Part of the M3 corridor

[night crawler]

Senn you have taken this serious. some great photos but the one of the cows is Brilliant.

 

[flyboys90]

Superb report looks like you had a great trip.

 

[Munchh]

Rurex is so much more hardcore than urbex.

Lol, pun intended?

blimey you wouldn't be popular with your comrades when you opened up with the gun so close to the centre of the box it would be even more deafening than firing out of an embrasure, and in S0010905 it looks like it would be almost useless in practice in any case because of the mound of earth behind the entrance.

I was’ keeping it brief’ in my previous reply but it may be helpful to expand a little regarding the ‘T’ table.

In the case of the Vickers table, by 'fixed line' I mean set up to lay down fire on a specific target area in rear of the PB on a Mk4 tripod mounting. The gun is ‘locked off’ both in traverse and elevation, and becomes the WW2 equivalent of a modern automated 'Sentry gun'. The gunner merely pulls the trigger in this scenario. It’s also possible to provide limited sideways movement of the gun by use of the traverse stops. Changes to gun alignment were made by the MG Officer not the crew. This is what prevented accidental fire within the PB. The 'strap' is part of the Auxiliary tripod mounting and was used to secure said mounting during transport Senn.

Line of fire for the Vickers would have been cleared by the engineers. The earth banking may not have been there in 1940/41. If it became necessary for the Vickers to open fire on the rear, the LMG gunners would not necessarily still be inside the PB if present at all.

The original stoplines were not designed/intended to fire in earnest to the rear of the line. They were exactly as described, 'Stop lines'. Rearward fire provision was built into some stopline PB's when the change to the 'Anti tank Island' defence strategy occurred, with additional new PB's being 'purpose built' to complete the ATI's where required. I suggest that these two boxes could fall into one of these categories although I’m not familiar with the area. The capn will better know whether ATI defence strategy was employed here or not.

This section of the original engineers map, provided by krela, of the ATI at Chard, Somerset illustrates how the ATI was built up around the existing Taunton stopline to the east. The TSL defences are shown in green with the later ATI defences in red. This is just to demonstrate the principle of the re use of a stopline. A number of other interesting features are present on the TSL/ATI’s and are covered in my numerous threads on here should anyone wish to look more closely at this defence strategy.