Stallingborough Lincolnshire abandoned WW2 gun battery

Описание: After the end of the war, Stallingborough was one of those gun sites that was selected for retention as a Battery Headquarters (an armed, fully operational gun site) as part of the Nucleus Force documented in January 1946. It is not known when it was finally decommissioned, but it could well have been as late as spring 1955 when the use of artillery for anti-aircraft defence was finally abandoned and the last gun sites decommissioned
A major feature of the Second World War was the strategic bombing of Britain by the German Luftwaffe. This prompted the construction of nearly 1000 HAA gun sites across the country, mostly using 4.5 and 3.7 inch calibre artillery and employed almost 275,000 men, in addition to women soldiers from the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) from 1941 onwards. Unfortunately the German bombers could fly beyond the reach of these guns at heights of up to 40,000 feet. In October 1940 AA Command requested the allocation of 5.25 inch guns which could fire up to altitudes of 43,000 feet. These guns were substantially larger (84 tons) and more complex than existing HAA guns and were really intended for mounting on the decks of battleships. Emplacing them on land in an anti-aircraft role presented significant technical challenges. Three individual guns were emplaced around London by June 1942. An early design for the emplacements (DFW 55368) called for them to be sunken and constructed out of shuttered concrete, but these proved to take around 9 months to build and were prone to flooding. From July 1943 a new "accelerated construction" form of the emplacement was developed utilising concrete blockwork built up from the ground surface on a concrete raft. This led to the issuing of a new standard design in September 1944 (DFW 55487). In April 1944 18 sites across the country (each with four gun emplacements), were under construction with Stallingborough (along with three other sites on the Humber and two on the Thames/Medway) being the earliest expected to be completed in May 1944. It was originally planned to emplace 200 guns nationally, typically in four-gun batteries, and although construction continued after the war, it is thought that only 164 were finally deployed. Most anti-aircraft sites were abandoned after the war. This left only 210 sites nationally, known as the Nucleus Force, of which only about half were fully operational, the rest being mothballed with guns stored off site. By August 1946 about half of these 210 gun sites were decommissioned, generally retaining those with 5.25 inch guns. In 1950, a new scheme (codenamed Igloo) reduced the number to 78 sites, 54 being permanently armed. Heightened international tension caused by the Korean War (1950-53) led to the construction of a very small number of new 5.25 inch gun sites, but by spring 1955, anti-aircraft defence using artillery was declared obsolete and the last gun sites were decommissioned (