Kev n Jo's Blog: Drive FR: Nord-Pas-de-Calais (Pt. 3)

This is easily one of the best TV series we have ever watched. And we finished Season 2 at the farmhouse. It seemed apt to be there at the Somme, watching Matthew Crawley down in the muddy trenches at his version of the Somme in 1914.

And then we visited La Coupole.

It was one thing watching an actor on TV, albeit a good one. It was quite different looking at actual photos of what happened here during WWI. Real soldiers, real bodies - someone's father, brother, husband.

La Coupole today is a historic and remembrance centre. It houses hundreds of audio visual documentaries on the occupation of North France by the Germans during WW2, and battlefield photos from WW1.

But in 1943 when it was built by the Nazis, it was a giant underground bunker to launch V-2 rockets.

Walking through the cold underground bunker to get to the dome, the main exhibition centre.

Sketches by a prisoner at Camp Dora, a Nazi concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany. In 18 months, 60,000 prisoners from 21 nations passed through Dora. One third of them did not survive.

As we discovered at Eperlecques, V-2 rockets were part of an evil plan.

Blockhaus d'Eperlecques open-air museum, just outside of Saint Omer.

It had a lovely peaceful setting in the middle of a forest.

But nestled amongst the greenery were very vivid reminders of war. This carriage was used to transport prisoners to concentration camps.

Metal footprints on the floor of the carriage show how many persons were packed into that small space.

Holes in the ground caused by bombs.

Bombs dropped by Allied forces.

We actually didn't know what to expect from this site until we emerged from the trees and saw this monstrous structure.

This is the Bunker of Eperlecques, built by the Nazis to launch V-2 ballistic missiles. It had the capacity to house over 100 missiles and could launch up to 36 daily.

You get an idea of the size by looking at the man on the left hand corner of the photo.

The V-2 was the first known man-made object to enter outer space, and is the progenitor of all modern rockets.

But back in WWII when it was developed by the Germans, its target was very much on earth: London and the south of England.

The good news is that the Eperlecques bunker was never completed due to repeated air strikes by the British and the Americans. They had no idea about the true purpose of the giant structure until after the war. They just thought it was a target worth destroying since the Germans went to such trouble to build it.