Newton Beach Porthcawl WW2 Firing range

[PHIL YNYSBOETH]

If your a WW1 WW2 nut like me you,ll enjoy this forum.
My dad took me here when i was around 6 years old, then when i was in my teens me and friends use  to rough sleep there after nights out with the  Porthcawl Girlies !
I found this post on ...

http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk

Porthcawl, Newton dunes there is an old ww2 shooting range with dug outs and a complex target system, plenty of old bullets and shrapnell to be found a true derilict palce, quite scary now its deserted!
canteen now bricked up for safety
 
bullet fragments found on the big dune, the amount of metal fragments and bullets in this dune is overwhelming you only have to dig your hand into the soft sand to find all sorts from 303 to bullets from larger guns...
old dug out, love a metal detector as the bottom of this trench is probably
full of intresting shells even today.
The huge dune in the distance is what would stop the bullets from over shooting, the inresting buildings are at the bottom of this hill, dug into the ground to protect them from the obvious danger. a system of pullies would hoist up targets a few feet above the shelter to be fired at by boys who would soon be leaving for Dunkirk and the Normandy beaches.....
My father looking along the underground trench that would have held all the targets and mechanical hoist machines. next to where the pic is taken is a canteen and abolutions house (bog!) now bricked up by the local council.

Stare into the darkness of the toilet block, now blocked off to the public, went there a few years ago, nothing special about ither the canteen or the toilet block as expected, so we wernt missing anything!
still an intresting area spanning about 5 square miles of dug outs and trenches. according to local sources when the military left in 1950 a huge dune was collapsed over the amo dump covering up years of amunition and boxed shells! need a metal detector, love to find a lee enfield or a strap of rounds!!

update, visited again today and took the kids and a spade with me see the pics of hundreds of bullets found!
My son and i spend some time polishing these up and some of them came up like new, even after over 60 years! wife probably kill me when she sees these on the cabinate on her arrival home from work!

ps, Wales won the grand slam!!!! and i went out hunting for ww2 rubbish, what a fab weekend!
pointless giving a google ref for this site nothing can be seen from the air at all, however to get to it go to Newton bay and walk along the coast left, head for a big dune in the middle (can't miss it) then the range is at the bottom, there are actualy 2 identical ranges both in the same state of repair and both facinating, look for the dug outs which are long man made dunes with corrigated iorn at the top. they run in sets of 3 leading up to the site, as a child i remember roads and buildings leading to the range, as of today site very accesable as long as you dont mind the 1 mile hike, quite easy. its common land and as such can be accessed legally.

[mole]

You,ll also find second world war artefacts on rest bay acouple of years ago me and my decided to do some beach detecting for the day sandy bay was full of holiday makers so we decided to mve to rest bay my minelab sovereign was picking up shell cases I think they were something like .50 calibre don,nt quote me on this but they looked like anti aircraft rounds or from an actual aircraft?? I was pulling these up from at least two foot !!! this put me of beach detecting   Istick to being a landlubber thank you  mole

[Stig(The)]

Sounds like a load of "Bullitts" to me ! 

[JohnHouseMaster]

In my family Porthcawl was always spoken of as a significant experience during World War 2, as my father was stationed there and my mother, with me in tow, joined him for most of the latter days of the war. I was just 3 years old and Porthcawl was much like my home town of Torquay having great beaches on which my mother and I spent many happy days.

I have three experiences that will live with me from that time. First there was being stung in the ear by a wasp, something that has stayed with me ever since as I still can’t stand wasps around me even now. Secondly I also remember being very concerned by a ventriloquist who shut his dummy in a suitcase. I can remember being very upset by this not fully understanding that the dummy was not a real person. Thirdly there was an incident at the house where we were billeted when I got hold of a carving knife and ran my thumb down the sharp edge causing much consternation and a lot of blood!

But there was a much happier memory from that time. During WW2 there was a distinct lack of food, especially luxuries like Ice Cream. But I can remember my father taking me to the officers mess where the visiting Americans would bring ice cream and make it available to the men at the base. I great treat.

Now for some information on the Firing Ranges. The reason my father was there was as part of a technical team who were developing Radar to direct Anti Aircraft Guns at enemy aircraft. Radar at that time was in its infancy, with only the Chain Home system operating to detect in-coming enemy aircraft and help direct fighter aircraft to intercept them. This system operated at a frequency similar to today’s VHF Radio Stations, that is around 100 MHz.

This is far too low to enable the direction of Anti Aircraft Guns which need a higher frequency to give the required resolution. These would have been around 1,000 to 4,000 MHz. (Usually referred to as 1 – 4 GHz). In 1943 the generation of these frequencies was only just becoming possible using special valves (vacuum tubes) such as Grounded Grid Triodes, H-Wave Oscillators, Backward Wave Oscillators and, a little later, Klystrons. These were capable of generating sufficient power to give a good return (echo) from a small target such as an aircraft and enable the Anti Aircraft Guns to be directed in the right direction.
Radar had been developed by Professor Robert Watson-Watt at Cambridge University, initially from a directive from the MOD to try and develop a Death Ray! However it soon became clear to Watson-Watt that this was not possible due to the low power available at that time. However a spin-off of this research was the capability of detecting targets which at first was known as RDF (Radio Direction Finding). Later, after the involvement of the Americans, the system became known as RADAR (RAdio Direction And Range).

Between 1943 and D Day in 1944 the Porthcawl firing Ranges were regularly used to test these systems against targets towed behind RAF transport planes. I can distinctly remember being told by my mother to put my fingers in my ears whenever the firing was to take place. She knew because Dad had forewarned her, probably against the official secrets act or something.

Dad told me much later that they had only limited success at first, as the shells would only explode if they actually hit the target, which was not that often. However this was eventually solved with the arrival of a plentiful supply of another British Invention that we had sent to America at that time to be copied and mass-produced. That was the Pulsed Magnetron.

The Magnetron was a generator of pulses of microwave energy with very high power. Being very small it was able to be placed in the nose of the Anti Aircraft Shell where it acted as a Proximity Fuse. This would detonate the shell if it came within a given distance of the target, close enough to cause severe damage and bring the aircraft down.
After that it was a hit every time.

To prove the system Dad and his team then took the system to Folkstone which was directly in what was called V1 Flying Bomb Alley, being right under the flight path of the V1 flying bombs heading for London. He said they set up the Gun and Radar and waited for the first V1 to come over. As it passed over they activated the system and the Gun fired bringing down the V1. After that he said it was one shell and one V1 every time. There were cheers all round.

In June 1944 Dad said there were plans to take the Radar Directed Anti Aircraft System with the invading forces of Operation Overlord to help protect the troops from attack from the air. To this end they tested all the operators and technical support team for colour blindness, to make sure they could all tell the difference between red and green Very Pistol Lights which would be used for signalling. It was during these tests that he discovered that he was red-green colour blind, so was unable to go with the team.

He later discovered that they had all been killed during the attack, and always claimed that his colour blindness had saved his life.

At the end of the war Dad returned to Torquay and his electrical and radio shop where he busied himself building a television receiver out of old Radar parts that soon became available on the military surplus market. The only TV transmitter at that time was at Alexander Palace in north London, and Torquay being over 200 miles away was well outside the service area, which only covered greater London. However Dad had built a very powerful receiver with over 200 valves (vacuum tubes) and a large aerial (antenna) array which looked like 9 regular TV antennas (three bays side by side and three bays stacked over each other). Quite an impressive sight on a roof in Torquay where nobody else had TV.

The reception was very intermittent as it relied on there being a meteorological phenomenon known as a temperature inversion, which caused a radio propagation phenomenon called “ducting” where the radio waves follow the curvature of the earth and not straight lines. This enabled the TV signals to travel the long distance from London to Torquay. This would occur about one or two days every month, usually later in the evening.

Whenever this occurred Dad would wake me (then 7 years old) and we would descend into the basement of the house (under the electrical and radio shop) where the TV received was located, and sit in the dark watching TV programmes such as Animal, Vegetable or Mineral, Café Continental, or Muffin the Mule. TV news was delivered by news readers such as McDonald Hobley dressed in formal Dinner Jackets with the women presenters such as Sylvia Peters in full evening dress. Very formal in those days.

As a record of this Dad had a local photographer take some photos from the TV screen which I still have.

Well that about wraps-up my family’s involvement with Porthcawl, RADAR and early TV.

Hope you find it interesting.

[tyna]

Last abode was next to the POW camp in Bridgend.  Hop skip and jump from Newton and Merthyr Mawr.  Never detected in the garden but bet there were loads of ammo there eh?  Certainly were rats living the life of leisure    Colonised the whereabouts in the past?  I like rats - we are all children of the universe and soon will be whole eh?  Not keen on any being so confident as to come into the house though