D-Day to the Rhine

The morning features a guided tour of key London sites that figured prominently in the war, followed by a visit to the Imperial War Museum, home to the national collection of twentieth-century conflict: aircraft, armor, weaponry and the immersive First World War galleries. In the afternoon you will descend into the Churchill War Rooms, the reinforced basement complex beneath Whitehall that ran continuously from August 1939 until the lights went out in August 1945, preserved essentially as it was left.

The evening is free to enjoy London.

Depart London for Bletchley Park, where a secret workforce of 9,000 — three-quarters of them women and many of them codebreakers — broke the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. You will see the huts where Alan Turing and his colleagues worked, the reconstructed Bombe, and the story of Ultra, the intelligence secret that held for nearly thirty years after the war ended.

In the afternoon you travel south to the Channel coast, where your historian will discuss Operation Neptune, the naval assault phase of the invasion, and the vast embarkation effort that filled every harbor along this coastline in the spring of 1944.

Overnight on the southern coast, close to Portsmouth Harbour, one of the principal D-Day embarkation points.

You will cross the English Channel by ferry, embarking for Normandy much as the troops did in 1944, and begin touring the invasion coast the same afternoon.

Over the following days in Normandy your visits will include the following sites, and possibly others:

• Longues-sur-Mer Battery: The only German coastal battery in Normandy still holding its original guns, and the finest surviving example of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall
• Utah Beach and the Utah Beach Museum: Where American forces came ashore on June 6, 1944, and where the story of the landings is preserved today
• Brécourt Manor: Where Lieutenant Dick Winters led the men of Easy Company against the German battery firing on Utah Beach
• Sainte-Mère-Église: The first French town liberated, taken by the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment
• Sainte-Marie-du-Mont: Whose distinctive church steeple the Germans used as an observation post over the invasion beaches
• La Fière: Where the 82nd Airborne fought three days for the Merderet causeway in one of the bloodiest small-unit actions in American history
• Angoville-au-Plain: The village church where two American medics treated some eighty wounded men, American and German alike, the bloodstains still visible in the pews
• Purple Heart Lane: The exposed causeway toward Carentan where Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole led the war’s most famous bayonet charge
• La Cambe German Cemetery: Where more than 21,000 German dead lie beneath dark basalt crosses
• Pointe du Hoc: Where the Rangers scaled hundred-foot cliffs and hunted down the relocated German guns
• Omaha Beach: Driven end to end, where the Americans suffered their heaviest losses of D-Day
• Normandy American Cemetery: The deeply moving 172-acre cemetery above Colleville-sur-Mer, overlooking Omaha Beach, where nearly 9,400 American servicemen and women are buried, including Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
• Pegasus Bridge and Ranville: Where British glider troops landed at sixteen minutes past midnight and fired the first shots of D-Day
• Sword Beach and the Hillman Fortress: Where the 3rd British Division came ashore and where a buried German regimental headquarters held up the advance on Caen
• Juno Beach and the Canadian Monument: Site of the deepest Allied penetration of D-Day
• Gold Beach and the British Normandy Memorial: Where the 50th Northumbrian Division landed, and where 22,442 names are now inscribed above the sea

On the final morning in Normandy you will follow the German collapse east to the Dives Crossing and Mont-Ormel (Hill 262), where the 1st Polish Armoured Division held the high ground against everything the encircled German army could throw at it, before continuing to an overnight stay near Paris.

An early departure by train brings you to Brussels, where your coach is waiting. From there you turn north onto Hell’s Highway, the single two-lane road that XXX Corps had to travel to reach Arnhem in September 1944, driving the corridor won by the 101st and 82nd Airborne past the landing zones and bridges that made Operation Market Garden possible: Son, Eindhoven, Grave and Nijmegen, where the 82nd made its daylight assault crossing of the Waal in canvas boats.

The day ends at the Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’ at Oosterbeek, the former hotel that served as British 1st Airborne headquarters and the heart of the shrinking perimeter. Your historian will recount how Lieutenant Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Battalion held the Arnhem bridge for four days against SS armor that was not supposed to be there, and how barely 2,400 of some 10,000 men made it back across the Rhine.

Overnight in Arnhem.

Crossing into Germany, your first stop is the dragon’s teeth of the Westwall, the Siegfried Line, south of Aachen, the belt of concrete anti-tank obstacles that American GIs fought so hard to breach in the autumn of 1944.

You then turn to the Battle of the Bulge. At Lanzerath Ridge, eighteen men of an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon under Lieutenant Lyle Bouck, joined by a four-man artillery observation team, held up the lead battalion of a German parachute regiment for most of 16 December 1944, delaying the SS spearhead behind them by some twenty hours and becoming the most decorated American unit of its size in the war. At Baugnez Crossroads outside Malmedy you will visit the memorial where Joachim Peiper’s SS murdered eighty-four American prisoners on 17 December, news of which hardened American resolve for the rest of the campaign.

The afternoon follows Peiper’s drive to its end through Stavelot, Trois-Ponts and La Gleize, where his abandoned King Tiger still sits in the village square, and on to Parker’s Crossroads, before a scenic run through the Ardennes to the evening’s lodging.

Today you study the siege that defined the Bulge. Beginning at the Houffalize Panther and the delaying action at Noville, you will walk the ground at Foy and stand in the Bois Jacques foxholes still visible in the pines where Easy Company endured the December shelling. In Bastogne you will visit the Mardasson Monument and the Bastogne War Museum, see the crossroads town where the 101st Airborne and elements of the 10th Armored Division held out while surrounded, and hear how General McAuliffe answered a German surrender demand with a single word: “NUTS.” At Assenois you will see where Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’ tanks punched through the corridor that broke the siege the day after Christmas.

The day closes at the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, where 5,076 Americans are buried and where General George S. Patton Jr. rests among his men.

Overnight in Luxembourg City, with the evening free to enjoy this bustling old-world capital.

This morning you leave Luxembourg for the Rhine, the river that stood as the last great barrier to the Allied advance and the objective that gives this tour its name. Your historian will trace the closing months of the war in the west, from the breaching of the Siegfried Line through the Allied crossings of March 1945 and the collapse of German resistance beyond it.

You will arrive at Sankt Goar, beneath the ruins of Burg Rheinfels and opposite the Loreley rock, and board a boat for a cruise through the Middle Rhine Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape of terraced vineyards, river traffic and castles on every bend. Lunch is served on board. Disembarking at Assmannshausen, you continue to Frankfurt, where you will enjoy a farewell dinner and discussion after an enriching campaign into history.

Overnight at a hotel near Frankfurt International Airport (FRA).

There will be one morning departure to Frankfurt International Airport (FRA) to catch your flight home.

Guests continuing on the post-tour extension will travel to Nuremberg.

You continue south through Bavaria, stopping first at Dachau. Opened in March 1933, seven weeks after Hitler took power, Dachau was the first regular Nazi concentration camp and became the model and training ground for the entire SS camp system. More than 200,000 prisoners from over thirty countries were held here, among them Jews, resistance fighters, clergymen, politicians, writers, artists and royalty, and at least 41,500 died. American troops liberated the camp on  April 29, 1945.

After lunch in a traditional Munich restaurant, you will enjoy a city tour of the movement’s birthplace: the Hofbräuhaus, where the party program was proclaimed in 1920; the Feldherrnhalle at Odeonsplatz, where the Beer Hall Putsch was shot down in 1923; Königsplatz, remodeled as the party’s parade ground; and the university where Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose were arrested, four days before their execution.

Overnight in Munich, your base for the final two nights.

Today you travel to Berchtesgaden for a guided tour of Obersalzberg, Hitler’s mountain retreat and, after Martin Bormann expropriated the entire hillside, a second seat of government complete with SS barracks, leadership villas and an extensive bunker system. You will visit the site of the Berghof, where Chamberlain came in 1938 and where much of the regime’s informal decision-making took place. It was bombed by the RAF in April 1945, burned by the retreating SS as American troops approached, and demolished in 1952.

You will then ascend to the Eagle’s Nest, presented to Hitler for his fiftieth birthday and reached by a road blasted into the rock and a brass-lined elevator driven straight up through the mountain. The road network was completed in only thirteen months in 1937 and 1938.

The complex fell to American troops in early May 1945, a fitting close for a journey that began on the Channel coast.

For your final night, you will reflect on your journey and enjoy the camaraderie of a farewell dinner.

There will be one morning transfer to Munich Airport (MUC) to catch your flight home.