Saturday 29 April 2017

The Battery Moltke Flak Triangle

Near the end of the track to Batterie Moltke at Les Landes, lies a trio of Flak gun bunkers - forming the triangle of positions on the right side of this Google Maps shot. All three are similarly aligned, but not quite exactly.

Plan of the 3.7cm Flak 37 bunkers - steps each side lead down to a crew room.
The first one to visit (most easily found via the 'beaten track') has a view of St.Ouen's Bay...
.. looking back. Nice and clean, because so many people have a wander about.
The north steps are filled in...
.. but the south steps look promising after we'd cleared away some greenery...
.. going down...
.. ah. Who wants to crawl over this? My nimble assistant volunteered...


.. and turned right to find the crew room fairly clean of graffiti or trash - just a bit of rubble.
Looking back.
The north end...
.. and the rubble filling in those steps. A human chain could probably clear most of this in a couple of hours :)
And so, another crawl back to daylight.

Looking east from this first bunker, a grassy mound from where rifle enthusiasts shoot at...

.. targets 1000 yards away over the model aircraft site and a ringstand ("Tobruk") bunker. I'd be lucky to hit the target at all, let alone a bull's eye!


The second position is just off the north side of the road, a few more weeds to battle through to get here. No-one seems to wander around in this one, so it's getting slowly covered over by nature. Both sets of steps are well filled in.
The third bunker is just west of another grassy patch which is the 900 yards part of the shooting range. Mostly surrounded by gorse, you can reach this one from the model planes runway direction (just left of center in this shot). The two short walls giving a zig-zag access are free standing, not tied into the rest of the structure, and some of them are leaning a little. I speculate that they were built after the guns were put in place, sealing them in somewhat?

This one might be crawl-able too, but, you know, seen one and you've seen 'em all ;)
It was at this point that I finally noticed the groove in the gun mounting.








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4 comments:

Unknown said...

Excellent work as always, Cheers Phil JWT

crapaudmatic said...

Thank you Phil, much appreciated.

Toerag said...

Your zigzag wall theory is correct. The 88 positions at Batt. Dolmen in Gsy have the walls missing but show fixing steel where they should be.

crapaudmatic said...

Thanks Toerag, good to hear that. Cheers!