Unidas?

Errado, Rui. A Suíça entrou no mesmo momento que Timor-Leste. A Suíça é uma democracia. Enquanto a população optar por uma neutralidade está no seu direito. É, aliás, esta razão de ser da sua estabilidade e properidade ao longo do século. Não obstante, a actual situação é ideal: a cooperação internacional desinteressada, nomeadamente, a nível económico, comercial e no combate à corrupção.
Um belo e grande país!  
Cumprimentos,
Pedro Monteiro