September 1, 2003
Champex, Switzerland - The simulated rock camouflage screens masking the embrasures of the mountain fort's 105mm guns were lowered, allowing me to look down to the town of Orsières, 350 meters below us, and onto the narrow road leading to the strategic Grand Saint Bernard pass.
Switzerland is only now beginning to reveal its deepest military secret: the hundreds of large forts and smaller defensive works built from 1940-1960. Upgraded, upgunned and made proof against nuclear contamination after World War II, the near invisible Swiss forts, dug into the sheer walls of its mountains, covered with lethal interlocking fire all passages through the nation's high Alpine region.
From heavily defended Orsières to Montreaux, at the eastern end of beautiful Lake of Geneva - a mere 50 kms - there are at least 14 major forts, and hundreds of smaller bunkers for mortars and machine guns. At the center of this valley of death lies the mighty fort of Dailly, along the defile of St. Maurice, the Gibraltar of the Alps, an entire mountain turned into Europe's most massive fortress.
I mention these forts again because a pack of American lawyers and professional victims groups seeking to extort money from Switzerland are accusing the Swiss of collaborating with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during WWII. These claims are lies. After the fall of France in 1940, Hitler and Mussolini were preparing to invade Switzerland after it refused to join the Axis. Hitler sneered he would quickly crush `these insolent herdsmen and cheesmakers.'
Switzerland, then a nation of only 5 million, mobilized 800,000 men. Swiss citizen soldiers were ordered to hold the mountain forts and passes, and wage guerilla war. `Leave your wives and children behind. Fight to your last bullet; then fight to the death with your bayonet' came the chilling command. This little nation, since 1291 Europe's oldest democracy and freest nation, would not be conquered. Hitler and Mussolini wisely backed off.
After WWII, the Swiss briefly feared invasion by the US and Britain. Then, from 1960-1990, Switzerland became the target of potential Soviet invasion. The Red Army, in a mirror image of Germany's WWI Schlieffen Plan, devised a massive strategic outflanking movement of NATO armies in Germany: an attack from Czechoslovakia, west through neutral Austria, then into Switzerland. Soviet tanks armies would race across Switzerland's flat northern plain on a Zurich-Neuchatel-Geneva axis, drive into France's Rhone valley north of Lyon, then come up behind NATO forces, cutting them off.
The Swiss reacted to the Soviet threat by keeping 600,000 men under arms, upgrading their forts, and came close, in the early 1960's, to building nuclear weapons.
Now that the Soviet threat is gone, Swiss are slowly reducing their defenses and plan to cut their citizen army to a paltry 190,000. But today, as in the past, each Swiss male is liable for military service and keeps his automatic weapon and ammunition at home. As Machiavelli rightly observed, `the Swiss are most heavily armed, and most free.'
The Cold War may be over, but Switzerland today still finds itself under foreign threat. The US and EU are heavily pressuring Switzerland to lift its vaunted banking secrecy and reveal names of account holders. Recently, Switzerland reluctantly agreed, under threat of severe economic reprisals, to withhold taxes from accounts of EU depositors in its banks, and remit them, without naming names, to the appropriate governments.
The Swiss, who are intensely passionate about their liberties and independence, are also under other pressures from the European Community, which now surrounds it. The EU is trying to get the Swiss to adopt its semi-socialistic labor laws, human rights legislation, commercial codes and mind-numbing regulations on every product from chemicals to cheese.
If the Swiss refuse to comply with Big EU Brother, they risk being shut out of the EU market around them. The Swiss are finding themselves in much the same position as Canada does with its huge, often testy American neighbor.
Foreign Correspondent
