This small pillbox, designed for two heavy machine guns, is nicely integrated into a small hill Local farmers has found the hill to be a good source of sand and apparently helped themselves to a sizeable portion of the hill, giving us a nice cross-section of the pillbox.
This gives a clue to the depth at which the concrete slab was nested in the ground, making it a very difficult target to destroy..
The loophole is just above the ground level, and the entryway is practically below the ground level. A communication trench would be dug there to give a safe access to the entrace. There are also two metal pipes protruding from the wall almost at the very bottom of the pillbox. They were supposed to house telephone lines which would connect all the pillboxes in the area. They had never been installed.
There are still traces of black tar smeared on the side of the pillbox which served as a protection agains moisture which could inevitably creep in once the slab was covered with its protective earth embankments.
Metal bars above the loophole are still mysteriously there – a camouflage net was supposed to be attached to them.
In 1941 the Soviet-German border was just 4,2 km away from this place and the German steamroller overwhelmed the defences so quickly that not even a single shot was fired from this pillbox.
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Tags: abandoned bunker derelict fortification history Linia Mołotowa military Molotov Line pentax pillbox shelter Soviet urban exploration urbex WW2 бункер заброшенные Pentax Art Szumowo Podlaskie Poland POL Visualmanuscripts
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This 1,5 ton armored housing for a 45 mm antitank gun is stepped to reduce damage from ricochets and is a fine example of good quality craftsmanship. Some of them, still covered in their factory grease, might be quite usable even today – not bad at all for a Soviet-made thing. No wonder then that many of them were “gently” extracted by the Germans who happily reused the precious metal for their Atlantic Wall defences.
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Tags: abandoned bunker derelict fortification history Linia Mołotowa military Molotov Line pentax pillbox shelter Soviet urban exploration urbex WW2 бункер заброшенные decay Art Poland Visualmanuscripts
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I took this photo of a single machine gun pillbox in November but the weather was so beautiful that it still seemed like summer. There are a dozen of pillboxes in the area of Podbiele and most of them are conveniently spread on the seemingly endless stretch of farmland. The sun was beautiful, the colors clear and somehow it struck me that the view was more reminiscent of a pure kitsch than that of a usual gloom of fdark and forgotten places.
And that is how I remembered that day and that lone pillbox adorned by a gnarled tree.
So here it is – a kitsch made of reinforced concrete.
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Tags: Linia Mołotowa Molotov Line Pentax Art Soviet WW2 abandoned bunker decay derelict fortification military pentax pillbox shelter texture urban exploration urbex бункер заброшенные Visualmanuscripts
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A single-casemate pillbox in the forests north-east of Osowiec Fortress.
One of the smallest structures built on the Molotov Line, housing a 7,62 mm Maxim heavy machine gun. It was equipped with an optic scope which greatly increased accuracy within its 2,2 km ( 1,37 mile) effective range of fire.
Remnants of an earth embankment covering the structure are still visible. Back in 1941 it was completely hidden under a pile of stones and earth. With grass and scrub growing on the roof, much like on the photo, this small killer was hardly visible to the enemy.
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Tags: abandoned bunker derelict fortification history Linia Mołotowa military Molotov Line pentax pillbox shelter Soviet urban exploration urbex WW2 бункер заброшенные BiaĹ‚aszewo Podlaskie Poland POL decay Art Visualmanuscripts
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This is not supposed to be a landscape shot.
In fact, this is not supposed to show you what you would normally expect from my Molotov Line Journals. What you can barely see on the photo is something pretty elusive - at least it became so after 75 years. No pillboxes this time.
A massive construction effort - building a defense line running all across Europe - required unbelievable amounts of raw materials. Those thousands of tons of stone, sand, conrete, wood - you name it - needed to be hauled into place and then moved around and delivered to hundreds of smaller construction sites, all in areas where there were very few roads or no roads at all. How do you go about it?
The answer is: narrow-gauge railway.
Soviets constructed (often employing forced labor) rail embankments and laid hundreds of kilometers of tracks. The railway snaked its way around dozens of soon-to-be-built strongpoints where hundreds of concrete pillboxes were erected. This simple transportation system became a lifeblood of the Molotov Line.
Where is it now? Can it be traced and mapped? Along with our research of the purely military side of the fortifications we also trace the elusive remnants of the Soviet narrow-gauge railway and draw it on the maps. Most of it is long gone: embankments had been levelled ages ago and only small traces of the railway can be found, usually in the forests, where nobody bothered to disturb them.
When you look at the photo the old embankment is visible right at the edge of the forest to the right. Then it goes across the field towards the forest on the left. Interestingly, there's actually almost no trace of it on the field (which must've been ploughed a thousand times) and even a satellite photo does not reveal much. But at certain hours, when light is favorable something like a shadow sneaking across the field can be seen. The embankment pops up again in the forest on the left side of the photo (well, you won't see it!). This is where massive, concrete foundations of stone-crushing machines still idle, all covered with moss. Once, the crushed stone was loaded there into the wagons and then hauled towards distant building sites where it was to be mixed with concrete.
What about the rails, wagons and locomotives? Well... the rails evaporated just hours after the Soviets fled. Bigger stuff took longer but still disappeared without a trace shortly after. Not far from the place where I stood taking the shot a friendly old farmer told a fascinating tale how it all happened. I am not a farmer and I find it hard to comprehend what use can be found for a pile of narrow-gauge railways in your average homestead. But his father and all his neighbours probably knew better. The most courageous ones, happily assuming the Soviet occupants won't come back, started to dismantle the track hours after the Bolsheviks were gone. The old man could still recall the desperation and disappointment of the more cowardly ones who, coming with their tools two days after, found nothing to scavenge!
War is hell, but life must go on in the meantime, and there MUST be some usage for a piece of rusty railway after all!
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Tags: texture history landscape Poland forest country road military Soviet ww2 Molotov Line fortification b&w Pentax Art onone software Visualmanuscripts
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