The Maginot Line

This weekend we decided to learn a little more about WWII and so we traveled an hour and a quarter south/west into France to take a tour of a fortress on the Marginot Line.

We took a German tour and the guide spoke Alsatian - which means he spoke a dialect of German but not high German. So I had a really hard time following him. We were given a nice english translation of the tour, so, here's the first page of it so you can learn a little bit about where we were:



Waiting to start the tour:



An American tank is hanging out near the parking lot. Not sure why.



The fortress was enormous. There were several hallways that were almost a half kilometer long.



This tour is long. And it's really cold in the fortress and I was wearing shorts. And I couldn't understand the guide. This sums up how I felt:



But it was pretty neat. Below are the beds where the soldiers slept. They slept 8 hours, worked 8 hours, and had 8 hours of free time. They each shared their bed with 2 other soldiers and they rotated through it every 8 hours - so your bed was always warm. But it also meant you could never relax in your bed or sleep in.



This diagram shows how the cannons were raised and lowered for use. Yep, it's only in French.



There was a huge lever that was used to raise and lower the cannons (left). That's our guide leaning on it. We had serious concerns about his ability to finish the tour without having a heart attack. The tower that was used to raise/lower the cannons weighed 70 tons (right). The counterweight on it weighed 17 tons.



Looking up into where the guys sat to man the cannons. They had to be small to fit in there. And it got so warm they had to be naked. (we assume they were wearing underwear but we have no proof)



Another long hallway - this one was slightly inclined so we had to walk down really tiny steps for 10 minutes straight. It's described below, known as "the incline".



Towards the end of the tour we wandered through a small museum. Here are a few various bits of ammunition. Not sure if any of them actually were used in the cannons or not.