A multitude of books, films, museums, collector’s clubs, re-enactment groups and travel agencies cater to the whims of historians, veterans, collectors, serving soldiers and others interested in World War Two. Despite subsequent conflict of one kind or another, if someone uses the term ‘during the war’, we still tend to presume that they are referring to the Second World War. No other war has captivated the interest and imagination of so many people world-wide. In post-war Britain, the baby-boom generation grew up with the immediate effects of THE war ever present. Our elders made frequent references to such phenomena as ‘powdered eggs, Deanna Durbin or the Blitz’. The government introduced some of the severest rationing after the cessation of hostilities and it didn’t end until 1954! At school, we swapped Nazi flags and medals and an uncle proudly showed me the Samurai sword he ‘liberated’ from one of Hirohito’s ‘supermen’. The draft had sent some off to war in France, Singapore and other far-off places while some risked life and limb down coal mines doing their bit for the war effort. My late father made armoured cars and served as an air raid warden while his future wife, a Belgian lived under the heel of enemy occupation in her hometown of Verviers.
On 9 September 1944, the U.S. 3rd Armored Division liberated Verviers and my mother, a fluent English speaker, went to work for U.S. First Army C2G1 Civil Affairs under Major Alan Brown as an interpreter in their headquarters at the ‘Crédit Anversois’, a local bank. Three months later the joy of liberation turned sour as Hitler launched a desperate counter offensive through eastern Belgium and Luxembourg. As his spearheads raced toward the Meuse River, the staff at C2G1 frantically loaded documents and typewriters onto waiting trucks for evacuation to the rear. Briefly, it looked as if the Nazi War machine might just snatch a last minute victory from impending defeat; such was Hitler’s plan. The idea originated with him and he took the leading role in planning the attack. One crucial factor he overlooked was the capacity of the American soldier to absorb, stop and ultimately reverse the tide of the German attack. Frequent childhood visits to my late mother’s family in Belgium, kindled my interest in what Winston Churchill later called, an ever-famous American Victory. An entire generation of Belgians never forgot the debt of gratitude they owed their liberators from overseas.
Marthe Close, interpreter at C2G1 Civil Affairs Detachment Verviers. (Author’s collection)
In the early sixties, I wrote a letter to the Center of Military History in Washington DC. In turn, I received a reply from one of their leading historians, the late Colonel Charles MacDonald, himself a veteran of the battle and author of several works including ‘Company Commander’, a classic account of his own experiences as a front line Rifle Company commander. He knew my grandmother’s home village of Waimes quite well and had first returned there on a post war bicycle tour in June of 1949.
In 1969, Mac asked that I assist him in guiding a returning group of veterans most of whom were returning to Europe for the first time since World War Two. I well remember taking Ray Fary, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division back to the village of Bra where he and a fellow veteran met Joseph Fourgon, who as a boy, remembered their anti-tank gun being positioned close to his home. Over the next twenty years we took thousands of returning veterans back to the fields and forests in which they fought, froze and bled. I assisted ‘Mac’ in the research for his book A Time for Trumpets as well as the production of several video documentaries including D-Day to the Rhine.
This guidebook is a small tribute to the thousands of young GIs like Mac in the fervent hope that future generations will not forget what he and his generation did in the name of freedom.
Over thirty years of contact with veterans, serving soldiers, historians, collectors, history buffs and tour guides I’ve met the full range of ‘experts’ on the battle. As in any field, some are capable, for example the true perfectionists in Luxembourg who can show visitors the precise location where Generalleutnant Kurt Moehring, commanding general of the 276th Volksgrenadier Division, died in a hail of machine gun fire on his way from Beaufort to the Mullerthal. These same avid students of the battle are responsible for the meticulous attention shown to detail in the splendid war museum of Diekirch in Luxembourg.
While some excel in their grasp of events and detail, others leave much to be desired. At the very least, anyone regarding himself as a guide to the battlefield should be familiar with the terrain and possess a sound knowledge of the events that took place, the people involved and the meaning of wartime terms and abbreviations such as ‘Pozit’, ‘OKW’ and so on. This guidebook attempts to fill such criteria and if read in conjunction with parts of the relevant books, can help visitors reap the very best from their time in the area, be it long or short. An extensive bibliography is included for readers with plenty of time on their hands. Since most people do not fall into this category, the author recommends that the visitor limits himself to reading MacDonald’s A Time For Trumpets, published by William Morrow in New York 1985. This book is a detailed account of the intelligence, planning and operational aspects of the battle, as well as a veritable ‘gold mine’ of human interest.
Charles B. MacDonald, veteran of the battle, returned to Europe on a bicycle tour in 1949. (Author’s collection-courtesy Moire MacDonald).
The author and Charles MacDonald during filming of the television documentary D-Day To the Rhine. (Author’s collection).
The U.S. Army official history of the battle, The Ardennes, Battle of the Bulge, by Dr. Hugh M. Cole, published by the U.S. Government printing Office in Washington DC in 1965, is a first rate reference source for the serious student of the battle.