Battle of the Bulge Tour: The Ardennes, Winter 1944

You will meet your group in Brussels and travel east into the Ardennes, stopping at the tank barriers at Hollerath, the dragon’s teeth of the Westwall, and the Losheimergraben crossroads, where the German attack came through on the morning of December 16, 1944. After the church steeple at Hünningen you will walk the twin villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath and the crossroads at Lausdell, where the 2nd and 99th Infantry Divisions fought the German main effort to a standstill and denied it the road net the whole plan had been built around. It is the most consequential ground on the tour and the least visited. The evening brings a Welcome Dinner and your historian’s first lecture on the Ardennes campaign.

Today follows Kampfgruppe Peiper, the SS armored spearhead ordered to drive for the Meuse. From the railway bridge at Scheid east of Losheim you continue to Lanzerath, where eighteen men of an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon under Lieutenant Lyle Bouck, joined by a four-man artillery observation team, held up a German parachute battalion for most of December 16 and cost the SS column behind them some twenty hours it could not spare. Following Peiper’s route through Honsfeld and Büllingen, you will break for lunch in Malmedy before reaching the Baugnez crossroads, site of the Malmedy massacre, and Ligneuville, where the killing continued. The afternoon runs through Stavelot and its halftrack memorial to the railway tunnel at Trois-Ponts and the December 44 Museum at La Gleize, where Peiper’s abandoned King Tiger tank still sits, closing near Habiémont, where American engineers blew the bridge in his face with his lead tanks in sight of it.

The 106th Infantry Division, the Golden Lions, reached the front on December 11, 1944 and was holding twenty-one miles of it when the attack came five days later. You will begin at the 106th Infantry Division Memorial and the 168th Engineer Battalion Monument at St. Vith, then visit the Captain Eric Fisher Wood Memorial near Meyerode and the Wereth 11 memorial, which stands in a pasture where eleven men of the segregated 333rd Field Artillery Battalion were betrayed, tortured and shot on December 17, 1944, and is the only memorial in Europe dedicated to Black American servicemen of the Second World War. After lunch on your own in St. Vith, the afternoon crosses the ground where the 422nd and 423rd Infantry Regiments were encircled and surrendered on December 19, running from Andler toward Schönberg and past Hill 204 to the church at Bleialf, the Schwarzer Mann heights and the ridge road toward Roth and Auw, where the German columns came across.

The 28th Infantry Division wore a red keystone the Germans called the Bloody Bucket, and it was strung out along a Luxembourg ridge road, resting and rebuilding after the Hürtgen Forest, when the attack came. You will begin at Clervaux, where the division’s 110th Infantry made its stand, with the château in the valley and the American memorial in the town, then follow the fighting to the bridge at Dasburg, the water tower at Hosingen, where a rifle company and an engineer platoon held a village against a division for two days, the Café Schinker crossroads, and Wiltz, where the division band fought as infantry and is remembered by the Bazooka Boogie memorial. The day ends on the approaches to Bastogne at Longvilly, St. Michael’s Grotto, Mageret, Neffe and Marvie, where roadblock fighting bought the hours the 101st Airborne needed to get into the town first.

Seven roads meet at Bastogne, which is why the 101st Airborne was trucked up from Reims without winter gear and why the town was surrounded by December 21. Your day begins at the Bastogne War Rooms, where you will stand in the NUTS! Cellar in which General McAuliffe answered the German surrender demand on December 22, 1944, and continues at the Bastogne War Museum and the Mardasson Memorial, where the whole map is laid out at once. After lunch on your own in Bastogne you will work around the sixteen-mile perimeter: Noville, where a scratch force of armor and paratroopers held long enough to matter; the pines at Bois Jacques, where the foxholes Easy Company dug are still visible in the ground; a view across the fields to the Kessler Farm; the 326th Airborne Medical Company memorial at the Barrière Hinck crossroads, where the division’s field hospital was overrun on December 19; and Hemroulle and Champs, where the glider infantry fought German tanks at close range on Christmas morning.

You will follow the route of the relief from the south, through Clochimont and the bunker at Assenois, where Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’ tanks of the 4th Armored Division punched a corridor through to the town on December 26, 1944 and broke the siege. Crossing into Luxembourg, you will spend the middle of the day at the National Museum of Military History in Diekirch, whose life-size dioramas of the Ardennes fighting are among the finest anywhere, with lunch on your own in the town. The day closes at the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, where 5,076 Americans are buried and where General George S. Patton Jr. lies among the men he commanded, facing them.

Turning west toward Brussels, you will stop at La Roche-en-Ardenne, a town largely destroyed in the fighting and the shelling that followed, to see the Battle of the Bulge Memorial and the M10 Achilles tank destroyer. Your last stop on the battlefield is Celles, near Foy-Notre-Dame, where a knocked-out Panther tank marks the farthest westward point the German advance ever reached: the lead elements of the 2nd Panzer Division stopped here on Christmas Day, out of fuel and caught in the open, four miles short of the river they had set out to cross. The evening brings a Farewell Dinner and a concluding discussion at your airport hotel in Brussels.

The tour ends with a morning transfer to Brussels Airport (BRU) to catch flights home.