Mortars Contra Cupolas
Details of the bombardment of French and Belgian forts in 1914
Last year, while looking for something else, I ran across a delightfully detailed report on the bombardment of selected French and Belgian fortresses in 1914.1 Weighing in at fifty-two typeset pages, this ‘memorandum’ (Denkschrift) describes both the number of mortar shells of various sizes dropped on particular forts and the effects they achieved. (For the purposes of this post, ‘mortar’ describes a large artillery piece, in calibers ranging from 210mm to 420mm, that drops its projectiles on top of its targets. ‘Fort’ refers to a single building, well-walled and well-armed. A ‘fortress’ consists of several mutually supporting forts.)2
The author of the memorandum, Julius von Bailer, wrote it while serving as the senior sapper of the German authority in occupied Belgium, the General-Gouvernement. A ‘dugout’ who had returned to active duty soon after the start of the war, Generalmajor von Bailer had previously spent eighteen years in the single-battalion pioneer corps of the kingdom of Württemberg, eighteen years improving the fortresses of the German Empire, and, after his retirement, seven years as a consulting engineer in private industry.
In 1915, the year in which the memorandum rolled off the press, the Royal Technical University (Königlich Technische Hochschule) in Stuttgart awarded Bailer an honorary doctorate ‘in recognition for his services to the art of fortification’.3 The author of the entry for Bailer a German biographical dictionary links this honor to a memorandum that he wrote ‘on the value of modern fortifications’.4 However, the memorandum on the effects of the bombardment of French and Belgian fortifications, while printed to a very high standard, was classified as ‘secret’ (Geheim). Thus, while the doctorate may have been awarded for a different work (which I have been unable to locate), I suspect that it may have served as a kind of ‘lifetime achievement award’.
I found the report on the bombardment of Belgian and French fortresses on germandocsinrussia.org, a dragon’s hoard of papers rescued from obscurity by the Russian-German Project for the Digitization of German Documents in Archives of the Russian Federation. (While most of the material in this collection dates were created during, or shortly before, the Second World War, several hundreds of the folders found on this website date from the First World War.)5
For Further Reading
Clayton Donnell Breaking the Fortress Line (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2013)
Julius Rébold La Guerre de Forteresse (Paris: Payot, 1936)
Marc Romanych and Martin Rupp 42cm 'Big Bertha' and German Siege Artillery of World War I (Oxford: Osprey, 2014)
Denkschrift über die Ergebnisse der Beschießung der Festungen Lüttich, Namur, Antwerpen und Maubeuge, sowie des Forts Manonviller im Jahre 1914 (Memorandum on the Effects of the Bombardment of the Fortresses of Liège, Namur, Antwerp and Maubeuge, as well as Fort Manonviller, in 1914) (Brüssel: Buchdrückerei des General Gouvernements in Belgian, 1915) (germandocsinrussia.org)
Mortar corresponds to the German Mörser, ‘fortress’ to Festung, and ‘fort’ to Fort.
Degree awarded to Julius von Bailer, displayed as part of an online exhibition of honorary doctorates awarded during the First World War, German National Library. (Deutsche National Bibliothek)