Tree felling work uncovers WW2 underground bunker near Moffat | Hacker News Reader

Tree felling work uncovers WW2 underground bunker near Moffat

bbc.com

103 pointstintinnabula26 comments

The specially-trained teams were often made up of local estate workers who knew the land in the area "like the back of their hand".

It was so heavily dependent on local knowledge that it was only found because someone who used to play in it as a kid went looking for it.

That's how you keep a secret.

Near the town of Moffat, in Scotland, not Moffat Federal Airfield (Naval Air Station) in Sunnyvale, CA.

That's what I was thinking originally, but knowing that area, who would have missed that?

That's Moffett Airfield.

Moffat vs Moffett

Also not near Moffat, Steven, the person famous for being showrunner behind BBC TV series Sherlock and Dracula and few seasons of Doctor Who, who was born in about 85 kms from that forest.

There's a map in the article which kinda makes this clear.

I wonder if these locations are recorded in WW2 era classified documents that have never been released. Someone at some point must have known where they were, in order to assign personnel.

They may have not kept records specifically because it was meant for a potential resistance movement. If there were records, then the Nazis could just read them after an invasion.

Yeah presumably this is something that is best used and highly localized as far as knowledge goes. No records, just some trusted locals who would use it... beyond that as few people as possible would know about it.

Some of these units operated in a cell-based system (similar to Al Qeada), so there wouldn't be any offical records.

The rock of.Gibraltar had a secret Stay Behind cave for Hitler's invasion.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/06/operation-tracer-secre...

It was not found until recently. They also found one of secret operatives alive (doctor).

https://www.google.fi/amp/s/www.warhistoryonline.com/world-w...

The way you put it makes it sound like he was still inside.

When they opened the door, they found Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos hiding from Coronavirus.

They wouldn't hide in a tube in the Scottish fortress, they'd go for something like https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/doomsday-luxury-bunker... or https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...

Apparently they are hiding out in New Zealand right now in their luxury doomsday coward bunkers.

I spent February driving around Scotland taking pictures of a bunch of castle ruins. It's great fun to walk around a pile of aging stones and wonder what the heck used to go on in there.

My favourite example of "what the heck happened here" being vitrified forts - someone had gone to the bother of melting the walls of fairly substantial fortresses - nobody has a clue whether this was intentional or accidental:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort

There are some short documentary on the Auxiliary Units on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgCamfiEqkc , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jedeTE-MUXo

Something like this would be so fascinating to delicately and tediously catalogue and study.

It's mostly empty except for some splinters of wood possibly from an old cot.

Is it though? I mean we know everything there is to know about the war and even if we discovered something new it's unlikely to be of any practical value. There were bunkers all over Europe.

Yeah this is a fair point, it looks like a generic bunker with the (same limited) equipment long ago pillaged by the local people who knew about it. Not much value IMO, outside of maybe knowing the full scale of the deployment.

Once one or two of them are museums and the known survivors were documented, there's not much archeological or historical value in hunting them all down.

How is that image created?

Photogrammetry. From multiple photos, 3d information is derived. Try it yourself with Meshroom (open source).

Reminds me of how Hitler killed himself in a bunker, basically in downtown Berlin... which is now a grass/gravel parking lot that, despite Germany’s desire to never forget WWII, is almost entirely forgotten (primarily for fear of worshipers overrunning the place).

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