Mundesley's Mines

This blog has been in limbo for the last week when the author was on holiday... During which he and the beautiful Ava Alexis discovered an unusual war memorial in Mundesley... Consisting of a 500kg German Bomb embedded in a Concrete Base...

...the unusual design is due to the fact that it's not mainly actually a memorial to people who died during the war but to the 27 Royal Engineers who died between 1944 and 1953 clearing the mines that the British government had laid around the Norfolk Coast to prevent the Nazis from landing.  Quite a topical issue with Iran threatening to mine the Straights of Hormuz.  It's easy to lay mines but much harder to clear them...

A similar memorial exists in Kent.

Denmark never managed to clear all it's mines.  

And the Allies resorted to using forced German POW Labour to clear minefields after WWII in violation of the Geneva Convention 1929 Article 32. Apparently there is even a film about this:  Land of Mine (Danish: Under Sandet 'Under the Sand') written and directed by Martin Zandvliet...  149 lost their lives.  And those were just the prisoners used to clear mines in Denmark... Not the ones also used in France.

I was watching a daytime documentary on Yesterday a year or so ago about the bombs that are regularly turned up on WWI battlefields even today.  Weary farmers treated them and the bones and bits of tanks as just mundane.  Officials from the government were supposed to come and collect them regularly but it took a long time so they'd stack them away in the back of sheds.  Shells that were live and even gas shells.  An official tried to reinforce how dangerous these things were and they should not be moved but the farmers who needed to move them to plough the fields so couldn't just leave them in situ sighed wearily... tired of the patronising bureaucracy that can never solve their problem..... And in many ways they are the lucky ones.  There are still uninhabitable areas of France  where the ordinance could not be cleared so they remain fenced off...

At the going down of the sun MAGA has forgotten them....

On a lighter note, nearby is the thema bone of a Mammoth...