The Battlefield Explorer

The Battlefield Explorer Join me on my trips, visit the known and unknown battlefields, uncover hidden artifacts that are still out there, and experience amazing events.

This bomb sat unexploded in the roof of the Watten bunker for sixty-four years. It was named after a Walt Disney film.Ca...
05/09/2026

This bomb sat unexploded in the roof of the Watten bunker for sixty-four years.
It was named after a Walt Disney film.

Captain Edward Terrell of the Royal Navy saw Victory Through Air Power in 1943, in which an animated rocket bomb punches through a German submarine pen. He built the real thing: the 4,500 lb Concrete Piercing, Rocket Assisted bomb, nineteen cordite motors firing thirty seconds after release, striking at around 990 mph.

Watten, in the forest at Éperlecques, became the test target in October 1944, chosen for its large accessible interior. Eighth Air Force B-17s began dropping Disneys there on 3 February 1945.

One buried itself in the concrete and did not explode. Sécurité Civile deminers lifted it out in January 2009 and took it to the depot at Vimy.

05/09/2026

The launch ramp still points at London. 328 degrees, 206 kilometres.

Site Nr 161 at Guerville, a V1 launch site hidden in the forest of Eu. Ten flying bombs were launched on the opening night of the offensive, 12 June 1944. Four failed on the ramps, two crashed into the Channel. One of the four that reached England hit the railway bridge over Grove Road in Bethnal Green, killing six people.

The race to Bastogne started late because nobody could find a key.The road bridge at Dasburg carries traffic across the ...
05/09/2026

The race to Bastogne started late because nobody could find a key.

The road bridge at Dasburg carries traffic across the Our from Germany into Luxembourg. On 16 December 1944 this was the crossing point of the 2nd Panzer Division, the spearhead of Manteuffel's Fifth Panzer Army. Its road towards the Meuse ran west across the Our and through Bastogne.

The Germans had blown the old bridge themselves in September. Now 2nd Panzer was to open its attack from Dasburg, and it needed a new one. The 600th Army Engineer Battalion under Major Georg Loos was to build it. The approach was blocked by an iron gate of the Westwall, electrically operated and set in concrete stanchions. Nobody could find the key. The gate had to be blown, but to keep the noise from giving the game away that could only happen once the artillery opened at 05:30. Work on the bridge could not start before then. It was 13:00 before it was finished.

The tanks were slow to cross. The switchback road down the east bank was hard going for Panthers. Ten had crossed when the next took the last bend too short, hit the side of the bridge and crashed into the river. The rest of the crew got out. The driver did not. Repairs took two more hours, and it was late afternoon before the column moved again.

The 28th Infantry Division day of my Battle of the Bulge tours starts at this crossing.

Three German shell strikes are still visible on this Sherman. One grazed the turret. Another struck above the gun mount....
03/09/2026

Three German shell strikes are still visible on this Sherman. One grazed the turret. Another struck above the gun mount. The third entered between the turret and hull and wrecked the gun.

The tank, an M4A3 with a 76mm gun, belonged to Company B, 2nd Tank Battalion, 9th Armored Division. It reached Clervaux on 17 December 1944 and took position beside the castle gate, firing at the advancing 2nd Panzer Division.

A shell glanced off the tank around midday and the crew abandoned it. Its gun was still working that evening, when three American tankers tried unsuccessfully to recover it. The fatal hit came the following morning.

Inside the castle, about fifty Americans under Captains Clark Mackey and John Aiken fought on until 18 December. With the castle burning and their ammunition almost gone, they destroyed their radio equipment and surrendered.

The Sherman remained where it had been knocked out until 1956. After restoration, it returned to Clervaux in 2024 and now stands below the castle.

We visited it today on a battlefield tour with a client from America.

On 28 May 1940, around eighty British and French prisoners of war were murdered on this spot. The cowshed in the photo i...
02/09/2026

On 28 May 1940, around eighty British and French prisoners of war were murdered on this spot. The cowshed in the photo is a reconstruction. The original was pulled down in the early 1960s. I visited La Plaine au Bois, near Wormhout, today.

The 2nd Royal Warwicks, men of the 4th Cheshires and gunners from 210 Battery, 53rd Anti-Tank Regiment, fought here on the southern edge of the Dunkirk perimeter. When their ammunition ran out, they surrendered to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hi**er.

Around a hundred prisoners, some wounded, were marched to this field. The SS removed their identity discs and possessions before packing them into the cowshed. Stick grenades were thrown inside. Company Sergeant Major Augustus Jennings and Sergeant Stanley Moore threw themselves onto them to protect the men behind them.

The SS then ordered prisoners outside in groups of five and shot them. Finally, they opened fire through the sides of the shed.

Captain James Lynn-Allen escaped and dragged the wounded Private Bert Evans to a nearby pond. An SS man followed and shot them both. Lynn-Allen died, but Evans played dead in the water. He later crawled to a farm and was taken to hospital by regular German soldiers. His arm was amputated. He returned to Britain in a prisoner exchange in 1943.

Fourteen men survived. Wilhelm Mohnke, who took command of the SS battalion that day, was suspected of ordering the murders but was never prosecuted. He ended the war as an SS-Brigadeführer in Hi**er’s Berlin bunker and died in 2001.
Lynn-Allen’s body was never found. Earth from the drained pond was later used to build the memorial mound behind the reconstructed cowshed.

The launch ramp still points at London. The bearing is 328 degrees. The target is 206 kilometres away.The V1 offensive o...
01/09/2026

The launch ramp still points at London. The bearing is 328 degrees. The target is 206 kilometres away.

The V1 offensive opened on the night of 12 to 13 June 1944, and local records name this ramp and Mont Gournoy as the sites that fired the first V1s in Seine-Maritime. Ten flying bombs were launched that night. Four failed on the ramps. Two crashed into the Channel. Four crossed the English coast, and one hit the railway bridge over Grove Road in Bethnal Green, killing six people. Whether the one fired from here was among the four is not recorded.

This is Site Nr 161, in the forest of Eu at Guerville, one of nineteen launch sites built nearby. Flak-Regiment 155(W), under Oberst Max Wachtel, ran the campaign against England. The site went up in the winter of 1943 to 1944 as a modified site: minimal concrete, wooden huts, netting strung between the trees. Quick to build, quick to repair, hard to find.

Allied aircraft photographed it within weeks and the bombing began in early July. The craters are still in the ground, and the compressor garage carries the damage from a 250kg bomb. In August 1944 the crews abandoned the site and withdrew north.

Visited today on a battlefield tour with three clients from the UK.

The Dieppe raid failed almost everywhere. This is the one place it did not.The Hess battery sat in the woods above Varen...
31/08/2026

The Dieppe raid failed almost everywhere. This is the one place it did not.

The Hess battery sat in the woods above Varengeville-sur-Mer. Six 150mm guns, within range of the main landing beaches at Dieppe.

On 19 August 1942 No. 4 Commando landed either side of it. Major Derek Mills-Roberts at Orange 1, Lord Lovat at Orange 2. A mortar bomb dropped into the gun position and set off the stored cordite. Then the assault went in with the bayonet.

Captain Patrick Porteous was shot through the hand, then the thigh, and kept going. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for that action here. All six guns were destroyed and the commando was off the beach by 08:15.

Here on a battlefield tour today with three friends from the UK.

31/08/2026

Two 24cm naval guns sat in the dunes east of Calais for four years, covering the Strait of Dover.

Two 24cm naval guns sat in the dunes east of Calais for four years, covering the Strait of Dover. They went through all ...
30/08/2026

Two 24cm naval guns sat in the dunes east of Calais for four years, covering the Strait of Dover. They went through all the effort to build these massive bunkers around them but there is no record of them sinking anything. This is one of the bunkers.

Batterie Oldenburg was held by the Kriegsmarine’s 2./Marine-Artillerie-Abteilung 244. The guns were sited to close the Strait to Allied shipping. They threw a shell about 27 kilometres, which reached across the eastern side of the crossing but fell well short of the English coast, so the shelling of Kent was left to the heavier batteries at Todt and Lindemann further west.

Two casemates, 35 metres long and 15 metres high, offset from each other to widen the arc, with quarters, ammunition rooms, ventilation plant and water reserves built in. They are still standing.

Waiting in Calais to collect my group. We start a battlefield tour on the Dieppe raid in the morning.

This was the St Elisabeth Gasthuis, the main hospital of Arnhem and the place the British medical plan for the battle de...
29/08/2026

This was the St Elisabeth Gasthuis, the main hospital of Arnhem and the place the British medical plan for the battle depended on. It stands about a mile from the road bridge, on the route into the city. It is an apartment building now.

The surgical teams of 16 Parachute Field Ambulance reached it on the evening of 17 September 1944, behind the 2nd Parachute Battalion, and were given the use of two operating theatres. The Germans took the building the next day. Most of the unit was marched off into captivity. The two surgical teams, one under Major Cedric Longland and one under Captain Alexander Lipmann Kessel, were allowed to stay and keep working, treating British and German wounded alongside the Dutch staff.

Brigadier John Hackett of the 4th Parachute Brigade was carried in on 24 September, hit by mortar fragments at Oosterbeek that morning. A German medical officer examined the abdominal wound and considered the case hopeless: morphine, and leave him. Hackett’s identity was concealed from the Germans while Kessel operated anyway. He removed a splinter about two inches square that had caused twelve perforations and two complete sections of the intestine.

Kessel was later moved to the British POW hospital at Apeldoorn and escaped on 16 October. He then spent months hiding in the occupied Netherlands before finally reaching British lines on 10 February 1945. He was awarded the Military Cross for his work at Arnhem. Hackett lived until 1997.

We stopped here today on an Arnhem battlefield tour with two friends from Ireland.

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