📌 WWII Demolition Prepared Bridge, Claypit Bridge, Lavenham [TL 917 496]

Now a popular walk between Lavenham and Long Meford, the former Greater Eastern Railway section of line known as the Long Melford-Bury St Edmunds branch line, was used during World War Two as an Anti-Tank Obstacle. The high embankments and the basin width made it a perfect Anti-Tank Ditch. The bridges would have been prepared for demolition, and would have been detonated with explosives, destroying the crossing and hindering any enemy advances. There are usually signs of brickwork being disturbed to places the explosives at the lower part of the bridge. These were repaired Post War, but identifying them isn't always easy.

 

Bridges, Railway Bridges and other key points were prepared for ''demolition'' at short notice by preparing chambers filled with explosives, a Depth Charge Crater was a sited in a road (usually at a junction) prepared with buried explosives that could be detonated to instantly form a deep crater as an Anti-Tank Obstacle. The Canadian Pipe Mine (later known as the McNaughton Tube after General Andrew McNaughton) was a horizontally bored pipe packed with explosives, once in place this could be used to instantly ruin a road or runway. Prepared demolitions had the advantage of being undetectable from the air, the enemy could not take any precautions against them, or plot a route of attack around them.

 

Crossing points in the Defence Network, bridges, tunnels and other weak spots were called 'Nodes or Points of Resistance'. These were fortified with removable Road Blocks, Barbed Wire Entanglements and Land Mines. These passive defences were overlooked by Trench Works, Gun and Mortar Emplacements, and Pillboxes. In places, entire villages were fortified using Barriers of Admiralty Scaffolding, Sandbagged Positions and Loopholes in existing buildings.

 

Nodes were designated 'A', 'B' or 'C' depending upon how long they were expected to hold out, Home Guard Troops were largely responsible for the defence of Nodal Points and other centres of resistance, such as towns and defended villages. Category 'A' Nodal Points and Anti-Tank Islands were usually garrisoned by regular Troops. The rate of construction was frenetic, by the end of September 1940, 18,000 Pillboxes and numerous other preparations had been completed. Some existing defences such as Mediaeval Castles and Napoleonic Forts were augmented with modern additions such as Dragon's Teeth and Pillboxes, some Iron Age Forts housed Anti-Aircraft and Observer Positions. About 28,000 Pillboxes and other Hardened Field Fortifications were constructed in the United Kingdom of which about 6,500 still survive. Some defences were disguised and examples are known of Pillboxes constructed to resemble haystacks, logpiles and innocuous buildings such as churches and railway stations.

 

 

Sourced from Wikipedia:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_anti-invasion_preparation...

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