A beach in Northern France, in the Pas De Calais actually, Stella Plage sits just south of Le Touquet and Etaples. It’s a beautiful beach, so I ignored it and took photos of this bunker. I can’t find anything much out about it. Except it’s a Vf style reinforced personnel bunker, obviously German, no gun slits, just an entry point with a protective wall, loads of sand in it and graffiti which seems to be a feature of just about every emplacement I’ve seen on the Atlantikwall/Atlantic Wall.
There are I think five of these between Stella Plage and le Touquet apparently. I built sand bunkers and dug sea moats instead of looking at them, partially under orders of mein mini-Obergruppenführer and I mostly smiled while I did it. We in fact built our own rather unsuccessful Atlantic wall, The sea won as it tends to even with concrete.
Behind it in an immense sand bowl in the dunes are the remains of two buildings, both appear to be concrete, although one involves reasonably contemporary block-work, I’m trying to find out if these are anything to do with this bunker, they’re very close to it, both destroyed, there’s also concrete rubble behind this small blockhouse. You know bored German boys and old men sat about here playing Skat, drinking bad coffee, watching the sea and smoking waiting for it to end thinking ficken das Vaterland in most cases.
I wanted to take a photo of the bunker further back behind the village, a proper artillery one, and the four at Etaples and the single artillery one at Le Touquet, and the entire complex of bunkers and pits at Le Point de Touquet (boy did I want to do that one) but it felt a bit churlish being on holiday dragging impressionable youngsters around hillsides and through Marram grass looking at WW2 stuff, when they could fly a kite or have a lolly or something, so I didn’t. On a holiday on my own (as I’ve proved since I did these), I’d just take photos of chunks of busted period concrete, bits of twisted metal, some historical misery and then drink beer and eat mussels in the evening.
Slicing clouds up with string.
Stella Plage, France