In Patton’s Footsteps

You depart Paris for Normandy, heading towards Omaha Beach. Your historian covers the landings of the 1st and 29th Divisions in the bloodiest action of the day. The day closes at the Normandy American Cemetery above Colleville-sur-Mer for the flag lowering ceremony and taps.

The morning begins at Brécourt Manor, where Lieutenant Dick Winters and the men of Easy Company took the German battery firing on Utah Beach, followed by the Utah Beach Museum at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. In the afternoon you visit Pointe du Hoc, where the Rangers scaled the cliffs and hunted down the relocated guns, then Sainte-Mère-Église, the first French town liberated, and La Fière, where the 82nd Airborne fought three days for the Merderet causeway.

You begin at Camp Patton in Nehou, the Cotentin orchard where Patton spent July 1944 waiting for Third Army to become operational while the press was told nothing of his whereabouts. Driving south through Coutances, you reach Avranches, where Third Army took command of the breakout, and the Pontaubault bridge, across which seven divisions passed in seventy-two hours to open the campaign in the west.

The morning is given to a guided tour of the abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel, the medieval monastery on its tidal island, with time for lunch on your own in the village. In the afternoon you visit Mortain, where the Germans attacked the 30th Infantry Division on 7 August in an attempt to cut Third Army’s supply line at Avranches. A cut-off battalion held Hill 314 for six days until relief arrived, and the summit gives you the ground and the view that made it worth holding. You continue to Mayenne, where one of Patton’s hard-luck divisions redeemed itself by seizing a vital bridge intact.

You travel to Argentan, where elements of Third Army turned north to close the Falaise Gap, and to Chambois, where American, Polish and Canadian troops fought to seal the German escape. At the Mont-Ormel Memorial on Hill 262 you look down from the ground the 1st Polish Armoured Division held against everything the encircled German army could throw at it, into the valley where that army was destroyed in August 1944. The evening is free in Reims.

The morning begins at the Musée de la Reddition in Reims, the schoolhouse that served as Eisenhower’s headquarters and where General Alfred Jodl signed the German unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945. You then drive to Verdun, site of the longest battle of the First World War, and to the room where Patton, Eisenhower and Bradley met in December 1944 to break the German stranglehold on Bastogne, and where Patton promised he could be attacking within forty-eight hours.

The afternoon turns to Patton’s own first war. At Pannes and Essey-et-Maizerais you see where a 32-year-old Lieutenant Colonel led tanks into the Saint-Mihiel offensive in September 1918, personally helping drive the Germans out of Pannes, and where he and Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur stood together under German shellfire, neither man willing to be the first to take cover.

In September 1944, short of fuel and replacements, Patton found himself stalled outside Metz, a city ringed with forts that had defeated every attacker for centuries. You will study the ground at Petite-Hettange, where Third Army crossed the Moselle and fought off the German counterattack, and lunch in Thionville. The afternoon is spent underground at Fort Hackenberg, the largest surviving work of the Maginot Line, with miles of tunnels, an electric railway and its gun turrets still in place.

When the Germans launched the Battle of the Bulge, Patton wheeled his army ninety degrees and drove north. You begin at the Patton statue at Ettelbruck, then tour the National Museum of Military History in Diekirch, whose life-size dioramas of the Ardennes fighting are among the best anywhere. Lunch is on your own in Clervaux, where the Germans broke through the 28th Infantry Division, before you continue to Longvilly and Noville, where armour and airborne troops slowed and then stopped the German drive on Bastogne. The evening is free in Luxembourg City.

You follow the route of the relief through Chaumont and Assenois, where Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’ tanks punched through the corridor and broke the siege the day after Christmas. At Bastogne Barracks you tour the War Heritage Institute site with a guide, and the afternoon is spent at the 101st Airborne Museum. Lunch is on your own in Bastogne. The evening is free in Luxembourg City.

The morning begins at the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, where 5,076 Americans are buried and where General George S. Patton Jr. rests among his men. You then cross into Germany for a lunch cruise on the Rhine, the river that was the last great barrier to the Allied advance, through the terraced vineyards and castles of the Middle Rhine Valley. Disembarking, you continue to Mannheim and the corner where the road accident of 9 December 1945 paralysed Patton and, twelve days later, ended his life. The tour closes with a farewell dinner near Frankfurt.

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