"Switzerland is a porcupine,
We will take her as dessert;
Then we'll go to the wide world
And get us Roosevelt."
These were lyrics to a popular Wehrmacht song that made fun of the Swiss. "The Swiss themselves, listening on German radio, joked that only Germans would eat porcupine. However, the image of a bristling hedgehog was apt. At the Swiss border, German soldiers saw concertina wire raised like the sharp quills of a porcupine, intermixed with tank traps and machine gun bunkers, erected to slow a Wehrmacht onslaught. After France fell in 1940, leaving Switzerland surrounded by the Axis, Swiss forces were concentrated in the Alpine Redoubt, or Réduit, the oval outline of which resembled a porcupine."
The porcupine "also relates to the traditional Swiss battle array of massed warriors with pikes, halberds, and other long-reach pole arms. Swiss pikemen used these virtually impenetrable formations to defeat German knights and infantry in the Swabian War of 1499. The victories of Swiss peasants against overwhelming odds--far larger numbers of enemy warriors in elaborate armor--were constantly recalled to inspire resistance to Hitler's armies."
From Halbrook, The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich, p. 135.
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