The newly opened D-Day Collins Museum recreates General Joseph Lawton Collins’ VII Corps headquarters at Chateau de Franquetot, in the actual building itself where he met more than once with Generals Omar Bradley, George Patton and Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower. And to give the...
Most people know that the famous airborne glider attack on Pegasus Bridge just after midnight on 6th June 1944 marked the start of D-Day, but I suspect many are a little confused about where exactly this dramatic action took place. At the east end of the landing...
The British Normandy Memorial lists the names of 22,442 servicemen & women serving under British command, who died in Normandy. It was conceived during the 71st D-Day Anniversary reunion in 2015, in a chance conversation between a British veteran, George Batts, and the BBC broadcaster Nicholas Witchell....
The Laatzen-Hanover Aviation Museum (Laatzen-Hannover Luftfahrt Museum), to give it its full name, is not a huge museum but it’s a really interesting aviation museum and it packs a lot – some 4,000+ artefacts – into its 3,500 m² of display space. The museum was founded by...
Arromanches-les-Bains is the site of the famous Mulberry B Artificial Harbour and home to the D-Day Landing Museum, known locally as the ‘Musée du Débarquement, Arromanches’, which focuses on the astounding piece of engineering that still dominates the seascape today. My last visit to the museum was...
The Radar Museum 1944 is on the site of the Germans’ largest radar station in the Calvados region of Normandy. The original top-secret site covered a huge 10 hectares on the plateau outside the town of Douvres*. However the museum and its bunkers cover only a small...
What exactly is Volkswagen’s Autostadt? Is it a brand museum? Is it a theme park? Or is it something else? It’s hard to get a grasp on it, and I suspect that for many potential visitors, while that might not put them off visiting, it might lose...
The Hamelin Automobile History Museum (Museum der Hamelner Automobilgeschichte) may be small but it gives a fascinating insight into the history and development of the German automobile industry in the early 20th century, and in particular into local car makers who developed two important and popular brands...
A World War II Vickers Wellington bomber has been restored to its former glory after 12½ years of conservation at the Royal Air Force Museum Midlands (Cosford)*. The Wellington, one of only two remaining in the UK (the other is at Brooklands Museum), was finally moved last...
These days, the huge fortified bunker built by the Germans in 1941 to protect its U-boats, is no longer referred to as the “U-boat base” or “the U-boat pens”. Instead they simply call it the ‘submarine base’, maybe to disassociate it from its origins, but we all...
The Museum of the Liberation of Paris, in Paris, tells the story of the occupation of Paris in the Second World War, its resistance, and its eventual liberation in Aug 1944. It’s not a museum loaded with artefacts, most of the displays are reproduced historic photographs, documents...
The SS Keewatin museum ship, an Edwardian Great Lakes passenger steamer, is moving from her current home in Port McNicoll on Lake Michigan to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston on the St. Lawrence River. The 103m long ship was purpose built for the...
The Automobili Lamborghini Museum, just outside Bologna, officially reopened on the weekend following a redesign and new layout. The reopening marks the start, of Lamborghini’s 60th anniversary celebrations. The museum has changed its name and been entirely remodelled, both in its layout and design, and in its...
Saint-Nazaire is an industrial port city and its history is inextricably bound up with its ship building industry. So it is no wonder that visitors are keen to see what goes on at the massive Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard, not least because its giant ‘products’ dominate the...
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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