Gary Sterne discovered the Maisy Battery, an extensive installation “the size of four football pitches” It turned out to be an invasion map for Omaha Beach, which included an area marked “area of high resistance”. Mr Sterne, a publisher and collector, believed that this could show the “lost” Nazi gun emplacements, which became buried by nature after the war and could not be located.
Experts were divided about the battery’s location and most believed that the area where Mr Sterne was looking was nothing but fields. But after travelling to Normandy to search for himself he stumbled across an entrance to the complex in undergrowth.
Wow. How short are our memories, even for such things.
If someone shook my pants from yesterday they’d get RTO’s soup recipe.
Certain people are welcome to shake my pants from yesterday, but please let me take them off first.
[…]
TMI?
That’s awesome. Er, not you, McGehee, the post. I’m a big WWII/Normandy buff, but that guy is dedicated. It’s hard to understand how that complex could get “lost,” though. First of all, a whole bunch of people knew where it was, and presumably it didn’t just disappear one day. Then there’s the sheer size of it. In any case, It will be a stop on my next trip to Normandy.
So much for man’s works versus nature’s.
Craig, IIRC Normandy was farm country, in other words, the middle of nowhere. To farmers, like my great grandparents who farmed along Lake Huron, the beaches weren’t important because you couldn’t grow anything there. And after WWII, France had more important fish to fry than remember another German coastal bastion, and a lot of Americans just wanted to forget their experiences along that coast. The cemetaries were enough; the German’s works could go to blazes.
As an aside, in the early fifties my dad was with the army in a little town called Parageux (sp?). In the town there was a bump under a railline, and when the French workers got around to fixing that they found a buried five hundred pound bomb. There was just so much to fix that the bomb had been buried and forgotten.
You have to have seen some of these sites to really understand how they could go lost. When I was about 8 my stepfather was stationed in England. My Brit friends and I would play all around grassy knolls and such, never realizing that they were actually the topmost level of bomb shelters that had their entrances buried right after the war was over. No features, no concrete, no doors, nothing just grassy humps in the ground. Nobody but the village old timers would ever have known there was anything under ground, unless somebody starts digging. Another thing to remember is that a lot of these structures were designed to be hard to find/see to foil bombing runs and such.
Mikey, good point. It’s one of the things that make the AGW and “We’re destroying the Earth” crowd so amusing (or would if they weren’t so dangerous). We can’t even find all of our “destruction of the planet” after awhile. Anybody can go to just about any run down part of Anytown, USA and see how fast nature will recover and destroy the “works of man”. When I was a kid living in Las Vegas I would like to go out into the desert to explore and play. Lots of stuff out in the desert that was just wearing away, soon to disappear. I’m pretty fond of mankind, but we really are specks when comparing us with the ecosystem of a planet.
Mr Sterne, a publisher and collector, believed that this could show the “lost†Nazi gun emplacements, which became buried by nature after the war and could not be located.
Mikey, I lived in France for four years, and I’ve been to Normandy many times. It may be farm country, but I wouldn’t characterize a place that’s been lived in and cultivated for thousands of years and seen invading armies come and go forever as the middle of nowhere. That’s one big fucking complex. All I’m saying is that there were plenty of people who knew it was there, and it shouldn’t have been that hard to find it if one wanted to.
Craig, it wasn’t in the middle of a city like that five hundred pound bomb.
It was out on the beach, everyone had better things to do, and a whole lot of people didn’t want to remember it anyway. And then nature takes its toll, a new generation comes along, and it is forgotten.
CraigC,
They are still finding artifacts from old fighting positions is the forests that surround all the towns and cities in Northern France. Unless one knows what they are looking for, it is hard to distinguish what is what. What looks like “natural” earth contours and uneven ground hide what were old fighting positions and bomb craters. They even find remains to this day. Veterans can usually spot them; most old Army posts have training areas that have the same contours and features of old abandoned unit positions. I have read stories of American WW2 Vets returning to France and showing the old earthworks and defensive positions to locals that had no idea they were there. Cool stuff.
If the emplacements were bombed at all, either from the air or through naval bombardment they could be easily covered by the airborn debris. Bombs and shells move a lot of earth.A few years of heavy channel storms and pretty soon things are completely buried. On top of that stuff starts to grow on it almost immediately after people leave. nature is a bitch if you’re a neat freak.
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