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I saw the map of AAA positions for Stickman''s upcoming update:



I see it gives numbers of guns for each area but I'm guessing exact locations are still hard to come by.

Just for fun I thought I'd pass on this little tidbit. During 1940 my father was 10 years old. He lived with his mother in London and then got shuffled off to the west like many london children. At one point during the summer of 1940 he was staying with a family in downtown Thurlestone. He doesn't recall the exact address but it is a very small town/village. He said there was an AAA battery directly behind the house! He also said 'it was very loud'!

http://g.co/maps/2gwem

- John

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Gateway FX6831-03
i7 (860) 2.80 Ghz - 8GB Ram
ATI Radeon HD 5800 - 1GB Ram
Windows 7 (64-bit)

I probably will not be able to recreate all of those HAA guns that I planned to do for v2.12, all together in game.
Ran into into some game limitations that did not allow my ambitious lust to reflect total reality to come to fruit!
Can only give it my best shots, after considering the targets of importance, and careful aim on them.



Each area that was defended by AAA guns was designated as a Gun Defense Area . GDA for a short acronym. I hate acronyms.
These Gun Defense Areas were placed near strategic locations. Typically Naval Bases, Docks, and Fighter (primarily) Aircraft Factories.
Surprisingly, I have learned that the Fighter Command airfields were all (each and every one) given the crappiest old 3.0" WWI era guns for airfield defense.
The newer and better guns were given to Ports and Factories.

It is not too hard to find exact locations of most HAA guns in summer of 1940 Britain, WWII.
That said.. some gun Troops did move early on, June and July, especially.
Once they were given expensive concrete and earth berm reinforced revetments with steel ammo lockers, they tended to stay on those built up gun sites.
Some of these old HAA 4 each-gun sites still remain and I have seen many of them zooming into Google Earth.
Many more have been bull-dozed away to make room for new suburban houses and useless golf courses. Or the farmer wants his hay field back, by god!

I learned more about England, researching 1940 HAA gun sites than I ever cared to know about, before.
Got an appreciation and love for England that I never had before. That is a sense of familiarity I guess.

This Google Earth thing shows all of the HAA sites in England for the entire WWII war:



This from "Anti Air Craft Command". Colin Dobinson. 1940.


Plymouth, 1944.


Dartmouth, 1944.




I would never presume to doubt your father's eyewitness and earwitness testimony.
If he said there was a Troop of (4 each) 3.7'' mobile guns in the field behind the house he lived at, summer of 1940,
then I take his word as gospel truth.
Not something a 10 year old boy would likely to ever forget.
Like I said, these guns did move around, relocating. Especially the 3.7" mobile guns.



Oh! Yeah!

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"Toto! I don't think we are in Kansas anymore!" Dorothy, OZ
"sniff.. sniff.. Snort! ARF! GGRRRR! ARF! (Tod der stinkenden republikanischen Partei, diesem ignoranten religiösen Monstrum.)" Toto

I did a quick bit of webbing, and found that
"After bombing raids on the Kingsbridge and Aveton Gifford — ‘Scatter raids’ they
were called aimed at non-military targets to cause panic among civilians — anti
aircraft guns appeared all around the area. We had a unit of the Army, the “Buffs”
stationed at Bantham Ham at the mouth of the river. The troops dug trenches and
dug-outs all around Ham. They did the same below the Links Hotel and on the cliffs
at Leas Foot and mounted a machine guns and anti-aircraft guns there."

But
http://www.devonheritage.org/Places/Kin ... dbrook.htm
the Kingsbridge raid was Feb 16 '43, so presumably the AA didn't appear in Thurlestone until then.

How fascinating - this is the exact location I holiday with my family every year ( since I was boy). I know about the low level tip and run raids - A fw190 dropped a bomb on the church in Aveton Gifford and the Admiralty college at Dartmouth was similarly hit - But as PV says these attacks occured later in the war. The head land at Bantham had always been covered with strange bumps and steep dips- That no doubt was the work of the Buffs. All over grown now.
I know the location of 2 Bofors guns during BoB - one on top of the Aerodrome Hotel at Croydon Airport and one on the seafront by the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Gun crew testimony and photographic evidence respectively. Clearly the Bofors crews enjoyed the finer things in life, establishing themselves so close to first class Hotels!

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attitude: inverted dive.
altitude: zero feet.
outlook: Well, lets look on the bright side shall we?

Ben told me that the Bofors gun atop the Croydon hotel was there up until the first air raid.
The dust and smoke was so thick that the gunners could see nothing.
Gun was wisely placed thereafter, at some place at the field's perimeter away from obvious targets where it could have a decent field of fire.

_________________
"Toto! I don't think we are in Kansas anymore!" Dorothy, OZ
"sniff.. sniff.. Snort! ARF! GGRRRR! ARF! (Tod der stinkenden republikanischen Partei, diesem ignoranten religiösen Monstrum.)" Toto

You gotta great memory for gun positions stickman! They did indeed shift it across the road into the park, East of its original position.

_________________
attitude: inverted dive.
altitude: zero feet.
outlook: Well, lets look on the bright side shall we?

Hi,

There was an RAF station very near the site of the Thurlestone AAA. From 1941 on RAF Bolt Head operated as a satellite of RAF Exeter. Wiki lists an impressive number of types based there. The pilots must have wondered where they were ' cause that part of Devon is pretty remote and Bolt head is very exposed. Having said that Bus and Train services were a lot better then they are now.

The airfield is still there although the original grass runways are gone. They operate microlites and have fly-ins most years. There is a large cold war era concrete ROTOR building that's occasionally open to the public.

Cheers!