Balconies: Le Blockhaus

After we left Le Touquet, we had time to spare.  So we went to visit "Le Blockhaus d'Eperlecques" (that is the French - we would say the Bunker) near St Omer.

This was built in WWII to be a V2 rocket launching installation, with comprehensive rail and road communications.  The site is now an historic monument, with AV presentations and displays.  You walk through a forest, finding out about the history of the site, until you are suddenly faced with the brutal shape and mass of the Bunker itself.

Operation Crossbow targeted the Bunker, and it was never completed.  The wreckage of the raid is still there.

There is a lot of information about the site, and about the awful conditions of the prisoners - the thousands of slave labourers - who were forced to build the Bunker, and the many who died as a result.

To try and put the site into context, they have also brought in other equipment from the Second World War.

I got the impression it was used as a liquid fuel factory after the raid, but because of the attack, the rockets were never actually launched from the site.

If the horrid, brutal military architecture echoes the Ayn Randian skyscrapers I referenced briefly in my original Balconies post, this is far from being the only connection. 

You can wander inside the huge, ruined Bunker (and watch yet another AV presentation);  there are big, damp empty concrete spaces like these:

But just inside the main entrance you come across this:

- which is when it really hit home to me that this horrid, brutal place of suffering and slavery was also part of the story of space travel that I've been looking at so romantically over the last few weeks. 

OK, so this isn't a real rocket, it is a huge (20 foot high?), well-painted, flat panel lit to look like a V2 sitting at the end of the corridor.  But it does its job. 

The classic streamlined rocket shape, with its pointed nose and stabilising fins, is exactly the same as that of Gargarin's launcher, and of all subsequent roamantic rocketeering pictures. 

The story of the building of these weapons - and particularly the V2 - is an inescapable part of the story of the development of space flight.  There is a V2 in the Space gallery of the Science Museum in London, as well as (if I remember correctly?) a diorama showing the earlier research carried out a Peenemunde.  It may even have been made by Mat Irvine, I don't know. 

And that was one of my favourite museum galleries to visit when I was a young teenager in London.  It captures the story of space travel as a historical narrative, leading up to Apollo (or it did then).   Richly engaging, I'd thought - not really thinking about the weaponry. 

Le Blockhaus really brought home the relationship.  The romance of space flight was and remains - at least in part - a product of brutal wartime weapons-making. 

On the way to France, we'd had a Tom Lehrer record on CD in the car, including "Werner von Braun" -

Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun

Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun

Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun

A song I've known and admired for years.   But the Bunker really drove the point home, in a way the satire just couldn't.

And yet, and yet, I can't quite leave it at that. 

Because I still get a kick out of looking up at the night sky, and humbly identifying those tiny, wavering points of light. 

They remain.