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The Fortress of Mimoyecques is the modern name for a Second World War underground military complex built by the forces of Nazi Germany between 1943 and 1944. It was intended to house a battery of V-3 cannons aimed at London, away. Originally codenamed ''Wiese'' ("Meadow") or ''Bauvorhaben 711'' ("Construction Project 711"),〔 it is located in the commune of Landrethun-le-Nord in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, near the hamlet of Mimoyecques about from Boulogne-sur-Mer. It was constructed by a mostly German workforce recruited from major engineering and mining concerns, augmented by prisoner-of-war slave labour. The complex consists of a network of tunnels dug under a chalk hill, linked to five inclined shafts in which 25 V-3 guns would have been installed, all targeted on London. The guns would have been able to fire ten dart-like explosive projectiles a minute – 600 rounds every hour – into the British capital, which Winston Churchill later commented would have constituted "the most devastating attack of all".〔 The Allies knew nothing about the V-3 but identified the site as a possible launching base for V-2 ballistic missiles, based on reconnaissance photographs and fragmentary intelligence from French sources. Mimoyecques was targeted for intensive bombardment by the Allied air forces from late 1943 onwards. Construction work was seriously disrupted, forcing the Germans to abandon work on part of the complex. The rest was partly destroyed on 6 July 1944 by No. 617 Squadron RAF, which used ground-penetrating "Tallboy" earthquake bombs to collapse tunnels and shafts, entombing hundreds of slave workers underground. The Germans halted construction work at Mimoyecques as the Allies advanced up the coast following the Normandy landings. It fell to the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division on 5 September 1944 without resistance, a few days after the Germans withdrew from the area.〔 The complex was partly demolished just after the war on Churchill's direct orders (and to the great annoyance of the French, who were not consulted), as it was still seen as a threat to the United Kingdom. It was later reopened by private owners, first in 1969 to serve as a mushroom farm and subsequently as a museum in 1984. A nature conservation organisation acquired the Fortress of Mimoyecques in 2010 and La Coupole, a former V-2 rocket base turned museum near Saint-Omer, took over its management. It continues to be open to the public as a vast underground museum complex.〔 ==Background== In May 1943 Albert Speer, the Reich's Minister of Armaments and War Production, informed Adolf Hitler of work that was being carried out to produce a supergun capable of firing hundreds of shells an hour over long distances. The newly designed gun, codenamed the ''Hochdruckpumpe'' ("High Pressure Pump", HDP for short) and later designated as the V-3, was one of the V-weapons – ''Vergeltungswaffen'' ("retaliation weapons") – developed by Nazi Germany in the later stages of the war to attack Allied targets. Long-range guns were not a new development, but the high-pressure detonations used to fire shells from previous such weapons, including the Paris gun, rapidly wore out their barrels. In 1942, August Coenders, inspired by previous designs of multi-chamber guns, suggested that the gradual acceleration of the shell by a series of small charges spread over the length of the barrel might be the solution to the problem of designing very long-range guns. Coenders proposed the use of electrically activated charges to eliminate the problem of the premature ignition of the subsidiary charges experienced by previous multi-chamber guns. The HDP would have a smooth barrel over long, along which a finned shell (known as the ''Sprenggranate 4481'') would be accelerated by numerous small low-pressure detonations from charges in branches off the barrel, each fired electrically in sequence.〔.〕 Each barrel would be in diameter.〔 The gun was still in its prototype stages, but Hitler was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea and ordered that maximum support be given to its development and deployment. In August 1943 he approved the construction of a battery of HDP guns in France to supplement the planned V-1 and V-2 missile campaigns against London and the south-east of England.〔.〕 Speer noted afterwards: To reach England, the weapon needed barrels long, so it could not be moved; it would have to be deployed from a fixed site.〔.〕 A study carried out in early 1943 had shown that the optimal location for its deployment would be within a hill with a rock core into which inclined drifts could be tunneled to support the barrels.〔.〕 The site was identified by a fortification expert, Major Bock of the ''Festungs-Pionier-Stab 27''〔Literal translation "Fortress Pioneer Staff"〕 of the Fifteenth Army LVII Corps based in the Dieppe area.〔.〕 A limestone hill near the hamlet of Mimoyecques, high and from London, was chosen to house the gun. It had been selected with care; the hill in which the facility was built is primarily chalk with very little topsoil cover, and the chalk layer extends several hundred metres below the surface, providing a deep but easily tunnelled rock layer. The chalk is easy to excavate and strong enough to dig tunnels without using timber supports. Although the site's road links were poor, it was only a few kilometres west of the main railway line between Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer.〔.〕 The area was already heavily militarised; as well as the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall on the cliffs of Cap Gris Nez to the northwest, there was a firing base for at least one〔 conventional Krupp K5 railway gun about to the south in the nearby quarries of Hidrequent-Rinxent.〔.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fortress of Mimoyecques」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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