That gate is one of the most reproduced backdrops in the 506th’s story. Captain Dick Winters was photographed under it in the autumn of 1944, by then executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Their headquarters was here at Schoonderlogt, near Elst, while the 101st Airborne held the Island between the Rhine and the Waal. The estate is still private. I brought a National WWII Museum group to the spot today.

One of the most feared weapons of the war. The crew didn’t blow it up. They just walked away. Clervaux, 1945.

Twenty-two identical bronze figures stand along one route through Bavaria. Each marks ground the Dachau prisoners crossed in the last days of the war. This cast is inside the camp itself, where the march began on 26 April 1945. The SS forced almost 7,000 prisoners south towards Tegernsee. The sculptor, Hubertus von Pilgrim, made a single huddled figure and let the repetition do the work. More than a thousand never reached the end of the road. We visited the site today with the National WWII Museum.

He wrote home from the Netherlands to say everything was fine. It was the last letter his family received. Alex Penkala Jr. had jumped into the Netherlands with Easy Company during Operation Market Garden. In Eindhoven, a girl remembered him signing her ration book. Weeks later, on 10 January 1945, a German shell struck his foxhole in the woods near Foy. He and his friend Skip Muck were killed instantly. Penkala was twenty. He is buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery. We visited his grave today with the National WWII museum Easy Company Tour

The end of the Bastogne Barracks as we knew it….

George W. Bonner At Henri-Chapelle, a medic of the 101st Airborne lies in Plot H, Row 13. He could have walked back to his own lines. He chose to stay with the wounded, and the enemy took him. George Bonner is my adopted soldier here. I tend his grave, and the groups I guide through the Ardennes stand at it with me. He was a farm hand from the Alabama-Mississippi line who enlisted in August 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor. He was twenty. By the winter of 1944 he was a Technical Sergeant in the Medical Detachment of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, with a wife, Toy, at home. On 23 December 1944, near Bastogne, German tanks and infantry overran Company C of the 3rd Battalion, 327th, and left many men wounded. Bonner and four other medics went out into the fire to reach them. They got most of the wounded into a nearby house. Then they were surrounded and captured. They could have slipped away. They did not. Bonner was already hit, shell fragments in his thigh, arm and side. He died of those wounds in German hands on 26 December 1944, the day after Christmas. He was 24. The German medical company buried him in the village cemetery at Asselborn, in Luxembourg, under a cross bearing his name, and returned his belongings, down to a comb and a photograph. After the war he was recovered, identified, and brought here.

The lights on the De Oversteek bridge in Nijmegen are an artwork. Forty-eight pairs, installed when the bridge opened in 2013, one pair for each soldier killed in the Waal crossing. Every evening at sunset they come on in sequence, at the pace of a slow march, from the south bank to the north. The crossing they mark was made on 20 September 1944 by the 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR, in canvas boats, under German fire. The march has run every night since 19 October 2014. We visit it with the National WWII Museum on our Easy Company tour.

At half past six on the morning of 6 June 1944, the first wave touched down on Omaha Beach. The 116th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Division came ashore here at Vierville-sur-Mer, into machine-gun and mortar fire from the bluffs above. The lead companies were destroyed within minutes of the ramps dropping.

Every parachute hook was still locked. When the crash site near Beuzeville-au-Plain was excavated, that one detail proved none of the men had got out. This is where Easy Company lost its commander before the company fired a shot. On the night of 5-6 June 1944 a C-47 carrying First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan III and the entire company headquarters group was hit by flak and came down here, north-east of Sainte-Mère-Église. All twenty-two aboard died, and command of Easy Company passed to Lieutenant Richard Winters. A recovered watch had stopped at 01:12, the moment of the crash.