Memorial 14-18 is not one, but three sites on, and next to, the dramatic Notre-Dame-de-Lorette hill just southwest of the town of Lens in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France… The National Necropolis of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is the largest French military cemetery with the remains of over 42,000...
The Juno Beach Centre is different to many of the other museums & memorials on the Normandy coast in that its focus is not so much on ‘what happened here?’, as ‘how and why were the Canadians here?’. “The goal is not to be too technical,” says...
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) opened its new ‘behind the scenes’ visitor centre last week in northern France. Most people are aware of the CWGC, particularly when they visit a CWGC cemetery or memorial, but they are perhaps not aware of what the CWGC does or...
You can’t miss the Utah Beach Museum. It’s right there, woven into the sand dunes that, along with the Germans, defended the shore in 1944. In fact it’s partially built on the remains of German bunkers. The History Utah beach was one the ‘extra’ beaches, added to...
The biggest surprise about the German military cemetery at La Cambe is its size – it is small (16.5 acres), given that 21,222 German soldiers are buried here. That’s much smaller than the American Cemetery at Colville (172.5 acres), which has 9,380 graves. The reason is that,...
Pointe du Hoc is the famous cliff promontory at the western edge of Omaha beach, that was heroically scaled and overrun by US Rangers on the morning of D-Day, June 6th 1944. Now it is a battlefield and memorial site. The History D-Day planners were particularly worried...
The build-up to the 100th anniversary of the end of The Great War continues to grow and so do the associated memorials, museums and interpretation centres in Belgium & France. In the French Ardennes, the War & Peace Museum is due to re-open on 11th November 2017...
I had heard of the Japanese WW2 balloon bomb campaign, but until I was reading David Hambling’s new book, Swarm Troopers – How small drones will conquer the world *, I hadn’t been aware that there had been civilian casualties. In fact these were the only deaths...
This is a memorial I stumbled across outside a church in Nottinghamshire a year ago. There’s not a great deal of information on the memorial itself but thanks to the efforts of a number of people who have been diligently researching the loss of Lancaster W4270 with...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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