Hitler’s tanks and armies would have to cross those bridges to strike the heart of Belgium.Located just miles from Germany and designed specifically to defend against that menacing neighbor, Eben Emael seemed impregnable. “What is going on above us?” wrote a Belgian chaplain in his diary. A 450-yard antitank ditch offered similar protection along the west wall. Student chose Captain Walter Koch, an experienced paratrooper and commander of 1st Company, Parachute Regiment 1, to lead the 480-man mission. At 3 a.m., the hangar’s lights were extinguished, its doors rolled open, and the troops marched onto the tarmac.
They would land at their targets only minutes before the army stormed across the Dutch-Belgian frontier.Finally, on the evening of May 9, the men received the fateful command: Tomorrow at dawn. Out leaped Lieutenant Witzig. But there was a reason his assassination, codenamed Operation Anthropoid, was the only attempt of its kind made during World War II. But it wasn’t until 8:30 a.m.—28 hours after the assault began—that the 51st Engineer Battalion arrived and relieved Witzig’s unit. Their mission? The men studied aerial photos of the fort as well as a large sand-table model. The hollow charges destroyed nine 75mm cannons. Perhaps the only glitches in the operation came early, with Witzig’s late arrival and the absence of a second glider. Sparks flew as bullets and grenade fragments ricocheted off the fort’s interior walls, and men fought hand to hand in the dark, smoky tunnels.The Belgians launched counterattacks, only to be beaten back. The Germans captured more than a thousand Belgian soldiers. Finally, the South-West Pacific and Pacific Ocean Areas were to combine for the capture of Luzon or Formosa from 15 February 1945.
331 likes. Tracers and bullets tore through the fabric covering of the gliders.
HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. Koch created four assault groups—one to take each of the three bridges, and a fourth to capture Eben Emael. Aftermath At the fort, the Granite detachment had destroyed most of the casements and cupolas; Belgian casualties were 25 dead and 63 wounded. While Hitler’s passion for paratroopers would cool a year later with the costly airborne attack on Crete [see “Dead on Arrival,” Winter 2010], he was buoyed by this success.The Allies, meanwhile, were shocked by the fall of the mighty Eben Emael. Between midnight and 2 a.m. the next day, May 11, advance elements of the German army reached the fort. But the attack was to start farther north, in northeast Belgium.Tactically, one of Hitler’s biggest obstacles was Fort Eben Emael. With a steel-tube fuselage nearly 40 feet long and a 72-foot wingspan, the DFS 230 had a maximum gliding speed of 180 miles an hour. At Hitler’s urging, Student devised a four-pronged surprise attack that would simultaneously target the three vital bridges and Eben Emael.TRAINING BEGAN IN NOVEMBER 1939 in a large, remote area at Hildesheim, near Hanover in north Germany. The Junkers sputtered and roared to life, taxied out, struggled down the runway, and took off into the dark sky.EBEN EMAEL WASN’T TOTALLY UNPREPARED for the attack. And he’s drawn more than a few lessons from the Germans’ work at Fort Eben Emael.Nearly 20 years ago, McRaven, then a young Navy Seal officer, wrote McRaven singles out the German attack on Eben Emael as “one of the most decisive victories in the history of spe- cial operations.” The attack plan, he adds, “was brilliant both in its strategic vision and in its tactical simplicity.” He was enamored enough of the operation that he even tracked down and interviewed Rudolf Witzig and Helmut Wenzel, two key leaders of the raid.McRaven, who now heads the U.S. Special Operations Command, in Florida, has not publicly suggested that his bin Laden plan was influenced directly by any of these case studies.But as one commentator put it shortly after the raid, the book’s “Cliff ’s Notes were on display in Abbottabad.”Pierre Charles L'Enfant, French engineer who designed the layout of Washington, D.C.John Tyndall, British physicist and the first scientist to show why the sky is blue.Irving Babbitt, scholar and founder of the modern humanistic movement.HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. Adding to the confusion, the Germans had dropped explosive charges and smoke bombs down ventilation shafts into the fort’s interior.The Belgian fortress commander, Major Jean F. L. Jottrand, ordered artillery in the area to fire onto the top of the fortress. Five men have been found guilty of drug offences at the end of a month-long Operation Granite trial in the High Court in Christchurch. No leave was granted, and calls and mail were screened.
The fight for Eben Emael was all but over. In training, the pilots found they could land in just over 20 yards.Each glider would carry a squad of seven or eight men armed with weapons and equipment that included 9mm MP 38 submachine guns, 7.9mm MG 34 light machine guns (most with bipods and 75-round saddle drum magazines), 7.9mm Kar 98k rifles with detachable grenade launchers, and M35 flamethrowers.
The first target for the squad led by Sergeant Hans Niedermeier was the fort’s observation cupola, from which spotters would direct artillery fire. Yet everyone had to be trained on the DFS 230 glider, which had been specifically built for the Luftwaffe.
‘Their engines have stopped! Wenzel in turn radioed for air support, and in 20 minutes Ju-87B Stukas were screaming down on enemy artillery.At about 6:30, two hours after the assault began, another glider swept in and landed on the fort. 20:36. The east wall of the triangular fort ran atop the Albert Canal and soared 200 feet above the water level, making a tank assault impossible.
However, two were acquitted on conspiracy charges. Each had been assigned casements or cupolas to neutralize.
The first plane to land leveled off in a flat glide and put down at 4:25 a.m. on top of an antiaircraft machine gun pit.
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