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Old 17-10-20, 16:37
Jakko Westerbeke Jakko Westerbeke is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2020
Location: Netherlands
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As promised:

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Name:	AVRE (Martin Reijnhoudt en moeder).jpg
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ID:	116834

Click image for larger version

Name:	D6A (Martin Reijnhoudt).jpg
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Size:	152.4 KB
ID:	116835

The top one is AVRE T69114/B, the identity of the D6A dozer I’m still not sure about, because I’m having a little trouble placing it. It looks like it’s on the middle of the beach, with the remains of the dyke near the village in the background.

Interestingly, the dozer has a name, The RAM and part of its WD census number is readable. The second digit is gone but must have been a 4, the fourth digit looks like a 9 to me, and the last one perhaps a 1 or maybe a 7? I’ve not really tried tinkering with the colours, contrast etc. on the much higher-resolution scan I have to see if I can make out more, though.

The little boy in both is Martin Reijnhoudt, who I got these photos from; the woman in the top picture is his mother. She and his father ran a bakery, which the AVRE was parked just in front of. Apparently, they moved back in in January 1945, and when British soldiers were using bulldozers around the village (reason unknown), his father paid one of them with a bottle of wine to tow the AVRE away from in front of his shop. The dozer driver hooked a thick steel cable to the tank, started pulling, and only succeeded in removing bricks from the paving of the street before the cable started to fray and broke


Edit, a few hours later: The WD-numbers seems to be E2?39?7:

Name:  E2?39?7.jpg
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Size:  38.6 KB

So most likely E2439?7 with one digit I can’t make out. There is some stuff visible where the fifth digit should be, but I can’t see a number in those squiggles.

Also, I think I figured out which bulldozer this is: the one I’ve got down as E22 (see my PDF), on the south side of the Gap, a bulldozer I only knew from the Rijkswaterstaat map I posted earlier and very long-distance photos, and of which I had not seen any close-ups at all.

The land in the right background does appear to be the old dyke near the village, with tank wrecks becoming more visible if I play with the colours and contrast in the scan. This fits with sight lines along bulldozer E22, from the south side of the Gap to the northwestern end.

Last edited by Jakko Westerbeke; 17-10-20 at 19:50.
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