Behind the bristles of sharp branches and thorns, animals hid even in prehistoric times, but only a person thought of closing the entrance to the cave with them.
Unapproachable drecolle
The heroes of old adventure novels, crossing the unexplored expanses of Africa, were not afraid to meet face to face with a fierce lion or a whole tribe of natives - but only during the day. At night, travelers and treasure seekers feared that they would fall prey to a surprise attack, so they surrounded their camps with branches of thorny bushes. The method of protection is simple, but very effective and, probably, as ancient as humanity itself. Behind the bristles of sharp branches and thorns, animals hid even in prehistoric times, but only a person thought of not living in thickets of thorns, but surrounding his camp with branches or blocking the entrance to the cave with them.
Conventionally, the barriers used by humans today can be divided into three categories. First, hedges - rose hips, blackthorns, rose bushes and other similar plants, planted quite densely. Through such a fence, it is not inferior in efficiency to barbed wire, but it looks much less ferocious.
Secondly, these are man-made barriers - ditches, embankments, piles of stones, as well as barriers made of cut branches, bushes or whole trees. The latter in Russia were called serifs and were known back in the 10th century.
The zaseka, which was built in the forests, consisted of trees felled at a height of about a meter and felled with a crown in the direction of a possible enemy attack. To make it difficult to parse the notch, trees were cut crosswise, often in two or three rows. Behind the first such line, the notches often made the second and even the third. The task of the trap was to stop the advance of the enemy - in the old days, as a rule, these were horse detachments of nomads, but it was not easy for foot soldiers to get through this man-made windbreak. It took a whole day to complete the passage, and sometimes more.
In the 15th century, the serifs began to be combined into colossal serif lines, stretching for tens and hundreds of kilometers along the borders of Russia. They stretched from fortress to fortress, and where the forest ended, they erected earthen ramparts with palisades and trees dug into the slopes (crown forward). The length of the "Big Zasechnaya Line", stretching from Kozelsk to Ryazan, in the 16th century was about 600 km, and the total length of the Russian "notch lines" reached 4,000 km.
Small notches as tactical fortifications were built in preparation for the Battle of Borodino, and during the defense of Moscow in 1941, 1,500 km of forest blockages were created in just a few weeks, blocking the German army's path to the capital.
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| The offensive of the steppe nomads on the Slavs who settled in the forest from ancient times was restrained with the help of such markings. Detail of an engraving by William Gondius. The beginning of the 17th century. |
The third group includes all kinds of artificial barriers, the most ancient of which is the palisade. Its name speaks for itself - these are poles or logs dug next to it, usually with a pointed top. The palisade could be just a fence made of logs, sometimes intertwined with branches or tied with ropes, and sometimes pointed stakes were stuck into the ground "in bulk", tilting towards the enemy - on the slope of the defensive rampart or simply on the battlefield.
Modern palisades are fences made of metal pointed rods, usually forged decorative, but, nevertheless, very dangerous for those who decide to climb over them. Even more inaccessible are fences with rows of tall steel blades, often curved outward - without a ladder, they are almost insurmountable.
The next step was to create slingshots - interconnected stakes, pointed at both ends. To get an idea of the simplest design of a slingshot, it is enough to recall the anti-tank "hedgehogs" of the Great Patriotic War. This is a slingshot, only welded from pieces of rail. In addition to "hedgehogs", there is a classic slingshot, consisting of two or more pairs of crossed stakes, connected by a long horizontal crossbar.
As well as dug in stakes, slingshots were an effective means of stopping enemy cavalry rushing into infantry formations. But they had two more advantages. First of all, the slingshots could be rearranged and carried when assembled. Therefore, it was possible to quickly change their location - if required, and they were also used as barriers to passages. Our own drove up - they pushed the slingshot aside, they let our own.
In addition, the slingshot did not need to be dug in - so it was easy to install, even on rocky ground or cobbled streets. And most importantly, slingshots were an obstacle not only for the cavalry, but also for the enemy's infantry. The effectiveness of the slingshots was especially evident in the 15th – 19th centuries, when the infantry went on the attack in a strict formation - and it slowed down and crashed at the slingshots. Sometimes the attackers had to take with them a detachment of sappers, armed with axes, to cut down the barriers. But while the adversary groaned, fiddling with slingshots, the defenders fired at him, inflicting damage.
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| In a photograph taken during the American Civil War in Atlanta, you can see a rather intricate combination of a variety of barriers. There are slingshots, palisades, and notches. Photo: George N. Barnard from the collection of the US State Archives |
Today, the distant and completely harmless descendants of slingshots are used for almost peaceful purposes - these are all kinds of barriers and portable fences used to fence or divide territories in parking lots, at the entrances of stadiums and concert halls, and checkpoints. And also portable barriers are set up during mass street actions - so that the crowd does not rush where they should not.
However, the appearance on the battlefields of machine guns, and then armored vehicles, did not dismiss the "combat" slingshots. Wooden or metal, they remain formidable obstacles for the enemy, especially since they were entangled with barbed wire.
The world is behind the "thorn"
Contrary to rumors, the inventors of barbed wire were not going to use it against humans. In fact, its appearance was the result of a shortage of lumber on the prairies of the Great Plains.
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, countless settlers moved to the Western lands. In a short time, thousands and thousands of farms appeared, many of which specialized in cattle breeding. As a result, there was a great demand for materials for the construction of corrals and fences at the boundaries of the sites. But wood on the prairie was in short supply, and iron ore, on the contrary, was in abundance. An American engineering genius began to be sophisticated in metal wire structures.
Fences came out cheaper and easier. However, the cows did not understand that the poles with wire were a fence, they tried to go through them - and they got entangled. Then the idea came up to weave thorny branches into a wire fence - there was no shortage of them on the prairie. But it was a very painstaking business. Therefore, a wire with ready-made metal spikes was produced.
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| Initially, the purpose of such barriers was to keep livestock inside the corral. Photo: Bain News Service from the Library of Congress Archives. |
Who exactly was the first to invent barbed wire is still not known. According to one version, it was done by the French, according to another - some American boy. However, the first patent for the “thorn” was taken by the blacksmith Michael Kelly, who presented his invention in 1868. By 1874, six patents were registered for barbed wire, by 1900 - several hundred! It would seem that what could be easier ?! But each patent is an original type of studs and a way of attaching them to the wire.
Curly stars, "swallows", wire spikes, blades - the imagination of the inventors was irrepressible. In order to prevent the animals from getting hurt, “sparing” thorns were created, which injected, but did not tear the skin. Some types of spikes required fixation, and then instead of one supporting wire, two twisted ones were used. All this was made by hand, with the help of improvised tools. For example, a schoolteacher from Illinois, Joseph Glidden, twisted a wire with a coffee grinder. But already in the 1870s, American factories began to produce it. By the end of the 19th century, the total length of barbed wire fences in the United States alone reached 80,000 km!
However, the military and those who were going to drive the "talking cattle" behind the barbed wire immediately became interested in the invention. Already in 1881, the reservations of the Indians - who called it the "devil's rope", began to be surrounded with a "thorn", and the fences of prisons were entangled with it. The British found the most widespread use of barbed wire during the Boer War. Thousands of kilometers it entangled South Africa, protecting the railways from partisans, dividing the country into separate regions. The British burned down the Boer farms, and from themselves drove into the first-ever concentration camps for civilians fenced with barbed wire. Since then, the "thorn" has become a symbol of tyranny, enslavement and bondage.
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| The US military used more than 10 kilometers of barbed wire to set up a fence around the Baghdad International Airport. Photo: Tech. Sgt. Brian Davidson / U. S. Air force |
Even more effective, barbed wire has established itself as field barriers. The thorns on it were no longer "sparing": they dug in serrations and tore at the flesh, or cut it with small blades. Even the new tactics of the German army, with which they entered the First World War, turned out to be powerless in front of the rows of barbed wire: the rapid rush of fleeing soldiers to the enemy positions - that very classic attack of the 20th century. The Germans did not run for long: the attacking chains stopped and they were mowed down from a machine gun. Wire fences in 8-10 rows were installed quickly and stretched for kilometers, and to further speed up and facilitate this process, the military invented the "Bruno spiral" - barbed wire specially laid in bays, which was then stretched out in a matter of minutes. And where, it would seem, there was free space, they erected ingenious stretch nets made of barbed wire - through which it was not easy to run without catching or falling.
The war turned into a protracted, positional war. To make a passage in a multi-row wire fence, it was necessary to fire one hundred and fifty shells of a field "three-inch" or send a special group of sappers. A bloody corpse hanging on a barbed wire has become a symbol of the wars of the last century.
A way out was found in the creation of special machines for passing through the rows of wire fences. At first, an armored car auditioned for this role - but it got stuck in craters and trenches. And then His Majesty's tank rode out onto the battlefield. However, an adequate response was given to the appearance of formidable machines in the form of modernization of the already existing barrage systems: on the fronts of the next wars, palisades of reinforced concrete obstacles and bristling steel "hedgehogs" appeared.
At present, the classic barbed wire is practically no longer produced - it was replaced by a special metal tape, on which thorns or sharp blades are cut out by stamping (we call it "Egoza"). It was invented by the Germans during the First World War - and the reason was also the economy, since such a tape is cheaper to manufacture, and in some ways even more efficient than barbed wire. Well, the most modern options are metal tape, reinforced for strength with carbon steel wire. The sections of the netted "thorny fence" (product "Akatsiya") woven from it, with the spiral "Egoza" at the top and bottom, are one of the most insurmountable obstacles of this class.
Danger! Keep out
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| Such a machine-gunner robot serves as a natural addition to any obstacle: it sees day and night, "knows" how to distinguish a person from other moving objects and shoots without a miss. Illustration: SamsungTechwin |
However, wire fences have one common drawback - if you have a tool and time, you can always cut them. And it happened that the attacking soldiers or escaping prisoners climbed through the "thorn", regardless of the resulting wounds.
And then one day someone came up with the idea to pass an electric current through a wire fence. The name of the inventor remained unknown, but the first combat use of an electric fence occurred during the defense of Port Arthur. On November 26, 1904, during a night assault, the Japanese came across a strange-looking fence made of pillars with stretched copper wire. The attempt to overcome it turned out to be deplorable - one hundred and fifty Japanese soldiers were electrocuted, the rest, who had hesitated in panic, were mowed down by bullets.
However, this type of electric barriers was rarely used in the war. Insulators unmasked them, depriving them of the effect of surprise, and it was quite simple to close electrical lines and thus disable them. Therefore, they were then used only for fencing rear facilities: warehouses, military enterprises and, of course, prisons and concentration camps. The photographs of the unfortunate Auschwitz prisoners standing behind the electric fence are sure to be remembered by everyone.
During the First World War, other methods of electric warfare were developed. The wires were thrown out with mortars or grenade launchers, or they were laid underground in front of the line of obstacles - and then suddenly a switch was turned on. The damp earth and wet clothing of the crawling enemy were good conductors of electricity.
Something similar was used in the defense of Leningrad in 1941. On one of the sections of the front, a fence about a kilometer long was created with the help of metric pins-electrodes and cables connected to them. When the Nazis launched an attack, voltage was applied (from a high-voltage line) and an entire battalion of the enemy remained forever on the ground. For several days, a group of electricians defended this area, until the enemy thought to plow it up with artillery.
Today, electric fences are used only to scare off intruders (not lethal currents are passed through them), but in New Zealand, electric fences for livestock are very popular with farmers. But keeping the fence under constant voltage is uneconomical, so now a different method is used: the current is turned on automatically when the motion sensors react to a large object approaching the fence.
By the way, modern tracking systems allow you to hang on fences and activate at the right time anything you want: tear gas or electrically conductive aerosol sprays, a stun grenade or even a machine gun.
