German Bunkers Reguelbau 501, 502.pdf

R EGELBAU 501

EINFACHER G RUPPENUNTERSTAND

R EGELBAU 502

D OPPELGRUPPENUNTERSTAND

Part 1

Photography, writing,

design, layout, etc.

indicated, all photographs and other illustra-

by Jakko Westerbeke.

This document may be freely distributed, on the

following conditions: that no changes or modifica-

tions are made to the document in any way; and

that no profit is made off the distribution.

Jakko Westerbeke < jakko@xs4all.nl >

http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/afv

Other images

Front cover map is a section of British map

Holland 1:25,000 Sheet No. 14 S.W. (W) Defence

Overprint 28 Oct 44 in the possession of Huib

Westerbeke.

Zoutelande map from Plattegrond Gemeente

Veere by BV Uitgeverij Rijnland, used with per-

mission nor commercial intentions.

Netherlands, Zeeland and Walcheren maps from

Route 66 by ROUTE 66 Geographical Information

Systems, also used without permission and com-

mercial intentions.

Page icon taken from one of KDE 3.0s icon sets.

Thanks

To Stichting Bunkerbehoud, for the easy-going

permission to photograph and measure their type

502 and 143 bunkers. See www.bunkerbehoud.com

Technical stuff

The photographs in this net.book were taken

using a Fujifilm 6900Zoom digital camera, while

the computer graphics were created with

POV-Ray 3.5 and the KPovModeler 0.20 front-end

for it. The document was laid out in Palatino

Linotype and Futura XBlk BT using

QuarkXPress 4.1 for Windows. The PDF was creat-

ed with Adobe Acrobat Distiller 3.01 and worked

on with Adobe Acrobat Exchange 3.0.

Printing tips (read this first)

the printer, the following points are what you need

to pay attention to:

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Introduction

This net.book contains photographs of a total of

four different German bunkers, all located in the

village of Zoutelande, on Walcheren island in the

south-west of the Netherlands.

Seefront Vlissingen (Sea Front Vlissingen), and

many of these were for coastal artillery, either gun

bunkers or their supporting facilities such as

ammunition bunkers, personnel quarters, or fire

control centers.

This was also true for much of the rest of

Walcheren: all in all, six batteries of coastal artillery,

all operated by the Kriegsmarine (navy), were built

into bunkers on dunes and dykes, and additional

artillery (of the army, not the navy) was placed in-

land to support ground

troops in case of an

Allied invasion. Three

navy batteries of heavy

anti-aircraft guns were

also emplaced on

Walcheren.

Other kinds of

bunker built included

radar systems and

anti-aircraft platforms,

as well as command

posts and housing for the ground

troops necessary to protect all this in

case of invasion. Much of this belonged

to the German navy, but the army (Heer)

and air force (Luftwaffe) also built their

share of bunkers.

Besides the Seefront, there was also the Landfront

Vlissingen. The aim of this was to defend the town

against an attack from behind, should an enemy

succeed in landing elsewhere on Walcheren. The

result of this effort

was a roughly cir-

cular array of

bunkers, running

clockwise from the

dunes to the north-

west of Vlissingen

to the south-eastern

tip of the islandto

be more precise,

from the hamlet of

Valkenisse in the

dunes (original plans started the line at Dishoek,

closer to Vlissingen), to the town of Koudekerke,

and from there to Klein Abeele on the Walcheren

Canal. On the other side of the canal, it continued

from Groot Abeele to the Napoleonic fortress

Rammekens. This line is marked on the Walcheren

map on this page.

Historical background

Construction of the Atlantikwall, the German

defensive line built on the European coastline from

northern Norway to the Franco-Spanish border,

was begun in 1942. In essence, it was a response to

the German failure to invade Britain, the bogging

down of the German offensive in Russia, as well as

of the USA entering the war on the Allies side; the

idea was that by fortifying the coastline, an inva-

sion could be repelled with far fewer troops than

would otherwise be needed, thereby preventing a

war on two fronts.

The island of Walcheren was heavily fortified as

part of these defenses, with two main pur-

poses in mind: the most important one was

that the island guards the entrance to the

Westerschelde, which is part of the estuary

of the river Scheldt and forms the main

approach to the large port city of Antwerp,

in Belgium. In

the 1940s,

Antwerp was

the third-largest

port in the

world, after

New York and

Hamburg. The

second is that

Vlissingen (or

Flushing, in

English), one of

the two major

towns on the island, had fairly extensive port

facilities as well.

This lead to the eventual construction of 207

true bunkers, out of a total of 245 planned, in

addition to numerous lighter defensive works.

To put this into perspective, Walcheren is a

roughly diamond-shaped island, approximate-

ly 13 by 16 kilometers in sizein other words, that is

one bunker for every square kilometer of ground

Many of these bunkers were built in the dunes

along the south-western and north-western shores,

facing the North Sea, since any shipping to

Antwerp would have to approach from that direc-

tion. The area around Vlissingen was known as the

Netherlands, ca. 2000

Zeeland

Walcheren

Landfront

(approximately)

Type 502

Type 501

500 m

Introduction

Atlantikwall defensive

organisation

higher ground along the edges of the island and

the villages in the interior. It also had the unfortu-

nate effect of causing many casualties among the

civilian population, who had beforehand been

warned by means of leaflets dropped from aircraft,

but who had nowhere to go.

On the 1st of November 1944, a three-pronged

assault was made by Canadian, British and other

Allied forces for the actual capture of the island.

Canadian forces attempted to cross the dam con-

necting Walcheren to the neighboring island of

Zuid Beveland (which was already in Allied

hands), troops of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers

performed an amphibious landing in Vlissingen,

and a similar assault was made in the village of

Westkapelle by Royal Marine Commandoes and

Norwegians, French, Dutch and Belgians of an

Inter-Allied Commando unit.

The island was defended by some 10,000 German

Wehrmacht troops (mostly army and navy, plus

some air force; there was no Waffen-SS presence),

who put up a varied resistance to the Allied forces

attempting to fight their way along the edges of the

island. Most of the army troops were second-line,

old men drafted to man fortifications (the 70th

Infantry Division, nicknamed the Stomach-com-

plaint Division), and so frequently gave little

resistance to the Allies, but the navy troops and

some army officers were quite willing to put up a

fight. Despite Walcherens small size, it took until

the 7th of November for the German forces to sur-

render, by which time only about half of the island

had actually fallen into Allied hands.

Various classifications were used to describe the

importance and size of defensive areas, the small-

est being the Widerstandsnest (Resistance Nest) that

was normally defended by a single section of ten

men. Three or four Widerstandsneste made a

Stützpunkt (Support Point), usually defended by a

platoon of troops.

A number of Stützpunkte together could form a

Stützpunktegruppe (Strongpoint Group), which

seems mostly to have been a classification used for

some stretches of coastline between more heavily-

defended areas. However, separate Stützpunkte

could also be found in such places.

An area that was to be heavily fortified was

known as a Verteidigungsbereich (Defence Area).

The town of Vlissingen was one of some twenty

Verteidigungsbereiche in Europe, and its afore-

mentioned Seefront and Landfront were a direct

consequence of this status. At least in the

Netherlands, each Verteidigungsbereich had a

Kernwerk (Core) that consisted of a large number of

bunkers in a small area.

The classification used from 1944 for the largest

fortified areas was Festung (Fortress), of which all

of Walcheren was one. Another term used with

Festungsbereich (roughly meaning fortress area)

but this seems to have been a bureaucratic term

whose exact meaning is hard to pin down.

To give an idea of the kind of defences a

Stützpunkt could have, consider that all four

bunkers pictured in this book were part of two

Stützpunkte in the village of Zoutelande, on

Walcherens south-western coast. These were

named Lohengrin and Meistersinger, after German

operas, as marked on the map on page 3 , and had

67 and 47 permanent fortifications, respectively,

according to a post-war Dutch army survey.

However, far from all of these were true bunkers

(of which there were 15 in all in the two

Stützpunkte); many were much simpler shelters or

weapons pits built from concrete and/or

brickthough it is in addition to trenches, fox-

holes, anti-tank obstacles, minefields, and related

defensive works.

Bunker museum

Since the summer of 2001, one of the type 502

bunkers in Zoutelande has been opened to the

public as a bunker museum, together with a type

143 nearby. For those interested in visiting, it is the

right-most type 502 shown on the map on page 3.

To get there, from the village center, follow the

Duinweg street to the east; about a hundred meters

after hotel De Tien Torens, take the road to the

right, up the dunes. The first museum bunker is on

the left, about halfway up the dune; to get to the

second, go slightly further up the dune and take

the footpath to the left, then keep following it.

Note that the museum bunks are only open on

Sunday and Wednesday afternoons, May through

November.

Liberation

In early October, 1944, the British Royal Air Force

bombed the Walcheren sea dykes in four places, in

order to flood most of the island, which is below

sea level. This forced the German defenders onto

Regelbau 501 Einfacher

Gruppenunterstand

The German type 501 bunker

was designed in 1939, as part of

the planned Westwall defences

against Francethe German

counterpart to the French

Maginot line. After construction of

the Atlantikwall was started in 1942, the

type 501 was built there as well, although it was

later superseded by the type 621, which was rough-

ly the same size but of more up-to-date design. At

least 1,519 type 501 bunkers were built during

World War II.

concrete was put into place at

the same time: steel armour

plates, firing ports, ventilation

tubes, chimneys, etc.

If the bunker had an escape shaft,

as the type 501 did, then that would

be built from bricks and covered with a

thin layer of concrete. Because the shaft is

partly built into the bunkers outer wall, it

is likely that it was constructed at this time as well.

The inside of the roof was also built together with

the interior fittings, by placing steel I -beams at

regular intervals (always so that they spanned the

short side of a room, for strength) and putting steel

plates between them. Use of wooden planks was

permitted if steel was not available, but due to the

fire hazard they presented, wood was not the pre-

ferred material.

Once all this had been done, an outer mould was

built around the reinforcements and the concrete

poured in. This was done in a single, continuous

operation that went on day and night, so as to cre-

ate a bunker consisting of a single block of con-

crete, without any seams or similar weak points.

The impressions left by the planks on the concrete

are very obvious on the actual bunkers, and also

quite visible in the photographs in this net.book.

German bunkers could have two types of

corners. One, as on this type 501, was sharp:

the sides were simply built into a square

shape, and so were the curved roof edges

where they joined. This was fairly simple to make,

as no complicated joints were needed.

A more complex, round shape was also used, as

can be seen in the photographs of the type 502

bunkers on page 19 . Here, the whole cor-

ner of the bunker wall was rounded,

and the roof corners were built into a

spherical shape. The moulds for

this must have been much more

difficult to build properly, but

this style of corner is

stronger than the

square type, and so was

more common.

German bunker

nomenclature

German bunker designations consisted of a

Regelbau (meaning approximately standardised

construction) number, in this case 501. The num-

bers were allocated in series, with bunkers

designed around the same time having similar

numbers. These bunkers also tended to share fea-

tures of the general design, such as the way the

interior was laid out, or the design of the ventila-

tion system. The 500-series was developed for the

Westwall, but was also used in the Atlantikwall.

The Regelbau number was followed by a descrip-

tion of the bunkers purpose. Here, the latter is ein-

facher Gruppenunterstand, which translates into

English as single section housingin other

words, this is a bunker in which one section¹ of

nine or ten men could live.

Bunker construction

German bunkers were made from reinforced con-

crete. After a site for a bunker had been

selected, surveyed and, if neces-

sary, prepared, a floor was

poured from concrete. Onto this,

wooden moulds for the interior

were constructed from beams and

planks, and the reinforcements

were built up around them. These

steel reinforcing bars were spaced 25

cm apart, putting about 50 kg of steel

into every cubic meter of bunker wall.

Anything that had to be anchored into the

¹ Squad in American terms.

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