Our founder, Stephen E. Ambrose’s research produced the unrivaled experience that we offer on all of our Normandy tours: D-Day to the Rhine, Operation Overlord and Normandy Campaign. Each one tells an essential story about this pivotal chapter in WWII history that lead to the Allied victory.
The D-Day to the Rhine tells the entire story of the D-Day invasion, from the planning in England, to storming the beaches in Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge in Ardennes, one of the most epic and decisive victories of the war.
The Operation Overlord Tour covers the planning and execution of the D-Day invasion. The 9-day tour is ideal for travelers who are looking for a shorted Normandy tour that includes visits to the key sites in England and France.
The Normandy Campaign covers the 100 days of fighting that continued after D-Day. This is a great tour for those who have already traveled on our D-Day to the Rhine and Operation Overlord tours.
D-Day to the Rhine Tour
Commemorate the Allied invasion of Normandy that led to victory in Europe in World War II.
Stephen E. Ambrose first designed our D-Day tour itinerary in 1978 when he began his intense study of the D-Day invasion, the Normandy Campaign and western front in WWII. Ambrose travelled with countless veterans to find the sites where they trained in the United Kingdom and the battlefields where they made history in Europe.
Ambrose’s research produced the unrivaled experience that we offer on our D-Day to the Rhine Tour. His expertise was directly handed down to the next generation of historians who have continued to document the battlefield memories of hundreds of WWII veteran soldiers and officers at the very places where they fought. Their vast canon of knowledge is what makes our D-Day tour so authentic.
Operation Overlord Tour
Follow the Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen from where they trained for D-Day in England, to where they fought in the Normandy Campaign during World War II.
Our tour is based on thousands of hours of interviews that Stephen E. Ambrose and his support staff conducted with the veterans who made the landings on the invasion beaches of Omaha and Utah—and then survived to liberate Paris and beyond. In studying the battlefields with veterans and other scholars, Ambrose also spent hundreds of hours on the ground analyzing the terrain.
The cumulative research started by Ambrose is the foundation for this tour, and every historian who leads it has conducted their own WWII research. You will hear tales of courage that will deepen your understanding of our troops’ survival skills—their American ingenuity, endurance, bravery and humor—and the unimaginable sacrifices that drove our fighting men to win WWII.
The Normandy Campaign Tour
Study Operation Cobra, the Allied plan to take Brittany and trap the remaining German army in Normandy.
By the evening of D-Day, more than 150,000 Allied troops had landed on the coast of France and had breached Adolf Hitler’s once impregnable “Atlantic Wall.” The war, however, was a long way from over. For the next 80-days the world fixated its eyes on the battles raging in Normandy. After almost five years of war, the Allies were poised to decide the fate of Adolf Hitler’s vaunted “1,000 Year Reich.”
You will travel from the D-Day beaches to the inland campaigns in the heart of Normandy. You will retrace the path of the American, British and Canadian armies as they fought for Caen and Cherbourg, stand where the GIs of the 30th Infantry Division stopped the last great German offensive in Normandy in its tracks, and see where Free Polish forces closed the German’s last avenue of escape at Falaise. You will finish the tour in Paris, which the Allies liberated from the Nazis in August 1944.
