The Maginot Line & a bit of Vauban

L'ouvrage de le Ferte was the small Maginot Line fort on the west end of the Line & was the only fort the Germans managed to take. 

Even an 88 couldn't get thru the capolas.

The most likely theory is thought that this pop up cupola was dislpodged & the bunnker under was set on fire & there was a failure in the isolation system & the entire garrison of 200 men was gassed or asphysiated.    We were not able to go inside because it was only open to guided tours in the afternoon & we had a higher priority for then

Montemedy was built over many years & held by a Spanish garison of 900 men when attacked by 20,000 French in Lousis XIV's time.  It capitualated after 59 days.  Vauban then added further improvements & not taken again.

It is on a  magnificent site providing great views of the beautiful countryside.  The village inside is mostly deserted with town now below the citadel. 
   

L'ouvrage de Fermont is a major Maginot fort & open for tours at the same time as le Ferte. We proritised this one.  It has been repaired by volunters.

The tour guide only spoke French, but we were lent an English booklet & most of it was self evident anyway.  The fort has two major bunkers with 2 or 3 75mm guns, numerous mg posts, amumitions stoes & living quaters spread over a 2km front all connected by underground railway.  We were taken from the ammunition store to bunker no.1 on the railway.  We were taken outside at bunker 1 & walked to bunker 2 & back.  Then back on the railway to the living quarters.  After the tour there was a museum full of bits & pieces from other forts.

The electric train.

Outside bunker no.1 with 3 75mm guns.

On top of bunker no.2 with a pop up twin 75mm turret.

Battle scars on the gun cupola  The German attacked the fort with a mix of guns for 88 up to 305mm but failed to break it.  The French lost 1 casulaty. The closest they got was when an 88 ponded one spot on bunker no.1 all morning.  It was almost thru when they gave up or ran out of ammo & the Frenc plugged the hole overnight.

Sleeping quarters for the 800 man garrison.

It took over 2 hours to go though the fort & aother half to check out the museum & array of guns outside the entrance.  Definitely a high point of the trip.

The Ardennes 1940 & 1944

From Hannut we drove south across the front of the German attacks of 1940 & 1944 to Sedan.  We had no data on small actions related to specific terrain features, but our focus was on the big picture, getting a feel for the ground that the Allies thought was impractical for a large army.  The area is indeed very hilly & largely forested.  Now there are a lot of good roads through it, but in the war these woudl have been one lane.  Clearly the Germans were taking a huge risk in 1940 when if the Allies had done air recon it would have become like the road to Kiev in 2022.  And the Bulge was just crazy.

There is an excelleny museum at Bastogne that covers the whole war in general as well as the Bulge in detail.   And it gives a balanced account with stuff about Germasn soldiers just doing their duty as well as the Bad Guys.

This Sherman in the museum got hit something big.  There is an exit wound on the other side.

A very cool kuberwagon.

The Panther below is beside the road in Houfalize, a town just north of Bastogne.  According to the information boards this tank was in Normandy, retreated to Holland, fought at Arnhem, then attacked in the Bulge.  But it met an inglorious end when the driver misjudged a bridge crossing in a fog & it fell in the river drowning the crew.  After the war it was repaired & put on display just up the road from the bridge.

A bloody sweep across Belgium

 From near Yres we drove east to Hannut via three battlefeilds.

At Oudenarde where Marlborough smashed the French in 1706.  There were no markers or display boards, but we identified the field of battle by comparing modern & historical maps.  It was made difficult by villages having two or three names - French, Walloon & sometimes English that have usually morphed significantly in 300 years.   The key manouvre was a cavalry sweep around the French left after pinning the front of their line (while Eugene kept the rest of the French busy on the Allied right).  We identified the ground where the Allied cavalry made their move.

We'd all been to Waterloo before, but it was on the way & the weather was perfect.

We did lunch at the Restaurant 1815 on the field.
 

There's nothing spectacular at Ramilies 1708, but although unmarked, it was easy to find as the village of Ramilies is in the centre of it & all you need is a compass to orientate the opposing lines.  The French had a strong position behind the creek running through Ramilies.  Marlborough attacked Ramilies & the French left to draw in their reserves while he massed most of his cavalry behind a slight rise on his left.  Then he sent a massive cavalry charge across the plain in the pic to smash the French right.   

The Western Front

We stayed at a Gite near Albert for two nights to explore the Somme before moving north to another gite near Ypres. Renfrey had some particular sites he wanted to visit regaridng his PHD thesis on a particular British division in the Great War.

In the main the battlefields are not that exciting to look at, but interesting to see just how flat the terrain generally is & how low the hills & ridges so many men died on were.   And the frequency & size of the cemetaries is geninely awful.

The most interesting location we visited was the Canadian site on Vimy Ridge, which the Canadians took with enormous casualties.  The site has tunnels & trench lines partially restored you can get into, plus a mess of vast craters from mine explosions in ground still undulating in a maze of shell holes.   The site also had the cutest guides - Canadian uni students on 4 month work experience.

Normandy Breakout, Cressy & Agincourt

We followed the US south thropugh the bockage & had dinner with my cousin who live in St Pois where we stayed the night.   Then to the hill at Montain where the US stopped Hitler's dumb counterattack.

US fox hole on the ridge.

South of the town of Falaise there is an excelent viewing point with detailed maps & descriptions of the closing of the gap.

On the ridge to the east where the Canadians & Pole blocked the Falaise gap there is a memorial & museum with a grand view of the gap.

Not far east of the gap at Vimotiers is a Tiger beside the road where it was abandoned out of diesel.

After staying overnight at Lisieu, we went north to Cressy.  Traditionally the battle site is close to the village of Cressy, but there is an alternative site about 5km away.  We visited both & really both fit the scanty records of the battle.  But finding the new alternative which is not marked & doesn't have a viewing platform was much more interesting.

We liked the recent alternative better, though the Cressy tourist businesses would rather it went away.

There is less contovesy about the site of Argincourt, but in fact there are plenty of other pieces of ground in the area that would fit the bill.
So much to learn from these battlefields except to get a feel for the terrain in general, the scale of the action & to tick off the boxes in our bucket lists.

On to Albert where we are staying two nights to allow a good look at the WWII battlefields east of Amiens.

 

Camp Cromwell Invades Normandy

 As expected we hit Sword Beach unopposed at dawn on the ferry from Portsmouth & caught the no.12 bus to Caen for breakfast (eat your heart out Monty).  We Picked up a Sdkfz A3008 Citrone scout car & headed back to the beach & headed north.

Pak 38 bunker.

There were heaps of Allied tanks on display along the beaches, but this lovely Hetzer outside the Bayeux D-Day Museum the only German tank we found.  That museum gave pretty good overview of the campaign & is worth a visit.

Lots of German guns though.

The destruction & craters at Point du Hoc are awesome, but the exhibits are very chauvanistic.  They are all about the bravery of the US soldiers, yes they were heroic, but not a word about the greatly outnumbered German garison that withstood days of pounding by naval & air bombardment & still held off the yanks for 3 days.

We stayed overnight at Hotel Le Vabaun in Carentan & enjoyed our first meal at a French restaurant for the trip.  Then in the morning headed for Utah.

Utah turned out to be the best beach of all.  There was little new development & shirtloads of bunkers & batteries to be found & examined. 

On a replica landing barge on Utah Beach.

There were large gun emplacements at regular intervals, many of them a shambles of broken concrete.

In between the large emplcemnets were small Tobrucs or anti-tnak gun bunkers at about 100m intervals.

The large guns had great enfilading fields of fire down the beach.

Behind the first line on the dunes there was a network of smaller bunkers.

North of nthe beach attack frontage we found a battery that originally had 3 210mm guns, several 155's & a bunch of AA, all in bunkers with connecting trenches, all restored apart from the Allied damage & the removal of the original guns for scrap.

A 105 shell flew down the atircase & blew this hole in the inner wall.

This site was well posted with information signs in 6 languages and uniquely it paid respects to the German defenders.  This poster tells the story of the commandant who held the fort for 8 days under US bombardment & infnatry attack.  After 8 days he was given permission to withdraw.  He withdrew his remaining 77 men of a garison of 280 to Cherboug where he was later catured.  He left behind about a hundred wounded & about a hundred US prisoners.

The team voted Utah as the best beach & this battery as the best presented & informative site on the front.

 

Portsmouth Naval Museum

We spent a whole day at the Portsmouth Naval Museum & still didn't have time to see it all.

HMS Warrior 1860.

HMS Victory.

Henry VIII's Mary Rose.

HMS M33 Monitor.

Apres museum pub.

Camp Cromwell Expedition: London& Bovington

I rendezvoused sucessfukky with Chris & SteveD in London.  Mostly we did touristy stuff.

HMS Belfast on the Thames.

With a 15" naval shell outside Imperial War Museum.

Yesterday we took the train to Southampton to meet up with Renfrey & today he took us  to the Bovington Tank Museum.

Team Cromwell with Cromwell.

Tiger still in running order.

M14 & Matilda

Lots of WWI tanks.

A shed full of works in progress not in the main museum.

A great museum though Samure had a better German collection.

On the way back to our digs we visited Cofe Castle.  It was thoughfully turned into s romantic ruin by Cromwell.