This three-loophole heavy machine gun pilbox has a gaping hole in the roof, an effect of tests of shaped charges. A huge explosion cracked the walls of the pillbox, too – a testimony to the power of the explosives.
Such massive damage was not sustained during combat. There was no need and, first of all, no time for such extravaganza.
Interestingly, several strongpoints of the Rava-Ruska Fortified Region offered some resistance in the opening hours of German attack on the Soviet Russia in June 1941. Construction work was well advanced in this part of the defence line and the mountainous region of today's Polish-Ukraine border gave the defenders a good chance to stem the advance of the Wehrmacht.
Yet, it all ended as usual: isolated pillboxes fighting stubbornly while the whole mighty Soviet front collapsing in an ultimate mess of incompetence of commanders, silent mass-desertion of troops and overall stampede of an army which was fleeing from the technically and numerically inferior enemy.
Even in the south, where terrain favoured defence, the role played by the Molotov Line was not exactly the one which had been envisioned by the designers of these powerful fortifications.
On the German part fighting in this area saw an employment of strange breed of armored weponry: captured French Char Bis tanks reequipped to fulfill a role of a flame-throwing tank. Those slow and powerfully armored tanks, which proved immune to German guns during the French campaign of 1940, were no match for the quality of the antitank guns installed in the Soviet pillboxes.
Several survivng German photos show destroyed Char Bis in the vicinity of the pillboxes of Wielki Dział strongpoint of the Rava-Ruska Fortified Region and are a good testimony to the fact that if there had ever been enough men willing to man the guns and stand their ground, the bill for the Germans could've been hard to swallow.
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