Today’s visit to Eagle’s Nest on @WWIImuseum Easy Company Tour found the nest covered in clouds and snow.

Former Concentration Camp Dachau Memorial Site. While the entire site is evocative, in my opinion the text on this wall sums it all up. Visited today on a @WWIImuseum Easy Company Tour.

Visiting the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten on the @WWIImuseum #easycompany tour yesterday was extra impressive for many guests. Many adoptant families visited the graves they adopted there a few days before on 4 May, Dutch Remembrance Day, and placing flowers. It was a perfect example of the power and beauty of the Grave Adoption Program. This program already started during WW2 and is still widely popular. All just under 8,300 graves and all 1,722 names in the Wall of the Missing are currently adopted. The waiting list for adopting a grave/name is so long that the average waiting time is about 7 years and coordinating foundation cannot accept new applications at current. A wonderful continuing ‘Thank you!’ by the Dutch to their liberators and appreciation of their sacrifice.

And we’re off on another season touring with the @WWIImuseum on their #EasyCompany tours. A great way to not only follow the experience of a group of US paratroopers, famously depicted in HBO series #BandOfBrothers but also to learn about the historical context and wider experience of US and other allied soldiers during #WW2.

Yesterday, we visited this spot on a private tour for the @WWIImuseum . The father of one of the guests was part of the gun crew and we brought the client to the very same spot where his dad helped stop the main attack during the Battle of the Bulge.

Hello Clervaux! Just arrived in this beautiful Luxembourgish town to meet up with two clients form the US on a private @WWIImuseum tour, following the footsteps of the father of on of them. The veteran in question was part of an AAA Gun Battalion which helped stopped KG Peiper’s advance during the Battle of the Bulge. The next few days we’ll follow his unit’s trail through NW Europe, Bulge onwards.

The past two days around Arnhem were stellar, guiding a group of nine English gentlemen on behalf of @itfbattlefield. All very highly interested and asking great questions. The story of Arnhem and Market Garden in a broader sense remains to this day a complex one and fraught with myth and misconceptions. But with that also one of the most interesting battlefields to visit.

A splendid tour today of the US 82nd Airborne Division area of operations during Op Market Garden for a lovely couple from Pennsylvania. We covered a lot of ground, looking at several well-known but lesser known actions, explaining the missions and challenges in this sector.

Every now and again, a proper off-the-beaten-path tour. It takes us and guests to places rarely visited by most tours. Today was such a day, so specifically following 1st Battalion, 501st PIR, 101st AbDiv during Market Garden with a client. One such place was Schijndel and the place where B Coy fought on 22 Sept 1944. The scars of battle still clearly visible on the buildings, such as in this photo.

A bridge across the Weisser Weh in the Hurtgen Forest, Germany. In Nov 1944, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 4th ID fought through this part of the forest towards Grosshau. Landing on Utah Beach on 6 June, by the time they entered the Hurtgen Forest roughly only 23% of the D-Day originals were still in the rifle companies. By early December 1944 at the end of their ordeal in the forest l, that number had shrunk to 9%. One of the “less than 1 in 10 man still standing” was the father of a client this week. He survived the war from D-Day to VE-Day. One of the few. Back home he rarely talked about the war. And he never talked about the hell of the Hurtgen Forest; it was just too painful a memory, a nightmare. While walking her father’s trail, talking about the fighting, mines, shelling, the cold and constant wet, the forest that seemed to swallow up anything that entered it, her father’s experience and how it shaped him became clear. As my client put it: “My dad always has been my hero for what he did during the war. And now knowing what he went through here, he is even a bigger hero to me than he already was.”

Yesterday’s Market Garden Highlights Tour took us to (a/o) the John S Thompson bridge. In a textbook example of aggressive airborne action, Lt Thompson neutralised two pillboxes (see photo on one), captured a pumping station and secured the south side of the bridge with just 18 men. Few people know, however, that ‘Jocko’ Thompson was a pitcher for rhe Philadelphia Phillies before and after the war. A stunning surprise for yesterday’s US guests who are huge Phillies fans.

Earlier this week, the #airbornemuseumhartenstein in Oosterbeek, NL opened a new exhibition on father and son Sosabowksi. The father, Stanislaw, raised and led the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade which fought in Op Market Garden, while his son Stasinek fought with the Polish Underground Army in the Warsaw Uprising. The photo shows the banner of the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, a centrepiece in the exhibition. Made in Warsaw during the war, it was smuggled to the UK to be presented to the brigade. A truly unique and impressive historical object.