Wednesday 11 May 2016

Imperial War Museum

At the imperial war museum front entrance they had a humongous naval gun that was used in the war against the Germans and the shells were bigger than me. When we went inside we saw a giant spitfire, harrier and a flying bomb hanging from the ceiling. This had me very interested and excited to see more. This was one place I had read about and really wanted to see. I heard about in the book grandpa's great escape read by Elly in class this year.  

We first went down to the ground floor and we saw a jeep that had been hit by an Iraqi missile with two journalists inside. The journalists survived. Next we saw a v2 flying rocket and then Connor spotted a tank in the back of the room so we headed over to see that, it was a Sherman tank. Then we decided to head up another level as dad had spotted a motorbike with a sidecar and a machine gun. It was very cool. Then we saw a truck that New Zealanders had used in the desert wars. After that we had a look in the second world war exhibition, it was cool and explained a lot about this war and new Zealand's part in it. There was a big section on world war one which I found really interested. We heard a story about a soldier who popped his head up once and didn't get shot however when he popped his head up again and shot in the head by two different snipers. We then walked through some trenches in the and there was a giant tank over the trenches which was very cool. There were lots of movies to watch and it was really interesting. Me and dad really loved it and for both of us it was our favourite in London.

The museum was huge, there were six stories. On our first visit we stayed 3 hours and then dad and I went back to visit again a few days later for another two hours. I bought a book on Nancy wake who was a NZ born woman who was a French resistance fighter and lived in Marseille and a 150 page tank spotters book about tanks.


                                               Huge naval gun out the front

Spitfire

Jeep that got hit by a missile


New Zealand jeep
 

Normandy/D'Day

Normandy is a Provence in northern France where the allied services launched the largest seaborne invasion in history. On the 6 of June 1944 is when thousands of allied troops spilled onto Normandy beaches trying to drive the Germans out of France. There were five beaches the allies were trying to capture. Omaha and Utah where the ones the Americans were trying to capture. Gold, Juno and Sword were the beaches the rest of the allies were trying to capture. The Normandy sites are spread along 120 km of coastline. I was tasked to find out which places to go to and why. These are the places we are going to go to:

Juno beach because it has a Sherman tank I want to see.
Omaha beach has the American cemetery dad wants to go to because there is 10,000 head stones.
Utah beach has the landing craft they landed in and the Utah Beach Landing Museum, the best museum on D'Day.
Gold beach has the Longues Battery where the Germans were shooting at the allied.
Caen memorial museum is a museum in France..