Battlefields 05 - Blockhaus d'Eperlecques

The bunker was never completed as a result of the repeated bombings by the British and United States air forces as part of Operation Crossbow against the German V-weapons programme. The attacks caused substantial damage and rendered the bunker unusable for its original purpose.

Part of the bunker was subsequently completed for use as a liquid oxygen factory. It was captured by Allied forces in early September 1944, though its true purpose was not discovered by the Allies until after the war. V-2s were, instead, launched from mobile batteries which were far less vulnerable to aerial attacks.

Today, the bunker is preserved as part of a privately owned museum that presents the history of the site and the German V-weapons programme. It has been protected by the French state as a "monument historique" since 1986.

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The A-4 ballistic missile (referred to as the V-2 from September 1944) was developed by the Germans between 1939 and 1944. It was regarded by Adolf Hitler as a Wunderwaffe (wonder weapon) that he believed to be capable of turning the tide of the war. Its operational deployment was restricted by several factors. Large supplies of cryogenic liquid oxygen (LOX) were required as the oxidizer to fuel the missiles. LOX evaporates rapidly, necessitating a source reasonably close to the firing site in order to minimise loss through evaporation.Germany and the occupied countries did not at that time have sufficient manufacturing capacity for the amount of LOX required for a full-scale A-4 campaign the total production capacity in 1941 and 1942 was about 215 tons daily, but each A-4 launch required about 15 tons.As the missile was intended for use against London and southern England, its operational range of 320 kilometres (200 miles) meant that the launch sites had to be located fairly close to the English Channel or southern North Sea coasts, in northern France, Belgium or the western Netherlands.This was within easy reach of the Allied air forces, so any site would have to be able to resist or evade the expected aerial bombardments.Various concepts were mooted for the A-4's deployment in a March 1942 study by Walter Dornberger, the head of the A-4 development project at the Peenemünde Army Research Center. He suggested that the missiles should be based in heavily defended fixed sites of a bunker-style design similar to the massive submarine pens then under construction in occupied France and Norway.The rockets could be stored in such sites, be armed, fuelled from an on-site LOX production plant, and launched. This offered significant technical advantages not only would the LOX loss be minimised, but the complex process of pre-launch testing would be simplified.A high rate of fire could be sustained as the facility could effectively operate like a production line, sending a steady flow of missiles to the launch pads.

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