Qualla: Blockhaus d'Éperlecques

Blockhaus d'Éperlecques: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 7th Photographic Reconnaisance Group USAAF, Public domain. The German engineer Werner Flos had an idea. To protect the bunker from Allied bombing, build it from the roof down. Cast the concrete slab flat on the ground first, five metres thick, weighing 37,000 tons, then jack it slowly upward and grow the walls underneath. By the time the British arrived, the roof would already be in place, and the building would be invulnerable. Flos was wrong about one thing only. He did not know that 200 kilometres away, Barnes Wallis was designing a bomb that could shake the earth.

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Image: 7th Photographic Reconnaisance Group USAAF | Public domain

Blockhaus d'Éperlecques: Wonder Weapon, Real Problem

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prioryman, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1942, Adolf Hitler had decided that the A-4 ballistic missile, later renamed the V-2, was the Wunderwaffe that would turn the war. There was a chemistry problem. The rocket burned alcohol with liquid oxygen, and the oxygen evaporated so quickly that it had to be made close to ...

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Image: Prioryman | CC BY-SA 4.0

Blockhaus d'Éperlecques: Thirty-Five Thousand Men in Twelve-Hour Shifts

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prioryman, CC BY-SA 4.0. Eperlecques would need 200,000 tons of concrete and 20,000 tons of steel. To put up that much in a few months, Organisation Todt drove its workforce in twelve-hour shifts of 3,000 to 4,000 men at a time, around the clock, seven days a week, lit at night by giant floodlights. The ...

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Image: Prioryman | CC BY-SA 4.0

Blockhaus d'Éperlecques: The Bombers and the Tallboy

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. In April 1943 an Allied agent reported enormous trenches being excavated in the forest. On 16 May 1943 an RAF reconnaissance flight photographed something the photographic interpreters could not identify. Lord Cherwell, Churchill's scientific adviser, admitted he had little idea ...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Blockhaus d'Éperlecques: A Disney Bomb and an Atomic Scientist

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Morgan, W.C. (Maj.), Public domain. Even after capture, no one was sure what Eperlecques had been for. The French atomic scientist Frederic Joliot-Curie inspected the bunker on 10 September 1944. The British engineer Sanders, peering at the large aluminium tanks that remained, guessed wrong: he decided it had been ...

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Image: Morgan, W.C. (Maj.) | Public domain

Blockhaus d'Éperlecques: The Forest That Grew Back

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alertomalibu, CC BY 2.5. After the war, the bunker reverted to private ownership. Pumps had stopped, the great cavernous basement had flooded, and the building was left to bats and damp. In 1973 the owners opened it to the public as Le Blockhaus d'Eperlecques. The site was declared a monument historique ...

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Image: Alertomalibu | CC BY 2.5