How safe is your pillbox?

Went for a walk down the gare today.

I've been promising Zigs that I'd get a picture of the pillbox down there for ages now, but never got round to it. This one isn't the one I want to photo, which is on the other beach, but its quite good. It would have been on top of the 'cliff' (I can't call it a cliff, its only a few feet hight), but through coastal erosion has fallen down.





The sun decided to set while we were out. Thought I might try to catch it happening. My camera is my phone, so needless to say it doesn't have any clever filters. The great monolith just on the north (far) side of the estuary is a nuclear power station.





The person with the funny shaped head in this pic is actually my missus. She doesn't really have a funny shaped head, well not that funny, she's wearing her wooly hat.

 

Blimey. You said your Mrs had a funny shaped head, didn't know that was down to the nuclear power station though

Great pics

Especially the last one.

 

the hat profile shape looks a bit like the nuclear station shape (since you pointed that out , clueless1).

 

I love pictures of old pill boxes . I imagine that one was to stop the battle hardened 5th Panzer armoured division rolling over Redcar beach , don't panic Mr Mainwaring !

 

According to the local archives, which I must admit I read a lot of with interest when I was a bit younger, that particular one was part of the coastal defences, which are in quite high concentration in that little area because of all the industry around the Tees. Just a few yards further along from where that one would have stood before it fell down, there is a mound that used to accommodate a massive great gun. There are at least 3 other pillboxes along our stretch of coast between Redcar and the gare (4 miles in all). I don't know how many there are on the other side of the river. There were big guns, installed all along the same stretch, I think two were of the calibre meant for sinking ships, and several more anti aircraft guns. All the guns have long gone, but some of the mounds they stood on are still there. Rather amusingly, the local steel and chemical works bought the air raid sirens after the war, and they are still regularly used. Every Tuesday at 10 AM for an alarm test, once a month for the 'drill', plus whenever anything worrying happens, the whole of Teesside enjoys the sounds of WW2 air raid sirens kicking off.

There is a local legend that I haven't been able to confirm (I've read a tiny fraction of the massive room full of local archives). It is that no less than the Bismark came to have a pop at our steel and ship building works, but the coastal defence guns, although incapable of sinking it, caused enough 'stress' for the Bismark that it was forced to leg it up the coast, past Hartlepool, before heading for the relative safety of deeper water away from the coast. Like I said, I've not been able to confirm it, but I like the story.

 

When I was on holiday in Jersey , I viewed the old German coastal defences . These were part of Hitlers Atlantic Wall . Huge pill boxes were dotted along the coastline , there was also an underground hospital . All this was built with eastern European slave labour.