An old gun that still works and is abandoned in the middle of nowhere in Sweden

@ElentirENG ES 11·25·2023 · 23:44 0

As you already know, I like to document the articles I publish about the artillery batteries I write about on this blog.

Sweden: He find a trapdoor in an old cabin and end up in an artillery battery
Svedjebergsfäst, a fortification from 1913 that is abandoned but that preserves its cannons

Today I'm not going to be able to tell you much about the battery I bring you. I simply know that he is in Sweden, in the middle of nowhere and that he has an old Bofors 12 cm gun from 1941, as commented by the author of CM Exploration in the comments of this video. The cannon appears to have been installed during World War II and would have been abandoned in 1988 by the Swedish Army. For a moment I thought it would be a piece of coastal artillery, but it isn't. The most surprising thing is that the barrel still retains its closure and other mechanisms, it can rotate and move up and down, something very unusual in a weapon that has been abandoned for so many years.

Searching the net I found a Facebook page, Batteri 616, which shows this same cannon, which could place it in a town 38 kilometers from the Swedish border with Finland. This canyon is in the interior of Sweden, almost 200 km from the coast. Surely it was a defensive position against a possible Soviet invasion (remember that the USSR invaded Finland in 1939 and the Swedes must have thought it was better to take precautions). I leave you without further ado with the video:

You can see some screenshots from the video here. Here we see the gun turret, which had camouflage paint and support for mimetic nets. It is surrounded by trees, but I end up assuming that they have grown in the years that this position has been abandoned.

An image showing the rifled bore of this barrel. The Bofors 12 cm was a howitzer, so it could fire its shots generally outside its line of sight.

A picture showing the barrel closure. It still works and is oiled.

The turret of this cannon has an underground bunker, in good condition and without signs of vandalism. There is also an attached warehouse, with a horrendous number of mosquitoes, as you can see in the video.