The Battlefield Explorer

WWII battlefield guide based in The Netherlands. I lead tours across Europe, sharing the stories of the men who fought, where they fought.

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

Fourteen were identified and reburied at Fleury. The other seven stayed here, under a monument paid for by the American banker George Rand. He was killed in an air crash in December 1919 and never saw it unveiled a year later. 4/4

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

Only the tips of their bayonets showed above the ground. That is the legend of the French soldiers at Verdun buried alive, standing at their posts. The seven unknown men under this concrete canopy were found lying down. 1/4

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

Bayonets were fixed to them later, and the legend grew from there. The 1920 excavation found 21 bodies in all. The likeliest explanation is that the Germans buried the French dead in their own trench and marked the graves with rifles. 3/4

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

Captain Lionel Queripel’s men refused to leave him. Wounded in the face and both arms, cut off in a ditch near Wolfheze, he ordered them out anyway and stayed behind alone with a pistol and a few grenades. This new memorial stands near where he was last seen alive.

He had been fighting for nine hours by then, on 19 September 1944, leading a composite company of the 10th Parachute Battalion. Earlier he had carried a wounded sergeant to the aid post under fire, then led the attack that killed two German machine-gun crews and recaptured a British anti-tank gun. In the ditch he picked up a German stick grenade and threw it back. He was 24, and was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.

We stood at his memorial today, on a cold and misty day outside Arnhem on a tour with a client from the United States.

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

The attack failed. Four days later Jacometti was found dead in the trench he had left. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Lion.

The Stoplijn held that night. It broke on the afternoon of 13 May, and with it the Grebbe Line. 5/5

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

This rebuilt trench was the Dutch army’s last line on the Grebbeberg, near Rhenen, which was the weakest point of the Grebbe Line: a hill that could not be flooded.

The Germans invaded the Netherlands before dawn on 10 May 1940. 1/5

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

These 40 metres of it were dug out again in 2004 on their original line. That afternoon Major Johan Jacometti, commanding II-8 RI, led about thirty men out of this trench to throw the Germans back. 4/5

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

@Bobcats46 Very bizarre indeed!

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

The 34 towers around the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg look like the bastions of a fortress. They were built to house toilets.

Albert Speer designed the field for the Nazi Party rallies, and it was completed between 1935 and 1937. The towers break up the earth banks where spectators stood, and each carried six tall flagpoles. From outside, they gave the complex the defended look the regime wanted. From the field itself they are hardly visible, so the massed formations saw one closed space facing the main grandstand.

Some towers still hold toilets. Others have been let as storage, and one as a motorcycle club’s clubhouse.

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

@JohnWil45304495 Indeed, I’ve seen that!

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

On 23 December he went into the chapel on the first floor of the Fondation and prayed in his own words: "Sir, this is Patton talking." Accounts disagree on whether he went that morning or that evening. The skies over the Ardennes cleared that day, and C-47s began dropping supplies into Bastogne. The 4th Armored Division broke through to the town on 26 December.

Patton lies at the Luxembourg American Cemetery in Hamm, a stop on our Battle of the Bulge tours. 4/4

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

General George S. Patton fought his part of the Battle of the Bulge from an old people's home in Luxembourg City. The Fondation Pescatore has housed the elderly since 1892 and still does. From 21 December 1944 to 27 March 1945 it was the headquarters of his Third Army. 1/4

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

Patton had already tried to do something about the weather. On 8 December, still at his headquarters in Nancy, he asked his chief chaplain, Colonel James O'Neill, for a prayer for fair weather for battle. By 14 December 250,000 copies had gone out to the troops on small cards, with Patton's Christmas greeting on the back. 3/4

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

@KJvanWijk @Toenennu1 Goed bezig, geef de passie door!

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

@thebattleguide Blimey , long day!

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

@battlesuntol Lets hope more will present themselves

[The Battlefield Explorer @battlefieldexpl]

The newest war cemetery built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission stands on the edge of Fromelles in northern France. It was dedicated on 19 July 2010, the 94th anniversary of the battle, and was the first new CWGC cemetery in fifty years.

The 250 Australian and British soldiers buried here fell in the attack of the 5th Australian Division and the British 61st Division on 19 and 20 July 1916. The Germans buried them in mass graves behind Pheasant Wood. Lambis Englezos, an amateur historian from Melbourne, traced the pits, and Oxford Archaeology recovered the men in 2009.

DNA from relatives has since put names on 181 headstones, the most recent this July. Sixty-nine remain unknown.