Bunker

Spanish Civil War bunker at the High of the Lion

Bunkers in Albania

Búnker de Los Barberos, of the Spanish Civil War in Palazuelos de Túma, next to the river

A bunker (plural bunkers) —from German Bunker, and this from English bunker: & 'Board of a ship' — is a construction made of iron and concrete, which is used in wars to protect itself from bombing, both from aviation and artillery.

Types

The bunkers have a military use, although sometimes also civil or mixed.

Trench

This type of bunker is a small, roofed concrete structure, partially buried in the ground, usually part of a trench system. Such bunkers offer better protection to the soldiers than the open trench and also includes protection against air attacks (grenades, mortar shells). They also offer protection from the weather.

The front of a trench system usually includes machine guns or mortars and forms a dominant firing range. The bunkers at the rear of the system are often used as command posts, for supplies storage, and as field hospitals to care for wounded soldiers.

Fort

The interior of a fort in Sydney, Australia

Bunker used by Germans in the Netherlands during World War II

They are known as "forts" those excavated in guard posts, which have concrete spaces through which firearms are fired. In English, they are called pillbox (literally translated as "pillbox"), a name that arose due to the similarity of the structure of this bunker with that of these small take-away boxes medical pills.

Forts are often camouflaged to hide their location and maximize the element of surprise. They can be part of a trench system, interconnected to form a line of defense with other forts with the aim of covering each other's fire (defense in depth), or they can be protected by strategic structures such as bridges and piers.

Many pillboxes were built before World War II in the Czech Republic to prevent the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. None of these were actually used in combat, as there was little resistance to the German Army. The Empire of Japan also made use of pillboxes in their Iwo Jima fortifications.

Gunner

Many artillery installations, especially for coastal artillery, have historically been protected by extensive bunker systems. These usually house the gunners and cannons, with the ammunition protected against fire, and in most cases the guns are also protected, although this usually reduces their firing ranges. Gunner bunkers are typically built for big guns in a pre-defined location as part of a larger system of defenses (such as for a port or coastal city).

They are among the largest bunkers built before the Cold War. The walls of facilities, such as the Todt Battery in northern France, were up to 3.5 m thick with the cannon inside, capable of reaching across the English Channel to the English coast.

Industrial

Búnker remodeled in the Heiligengeistfeld, the centre of Hamburg, Germany. To open the windows first the wall was perforated and then the concrete was cut with a saw

Industrial bunkers typically include mining sites, food storage areas, material dumps, data storage, and sometimes living quarters. They were mainly built by nations like Germany during World War II to protect important industries from aerial bombardment. Industrial bunkers are also built for control rooms of dangerous activities, for example, tests of rocket engines, experimental explosives or as storage for radioactive elements, explosives or other dangerous elements, which can be of a military or civilian nature.

Countermeasures

Bunkers can be destroyed with powerful explosives, usually shaped charge explosives, although the occupants of a pillbox can be taken out with flamethrowers. However, certain bunkers are extremely strong and therefore the only way to destroy one One of these characteristics is using highly specialized and guided munitions, or bombs specially designed to destroy solid concrete, such as the so-called "earthquake bombs" or the bunker busters becoming necessary anti-bunker munitions with a nuclear warhead for those more resistant bunkers.

Famous installations

Bunkers were used in a massive way, especially in World War II, and were also built in the Spanish Civil War, especially along the insular coasts, forming defensive barriers that sometimes stretched for hundreds of meters. kilometres. This is the case of the so-called "Maginot Line" built by the French government between 1927 and 1936 along the German border and the bunkers built by the Nazis along the French coast. Bunkers are also currently built in Israel for cases of biological and missile attacks.

After World War II began, Swiss territory found itself in the middle of being surrounded by Germany and Italy, and later completely with the annexation of Austria and the German invasion of France. In this context, and despite the fact that Switzerland was neutral, an invasion was never ruled out. For this reason, in the war years, a large number of bunkers were built throughout the Swiss territory, especially on the country's borders and in the Alps.