Hi, my dear friends, I finally recouped from my extenuating long trip through Belgium (Ardennes > Battle of the Bulge) and France (Normandy > Ouistreham through Ste. Mere-Eglise), as well as - for those more inclined to modeling ancient castles of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance a few visits to a few Loire Valley castles.
I will document my journey as it happened. Logically it should have been the other way round, from Brittany through Normandy on to Belgium, but since I live in Switzerland, it was easier for me to go in reverse.
I took the path of Jochen Peiper and other German units during the first phases of their invasion into the Ardennes. Alas, nothing really major to see except, at least for me, the terrain and the nature all around it imagining how it must have looked in the Winter of 1944, more precisely from December 16 through December 18, when Peiper started to encounter the very first problems with the U.S. Forces and the lack of fuel, among many others.
What was really worth visiting was actually Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne were besieged by the Germans until Patton managed to chase them out of there. There are a few very interesting things to explore there. One of them is called Bastogne Barracks which was actually the U.S. Headquarters there commanded by General McAuliffe, who became famous for having responded “Nuts” to the German messenger asking him to surrender on behalf of the German command.
Now it is a mechanical depot where they restore many vehicles of WWII and then display them in their own museum.
Another worthwhile visit should not only be the Airborne Memorial but rather the Bois St. Jacques, where the 101st had encamped and dug many shelters into the ground and where many men actuallly died, not so much through German shelling or bullets, but through the icy conditions during that winter and indeed, some froze to death in their makeshift holes in the ground.
It was a very emotional experience for me, even if I am Swiss and had no one in my family involved in those battles, but as a human being, and even as a former actor and director I could really feel what they must have experienced during such terrible days and weeks.
I, myself have served in the Swiss Army and we did indeed spend some time in makeshift holes in the snow in the mountains, but at least we had sleeping bags holding us warm, but to get out from those holes in the morning, sometimes snowed in and frozen took quite a while and one could really feel the freezing temperatures, especially if you had to wash yourself in cold water which woke you up instantly but resulted in very frozen hands.
All this just to tell you that it is a worthwhile visit for those who want to know more about the conditions in which those poor sods had to live and die.
In Normandy instead, not all Museums are worth visiting, since for someone who has already extensively studied WWII, its origins and its aftermath already knows what they are explaining.
In some ways I was also disappointed by the Canadian Juno Beach Museum in which I expected to know much more about their landing actions and instead all I did get was a seminar on how civilians suffered during the occupation by the Germans and the Vichy Fascists. All things, again, I already very well knew and so it was just a waste of money and time.
But other museums, such as the Casino Bunker in Oustreham, the Longues-sur-Mer battery, and some of the Bunkers still existing on Fox Green (WN61) and Easy Red (WN62) as well as the giant dome of the Observation Bunker at Pointe-du-Hoc, plus many in between Museums offer a lot to be seen.
Carentan instead didn’t offer much, nor did Villers-Bocage where Wittman managed to stop an entire British column of vehcles and tanks with his Tigers. Nothing left to see of these historic passages. But Ste. Mere-Eglise has a large Airborne Museum which includes a Dakota transport aicraft and a large Diorama which includes a complete WACO glider.
My visit in all those places was not just meant to visit museums but to explore the terrain and understand how to faithfully reproduce those historic places in scale without adding stuff that was not there at the time.
This is why I also stopped many locals in hope they might know something of how those various regions actually looked like back in the 1940s and amazingly mostly farmers either elderly ones, but also younger ones who had their grandfathers living in those villages described in detail how their landscape looked there when the Germans occupied it.
Indeed the best way to fully understand the landscapes.
One notable and very friendly encounter happened just while I visited Fox Green to examine the 88mm PAK43/41 Bunker which now is actually a garage with the neighbor of the current owners and told me that they were on holiday and allowed me to rummaging around to take a few pictures to see if I did recreate it correctly.
Of course many changes have been applied to it and it looked quite different from what it appeared on June 6th, 1944, but since I did follow the original plans, all in all I did manage to reproduce it to a tee.
Same thing at Longues-sur-Mer where I imagined that the Naval Gun in Bunker 3 was the actual still intact one. WRONG!!! The only one still completely intact is Number 4, the last one in the row. But the Bunker I recreated is in fact Number 3 and it looks and feels just like its original one.
The only downside is that by now the terrain that covered all the side walls of these Bunkers almost to the top has eroded quite a lot and to reach the roof one must climb it, but at my age I cannot do that anymore, but no big deal, I could take pictures on its sides.
So, now that you know all this, my next post will contain my pictures of the various stopovers I made and I will try to explain what they represent.
I hope you will like them and for those trying to reproduce Battle of the Bulge dioramas, just imagine all that green stuff you will see covered under a thick layer of snow a bit everywhere.
Good viewing and don’t forget to add some comments on my posts for which I will certainly be grateful.
