Friday, May 27, 2011

The Maginot Line – Fort Schoenenbourg

Left Lorraine for Alsace – drove through beautiful countryside, very neat and orderly. Lots of little villages – when they’re just a collection of houses, they don’t look much but add a spire or a tower (usually a church) and the scene is transformed into something really picturesque and special. Rather like towers on houses in Italy. Went through a little place called Hunspach, signposted as one of the prettiest villages in France. Deservedly so but definitely not the place to leave your lawns for one more week before mowing them! The style of the buildings has changed – very Germanic looking with half timbers and geraniums.





We were heading for Fort Schoenenbourg, one of the 2,000 fortresses on the Maginot Line. Apparently it was the most heavily bombarded structure on the line. In spite of the incessant attack, the fort maintained its defence capability. Its guns fired more than 17,000 shells in retaliation. They were never conquered and the crew at Schoenenbourg only laid down their weapons on the formal order of the French High Command, six days after the Armistice took effect.


You go 30 metres underground and walk around a 2.8km circuit – you see all the weaponry (some very big guns there), where the 650 men were fed and slept, the infirmary, electrical power plant and the command post – it’s really a subterranean city, they had the means to survive with no contact with the outside world for three months. When you think about it, huge parts of Europe must have such underground systems. As you drive away, you see lots of evidence of former installations, now overgrown in local fields.





It had rained on and off for most of the day but when we were heading for Heidelberg in the late afternoon, it just poured. Not particularly comfortable when you’re on the autobahn, there’s no speed limit and powerful Mercs and BMWs are speeding all around you. Thankfully Andrew was driving!

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