One of Hamburg’s World War Two giant flak towers (Flakturm) is to have a 136-room hotel built on the top three floors. The NH Hotel Group has won the tender to operate the NHow hotel, which will have a bar, cafe and a spectacular roof-top garden with...
I recently came across this small event in Patrick Delaforce’s book, Churchill’s Desert Rats . It illustrates how, sometimes, there can be brief moments of honour & decency – even involving the SS – in the midst of total war. It was during the opening stages of...
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...
We think of the Hawker Hurricane as the workhorse of the Battle of Britain and, while generally acknowledged to be not as fast or glamourous as the Spitfire, most pilots found it to be a highly efficient gun platform that could take a lot of punishment. Most,...
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 Biber (“Beaver”) midget submarine was not Germany’s most successful weapon in WW2. Designed hastily in Feb 1944 in a bid to compensate for the horrendous losses in the U-boat fleet, and in anticipation of an imminent Allied invasion, the Biber was a cheap, one-man submarine, capable...
The Naval and Maritime Museum at Patriots Point is pretty spectacular and definitely worth a visit if you are in the neighbourhood. By ‘neighbourhood’ I mean pretty much anywhere on the central east coast of the continent! The largest exhibit by far is the aircraft carrier, USS...
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...
The Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Eglise is a ‘must see’ for those touring Normandy, and it’s usually one of the first or last stops on a tour of the Normandy beaches because it’s out there on the western flank, which is exactly why the US airborne forces set...
We reviewed the German battery at Grandcamp Maisy in Normandy, last year (Oct 2018), but I was in the neighbourhood in April, so I stopped by to have a look for myself. I spent a happy 40 minutes chatting to Dan Sterne, the owner (Gary)’s son, and...
The German battery at Azeville north west of Utah Beach was supposed to be taken on D-Day itself. It was still firing on Utah on the morning of D+3 (9th June). Azeville is a little different to other batteries in Normandy in that you spend the first...
The newly renovated Army Flying Museum held its official re-opening yesterday with their patron, HRH Prince Michael of Kent as guest of honour. I wrote about the changes in March, but this event gave me a chance to actually see the new facilities and exhibits… and there’s...
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,...
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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