17Sep
Avoid The Brown Goldfish
…or, finally getting around to seeing what all the hubbub about drains is all about.
The Tunnels
Stuff under the Earth.
17Sep
Air Raid!
The only information I’ve found about this facility associates it with a Wehrmacht regional headquarters, but others more informed than I have claimed that it’s a bog standard civilian design. The fluorescent markings leading towards the exits were still visible, causing us to waste a hilarious amount of time repeatedly ruining our night vision with flash guns and high-powered torches to get things to shine “just right”.
18Jul
Cave Men
Wherein our heroes decide to take a break from the stunningly filthy German summer weather and duck below ground into some nice wet bunkers.
02Apr
Duck and Cover
An underground French military command center in the heart of a massive abandoned Maginot Line fortress. From the 1950s until France’s eviction of NATO in 1967, the facility served as one of three command centers for German, French, American, and British forces, to coordinate nuclear response to an expected Warsaw Pact attack.
19Mar
Bunker Busters
In the 1920s, determined to avoid a repeat of the kind of slaughter witnessed in the trenches around Verdun, which bled out a good proportion of its male population, the French government established CORF, the Commission d’Organisation des Régions Fortifiées, to create an impregnable network of border fortresses facing Germany.
Typical of Maginot Line fortifications, this fortress consists of a long central tunnel with underground electrical railway, separate munitions and personnel entrance bunkers, repair shops, huge magazines, escape tunnels, hospitals, kitchens, command posts, and everything else required to support hundreds of combat troops in relatively sheltered comfort under prolonged direct assault.
The entire network is a mix of passable quarry and what seemed like either natural caves or utterly collapsed segments that required some appreciable climbing. Much of the place was actually destroyed, with rotten overhead support beams providing testimony to the insufficient architectural acumen of the miners…
27Jan
Slaughterhouse VI
The latest entry in the “oops-bombers-let’s-move-stuff-underground-department”, this large bunker in Northwest Germany is one of the more beautifully intact World War II relics I’ve seen in a while, thanks to my associate D. for the tip and tour.
Like so many German industrial sites late in the war, the hail of Allied bombs drove Nazi Germany to start moving vital wartime production underground.
21Nov
Belgian Awfuls
40 meters under the Belgian countryside, trying to get lost in a derelict limestone quarry.
Nazis, nazis, everywhere, them and their rockets. Terribly annoying, especially when they start hollowing out entire perfectly good mountains from which to spew forth their ballistic pollution. Here’s an unfinished WWII German V2 storage and marshaling facility in France.
A mine, like so many in the area, that was used to supply limestome and quicklime for construction.
