Ardennes / Battle of the Bulge etc

Ping them up here, please.

Here you go, I'll add more to it when I get home at the weekend. Foy Foxholes from the 501st Easy Company, King Tiger at La Gleize, Easy Company Memorial and more trenches / foxholes, and the Tiger at Vimoutier.
 

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I took some uni mate on a Tour of the Ardennes back in xmas 2008, we even had snow, which made navigating the icy lanes in the minibus quite 'interesting'. Here's a few piccies... I wish I had my DSLR, could have got some great images instead of these naff point and shoots.

Dragons Teeth (anti-tank) defences on the Siegfried Line.
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Bastogne Memorial
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The Bois Jaques and Foy
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Baugnez location of the Malmedy massacre
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I have made a start.

Ignore the routes from and back to Calais and some of the waypoints. I made them for something else, though I guess they'd be OK if anyone wanted to take them. I have lobed in some ADAC routes, based roughly on Clervaux. I might well add some more as and when.

Some of the sites' locations I have had to make a vaguely educated guess at; hopefully they are not too far out.

As usual, the file is .gpx created in BaseCamp on a Mac and then hosted on Dropbox. Sometimes a Mac / Dropbox might change the file extension from .gpx to .gpx.txt which makes it into a text file; I have no idea why. If that happens, all is not lost. Download it and save the file to your desktop, then rename it by DELETING the .txt bit but LEAVING the .gpx bit. All should then be well in your life. I'll update the file as I go along.

Richard

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p3h6euow0q02zx6/Battle of the Bulge WIP.GPX?dl=0
 
I tripped over this whilst looking for something else:

http://tank-photographs.s3-website-...bulge-ardennes-offensive-turrets-belgium.html

I can probably track them all down to mark.

Not a bad very amateur website, with a chunk on Bastogne and then a suggestion of a tour:

http://www.strijdbewijs.nl/battleofthebulge/baseng4.htm

http://www.strijdbewijs.nl/battleofthebulge/toureng1.htm

http://www.strijdbewijs.nl/battleofthebulge/toureng2.htm

http://www.strijdbewijs.nl/battleofthebulge/toureng3.htm

If nothing else it shows how easy it is to get information from the web and stick it together to form a tour of your own.
 
I have some of those from a previous trip, so I will see if I can get time to ping them up here before I disappear off to Normandy on Saturday Richard. I've also got a few POIs from "Patten Town" in Luxembourg which would not be straying massively from your route or on a slightly longer wander.

Will try and make the time when I get back from work.

Tony.

PS, excellent work on that route sir.
 
Hi there not posted a lot on this site in the past but have scouted around it a little especially this section not tried an attachment before
see how it goes- Peipers Route apparently. Also second the Overloon Museum very good no direct relevance to The Ardennes Battle though.
 

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another GPX

Not followed it myself or can say how accurate
 

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Thanks for the links, files, pictures etc

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This works well.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/wor.../articles-and-essays/the-battle-of-the-bulge/

When I've finished (that'll be the day) mapping out the sites, I thought I might have a go at superimposing the front lines at the start of the battle and at its furthest extent. This might work to help to place the sites within the context of the battle itself.
 
Not a bad little site http://www.belgiumtheplaceto.be/memorial-ww2.php

with an interesting enough little deviation into Brûly-de-Pesche for:

http://www.belgiumtheplaceto.be/890-bruly-de-pesche.php

As I regularly go from Chimay to Couvin, a short excursion to Brûly-de-Pesche would be quite easy.

Rather like the Belgium airman's memorial in the field, this is just the sort of snippet I wanted to trip over. Nothing particularly to do with the Battle of the Bulge (the airman died in 1940, shot down in an unarmed Hurricane) but enough to make it interesting.

PS Just to show how one search leads to another (it's the joy of surfing) here's a site I clicked on, with ideas for the Seelow Heights and the fall of Berlin. Miles away but might be worth a look one day:

https://tanksandtrenches.wordpress....tle-of-the-seelow-heights-a-battlefield-tour/
 
I haven't forgotten about this labour of love.

One book I have picked up, might be of interest to some. 'A tour of the Bulge battlefields', by father and son Cavanagh, which features nicely divided tours of six of the main battle grounds, Bastogne of course being but one. I'll wrap the project up by creating routes in the Garmin file, to mirror the six in the book.

cover.jpg


Available on Amazon.
 
I haven't forgotten about this labour of love.

One book I have picked up, might be of interest to some. 'A tour of the Bulge battlefields', by father and son Cavanagh, which features nicely divided tours of six of the main battle grounds, Bastogne of course being but one. I'll wrap the project up by creating routes in the Garmin file, to mirror the Six in the book.

cover.jpg


Available on Amazon.

Good man.....:thumb2
 
It is enlightening to do a bit of research. I'm having a look at the Maginot line for a trip next year. There are loads of info that has to be pieced together or you can do it the easy way and go on a Ledger holiday. But I guess that retirement is not far away for you Richard and this is a good hobby to have. Keeps the grey stuff ticking over giving you stuff to do and go see. Are there any German accounts or records you have traced for the Bulge? A lot of info regarding WW1 and WW2 seems to be centred around Allied accounts of events.
 
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A great book with a full account from the German side and includes sketches and maps along with after action reports.
 
Tigers in the Mud by Otto Carius is a brilliant book, looking at the operations of the 502nd Heavy Panzer battalion on the eastern front and then to their operations on the West Wall. It's a great insight into the operations and the mindset of the Wehrmacht
 
I have done a little more work, starting from the 'A tour of the Bulge battlefields' book mentioned above in post 33.

Just to see how it goes I started to map out the route in Chapter 1, Monscau - Hofen Wahlerschied - The North Shoulder - Elsenborn Ridge sector, which includes the so called, Wahlerscheid or 'Heartbreak Crossroads', all in Google, just to get a feel for what was involved.

The main German offensive was conducted by the 1st SS Panzer Korps, whose 12th SS Panzer Division and its supporting infantry from the regular German army spearheaded down five separate assault routes (code named Rollbahns) listed A to E, that were targeted westwards (basically into the 2nd and 99th US Infantry Divisions, through the twin villages of Krinkelt-Rocherath, across the Elsenborn Ridge towards the river Meuse, which of course they never reached.

https://goo.gl/maps/PdHqpVzi5K32

The route taken near enough mirrors that in the book but it's a little incomplete at the moment. Even so, at just under 56 km in length it would, when driven, embrace at least twenty or more individual sites of 'action' involving multiple individual units from the American and German side. If nothing else, it highlights how the battle (so often condensed into just Bastogne in the public's imagination) embraced many more 100's to 1000's of men, often in quite small groups, cut off, surrounded, fighting, floundering about or just plain lost. The book lists the units involved in each action and their exploits. This again only serves to highlight how units were thrown together, attached and then detached to other units as the fighting intensified. It's not far as the crow flies south-south-west to Bastogne from the Elsenborn Ridge but to them fighting and killed in the all but devastated twin villages of Krinkelt-Rocherath and on the ridge itself, Bastogne might as well have been on the far side of the moon.

I turned this video up on YouTube which explains what went on:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Wd8pwCzW4co" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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I have now hacked the route as above for Chapter 1 into BaseCamp and hosted the file on Dropbox.

I had to guess some parts (some of the roads are very small) and haven't yet included the specific points of action detailed in the book but at 58 miles from end to end it looks about right. That mileage alone shows the scale of the total battle front, this being but one of six distinct separate but interlinked battles making up the whole of the bulge.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vgqbtrm81lmpzc9/Chapter 1 - The North Shoulder.GPX?dl=0

The other bit of good news is that it looks pretty similar to the basic drawing of the 'North Shoulder' battle above

This is a decent enough summary of the battle itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge

PS If the file opens as a load of text, delete the .txt extension and leave it as .gpx
 


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