A World War II European vacation to remember

About two years ago I was talking with Mike, a friend of mine I’ve known since Ronald Reagan was still in the White House, and he asked me a question out of left field: What if we went on a tour of World War II European battlefields?

I couldn’t say yes fast enough because, other than two weeks in Scotland visiting a girlfriend in college, my only experiences in Europe involved short layovers in Frankfurt, Germany, and Shannon, Ireland, going to – and coming out of – Iraq between 2004 and 2005.

And that’s how we found ourselves meeting up at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on May 1 for three days of sightseeing around the City of Lights before boarding a tour bus that would carry us across France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to see snapshots of World War II on the European front.

While in Paris we saw the highlights, from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe along the Champs Elysées, walking among the gardens of stone at the Père Lachaise to visit the final resting place of Jim Morrison, experiencing the majesty of Notre Dame, eating in sidewalk cafes and riding the Paris Métro. We also took the train about 60 miles east to Château-Thierry to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, which sits in the shadow of Belleau Wood.

When we started planning our trip to Europe in 2023 Mike asked me what’s one thing I’d like to see and experience. I thought about it and said Belleau Wood, which I had first heard about during Marine Corps history classes in boot camp. It was at this forest outside of Paris in the summer of 1918 that the Germans had launched one last offensive. The French lines in the Marne sector were collapsing and the Allied Expeditionary Force sent in two Marine Regiments and the 2nd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army to hold the line.

As legend goes, a French colonel leading his troops back toward Paris told the Marines they should retreat as well. Capt. Lloyd Williams, USMC, replied, “Retreat hell. We just got here.”

The Marines suffered massive losses but pressed the attack home through Belleau Wood. The Germans, surprised by their tenacity, called the Marines Teufel Hunden … Devil Dogs.

Below the forest, the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery holds close to 3,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who fell during World War I. Another 1,000 remain missing. As you approach the cemetery you find these men standing in an eternal parade, headstones on line, covered down on the person in front and aligned to the right. Even in death there is a precision among the rank and file.

Across the European continent, from France to Belgium to Luxembourg, there are similar gardens of stone sitting under the Stars and Stripes, filled with thousands more servicemembers from both World Wars.

This wasn’t a vacation so much as a remembrance tour to get a glimpse of the hell on Earth people endured in Europe.

Road trip

After our brief stay in Paris we were back out at the airport to meet up with Beaches of Normandy Tours, our guides for the next 11 days as we traveled to 81-year-old battlefields that help tell the stories of our past, no matter how painful it might be, and see firsthand what people, military and civilian alike, endured during the war.

Our tour director was Ben Major, whose job was to gather a flock of 40 people from all across the United States and keep the bus running on time as we traveled from point to point across Europe. Akos Lenart, our bus driver, might have been a former F1 driver with the skills with which he drove the bus through the narrow side streets of Arromanches and the switch backs leading up to Obersalzberg.

While I had read a number of books over the years about World War II, and the Normandy invasion in particular – including Stephen Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers” and “Pegasus Bridge” and Cornelius Ryan’s “The Longest Day” – their writings are made tangible when you walk the beaches and past the hedgerows and across the cobbled streets, house to house, where the events of June 6, 1944, through the war’s end the following May took place.

Ben talked up every town we were traveling through, explaining the history of each region and subordinate department within each. Think counties and states. As we left Paris behind he explained there were two famous monuments in France, and that the Eiffel Tower was the second most famous symbol behind the McDonald’s Golden Arches, though there may be some debate about that from the people of France.

Four hours on the road – three hours driving plus an hour stop for lunch – and we arrived at our hotel in Port-en-Bessin-Huppain.

Utah Beach

The first full day of our tour started early in the morning with a short drive down the winding roads of the Cotentin peninsula to Utah Beach. The brisk wind whipped up the sand along the dunes overlooking the wide, flat beach where, the 4th Infantry Division landed at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. The division commander, Maj. Gen. Raymond Barton, had fought the request of his assistant division commander to go ashore in the first assault wave. In the end, after much discussion, and a carefully worded letter, Barton relented, and that’s how Theodore Roosevelt Jr. ended up in the first wave.

Once ashore he realized the first troops ashore had landed on the wrong stretch of beach but made the decision that we would start the war from here now.

Leaving Utah Beach you see memorials along the road every now and then to different battles and the people who fought in them. Near the farm at Brecourt Manor, for instance, there were memorials to the men of Easy Co., 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and their leader, Lt. Dick Winters, who assaulted the German gun battery dug in on the grounds.

Overshot the dropzone

As a fire raged in a building in Sainte-Mere-Eglise, a bucket brigade of French civilians worked frantically to put the fire out as the German garrison looked on.

Suddenly just after 1 a.m. on June 6, paratroopers started landing in and around the city square, having overshot their drop zones. At point-blank range the Germans were fighting paratroopers as they dropped out of the sky and hit the ground. Two paratroopers landed on the church, their chutes caught on the spires. Two men were sucked down into a burning building across the cobblestone square, their ammunition exploding.

The American airborne troops marshaled outside of town and attacked in force, liberating the town later in the morning.

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Like in many towns across Europe, when walking around Sainte-Mere-Eglise you’ll find one of their main industries is D-Day tourism. Restaurants and pubs have airborne themes, gift shops are filled with D-Day and airborne tchotchkes. The centerpiece of the experience is the Airborne Museum, which tells the story of the Airborne and glider troops who participated in the Normandy landings with buildings filled with interactive dioramas, displays and historical artifacts.

Also, if you find yourself needing a haircut there’s Hair’born Coiffure across the road from the church.

Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc

“There are two kinds of people who are staying on this beach: those who are dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” -Col. George Taylor, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division

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The second day of our tour took us from the American cemetery, which overlooked Easy 1 and Easy 3, two lanes off Omaha Beach, across to the Dog and Charlie lanes, and later in the day the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. Approximately 2,400 servicemen were killed, wounded or missing during the landings at Omaha.

The temperature was a cool 54 degrees Fahrenheit (I didn’t convert to Celsius during the trip), or 45 degrees with the wind chill. At times on the beach you feel the lash of the wind, the bite of the sand or the salty spray of water, sometimes all at once.

Walking around in jeans and a light jacket taking photos every few feet is one thing, but imagine throwing on a rucksack, load-bearing equipment for your ammunition and a helmet, picking up a rifle and boarding a landing craft for the slow journey through choppy waters, trying in vain not to throw up, heading to a beach filled with flying lead and death a real possibility for one in four men on your landing craft.

Overlooking the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach sits the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. Honestly, there are no words that can adequately express what I saw and felt walking through acres upon acres of white crosses overlooking Easy 1 and Easy 3, two of the Omaha exit lanes.

We walked as the gray skies threw a smattering of rain and wind at us and listened while our local tour guide, Christophe, explained each memorial wall, the history of the cemetery, and shared the significance of several people buried in the cemetery, including Quentin Roosevelt, a fighter pilot who was shot down during the first World War in June 1918, and was buried next to his older brother, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., who died in France 26 years later during the second.

Quentin was the only son of a president to die in combat. Teddy Jr., like his father, received the Medal of Honor, one of only two fathers and son to receive the medal. The other was Arthur MacArthur Jr., who received for his actions at the Battle of Missionary Ridge during the Civil War, and his son Douglas.

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“How did we do this? It was crazy then and it’s crazy now.” -Lt. Col. James Rudder, 2nd Ranger Battalion, in comments made when he revisited Pointe du Hoc for the first time 10 years after the war

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For the men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, the job to take out coastal defense batteries involved approaching the beach from choppy seas under fire, scaling a 100-foot cliff again under fire and rolling straight into the assault on these gun positions.

Prior to their attack, bombing raids by the Army Air Corps saturated the fields above the cliffs. In one hour-long period, 637 tons of bombs were dropped on roughly 40 acres of land.

The grounds of Pointe du Hoc are now covered in dense grasses and shrubs and pockmarked with huge, bowl shaped holes.

Once they scaled the cliffs and started to fight their way inland, one bunker and pillbox at a time, they found the artillery pieces they were supposed to knock out had never been installed.

Pegasus Bridge, Batterie de Longues-sur-Mer and Juno Beach

Our fourth day on tour was our last day in Normandy so we were on a mad dash criss-crossing the coast. We started the morning with Pegasus Bridge, followed by Sword Beach, Longues-Sur-Mer, Arromanches and ended the afternoon at Juno Beach.

Driving across the Cotentin peninsula to Bénouville, our first site visit was Pegasus Bridge. It was here that Major John Howard of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was given the task of seizing the bridges across the Orne River and Caen canal from the Germans on June 6.

The roughly 180 men of the Ox and Bucks would be dropped into their landing zone on six Horsa gliders, with the orders to seize the bridge and hold it until reinforcements, led by Simon Fraser, the 15th Lord Lovat, advanced inland from Sword Beach to link up with Howard’s men.

When the gliders dropped out of the sky their training paid off. The first glider landed 50 meters from the bridge. Two more landed right behind the first one. The Ox and Bucks seized the bridges and held them until reinforcements arrived from the sea.

If you’ve ever seen the 1962 movie “The Longest Day,” the segment about Pegasus Bridge was filmed on location. Both Maj. Howard and Lord Lovat served as technical advisers while the English actor who played Howard in the film, Richard Todd, wore his personal beret in the movie. Todd had been a paratrooper in the 6th Airborne Division who jumped into Normandy and was also part of the relief force that moved inland as part of the force to relieve Major Howard’s forces.

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The gun battery at Longues-Sur-Mer was a section of the Atlantic Wall, four 6-inch guns housed in concrete and steel bunkers.

Their mission was to engage naval forces offshore, with a network of machine gun nests and mortar pits all linked into a command bunker near the cliff that dropped down to the beach below.

It was here, though there has been vigorous debate as to whether he was the first, that Major Werner Pluskat of the 352nd Artillery Regiment at Longues-Sur-Mer reported the invasion was underway.

The battery fired 157 shells, each one weighing 100 pounds and required two men to carry. Ships offshore providing fire support to the landings helped encourage the battery to cease fire, including USS Arkansas, a pre-World War I battleship.

Not one shell fired by the battery hit a ship offshore.

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Many people know Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and France and Great Britain declared war against Germany a few days later. What I did not know was that the Canadians declared war independently from Great Britain on Sept. 10.

Our last stop of the day on our last day in Normandy was the Juno Beach Centre, unique in that it was financed by people from Canada, with its staff and tour guides all Canadians. Our guide was Vivian, a 22-year-old from Ontario, who had been chosen for a seven-month tour at the center.

She explained that with the construction of the center, located along a nearly mile-long stretch of beachfront property known as the Mike Red sector 81 years ago, the Canadians were able to tell their story, often overshadowed by the British, Americans and Free French in the liberation of Europe.

Of all the museums and monuments that focused on telling the immediate story of what happened in the moment during the war, the Juno Beach Centre set itself apart in that it tells not just the role Canada played in World War II, but what life was like on the homefront before and during the war, and Canada’s modern role supporting U.N. Peacekeeping missions along with combat operations in Afghanistan.

The final panels of the museum walls focused on the mental health of veterans, particularly in coping with PTSD. It was the first, but not the last, site where the remembrance tour addressed those invisible wounds of war.

Bastogne and the Luxembourg American Cemetery

After four days along the Normandy coast we piled onto our tour bus for the next part of our tour, a six-hour drive across France and Belgium to Bastogne. At a pit stop halfway across France, I realized that Jules Winnfield, played by Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction,” was right.

In Europe, McDonald’s does not have a Quarter Pounder with cheese. It’s the Royal with cheese, because of the metric system.

Bastogne, home to about 15,000 people, is like many small towns across Europe which goes out of its way to remember the sacrifices made during World War II. The town square in the center of Bastogne is named McAuliffe Square, after the general who led the 101st Airborne during the siege. It’s hard to miss, as it’s home to the only street light in town, is surrounded by restaurants and at least four different pizzerias and a Sherman tank.

A plaque adorns a wall outside Cite Wok, an Asian restaurant a few blocks from the center of town remembering the wounded soldiers and Renée Lemaire, a Belgian nurse dubbed the “Angel of Bastogne” who were killed there in a German bombing raid on Christmas Eve 1944. At a cemetery not far from town Lemaire’s grave site is a veritable shrine a few yards away from a similar shrine to fellow nurse Augusta Chiwy, who was born in the Belgian Congo and on that Christmas Eve was in a nearby building when the bombs hit the aid station and survived the war.

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A few minutes from the cemetery is the Bastogne Barracks, home to a vehicle restoration center where mechanics painstakingly restore World War II-era tracked and wheeled American, British and German vehicles.

Among the tanks with names like Sherman and Grant and Churchill and Valentine was one Sherman painted in the livery of Cobra King, the first tank to break through the German lines at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. The real Cobra King is on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Army at Fort Belvoir near Washington, D.C.

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“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” -Gen. George S. Patton

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More than 5,000 troops lie in rest at Luxembourg American Cemetery. Twelve sets of brothers. One woman. And Gen. George S. Patton.

Sidelined for D-Day, he arrived in France after the Normandy landings, took command of the 3rd Army and started pushing eastward for Berlin. When the Germans launched the Battle of the Bulge, Patton ordered the 3rd Army to standby for a change of mission. At a high level conference of Allied commanders no one thought any of the armies could be re-tasked to relieve Bastogne in 72 hours. Patton said he could do it in 48. And he did.

As much as the groundskeepers keep the cemetery grass seeded, watered and mowed, the grass around Patton’s grave was always muddy and unkempt because of the sheer volume of visitors to his gravesite. So his grave stands apart from the rest, behind a chain, facing a formation of other fallen servicemen.

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“Even today, a real cold night, my wife will tell you that first thing I say is I’m glad I’m not in Bastogne.” -Sgt. JB Stokes, Easy Co. 506 PIR

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On a warm sunny day in May, you can walk through Bois Jacques, which overlooks the nearby town of Foy, an array of foxholes and fighting positions preserved behind fences with admission allowed only through the Bastogne War Museum, in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt.

Eighty years ago this last December, 101st Airborne troopers, lacking cold weather clothing, gloves, cold weather boots and ammunition, battled the Germans, trench foot, hunger and frostbite, not necessarily in that order. And then, after holding that line and suffering serious casualties, were ordered to attack Foy across several hundred yards of open ground. So that’s what they did.

Dachau and the Eagle’s Nest

After several days in Bastogne and visiting nearby Luxembourg we were back on the tour bus for a drive from Belgium to Germany for our final stop on the tour, Munich, where we’d take a walking tour around the city core to see all the different locations that chronicled Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, drive up to Obersalzberg to visit Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, and in-between visit one of the most horrible places I’ve ever been, the Konzentrationslager Dachau.

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You walk down tree lined brick paths that lead up to a gatehouse with a black iron gate. At the top of the gate door is written “Arbeit Macht Frei” – “Work sets you free.”

Your welcome to the Dachau work concentration camp was a lie as all of the criminals sent to the camp – Jews, homosexuals, priests, journalists, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and whoever else was deemed an enemy of the state – rarely left the camp alive. Thousands perished inside its walls.

If you didn’t show up to roll call on time it was a crime that could be punishable by death. If your bunk wasn’t made correctly, that crime was also punishable by death.

If you were sick you didn’t want to end up in the camp infirmary, where German doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners. Some were injected with malaria in an attempt to find a cure; others were subjected to dunking in ice cold water to measure hypothermia. Others were placed in a pressurized chamber and then sent up to high altitudes and then brought down through rapid depressurization to observe the prisoners’ reactions. A photo montage documents one prisoner suffering an aneurysm and dying during depressurization.

And for the prisoners who died, a crematorium on the camp’s grounds disposed of their remains. While Dachau had a crematorium, it was built to serve as a slave labor camp, not a conveyor belt to a human meat grinder like Auschwitz, which was part of Hitler’s “Final Solution” to slaughter Jews.

As you read this, realize that it was halfway through walking down a prisoner block at this former concentration camp I muttered the first words – not fit for print – I’d said since I stepped foot inside Dachau half an hour earlier.

Even as you read this I cannot fathom the evil that was unleashed on the world by the Nazis. There was only one bright spot, if you could call it that, when I visited Dachau. The children.

Hundreds of schoolchildren, in tour groups of 20 to 30, were taken through the grounds on learning tours similar to ours. Learning and hopefully at the end of the day remembering.

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The final day of our tour was to Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Fourteen days earlier we had started our journey in Normandy, crossing Western Europe, visiting different historical sites that played a role in World War II, so it’s fitting the last place we visited was Kehlsteinhaus, known in English as the Eagle’s Nest.

To get to this mountaintop retreat required driving up to Obersalzberg to a parking lot for a second bus ride uphill to a tunnel, which was bored through solid rock in the 1930s, that led to a large brass elevator that carries up to 20 people at a time several flights up through the mountain, where the doors open inside the Eagle’s Nest, which is now a restaurant with a beer garden out back.

Beyond the beer garden, a hiking path leads further up a ridgeline, the boulders on the ground and along the sides of the path practically polished from decades of people stepping on them or using them for handholds. The footpath is deceptive in that just when you think you’re at the top there’s one more saddle, one more ridge to climb

From that perch, at 6,017 feet above sea level in the Bavarian Alps you could see for miles; from Berchtesgaden and Königssee (King’s Lake) all the way Salzburg, approximately 30 miles north of us in Austria.

More than 80 years ago this was a mountaintop villa that Hitler visited about 14 documented times. Back in those days, Berchtesgaden wasn’t just the vacation getaway for high-ranking Nazi officials like Martin Borrman, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. Berchtesgaden was the place from which the Nazis planned their conquest of Europe.

Today it’s the top tourist attraction in the region. Sitting in the beer garden in the sun drinking a quarter-liter of beer, I watched a toddler at a nearby table learn the joys of repeatedly dipping a piece of bread into a bowl of soup as a parasailer buzzed past us before turning back down toward Berchtesgaden.

Rod Serling’s closing narration for “Deaths-Head Revisited,” an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” encapsulates why we need remembrance tourism, why people need to see and experience firsthand the killing fields of France, Belgium and Germany, and why people need to know that the Nazis let loose on the planet were monsters who created places like Dachau as a testament to their evil:

“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard.”