D is for Defence Works & Dragons Teeth!

I shot these the other evening in Guildford. When I was going to collage there in the 1980's they were hidden in the undergrowth either side of the old sort-cut path, but, in the 1980's the population of the UK was half what it is now, and the necessary development which has filled the years between has lead to them being revealed, as more formal paths were arranged through them, and in 1998 they are formally recognised with a plaque (bolted to one of them) and are watched-over of not actually looked after! They are yards from the London Road railway station in the centre of town.

One or two are still overgrown in the background, and a better-surviving example was seen here on Small Scale World, many years ago, about a mile to the south, which would all have been part of the same defence plan - to prevent German invasion forces coming up from the South East corner of Britain, getting though the Downs at the  'Golden Ford' and having a clear-run across Surrey Heath toward London.

 

When you realise how many gargantuan flack-towers (Flaktürme) are still blotting the landscape around Germany and Austria, a few Dragoons teeth look quite innocuous! These, unlike the ones down by the river, don't seem to have any pattern to them and may have been individually cast on a Monday morning, or Friday night?!! Built by 578 Army Field Company of the Royal Engineers in February 1942 . . . a bit late really!

B is for Bobbly Bunker!

I drove past this the other day, at Edenbrook, near Dogmersfield, and noticed it had an interesting roof, so stopped and took a few pictures, now there's a car park - it has been a field most of my life - and despite being still quite away outside town, is being turned into an 'end destination leisure facility' for the denizens of the new developments which are turning Fleet from a small Victorian dormitory into a larger town lacking facilities of most kinds!

Facing Northward, it seems to be a pretty standard Type 22, but they are hexagonal, while this in an octagon; more commonly associated with the much larger Type 27, even to the added entrance block off one wall, but the variation between bunkers - of any type - was vast and the common instruction from the ministries was "do what you can with rationed materials, local supply/construction problems, manpower availability and the lie of the land."

Looking Southeast, this would have been part of the GHQ-A Line, one of several lines of defence against invasion from the Germans, and I shot another a couple of miles away ages ago which I'll try to get up here shortly. The door is obviously a modern one, and I suspect the town council is using it to store tools or community activity stuff for the bike track and allotments being constructed in the field.

Due West, this could be modeled from the unit embedded in the old Airfix play set Gun Emplacement although that plastic one doesn't have walls of the same length, but it would look OK! In fact you could remove the ventilation shafts and door over-hangs of both bunkers in that set and glue them together to get the basic for this one!

Heavy-wire/reinforcing bar has been set into the cement/mortar courses to attach camouflage netting or foliage too and you can see that with a lot of these bunkers, the corners were left unfinished to save time - in peacetime a join like that would be pared-back flush with each face.

Dead South, and you can see a heavy concrete roof has been added and given a look I haven't seen on others round here, perhaps at the whim of the builder, in his own time at the end of the day, perhaps for a specific reason, like breaking up its outline in a bare-arsed field - the trees may not have been there then, just a low/trimmed hedge?

The light was muted and with uniform weathering it was not the best conditions for photography, but you can see the bobbled effect of 20 or so pimples rising out of the body of the concrete.

The positioning of the bunker - which would have had a section of ten men when fully manned with a couple of LMG's and maybe some anti-tank capability, Boyes .55" A/T rifle or one of the Home Guard 'contraptions' (The Northover Projector) - is ideal for covering the tunnel under the main-line to Basingstoke to the West (upper image) and the bend in the road coming up from the South (lower image).

Although the positioning of the door without an additional protective blast-wall suggests that the main expected role was to cover/counter enemy advance up the road from the south - the Odiham area. Once the Odiham/Alton area was in their hands, they would have several air bases to bring in troops, and would be heading to Farnborough and Blackbush, to take/neutralise the air bases there?

And/or indeed - to neutralise the vast garrison/training area of Aldershot-Farnborough-North Camp, Arborfield, Camberley-Frimley, Chobham, Crookham, Deepcut, Pirbright/Bisley and Southwood-Minley (hell - it was all military round here!), before turning-right for London!

By some chance twist of irony, there are at the same place, three modern, civilian, triple-spike 'containment' barriers, aping the old dragons-teeth, but probably presenting little challenge to a Challenger II! They join-together like jig-saw puzzle pieces!

News, Views Etc . . . more Giant and 6H-4!

I've posted a quickie over on the 'But is it Giant' Blog, not quite as complete as I'd like, as I've mislaid one of the samples! However, with a few links to previous posts here at Small Scale World, I've cobbled-together a post on  . . .

. . . the defence works of Giant, with the closer copies - there's tons else in other scales!

As there is an additional (to the above screencap) mention of Dragons' Teeth at the end of the post, I've used it as a thin excuse for a barley credible segue to another of Hugh's Handy Helpful Home Hobby Hints - No.4 no less!

Dragons' Teeth

Needed:

• ·         1x diamond-corrugated meat (or fish) pack from your local supermarket, corner shop, convenience store or Eastern import emporium!
• ·         1x washing-up liquid
• ·         1x washing-up brush
• ·         1x burst of elbow-grease
• ·         A pair of scissors or a craft-knife 

Instructions:

• ·         Eat, or otherwise dispose of the meat . . . or fish!
• ·         Clean the packaging
• ·         Dry the packaging
• ·         Cut the diamond-corrugated section away from the rest of the packaging
• ·         Et viola!

Obviously you can then cut them into blocks or strips, or to fit round the corners of bunkers or ends of bridges &etc. I weight mine with blobs of Plasticine in the hollow underside before painting, but two-part epoxy might work, or basing will keep them firmer, you might also use the sheet to mass-produce plaster versions?

The example above produces slightly short, flat Dragons' Teeth (but big enough to 'ground' AFV's in 20mm, 1:76^th, 1:72^nd and 28mm war-gaming scales/sizes), but different food packers use different designs so there are others out there, these were found in a Polish/Turkish deli' (yes - of course Brwreakshit was a nonsense, but we're stuck with its bigotry for a while now!) a month or so ago, but I first made some in around 1980, which look almost the same!

CBG c'est la Cuisine de le Barracks pour le Grognardes!

I shot two! This one is even better, it is one of the theatrical stage-set boxes and is quite sublime, but you feel the removal of the figures would somehow be a crime, leaving it more as an ornament than a set of 'toy' soldiers!

Box lid; set 587 Cuisine . . . aaaaand - that about covers the box lid, so moving swiftly along now, mind your heads . . .

. . . isn't it lovely? I wonder if this has a liitle more age than the previous post's set, if only because the guy swabbing here has a far more realistic mop than the chap in yesterday's group, who's mop looked like I made it! maybe they were done by out-workes and some have err . . .  better technique than others!

Eyes left; and it seems Minot went into vin ordinaire as well! Who's ever seen advertising hoardings - real or imagined - in a military facility? That aside; the oven is superb (see below) and the whole set oozes charm.

Eyes right; one of the carrying poses from yesterday's set and a bit of sharp-knife action! Lovin' the carrots and the pig looks all too realistic! Thanks again to Adrian Little (Mercator Trading) for letting me shoot the two sets, a real treat!

This Victorian (or possibly Georgian, it may be later, Edwardian; it's all in the crown?) combined range/oven/open-hearth fire was still extant in Fort Tourgis on Alderney in the Channel Islands back in 2007 when I shot this. I don't know if they are still there, there was a plan to clean them up for the incomer-workers on the internet gambling sites (which I think have moved-on) and another plan to turn it into a hotel (which has been tried before), and there may have been initial work which finally did for these old fittings?

I think BO is for British Ordnance? And the old government-arrow is a nice touch, as if you could slip it done your trousers and wander-off with it; it's survived generations of squaddies, German occupiers, Italian immigrants after the war, several building plans and 70-years of vandals and neglect! But then it was built when the whole world came to us for railway locomotives, ships and cranes, now, we go to them, but the Brwreakshiteers haven't worked it out for themselves yet? Without Europe behind us; we'll pay more, not less.

The Germans heavily fortified Tourgis in the war with large emplacements and bunkers built-into the lower ramparts, while A/T guns and FlaK were stuck up on the walls and roofs, both covering Platt Saline beach against invasion and providing AA-support for the big gun-position 'Blücher' behind the beach, so maybe a billeted German used this, as his Waterloo allies might have 120-years earlier?

HMS Rodney took out the big emplacement (remains above photographed earlier this year) after D-Day to stop it firing on US troops advancing out of the beachhead. The ruins make you realise how much the Airfix ones' walls need to be thickened-by!

I'm not sure how I got from colonial barracks to long-range naval artillery but there you are, never a dull moment! 

K is for Küstenstellung

While I was over in Alderney earlier in the year I managed to get round to a few old childhood haunts and get some photography and filming done before they get any more derelict, although the German concrete is still pretty solid stuff, not apparently suffering from the concrete-cancer 60-year rule. From time-to-time I'll post bits up here as they may have interest to war gamers, and are militaria - of a sort?

There are lots of military structures on Alderney, and - indeed - all the Channel Islands, and many of them are German from the World War Two period, part of the Atlantic Wall, although, acre-for-acre (hectare-for-hectare) the amount of concrete poured on Alderney by the Nazis exceeds the other islands, and - according to the plans, were far from finished, against the near completed, planned-works on the other islands, leading to the rumor Alderney was one of the possible Hitler 'bolt-holes'.

More likely that as the northern-most island, and de-populated for the duration, it was expected to break any invasion force steaming down the channel and/or as the least easy to invade, provide support for the other islands if they came under attack?

Nobody knows, and the nature of totalitarian regimes and the inherent paranoia that comes with illegitimacy, is that all sorts of shenanigans goes on which can't be properly explained . . . ever! Suffice to say it bristled with armaments and would have been a cushy-post for the fat-knackers of the 'lame, late & lazy', sorry; 'second line' troops!

This is a small infantry squad position on the southern shore of the eastern tip of the island and seems to be for the watching of a small inlet with a sandy beach that would have been an ideal commando-landing point - the entire German crew of the nearby Casquettes lighthouse having been captured by commando's earlier in the war!

It has - in part - been dug in the wind-blown sand captured in a hollow of the granite outcrop, but would have been part-blasted out of the granite too, the rubble (and sand) being useful for the concrete mixer! While there were slave labourers on Alderney, there were also OT (Organization Todt) workers, and soldiers would have been expected to labour, certainly in the early days of the occupation.

In recent years the States of Alderney (local government - Alderney is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey) have been putting these signs up for tourists, the drawing is credited to someone I don't recognise, but obviously not copyrighted as it's public, but kudos to TGD. Colin Partridge did a lot of the early work on Alderney's fortifications, but I was told there are now two 'camps' and they squabble, so least said; soonest mended!

Note the guy (Fallschrimjager?) firing the 5cm mortar, and how the mortar seems to be self-supporting, on a very small base-plate? Note also how the rounds are piling-up next to the SF machine-gun, and no-doubt; rolling off the wall? Both are points we will return to in a minute. Why are the gunners tolerating a giant hedgehog in the way?

There is a small concrete sign which I assume is Position Funfzehn? An iron barbed-wire picket was set in it originally, but, despite being galvanised, its proximity to the rocks has resulted in salt spray sending it back to the molecule gods as rust dust!

Stairs lead into the prepared trench and you can see immediately the parallels between this post's subject and the old Airfix 'Costal Defence Post' toy, and indeed; you could use this post to convert that inaccurate plaything to something more realistic. The following video starts at this flight and moves down the left-hand branch of the trench - toward the viewpoint here.

I won't waffle-on about the video, it's to get the geography set in your mind's eye, and then we'll look at it section by section below, I came to a grinding halt when I found the connecting trench between the MG post and the fire-trench had filled with a few inches of what was probably half-rainwater and half sea-spray, leading to an interesting, bubbling, brackish, green micro-biome! But I was wearing my new dessert-wellies so I couldn't go paddling in it! I was also wearing my Indie' hat - thanks Shane!

So; we go back to the stairs, and moving toward the camera in the left-hand picture, and round the corner away from the camera in the right-hand picture, to get to the shelter-bay.

The lines in the walls don't line-up, or meet over the whole position, so will be part of the shuttering for the concrete-pour, rather than any structural feature, but could prove to have practical uses, the lower ones would hold duck-boards if the system temporarily-flooded at the time (but with slave-labour available, bailing out would not take long), while they could carry cables for comm's, lights or pre-laid demolition charges?

The little holes in the walls, of which there are three, are probably for grenades or ammunition, hot-food would have been brought out to the position, cold-food or emergency rations; carried by the soldiers, while bedding - if there was any - would have been shared on a hot-mattress system.

But the shelter will only take three lying down, while the curve of the roof would make sitting uncomfortable, it is really for protection under bombardment, and is definitely one of the features partially cut-out of the granite outcrop.

The recess seen in the video (to the right/opposite the shelter-bay) which looks like a blocked-door would probably have held either a rifle-rack or a notice-board?

The Machine-gun post; the mounting plate for the sustained-fire medium-MG has now been obscured by illustrated nature and viewpoint tourist-information boards! Again there are two small recesses at either end of the crescent-trench . . . ammo and/or grenades seem obvious, maybe signal flares? Landline radio-telephone's would make some sense, but two in the same trench?

The other hollow is described as a shelter, and it would be useful as such if you saw the enemy firing a bazooka in your general direction, but it's quite shallow (under the water!) so I suspect it was for the crew to shove, shovel or kick the empty cases as they built-up, so they weren't trying to stand on the equivalent of elongated marbles! Indeed - it looks like it may have had a removable wooden tray/liner?

Note also the texturing on the large concrete glacis at the front of the MG-position, you see this a lot in the fortifications on Alderney, where the last pour was mixed with broken granite chunks, and then washed or brushed before it had set, leaving an uneven surface, which - from a ship's binoculars - would have matched the stony cliff in front of it.

The right-hand (left hand shot) corner of the fire-trench has a little nook with a raised floor, as it’s the point of the position closest to the little cliff (you can scramble up and down it), it would have had a good view of the frontage and the inlets to either side and could be seen by positions further along the cost in both directions, although the MG gunners were actually higher.

While over on the left (right-hand shot) we have the other nook, with a plate in front of it which takes us back to that photo' of the chap with a mortar. We find a smaller indentation, about an inch/inch and a bit (40mm) deep, which seems to have held the base-plate through a combination of gravity and tight fit; as there's no sign of fixings - on site, or in the photograph of the chap holding it?

Cropped, turned up the other way and re-annotated, to give you an impression of how it was set to face attacking forces, the unit is spread out in line, the main communication trenches are presenting a minimal profile bring almost straight and it then curves round the back of the granite outcrop to a near impregnable shelter, a battleship could take it out, but nothing else, and that would be a lot of effort for a platoon or sub-platoon of maybe six-to-eight men?

I've 'emplaced' a modern section of ten men, but with the flooding it was hard to tell if the front trench could be fired-over, along it's whole length, if only the two nooks are usable, then a garrison of six-to-eight is sensible, if the whole front trench is a fire trench you could easily find un-crowded work for about twelve? The other trenches are too deep for fighting/firing from.

Returning to the Airfix play set; if you remove the hexagonal pill-box (and use it as a pill-pox) and fill-in the gap, remove the old corvette's gun and convert its pit to match the MG-post here, and pile some rocks on the smaller, oblong shelter, you'll have a very similar position! Of course; it would be easier to scratch-build something in an expanded polystyrene tile!

Given the size and cheapness of my camera, and the vibration of the Fokker I happened to be in (and it WAS a Fokker, Mr. Brown) on the way out, not a bad shot. You can see the small sandy beach which might have appealed to a handful of 'cockleshell heroes' on the left and how close to the cliff the position is; you can see - briefly - the gray-stone edge in the video at one point.

The light was poorer on the way in! You can see the larger beach is well covered by the garrison at Fort Houmet Herbé. The lighthouse in the background is not the one involved in the commando raid.

A final point - while this is the only one of its type on Alderney, there are similar constructions and - more widely - these positions will be typical of the kind of stuff constructed in Russia for the winter defence-lines, or around the Stalingrad salient - then - pocket's perimeter; in the Western dessert during the lulls between pushes; in Italy (Monte Casino) and which would have been peppered across Northern France and on the line into Germany after the Rhine-crossing.

Forty laborers, five carpenters and a cement-mixer could build this in a day, two if the floors are a separate, first pour - not perhaps; when you're digging granite though! And tanks can't crush these like they crush earthworks by turning on/over them.