Oh,
If I had known that a bit earlier......Last week I was there with a friend of mine and it would have been interesting to look where the airstrip used to be, allthought it will probably have a large amount of houses built on it in the meantime!!
Well, maybe on a next trip!
I have been to a former airstrip in Normandy, France (near St. Mere-Eglise) some years ago. They do have a monument/plaque over there. The former strip over there is still a large flat surface and can therefore still be regognized, maybe the Mill area can also still be regognized.....????
The Overloon museum has been changed a lot during the last years. When I was in Overloon about fifteen years ago with my father (I am 24 now), the museum still had most of its vehicles stored outside, which gave it something special. You would just walk through some woods and see a vehicle every once in a while. The other special thing was that most vehicles were "victims" taken from the battlefield, like TColvin allready pointed out and that they were just displayed "as found", for instance they have a M4 Sherman which was hit by some "88"-rounds and has a complete bougie pulled of and the turret displaced. But offcourse this outside storage isn't very good for the vehicles, so some years ago the museum started "restoring" a lot of the vehicles and putting them in a newly built museum building. So the museum has lost some of its "specialty", but is still worth a visit! They also got some new vehicles for display, like a Staghound, a LVT Buffalo taken from the Maas river and sadly enough also some russian equipment, like a Josef Stalin-2 (?) and even some " modern" equipment like russian T55! The museum thinks they also have to show some things from other conflicts after WW2 to show visiters that war is terrible. This policy has led to some discussion over here, but it is always hard to follow the decisions museum-staffs make.
I can name a few:
The museum in Arromanches museum in Normandy brought their LCA landing craft to the scrapyard some years ago because they didn't have the money to restore it. This LCA was a real Arromanches/Normandy veteran that arrived and stayed on the Arromanches beach on 6 june 1944!
Overloon sold the engine out of their Panter G to Bovington Camp tank museum in Great Britain in exchange for some "new" Panter Tyres to restore the Overloon Panter G for static display.
Like I allready pointed out, the Overloon museum is still worth a visit because of their rare vehicles.
Some of them: Valentine Bridgelayer, Sexton, Sherman Crab, Conger carrier, Churchill, Staghound, Archer, Cromwell, German Wurzburg radar etc. etc. I'll post some pictures in afew days.
Alex van de Wetering
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