Summer Holiday Special Part I

Hoi,

Like I said in the last post, we've been away for two weeks on a lovely, relaxing holiday. Yet even on holiday my hobby keeps following me around. Apart from about 19 WW1 highlanders I managed to paint, my son and I visited the Harskamp Museumpark. Harskamp is a little town in the middle of a forest-rich area which is the site of the Dutch Royal Army's biggest practice range for both shooting, exercises and even for the Dutch Airborne troops. This range also has a small museum-park, 4 museums are located in large barracks, there's also a small amount of AFV's and other equipment in the grounds. Sadly due to cut-backs the museum-park will be definitely closed September first.

The entrance is well guarded by a smallish sentry in this typically Dutch sentry-box:  

Two guns flank the gate, here they are:

I took several pictures of the vehicles situated spread over the premisses but only two actually were decent enough to be shown here. I did read all the accompanying signs but forgot what types of vehicles they all were...

The museum had two field kitchens, one was put up under a tent for use in cold and wet weather.

My son is absolutely fond of fire-trucks and luckily for him there were two old fire-trucks on display, apart from the obvious use of fire fighting on base, these trucks could also be deployed to battle forest- and heath fires.

One of the barracks housed a "small track museum" which showed all kinds of stuff related to small track trains used to transport personnel and supplies along the base, it had some showcases with toys as well.

The other museums also featured lots of showcases and vignettes with mannequins, I only put a few on photograph.

One of the museums (the National Reserves museum I think)  had some very badly made diorama's using Hasegawa miniatures and models kits to depict several scenes from the mobilisation and German invasion in 1940.

This vignette I found to be particularly interesting; its depicting two 1939-ish Dutch soldiers using a Lewis gun for AA purposes. The ammo carriers rifle is serving as the mount for the Lewis, a construction I had not yet seen before. The last photograph shows the combination in action, oh and the flash of the camera...

At the end of our visit, after riding one of the small track trains, we went to the museum shop and I bought two books containing diaries from Dutch soldiers during the Napoleonic wars, more about those in Part II.
It's a real shame this lovely little spot is going to have to close it's gates. One can only hope the contents of the museums will be re-located to other museums so they will be open to the public still.

Cheers Sander

Watching: "Episode 9" of Turn, season 1