The Entire Story of Lorient's U-Boat Pens - the Base the Bombers Could Never Crack

On a fine day on the coast of Brittany, the marina at Lorient is one of the prettiest places in France. Yachts and racing trimarans crowd the water. People sit on the quay with coffee and watch the sails go out toward the Atlantic. And behind all of it, refusing to blend in, stand three enormous blocks of grey concrete. They have no windows worth the name. Their roofs are thick enough to shrug off an earthquake. During the Second World War, the Allies dropped roughly four thousand tons of bombs on this port and flew hundreds of raids against it. They burned close to ninety percent of the town to the ground. And in all of that, they never once destroyed a single submarine inside these walls. Not one. This is the entire story of the Lorient U-boat pens. The base the bombers could never crack. For most of the war, this was one of the most dangerous places on earth for a British sailor, and one of the safest in the world for a German submarine. From these pens the U-boats went out into the North Atlantic to hunt the convoys that kept Britain alive, and to these pens they came back, sliding in under seven meters of reinforced concrete that no bomb in the Allied arsenal could break. The Allies knew exactly where the submarines slept. They simply could not reach them. So the real question that hangs over Lorient is not how the Germans built something the bombs could not touch. It is how, in the end, the base was beaten anyway. Because it was. Just not from the air, and not by the men everyone remembers. If this is your first time here, we tell the stories of the places the war turned into fortresses, and the people caught inside them. If that is what you came for, take a second to like this video and subscribe. It helps more than you would think.