Fortress of Mimoyecques

About

The fortress of Mimoyecques is a bunker of the Second World War located to the west of the hamlet of Moyecques, on the territory of the commune of Landrethun-le-Nord in the French department of Pas-de-Calais. With the code names Wiese (" prairie") and Bauvorhaben 711 ("construction project 711"), it was built by Nazi Germany between 1943 and 1944 to house a battery of V3 guns targeting London. The installation consists of a network of tunnels dug under a chalky hill connecting five oblique wells, each to accommodate five V3 guns.

Oriented towards London, the guns would have been able to fire nearly 600 shells per hour on the British capital, which, according to Winston Churchill, would have been "the most devastating attack." The Allies were unaware of the V3 gun but assumed that the Mimoyecques fortress was a V2 missile launch base. Beginning in the fall of 1943, the site was heavily bombed several times and construction was abandoned a few weeks before the arrival of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division on September 5, 1944. The complex is partially destroyed after...