The Museum of the Atlantic Wall, aka ‘Batterie Todt’, is all about the big guns! Not only was the giant concrete casement built specifically to accommodate a massive gun, it now has one of the two remaining German K5 railway guns parked alongside as a major exhibit....
Montormel*, or ‘Hill 262’ as it was known to the Allies, was the location where the ‘Falaise pocket’ was finally sealed by Polish and Canadian forces on 21 August 1944, trapping up to 50,000 German soldiers and marking the end of the Battle of Normandy. On this...
The Musee 39-45 * north of Boulogne in Pas-de-Calais, differs from many WW2 museums in that it is dedicated to the uniforms and accessories of the combatants, rather than their equipment. The only large pieces of military equipment are parked outside, namely ‘Jean Beart’, a Sherman M4...
The medieval hilltop town of Thiers in the Puy-de-Dôme department of Auvergne*, is known throughout the commercial and domestic kitchens of France as the historic home of the cutlery industry. In particular it’s known for its knives. The town’s craftsmen (& women) have been making knives for...
This [Gen. Richter's HQ] is where the Third Reich first realised what was happening on 5/6th June 1944
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is to be the new home of American author Robert M. Pirsig’s 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle featured in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. Pirsig’s book, originally published by William Morrow in...
On a coastline dotted with D-Day museums, it’s easy to assume that the America Gold Beach Museum in Ver-sur-Mer, Normandy, is dedicated to the events on June 6 1944… but it isn’t, exclusively. Musée America Gold Beach reminds us that before the British Army’s XXX Corps landed...
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...
My expectations of the Grand Bunker Musée (museum) were not all that high when I eventually got around to visiting, but it turned out to be really interesting. I originally thought the 16m tall concrete bunker, which has been restored to its 1944 condition, was a flak...
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...
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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