Catching occasional glimpses of a famous merchant vessel used to guide the way for ships during the D Day landings, I meandered around the tracks and back roads of Skewen before finally ending up on the waters edge alongside the River Neath. Perched in the mud was LV72 – Juno. Built in 1903 by John Crown and Sons in Sunderland this lightship is now ‘rusting and resting’, embedded in the sticky estuary mud and, to be honest, is a sad sight. Having been a lightship for Trinity House she was moored off the Normandy coast on 18th June 1944 and was used to mark the edges of minefields and give safe passage – remaining on station until 27th January 1945. In the spring of 1973 she was sold and after plans for a nightclub conversion failed, she now sits on the bank slowing eroding back into her surroundings.
Tag Archives: WWii
The Iron Harvest
I had heard about the ‘Iron Harvest’ before visiting the WW1 battle fields but have been shocked at the sheer volume of shells casings and shrapnel fragments all over the landscape. The urge to walk into a field and look for “rusty bits” like lumps of iron shell casing, shrapnel balls or bits of equipment is hard to resist. Although the fighting in the northern front stopped over 90 years ago, there is still a large quantity of WW1 ammunition, artefacts and explosives in the Salient. During World War I an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front and as many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In Ypres an estimated 300 million of the 1.4 billion projectiles that the British and the Germans forces fired at each other during World War One failed to explode and most of them have not been recovered. Today I was advised that in 2013 alone 160 tonnes of munitions were unearthed from the areas around Ypres.
WWII on my doorstep
Disregarding the driving rain, I could not help but notice on my way into work this week that the felling of some mature larch trees had exposed hidden WWII bunkers, pill boxes, trench complexes and anti tank defences near Brecon. Despite the damp and resident amphibious inhabitants they are well worth a visit. Seemingly date stamped 26/8/1940 by the engineers they were built for the Home Guard who manned them round the clock and the combination of anti tank defences and pill boxes were designed to prevent northward movement of any invasion forces – though the Home Guard Officers were issued with weapons they had no communication equipment, so if they spotted an invading force it would have been a long march to the nearest Army Camp to call for reinforcements!
