Excavators Chipped Away At A Concrete Block – And Unearthed This Startling Wartime Secret

Allied and Axis forces bitterly fought in the skies above Europe during World War II, and the airfield at Bardufoss came to play a vital role in that struggle. But a secret remained hidden underground years after the guns fell silent. And in August 2007 excavators uncovered something that had been buried for decades.

What exactly did the Norwegian Army’s Heavy Engineering Battalion find, then? Also, what can it tell us about the battles fought here during World War II and beyond? Well, the army staffers would soon unravel these mysteries and shine a light on the forgotten past.

Today, Bardufoss Air Station is a modern military facility and home to several squadrons of the Royal Norwegian Air Force. Located in Troms og Finnmark – a county in the north of the country – it shares a site with a civilian airport of the same name. As a result, it’s a bustling place, with both helicopters and commercial airliners landing and taking off on a regular basis.

Despite the business of Bardufoss Air Station, though, a number of World War II relics went unnoticed at the facility for decades. So, how did this happen? After all, the base has been in service since 1938, and its connection to the Allies’ fight against the Axis powers is well-documented.

It was here in the spring of 1940 that fleets of British fighter planes took off to fight on the Narvik front. By then, the Germans had set their sights on Norwegian territory and the Allies were fighting to resist the impending invasion. But despite the best efforts of those stationed at Bardufoss Air Station, they did not succeed.  

Was it a relic of this invasion that excavators uncovered in the summer of 2007? Or was it something leftover from later in the station’s military career? When the Allies were driven out of Norway the Germans took over – moving their own bombers, fighters and tanks into the facility. And when the war was over, some equipment got left behind. 

Perhaps, then, the discovery at Bardufoss Air Station could have been something that the enemies – not the Allies – abandoned to the passage of time. But that doesn’t explain why the mysterious relic was encased in concrete and forgotten about for so many years. Could it have been a secret that someone wanted to stay buried? Or was it a weapon so volatile it must be kept under wraps?

Looking at reports, it’s not clear exactly when excavation work at Bardufoss Air Station began. But according to the American military history magazine Armchair General, work was ongoing in August 2007. Inside the military base, it seems, questions had been raised about what might lie under some thick layers of concrete that covered the ground. And so, the Heavy Engineering Battalion of the Norwegian Army apparently decided to delve deeper.

As the engineers chipped away at the concrete, it soon became clear that this was no ordinary piece of urban architecture. Instead, the team soon discovered that the layers were concealing a historic relic: a German Panzer III tank from World War II! Slowly, fragments of its permanent camouflage fell away – revealing the armored vehicle underneath.

Though that wasn’t all. According to the online military history community WW2Live, a total of three Panzer III tanks were recovered from beneath the concrete at Bardufoss Air Station. How, though, had these once fearsome vehicles succumbed to such an uninspiring fate? And why had they remained lost for so many years?

According to Armchair General, the tanks were among the German equipment left behind at Bardufoss Air Station after the war. Rather than discard the vehicles, though, the Norwegian Army decided to put them to good use. So, they were renovated and returned to service until new technology rendered them obsolete in the early 1950s.

Yet that was not the end for the formidable German tanks. Armchair General reported that in 1953 the Norwegian Army began constructing a fort on a hillside close to Bardufoss Air Station. Designed to protect the facility from enemy attack, it was equipped with heavy weapons capable of firing at close range.

But why bring in new weapons when the base already had armored vehicles that were more than up to the job? Ingeniously, staff at Bardufoss Air Station buried the German tanks, covered them with wood and created a sort of instant battle station, according to the magazine. Because the vehicles no longer needed to move, their interiors were gutted of everything except their guns. 

To ensure a steady flow of ammunition, the article claimed, a tunnel was built that allowed direct access through the floors of the tanks. Yet while this solution was certainly innovative, it had its flaws. And by the 1960s these weapons – which could only fire on targets within a limited range – had in turn become obsolete.

Though the story still didn’t end there. Instead of removing the tanks, army engineers simply incorporated them into their defenses – building new structures around the aging tanks. And eventually, the vehicles disappeared completely. For decades, they sat beneath several tons of concrete – practically forgotten as the world around them moved on. 

According to Armchair General, the fort outside the station was abandoned at some point in either the 1970s or ’80s. And the German Panzers might have remained buried forever were it not for the work of the Heavy Engineering Battalion. Luckily, though, they were unearthed, and amateur military historians were quick to establish the identity of the long-lost tanks.

“We have now established with 100 percent certainty that ‘our’ Panzers were indeed used by the Norwegian Army post-World War II,” writer Tor Helge explained in the article. “We have interviews with crews of these tanks, and even one man who was part of the team digging them into the ground. We think that these were dug down around 1953.”

Going further, Helge believes that the tanks buried at Bardufoss Air Station may have been part of a battalion that traveled to Norway from Finland in 1944. By this time, the tide of the war had firmly swung in favor of the Allies and the Germans were losing their grip on Europe. Despite their might, then, these Panzers rolled onto a battlefield that had already been lost. 

But after decades spent buried in concrete, the tanks are reliving their glory days at last. Following a painstaking excavation, the vehicles were donated in 2013 to the Museum of Armored Weapons in Poznań, Poland. And two years later, work began on restoring them to their former splendor. Now, visitors can marvel at these feats of engineering – retrieved from the earth that threatened to swallow them whole.

Not all WWII relics have been rescued from nature, mind you. When Imgur user CanadaSpeedoMan and his wife were on a backcountry hiking trip in Greenland, they stumbled across a haunting reminder of this not-so-distant past. For days, the couple had trekked through the fjords, getting farther and farther from anything resembling civilization. Then they came upon piles of old barrels and the twisted frames of long-collapsed buildings. It made for eerie viewing, that’s for sure!

East Greenland is a remote and lonely part of the world. Its landscape is one of mountains and lakes, and for much of the year it’s locked in pack ice. But in this great wilderness, the hikers discovered the rusting remains of a facility – one that dates from a time when the area played a very important strategic role.

Amid the rocky peaks, on a shelf of land close to an Eskimo encampment known as Ikateq, the United States had built an airstrip. It was designed to be a refueling station for military aircraft flying from America to Europe during the Second World War. And it’s still there, slowly collapsing into the dirt.

Work began on the airstrip, known as Bluie East Two, in 1942. A year earlier America had taken over the defense of Greenland and began looking for sites on which to place a 5,000-foot runway. Eventually, they found the best location, 35 miles northeast of Tasiilaq. So it was that a supply flotilla arrived on July 26, 1942, and building work began.

The airfield remained open from 1942 until 1947. After the war came to an end in 1945, though, the importance of Bluie East Two began to wane. In fact, like other American bases in Greenland, it was vacated two years later. But the site’s inaccessibility is largely responsible for the fact that its legacy remains visible for anyone lucky enough to find it.

You see, everything that the Americans used to build Bluie East Two had to be shipped in. There are few, if any, trees in East Greenland, so the timber needed to be ferried over. But this also meant that when it was time to leave, there was no desire to take anything from the site.

It wasn’t just the buildings that were left, though. Almost everything was abandoned to the elements. And now, hundreds of barrels litter the area. These containers were used to refuel the planes, and some of them still hold fuel in their rusting shells. All told, it’s certainly a strange thing to stumble across in the middle of nowhere.

Nowadays, alongside the barrels are huge pieces of machinery. These would have been used to build the runway that was the heart of Bluie East Two. Completed in 1943, the landing strip was made out of gravel, and you can still see it cut into the cold earth today.

Most of the useful things that were left behind at Bluie East Two have, though, been removed over the past 70 years by the native Inuit people. However, anything that couldn’t be taken away by foot or in small fishing boats remains where it was left.

Interestingly, too, old photos from when the facility was being built show that it wasn’t just machinery that was needed to create the airstrip. Huge crates of explosives were also used. East Greenland isn’t, after all, the sort of place that makes building, or maintaining, large complexes easy.

In its day, every season, when it was possible, the base was resupplied by the American coastguard. And when the area was in the grip of winter and the snow couldn’t be cleared from the runway, provisions were dropped from the air. Then, once the Americans had left, the Danish government had no interest in Bluie East Two.

Yet while the Americans no longer used Bluie East Two, it did still offer the occasional benefit. In 1958 the facility served a vital supply role during the building of an early-warning radar system farther south at Kulusk. However, once the war had finished, the site never regained its former importance.

Now, amid the twisted metal, there are other interesting items left behind from when the Americans departed. Littering the ground are shards of glass marked with the telltale logo of the Coca-Cola company – a clear reminder of the airfield’s short-lived occupation by U.S. airmen.

Meanwhile, alongside the earth-moving machines, other static pieces of machinery remain. Boilers and furnaces that once heated and powered the base are largely still intact. One even bears the mark of the company in New York that built it. The buildings around them, however, have long since collapsed.

Other pieces of equipment can be seen as well. A radio mast lies collapsed, its frame pointing to a body of water where icebergs drift eerily by. And radios themselves are still there, too. They’re mainly just decaying metal boxes now, though, stood in the middle of a frigid plain.

It isn’t just metal that remains, either. Thick black tires sit among the wreckage. Some of them are still wrapped in the snow chains that would have helped them during the coldest parts of the year. The tires are marked “United States Rubber Company.”

The site has, then, stood abandoned for more than half a century, and yet there’s a chance that it may not be around much longer. For some time, cleaning up Bluie East Two has been a point of political contention between the governments of Greenland and Denmark. But it seems that the two have finally settled on what to do.

In 2017 the two governments concluded that it was time to do away with all of the detritus left at the abandoned airstrip. It’s believed that efforts were made to rid the area of this strange, rusting relic of the Second World War. The clean-up operation was scheduled to begin in 2018.

If that’s the case, then CanadaSpeedoMan and his wife might conceivably be the last people to visually document the remains of the airstrip. Once the huge tidy-up is finished, it’s entirely possible that there’ll be nothing left whatsoever of the American base. The wilderness of East Greenland will be all but empty once again.

That, of course, makes these photos all the more important. Bluie East Two played a role in one of the biggest conflicts in human history. And even though it’s been left to fall into rot and ruin, it’s still an intriguing, bizarre place – and one that’s made even stranger by its incredible surroundings.