At 0700 on 30 November 1944, the 46th Armored Infantry Battalion crossed 2,000 yards of open ground to take Kleinhau and Hill 401.3. Casualties were heavy. Visited the memorial today with a guest who just learned her father fought here.
Joe Mann, H Company, 502nd PIR, 101st Airborne, was 22. The memorial near the canal marks the ground. A stop on the tour I'm running this week, from the Netherlands to Berchtesgaden with Sea the World Travel.
On the morning of 19 September 1944, a grenade landed in his forward position near the Wilhelmina Canal at Best. He shouted "grenade" and fell onto it. Six men in the foxhole survived.
Joe Mann was awarded the Medal of Honor for throwing himself backwards onto a German hand grenade. He couldn't pick it up. Both arms were bandaged to his chest, immobilised by four separate wounds taken the day before.
Today's tour: the son and two grandsons of a glider pilot who landed near Nijmegen on 18 September 1944, his Waco carrying a jeep of the 320th GFAB. We followed his route from the landing zone south to the fields below Veghel, where he was caught up in the German counter-attack at the Koevering.
An arbitrary cut-off date was chosen: 15 August 1917. Another 35,000 names had to go to Tyne Cot instead. A memorial to the missing that ran out of room for the missing.
Over 54,000 names on its walls, and it still wasn't enough. The Menin Gate in Ypres was built to record every Commonwealth soldier killed in the Salient with no known grave. When they finished it in 1927, they realised it couldn't hold them all.
Still on the wall. The swastika was scrambled. Everything else stayed. Berchtesgaden station, on my battlefield tours.
The bridge behind this monument carries 48 pairs of street lights, one for each American paratrooper killed crossing the Waal here on 20 September 1944. Every evening at sunset they are lit one by one at marching pace. A veteran walks with them. Every single night since 2014.
The date is still carved above the entrance. The space where the Reich eagle was mounted is still visible. Today it appears to serve as a small shop. Easy to miss. Something I always point out when guiding groups through Berchtesgaden.
Three guardhouses once controlled the road from Berchtesgaden to the Obersalzberg. Only one survives. Built in 1937, it sits by the river near the train station, right where the road begins its climb.
He stayed at the nearby guesthouse under the name "Hugo Wolf." The cabin had a tiled stove, a table, a chair and a bed. It was demolished around 1951. The foundations are still there. A site I cover on my Obersalzberg tours.
A few stone foundations in the forest on the Obersalzberg. Easy to walk past. This was the Kampfhäusl, a small log cabin where the second volume of Mein Kampf was dictated after its author's release from Landsberg prison in 1924.
On 30 September 1938, this was the Führerbau, where four leaders signed the Munich Agreement at 1:30 in the morning. Czechoslovakia's delegates were not inside. They waited in a nearby hotel, under Gestapo watch, and were handed the result the next morning. Their approval was not expected.
The room is smaller than you’d expect. Courtroom 600, Nuremberg. Where the International Military Tribunal changed international law forever.
Bullet holes from 1944 in a wall built in 1155. The Barbarossa ruin in Nijmegen's Valkhof Park stands overlooking the Waal road bridge, right where the 82nd Airborne and British armour fought to clear German positions during Market Garden. Today's highlights tour with an American guest.
This parking lot hides the most deliberately forgotten structure in Berlin. Beneath the gravel lie the remains of the Führerbunker, walls up to four metres thick, that the Red Army tried three times to demolish and failed. So the East Germans buried it and paved over the top.
The Guards Armoured Division, themselves delayed by a German blocking line, finally linked up with the Americans in Eindhoven in the afternoon. The schedule was already slipping. Sixty kilometres to the north, John Frost's battalion was holding the Arnhem bridge with no relief in sight.
Instead, the demolition at Son forced improvisation. A temporary crossing had to be arranged before the advance could continue. They waited for first light and by the time the 101st reached the Dommel and pushed into central Eindhoven.
The plan assumed the Son bridge would be taken intact, allowing a rapid push into Eindhoven and a link-up with XXX Corps driving north from the Belgian border in the early morning hours of 18 September.
When the Germans blew the bridge at Son over the Wilhelmina Canal on 17 September 1944, the entire timetable for the division's advance was wrecked.
Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne at the bridge over the Dommel on the Kanaalstraat in Eindhoven, 18 September 1944. The Screaming Eagles lost hours they could not spare before they ever reached Eindhoven.
Three miles up, three miles down, often in full gear. The purpose was simple: paratroopers who could not keep up had no place in an airborne regiment. Sink was building a unit that would eventually make combat jumps into Normandy and Holland. "Currahee" is Cherokee. It means "stands alone."
The Colonel Sink Memorial Trail winds up Mount Currahee near Toccoa, Georgia. It does not look like much until you start climbing. Colonel Robert Sink had the men of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment run this trail repeatedly during 1942 and 1943.
The division was all but destroyed for the second time in weeks, but its resistance and sacrifice slowed the German advance by critical days. That delay allowed the 101st Airborne to reach Bastogne in time to hold it.
The 28th had been sent to the Ardennes to recover. Instead, every available soldier, bandsmen included, was thrown into a desperate fight against overwhelming German forces.
When the German offensive began on 16 December 1944, the division was so depleted after being torn apart in the Hürtgen Forest that even the band members had to drop their instruments and pick up bazookas and rifles.
Near Wiltz, Luxembourg, a PaK 43/88mm stands as part of the Bazooka Boogie Memorial. The memorial takes its name from the 28th Infantry Division Band.
They held this position at the Dreyeroord Hotel, the “White House,” anchoring the northeastern perimeter under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Payton-Reid DSO alongside Glider Pilots until 21st September. The original hotel was replaced by the current building in 2019. The memorial stays.
The 7th King’s Own Scottish Borderers landed 750 strong on Landing Zone ‘S’ near Wolfheze on 17th September 1944. By the evening of the 19th, after Ginkel Heath and the Johannahoeve, around 250 remained.