The capture of Fort Eben-Emael

On 10 May 1940, a few minutes before dawn, nine German gliders landed silently on the flat, grass-covered roof of Fort Eben-Emael, Belgium’s most modern fortress. Out of them leapt several dozen parachute sappers carrying explosive charges of a new type. Within a quarter of an hour they had knocked out the fort’s most important guns, and for more than a day afterwards they kept its large garrison shut up underground. At the same time other groups from the same unit seized two of the three bridges over the Albert Canal that the fort was meant to cover. At around noon on 11 May Eben-Emael capitulated. The Belgian defence line on the Albert Canal, which according to the plans was to hold the Germans for several days, had been broken in less than two days.

It is often said that German paratroopers took the Belgian Fort Eben-Emael in a daring assault. That is true, with one correction: nobody parachuted onto the fort. The men of Group Granit landed in gliders, and parachutes were used only to drop reinforcements and supplies to the groups fighting at the bridges.

A fort to bar the way

In August 1914 the German army had entered Belgium by exactly this route, along the valley of the Meuse between Dutch Maastricht and Belgian Visé, where there were no fortifications at all. After the war the Belgians resolved to close this gap. Between 1932 and 1935, on a plateau above the point where the Albert Canal branches off from the Meuse, near the village of Eben-Emael, a fort was carved out of the chalk rock; it became the northern pillar of the new ring of the fortified position of Liège. Here the canal ran through a cutting several dozen metres deep, which formed a natural moat on the eastern side. On the other sides the fort was surrounded by anti-tank ditches, walls and bunkers with anti-tank guns and machine guns.

Its armament was impressive for the time. A rotating armoured turret held two 120 mm guns with a range of about 17 km, two retractable cupolas held two 75 mm guns each, and four casemates – named after their direction of fire Maastricht 1 and 2 and Visé 1 and 2 – held three 75 mm guns each. The combat blocks and positions were linked by several kilometres of underground galleries to barracks, magazines, a power station and a hospital. Dummy turrets were also set up on the plateau to make the fort seem even stronger. The garrison numbered about 1,200 men, but in peacetime the gunners served in the fort in rotation, a week in the fortress and a week in quarters in nearby Wonck. It was commanded by Major Jean Jottrand.

The fort was meant to cover with its fire the three bridges over the Albert Canal at Veldwezelt, Vroenhoven and Kanne, over which roads from Maastricht led into the interior of Belgium. They were defended directly by the Belgian 7th Infantry Division: at each bridge stood bunkers with machine guns and an anti-tank gun, and the bridges were mined and could be blown within minutes. The Belgian plan did not envisage a long defence on the canal. The fort and the bridges were to hold the Germans for a few days, so that the army would have time to fall back to the main defence line on the Dyle, where, under the Dyle Plan, French and British troops were to join it.

The fort also had weaknesses. Its extensive roof was neither mined nor divided by barbed-wire entanglements, and it was defended by only four anti-aircraft machine guns and two machine-gun bunkers. The soldiers played football on it. Nobody imagined that the enemy could get there before taking the fortifications surrounding the fort.

An idea from the air

The main blow of the German Army Group B in Belgium was to be delivered by General Walther von Reichenau’s 6th Army, whose tanks had to cross the Meuse at Maastricht and then the bridges over the Albert Canal. Had the Belgians blown the bridges while the guns of Eben-Emael shelled the crossings, the offensive would have been stuck for many days. In the autumn of 1939 Adolf Hitler asked the commander of the parachute troops, Kurt Student, whether the fort and the bridges could be taken from the air. According to Student’s later account, it was Hitler himself who suggested using gliders, which could land silently, with great precision and with a whole unit in one place, together with new shaped charges capable of piercing a cupola’s armour. After some reflection Student judged the operation feasible.

In November 1939 a special unit was formed and named after its commander, Captain Walter Koch: Sturmabteilung Koch. It numbered about 450 men: paratroopers from the 1st Parachute Regiment of the 7th Air Division (PL), a platoon of parachute sappers and glider pilots. It was divided into four groups. Stahl (Steel), under Lieutenant Gustav Altmann, was to take the bridge at Veldwezelt; Beton (Concrete), under Second Lieutenant Gerhard Schacht, the bridge at Vroenhoven; Eisen (Iron), under Second Lieutenant Martin Schächter, the bridge at Kanne; and Granit, 85 sappers under Lieutenant Rudolf Witzig, the fort itself.

Preparations lasted six months and were surrounded by exceptional secrecy. The unit trained near Hildesheim, the gliders flew fully loaded, and the sappers tested their charges on captured Czechoslovak fortifications in the Sudetenland. A model of the fort was built from aerial photographs and information supplied by German firms that had worked on its construction. Every squad knew its target exactly: the cupola, casemate or bunker it was to destroy. The men were not allowed to leave barracks or go on leave, received no post, and the unit changed its name and location several times. Most of them learnt the name of the fort only just before the operation. When the Belgians seized German orders for the 7th Air Division after the Mechelen incident in January 1940, they contained not a word about Eben-Emael.

Landing on the roof

On the evening of 9 May the unit received the order to go. At around 4.30 a.m. German time on 10 May more than 40 Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft took off from the airfields of Köln-Ostheim and Köln-Butzweilerhof, each towing a DFS 230 glider. They flew without radio contact, guided by a chain of bonfires lit on the ground towards the border. Bad luck struck Group Granit at once. One glider, after a misunderstood signal, cast off too early and landed near Düren; in another, carrying Witzig, the towrope snapped. So nine gliders reached the target, and command passed to Witzig’s deputy, Oberfeldwebel Helmut Wenzel. The gliders were released at a height of more than 2,000 m, while still over Germany, and glided on in silence across the Dutch strip around Maastricht.

The Belgians were not entirely surprised by the war, but they were surprised by the way it came. The general alert reached the fort after midnight, but Major Jottrand was preparing to defend it against a ground attack. Part of the garrison was still on its way from its quarters, while others were dismantling wooden buildings around the fort that might obstruct the field of fire. When Dutch anti-aircraft artillery opened fire over Maastricht and observation posts reported aircraft with their engines off, the crews of the anti-aircraft machine guns on the fort spent a long time not knowing whether they were allowed to fire at unidentified aircraft.

At around 4.25 a.m. Belgian time (5.25 a.m. German time; Germany was then an hour ahead, which explains the discrepancies in timings between accounts) the gliders slid onto the roof of the fort, braking on skids wrapped in barbed wire, several of them right beside their assigned targets. The anti-aircraft positions were the first to fall silent. The sappers ran to the cupolas and casemates with 50 kg shaped charges, carried in two parts, and smaller 12.5 kg ones. Nobody had used such a weapon in combat before. The explosion concentrated its energy in a narrow jet that either pierced the armour or tore red-hot fragments from its inner face. Casemate Maastricht 1 was wrecked along with its guns and crew, the northern retractable cupola was put out of action, and smaller charges were thrown into gun barrels and embrasures. Several charges were wasted on dummies that the Germans took for real turrets. According to most accounts, within ten to fifteen minutes the guns facing north, towards the bridges, had ceased to exist as a fighting force. By the end of the first phase the main turret with its 120 mm guns had also been knocked out. The sappers also used flamethrowers against the bunkers’ embrasures.

Not everything succeeded. The southern retractable cupola, with its two 75 mm guns, and some of the guns in the Visé casemates kept firing all day, and the cupola had to be retracted several times to escape attacks by Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers, which the Germans called in to help. The fire of these guns, however, could not reach the attackers sitting on the fort’s roof and in the captured bunkers. The Germans also blew up the entrances to the shafts, so that the garrison could not come up to the surface. At around 8.30 a.m. German time the last glider landed on the roof. Witzig, whose glider had come down in a meadow in Germany, summoned a new tug aircraft, had the fences pulled down and reached his men.

The bridges

The fighting at the bridges was far bloodier. At Veldwezelt Group Stahl landed right beside the bunkers, and two soldiers climbed onto the bridge structure and cut the wires to the demolition charges. At Vroenhoven, where Captain Koch himself landed with Group Beton, one glider came down beside the bunker from which the charges were to be fired, and the paratroopers tore out the wires before the Belgians could use them. Both bridges fell into German hands intact. At Kanne the attack failed. The defenders there had been warned; Major Jottrand ordered the bridge blown immediately after the first reports, and it went up before the gliders of Group Eisen could land. One glider was shot down.

The Belgian 7th Infantry Division counter-attacked all day, and the paratroopers held on thanks to machine guns and ammunition dropped by parachute from Ju 52s and to support from Stukas. Relief was supposed to arrive within a few hours, but it was delayed because the Dutch had blown the Meuse bridges in Maastricht and the Germans had to build a crossing. Groups Stahl and Beton were relieved only in the evening, and Group Eisen at Kanne on the morning of 11 May.

Capitulation

Inside the fort chaos reigned. Explosions, smoke and dust in the galleries, lights that had failed in places and news of casualties sapped the garrison’s morale. Jottrand had no infantry trained to fight on the surface, and several counter-attacks onto the roof by gunners armed with rifles broke down under German fire. Neighbouring forts of the Liège position shelled the roof of Eben-Emael, but to no effect. In the evening and during the night the first units of Lieutenant Colonel Hans Mikosch’s German 51st Engineer Battalion crossed the canal and the flooded meadows along the little river Jeker, and on the morning of 11 May, at around 7 a.m., they linked up with Group Granit. Together with infantry of the 151st Infantry Regiment, the sappers attacked the entrance block. Earlier, a charge set off in the shaft of a casemate had smashed the steel doors on the fort’s middle level, killed several defenders and scattered chlorinated lime through the galleries, which gave rise to a rumour of a gas attack.

On the morning of 11 May Jottrand conferred with his officers and concluded that further defence was impossible. He ordered the documents and the remaining equipment destroyed. At around noon an officer with a white flag emerged from the entrance block. Accounts give different times, from 11.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., partly because of the time difference. About a thousand soldiers went into captivity. According to Belgian and German tallies, between 23 and 26 defenders were killed in the fighting for the fort and about 60 wounded. Older accounts gave higher figures. Group Granit lost 6 killed and about 20 wounded. Koch’s unit as a whole, including the groups fighting for the bridges, lost, according to German figures, more than 40 killed and about 100 wounded, most of them at Kanne.

Echoes in Berlin and in Belgium

The Wehrmacht communiqué of 11 May announced that the fort had already been “put out of action” on 10 May by a picked Luftwaffe detachment under Lieutenant Witzig “using new methods of attack”. Nothing was said of gliders or shaped charges, and this secrecy gave rise abroad to rumours of a secret weapon, a paralysing gas or German agents inside the fort. Hitler received the men who had taken part in the operation. Koch and Witzig, as well as the commanders of the bridge groups, received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, and Koch was promoted to major. General Student also received the Knight’s Cross on 12 May.

For several days the bridges at Veldwezelt and Vroenhoven became the targets of desperate air attacks. On 11 May Belgian Fairey Battle light bombers attacked them without success, losing most of their aircraft. On 12 May five British Battles of No. 12 Squadron RAF attacked both bridges from the direction of Maastricht. Four aircraft were shot down, and the leader of the attack on the Veldwezelt bridge, Flying Officer Donald Garland, and his observer, Sergeant Thomas Gray, were posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. The Veldwezelt bridge was damaged, but the Germans soon restored traffic. By then the 4th Panzer Division was already rolling across the crossings at Maastricht.

The fall of the fort shook the Belgians and their allies. Eben-Emael was regarded as the strongest fortress in Europe, yet it fell within a day and a half, overcome by a few dozen men. In accordance with its plan, but earlier than it had intended, the Belgian command ordered a withdrawal from the Albert Canal to the Dyle Line as early as the evening of 11 May. The Belgian government and King Leopold III, who for years had staked everything on strict neutrality and had trusted German assurances, now had to rely on the French and the British, whose troops were just entering Belgium.

Place in the war

The capture of Eben-Emael was the first operation in history in which a glider-borne unit landed directly on an enemy fortress, and the first combat use of shaped charges. It became a model for later glider assaults, Allied ones included – such as the British capture of Pegasus Bridge in Normandy in June 1944 – and it is still discussed in textbooks as an example of special operations. Military historians stress that success was brought not only by new weapons but also by meticulous preparation and by the initiative of the NCOs, who accomplished the task without their commander.

In the wider picture of the 1940 campaign, however, the fort and the bridges played a different role from the one assumed in May. The advance across the Albert Canal and on through central Belgium was meant to draw the Allies’ attention northwards and confirm their belief that the Germans were repeating the plan of 1914. A spectacular airborne assault, trumpeted by propaganda, served that purpose well. Meanwhile, in accordance with Manstein’s concept, the main blow fell through the Ardennes on Sedan. For the Germans themselves, the rapid capture of the fort and the bridges strengthened the conviction that airborne forces could decide the outcome of entire campaigns. At the same time Student’s paratroopers were fighting for the airfields around The Hague and the bridges near Rotterdam, where the landings proved far more difficult and costly. A year later, on Crete, these troops suffered such heavy losses that Hitler forbade any further large airborne operations.

The Belgian prisoners from the fort were sent to camps in Germany. The Germans used Eben-Emael as barracks and moved some of its equipment to the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall. In September 1944 the Americans occupied the fort without a fight. Today it is a museum, and the shattered cupolas and casemates of 10 May 1940 can still be seen on its roof.