As a little girl I loved Indiana Jones, not Harrison Ford, no, Indy. I dreamed about one day exploring ancient temples just like him.
Now, as an adult, many say I am a real life Indiana Jones. I'm an archaeologist with a masters degree in Cultural...
For this story, I'd like to take you all to something known as the Atlantic wall. This was the coastal defence build during World War II, by Nazi Germany roughly between 1942 and 1944, along the coast of continental Europe and Scandinavia to defend their territory from invasions.
At first, the plan was to build an enormous concrete wall from the coastline of Denmark all the way down to the Northern coastline of France, but seeing how such a gigantic wall, meandering the coastlines of Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France proved to be next to impossible, they came up with a new plan.
Organisation Todt was instructed to undertake the building of 200-250 strong points on the Channel Islands, and with the Regelbau system, they build over 600 types of bunkers with casemate and trenches, each having a specific purpose of keeping the enemies out and their citizens in. There is much more I could explain about the Atlantic Wall, but to make a long story short, the majority of those bunkers and casemates were abandoned after the end of World War II and left scattered across Europe's coastline.
At the time of this story, two other archaeologists and I were researching the Atlantic wall as part of an international effort to get all this forgotten Heritage on the map (literally) and raise awareness for this often overlooked part of the World War II.
We first researched maps of the Atlantic wall, comparing them with satellite pictures to see what we could still find, and what was completely overtaken by mother nature. This part of the research might sound very dull, but it was quite exhilarating to train your eyes to spot these kinds of things. For instance, a trench will always overgrow after it's abandoned for a couple of years, but the zigzag patron can remain visible in the landscape even decades after it was used. As soon in this picture.
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This picture doesn't show any bunkers, but if you look closely you can see zigzag lines on the right side of the picture; those are trenches. You can also spot trenches in the left corner, with a casemate around it (the darker lines with triangle cutouts in them)
It's the same for a bunker. These concrete armoured constructions were more often than not built in a camouflaged way. The enemy wasn't supposed to see them, not even from the air, but if you train your eyes, you can spot the distinct shape in a satellite picture.
But spotting these constructions on pictures is one thing; finding them in real life is something else. Because that was the second part of our research, searching for everything we had spotted in the pictures and taking its measurements and coordinates to create one giant map of all the fortifications from the Atlantic wall.
This meant we had to go out into the dunes, in the middle of winter, for months to roam around and try to find the fortifications with GPS and our eyes as our only tools. Now, for those who have never experienced a winter in the Netherlands or Belgium before; we don't really have snow, not much at least, but the wind is like ice and will chill you to the bone, regardless of the amount of clothes you wear.
