I have to go to Frankfurt for work later this week. I'm going to wind up with this Saturday and Sunday free and I was thinking about heading over to Bastogne to have a look at the memorials, etc.

Can anybody give me any advice on what to look for, what things I should make sure I see?

I will have a rental car so I'm up for anything within an hour drive from Bastogne, or between there and Frankfurt.

I went a few years back on a tour of WWI and WWII sites. Definitely going back as I didn't get to see it all.

Start at the Bastogne War Museum and War Memorial is incredible. It was the best museum and you can get the guided tour headset in English. Give yourself 2-3 hours for this stop to truly give yourself enough time. It is on the outskirts of town (NE side). The 101st Airborne Museum and the Bastogne Barracks are also good if you want another Museum option. I was also lucky enough to see the Aggies go to war exhibit...awesome but it is no longer there. We wanted to do a tour as well but ran out of time. I would also recommend a stop at a restaurant on the square for some incredible food and very good beer. There is one place that serves airborne beer out of helmet mugs. Good beer, mug is kitschy but makes a good souvenir.

As a side note if driving you can take a minor detour through Luxembourg to the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial to see Patton's grave site

Thanks for the recommendations. I was going to try to spend Saturday night in Luxembourg. Need to call the travel agent tomorrow and change my hotel bookings.

Thanks for sharing those videos. I'm pretty stoked now. I'll have to find out the hours on the museum and memorials.

Just booked the hotel for Saturday night in Luxembourg. And doing a little Google Maps - Map Reconnaissance, it amazes me how close it is from Bastogne to Foy. I'm definitely thinking of walking a good portion of it. At least the last 2km from the woodline into town.

I also found this site which highlights some of the things I'm hoping to see.
https://peteajohnston.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/in-the-footsteps-of-easy-company-in-the-battle-of-the-bulge/

Rudder's command post was Chateau de Berg, south of the Ettlebruck bridge over the river Sure.

Look for villages Feulen, Mertzig and Grosbous, which his 1st Battalion was placed to cover the high ground.

When you see the Mardasson memorial picture it as the canvass it was for this amazing tribute to Texas A&M. The people of Bastogne love America and have a special place in their hearts for Texas A&M. If you want to see what the people of Bastogne think about us, watch the video below.

https://vimeo.com/104647708

Just checking in for my flight. Hopefully I'll have enough time to watch that in the lounge or when I change planes in Abu Dhabi. Thanks for sharing.

Dumb of me not to expect the thing to be narrated in Frog.
Some of my Junior High French in Saudi Arabia is coming back to me.
Just got to the War Hymn part. Excellent!

Oh, and I will listen to Glenn Miller all day long. Love it!

Glad you watched it. It's a great way to show how TAMU really did save Europe. Good stuff huh?

The mayor of Bastogne has been to TAMU a few times. Nice guy. His personal assistant, Coralie Bonnet is a friend of mine. Drop by their office and just say you are an Aggie and ask for Coralie. She great, and a cutie.

Hogties said:

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Glad you watched it. It's a great way to show how TAMU really did save Europe. Good stuff huh?

The mayor of Bastogne has been to TAMU a few times. Nice guy. His personal assistant, Coralie Bonnet is a friend of mine. Drop by their office and just say you are an Aggie and ask for Coralie. She great, and a cutie.

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Bastogne and BCS are "sister cities" as I recall.

You are correct AEK. That grew out of the recognition that Bastogne did for AM on the 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Ardennes.

Just checked into the hotel in Luxembourg. Had an amazing day in Bastogne. Will write and post some pictures later.

Just checked into the Hotel in Frankfurt. It's 31 degrees Celsius and no A/C. I do have a below Wal-Mart quality fan and re-runs of "Married with Children" in German. It's going to be a long night. My travel agent in Australia won't come online until about 1am local time.
After dinner, I'll come back and summarize today's trip to the American and German cemeteries in Luxembourg. Very interesting stuff.

*popcorn*

Finished Day 1 with my customer in Frankfurt and we've got dinner in 1 hour so here goes the first installment. This is going to take several iterations to unpack everything I saw in two days.

Arrived in Frankfurt from Abu Dhabi at 0705 on Saturday. It was about 9:20 by the time I finished fooling around with getting the rental car. Based on my Google Map Recon, my goal was to drive 3 hours to Bastogne and get there in time for lunch. Since my customer is Daimler, I insisted on a Mercedes-Benz and got a C180 with a satellite navigation system.

So, I headed out on the Autobahn towards Belgium. I had driven on the Autobahn in Austria some 14 years ago so I had some idea how it worked and I'd read some books - most notably Neil Peart's book - Roadshow: Landscape With Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle where he repeatedly emphasized the concept of "drive-right" and how people being overtaken need to move to the right. Once I got to the first no speed limit zone, I kicked it in the butt just to see what this little C180 would do. It accelerated up to 140 kmh easily and got up to 160 kmh (100 mph) with no real problems. It continued to work it's way up to 180 kmh but beyond that, there wasn't much. I did get it up to 200 kmh on one stretch but there was really nothing left.

Now, the road trip was the first part of my journey and an important one since I was really relying on the SatNav to get me where I was going. So, at one point, I ran into some road construction and the SatNav detoured me around on some rural roads. Then, I made a wrong turn at some point and I guess the "shortest distance" option must have kicked in because the next thing I know, I'm driving through small farm towns that looked like they could have been anywhere between Hearne and Temple. Eventually, this overzealous nav system takes me down a gravel road through a cornfield in rural Luxembourg. This also answered one question I had - Passports.

Once I cleared immigration at Frankfurt, that was it. I drove right across the Luxembourg and Belgian borders like I was driving to the next county. It was no big deal at all. In fact, I was lucky if the border was even marked in most cases.

Eventually, I get to Bastogne and it's definitely lunch time. I had been driving for 3 hours nonstop - except for a 30 second stop to try to figure out what my navigation system was telling me.

I drive through town and figure my best bet for lunch is going to be to park and walk around until I find a cafe to eat at. There appeared to be a lot of pizza places and of course plenty of cafes with seating outside on the sidewalk or in the town square.

As I park the car, I hear police sirens and hear a really loud roar of what sounds like motorcycle engines. I look down the street and I see a fleet of Quad bikes. Four Wheelers. There must have been at least 200 of them riding in two files down the street. Apparently, I'd stumbled on to some sort of European Quad Bike event called the Nuts Cup. http://www.eqtb.eu/

So, after the Quad bikes roared by, I headed up the street to the town square.
I have lunch there at one of the many cafes. There is an old auto tour called the Tour of the Ardennes or something like that so there are tons of old cars from the 1910s to the 1930s rolling around. A smaller number from the 50s and 60s.

In the town square is an M4 Sherman Tank and a bust of General McAuliffe along with plaques describing the tank and the General. That reminds me, I did walk past the Le Nuts cafe. When I walk up to the tank, there are a few tourists inspecting the tank including one teenage boy who is climbing all over it. In fact, as I walk up, he's standing on the back deck of the Sherman and contemplating jumping off. I have no idea if this kid even speaks English but, I tell him that jumping off the tank would be a really bad idea. Hey, I was a teenage boy once, they're full of bad ideas. So, the kid shimmies his way down off the tank and I speak with them for a few minutes as we inspect the battle damage this tank sustained. Looks like it took two direct hits. The plaque offers a more detailed description.

Based on the accents, height, hair color, etc, I figure they're Dutch. They spoke good English but not perfect as I would later find out. We talked about the other museums in the area and which ones they had already been to. So, I walk down the street to the 101st Airborne Museum probably 100 meters away.

This museum cost 8 Euros to enter and was four floors tall. Not a very large base square footage but there was plenty packed in there. On the first floor, they had maps of the battlefield, and a bunch of artifacts from the Battle era. At the entrance, I met an old English couple who encouraged me to not miss the basement and the simulated air raid.

As I worked my way up to the second floor, there were some displays in the stairway. One was a tribute to American Indian paratroopers who had served with the 101st and they had a profile of one kid in particular who was from Florida. I think he was Creek and maybe Choctaw (I can't remember exactly). And in the middle of the stairway was a full size wax statue of a paratrooper setup in authentic jump gear of the era and suspended from the ceiling as if his chute had gotten tangled in overhead powerlines. That was pretty cool.

The second floor as did the rest of the museum, contained a bunch of wax statues dressed in authentic uniforms of the day and setup in diorama type battle scenes except that these weren't miniatures but rather full size people. Of course there was a collection of guns, equipment and personal accessories. And there were a lot of authentic rusted out weapons that had undoubtedly been found by farmers or Belgian blokes with metal detectors.

One thing that really got me was how big a role smoking cigarettes played in the War. There were all types of cigarette paraphernalia in the museum. There were also some personal hygiene and food items. Remember, part of the story of Bastogne was just survival against temperatures that reached 20F below zero.

I think it was on the fourth floor that they had a room full of Nazi wax statues in an interrogation scene. The way this was setup, you could walk into the room amidst the statues separated by glass. These were very lifelike wax figures and there was a giant Third Reich flag on the wall. Honestly, it was scary A.F. to use the terms my college aged kids use these days.

I then ventured down to the basement where there were two things of interest. One was the wax figure scene of an aid station treating wounded. This was actually hidden behind a curtain because it was graphic. As civilians or peacetime veterans like myself, we don't often think of what those wounded, dead and dying really look like. This scene made it very real. It was no MASH episode where the doctors play grab-ass with the nurses.

And lastly, the simulated air raid. You enter this room which is dimly lit and simulates being lit at night by lanterns. You play the role of a Belgian family waiting out an attack. It was very well done. The whole thing lasts about six minutes and takes you through the sights and sounds of what it would be like hiding in a basement. And from a technical perspective, I have no idea how big the subwoofer was but lets just say, they figured out how to simulate the overpressure from an explosion. It was very realistic I thought.

After that, I looked at the gift shop where you can buy all manner of WWII artifacts, US and German. While I'd love to have a Stahlhem, it's not something I wanted to try to bring back with me to Australia.

I wanted to wrap up my museum tour by 2pm because that's when the Dutch folks told me the Bastogne Barracks museum opened. They also told me it was free so, it sounded like a really good deal.

About to board the flight from Abu Dhabi to Sydney so... more later.

Oh, one other thing I learned. We all know that Americans pronounce it as "Bas-Stone". The local folks would refer to it as "Ba-Stoin-yay"

After the 101st Airborne Museum, I headed over to the Bastogne Barracks. It took me a couple of wrong turns because I only had a verbal description of where it was and the way the roads are laid out in Belgium and Germany as I found, it is frequently very difficult to make a U-turn. I had the same problem in Australia when I first moved there. I think I've just adapted to it now.

I arrived at the Bastogne Barracks and walked up to the entrance. There was a Belgian soldier wearing some goofy looking camouflage and a dark blue beret. He didn't hablo any Ingles and my Jr. High French was not holding up so, he explained to me that 2pm is when they "Finish" and that they would be open again at 10am tomorrow. Tomorrow was not part of the plan for me. And I was briefly frustrated that the Dutch tourists earlier said the place opened at 2pm when that was actually the closing time. Oh well. It was a target of opportunity. I went to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland back in 2000/2001 time frame so I've seen tons of crazy military vehicles. Although some of those were just rusting hulks versus these at the Bastogne Barracks that would be maintained.

So next I headed out to the Mardasson museum and memorial. I got over there and entered the Museum first because I wanted to hit that while it was open because I figured the outdoor memorial didn't close until much later than the museum. BTW - this time of year, at that latitude, it gets dark around 10 pm and gets light by 5 am.

When i entered the Museum, they asked me what country I was from and I said USA. So, they charged me 14 Euro and gave me a headset to listen to as I walked through the museum. The way they had it setup, they had 4 characters based on real people who had been involved in WWII, Battle of the Bulge and Bastogne. There was a nurse, a little boy, an American soldier and a German soldier. So for different parts of the museum, they would have one of those four characters tell how things were going at that point in the war from their perspective. It was pretty interesting. I rushed through the museum but stopped long enough to take in a lot of things that either I hadn't realized or things that I had not researched in that much depth before.

They had plenty of displays of vehicles, weapons, equipment, etc. One of the things I found more interesting was the recruitment posters for the SS and other propaganda items. As you walk through the museum, you kind of work your way through the late 1930s and into the 40s and of course wind up at the Battle of the Bulge, and then the end of the war.

I was pleasantly surprised to find one section dedicated to the war in the Pacific. They talked about the logistics and the challenges that America had fighting two very resource intensive wars simultaneously.

Towards the end of the museum there were a couple of displays that I thought were kind of weird. One was a ton of artwork made from shell casings, bullets, etc. And then there was a display of landmines planted in the floor under glass so you could walk over them. All in all, the museum was definitely worth the 14 Euro. Different than the 101st ABN museum because this one was more focused on the whole war versus a single battle.

At the end of the tour, you return the headset and can head across the street to the gigantic memorial. The memorial lists all the major units that were involved in the Battle of the Bulge and the campaigns to free Belgium. One thing that I got from the Museum was the scale. I mean we're talking about Infantry and Armored Divisions like they're candy. They showed the battle lines for Army, Corps and Army Group level units.

The Mardasson memorial has a spiral staircase that you can take up what would be probably 3-4 stories to reach the top where you can walk around and see the vistas. The memorial is laid out like a 5 pointed star and on the upper deck, from each point, it looks out toward where battlefields would have been. At the apex of each point of the star, there is a brass plaque that shows which unit had responsibility for each section.

On the way out, I walked past this gigantic statue probably 40 feet tall of the famous picture of the sailor kissing the lady in the street after V-E Day.

Then, I went into the giftshop and looked around. They had lots of 101st Airborne stuff, books, and even some liquor you could purchase. As I was walking down one aisle, I saw a bottle of champagne that had a custom label that said - "From Texas to Bastogne" the story of the Texas Aggies, or something like that. Anyway, like the video that somebody posted earlier, it was the same theme.

When I went to checkout, the lady working the cash register told me that they had a Texas A&M exhibit in their museum until a few months ago and they have now moved it to the George Bush Library in College Station, Texas.

Texas Aggies go to War. The teaser for the exhibit.

The 2014 75th Anniversary Production. Belgium's view of Texas A&M.

One of my S-2 buddies stationed with NATO got to see it live.