We began our time in Vienna with a walking tour of the downtown area and the Hapbsburg palace with its many courtyards. After the walking tour, there was some scheduled free time for shopping. Instead of shopping, Greg, JJ, and I met Duncan at the Vienna military museum.
Preparing to take out tour. This is a view of the “foyer” of the boat.Wow! This was taken from the bus window while moving to the start of our tour.Part of the Hapsburg winter palaceDowntown ViennaSt. Stephan’s church in the center of Vienna’s old town area. I really like the colored shingles/tiles on this roof.
Duncan had found this gem while looking for things to do in Vienna many months ago. Duncan skipped the walking tour entirely to make sure he had time to see everything. JJ, Greg, and I spent over four hours there. It was well worth the time. The architecture in the museum and the artwork, but might have been “over the top” in an art museum. It is unprecedented in a military museum.
We passed through a park on the way to the museum. Greg and JJ made a new friend.This is a small part of the entrance hall of the military museum.In the WWI and WWII sections, most of the signs were in both German and English.
There were several of these maps in the WWI section. The displays were organized by year of the war. As a result, the displays did a great job of showing the evolution of technology throughout the war.A unique, double-barreled automatic pistol. I found the thumb, leaf trigger (like on the US .50 cal. machine-gun) interesting.Duncan really WAS happy to be there.This drum magazine was interesting.Another double-barreled submachine gun. This one appears to have been mounted on an airplane.
I took over 350 photos in this museum. These are just a small sample.
Frescoes high above the first floor (second floor to Americans) galleries.
The famous Austerlitz surrender painting.Throughout the Napoleonic area, there were many of these excellent figurines to show different uniforms of the period.A Storch aircraft in the WWII section.An interesting automatic rifle with a side-mounted box magazine that was on display as a weapon of paratroopers.A fallshirmjaeger.This is an interesting glass landmine. It is unclear if the glass was because raw materials were becoming scarce toward the end of the war or whether this was to avoid mine detection. My theory is the latter.A Goliath. I hadn’t seen one with the top off before. This was used to drive explosives under enemy tanks.
After seeing everything in the museum itself, we walked around the corner to the panzerahalle (Tank Hall). This included an excellent display of Russian and Cold War equipment that you rarely see.
A 1:1 scale model of an Austrian tank design in 1911. This was way ahead of its time, but no prototypes were ever produced for testing.A view of a portion of the panzerhalle.After the museum we took the underground back to the center of town.Before returning to the boat, we stopped in a Viennese coffee house for coffee and desserts: JJ, Greg, Duncan.
