One of WW2’s infamous chapters was Operation Eisbär, the merciless bombing of England with V-1 flying bombs. Facilities were built for that purpose across the Channel in many of the woods that dotted Northern France’s rural landscape.
One of these was Grambus, a nine-acre forest that has belonged to my family for ten centuries, and where a fortress had been erected in medieval times. There, the Germans built concrete garages, roadways, ammunition and parts depots, bunkers for the troops, a launching ramp and the orientation arch where the rockets’ gyroscopes were set before being fired—all hidden under the tree canopy.
Grambus was readied for war again after a thousand years.
At some point, the whole compound was totally destroyed by the Allied Air Force, leaving dozens of bomb craters and ruined bunkers that the forest quickly set out to reclaim.
Nonetheless, eighty years later, as I walked through the broken concrete paths emerging here and there under the greenery, the forest seems to still be reeling from the violence of those days of fire.
I took these pictures with a 5x7 Agfa view camera on paper negatives. They’re a part of a portfolio documenting four seasons in Grambus
