Tour of WWII battlefields

marie,

I've only visited various sites on my own, sometimes with a guide (Normandy) and sometimes self guided. I would highly recommend using one of the local tours in Normandy as the guides are excellent.

There are lots of Museums and other historic sites in England, but I'm not sure you would need a guide for those. The Imperial War Museum has several branches around the country including the Cabinet War Rooms, HMS Belfast, Duxford and Bletchley Park and also the excellent Tank Museum, and those don't really need a guide.

There are some historic sites in Germany including some of the concentration camps, but you could easily see those on your own. You could check Radius Tours in Munich for Third Reich tours or Original Berlin Walks for tours in that area.

You'd have to do some research on Sicily. The only "organized" site there that I know of is the Museo Storico dello Sbarco * in Catania (it's *very well done).

"...something like this themselves?" I have only visited WW2 sites on my own, ie, those sites in Poland, Austria, France and Germany. I am talking about military sites (cemeteries, battlefield memorials, monuments, and museums, etc pertaining to WW2.

Basically tracked them down myself by using public transportation or was driven there. Never used a guide or was part of a guided tour.

For Normandy, I second the recommendation of using a local guide. You will get much more out of the visit.

Hi,

One of the cities other than in London "Lambeth North," the location of the Imperial War Museum, where the Imperial War museum is located is Manchester...easily doable from London as a day to visit that museum.

There is also the D-Day in Portsmouth which you may want to explore.

Bletchley Park, outside London, was the ultra-secret centre of code-breaking in WW2 and has been turned into a fascinating museum. Top attraction is a replica of the enormous and intricate machine, The Bombe, used to make daily adjustments to the German codes. It's been called an ancestor of computers, although it was not electronic. It puts on a whirring show when demonstrated (try to find its schedule, perhaps through an e-mail.) Hi-tech companies helped finance this relatively recent museum, an easy walk from the Bletchley train station. West Midlands runs the train service, around an hour or less from central London.

https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/visit-us

Does your husband want to see "Band of Brothers" sights related to Easy Company of the 506th PIR - the subject of the HBO series? They didn't fight in Sicily.

In Bayeux, there are a number of companies offering 101st Airborne/Band of Brothers tours. You didn't mention Belgium, but this fall we have arranged for a guide to show us Band of Brothers sights related to the Battle of the Bulge.

There are several "Band of Brothers Tours" available if you search on the internet. However, like most guided tours, they are quite expensive. However, you can study their itineraries and incorporate them into your planning. I have seen BoB tours starting in England, then going on to Normandy, to the Netherlands (don't forget Operation Market Garden), to Bastogne, and to Berchtesgaden (Eagle's Nest). If you did a lot of research, you could line up your own guides and arrange all of your hotels and transportation, and would save a lot of $$. But that will also be a lot of work, so if you have the time you could start planning and see how things work out.

I just want to add that Tours by Locals is a good resource for finding local guides.

My husband is a guide for Colorado tours, he’s represented by them and it’s a fair organization with rigorous checks to ensure qualified guides.

Planning your own trip gives more freedom to travel at your own pace.

Enjoy the planning and the trip!

Thank you all for the great responses!
Ken- yes, Catania is the spot in Sicily I was thinking of! We were just in Berchesgarten (lake Konigsee) 2 weeks ago and he didn’t want to go to Eagles nest. He said he didn’t want to walk in Hitler’s footsteps. Thank you for your information, as always!
Traylapark- thank you also for the tip, but Belgium is not on our list as of yet. So much to see...so little time! I know the fighting of the group was not in Sicily, it is just an excuse to visit.
Robert- This is exactly what I was thinking, putting the tour together myself. I love doing the research and do this each time we travel. We actually “debrief” over dinner each night, as I explain the history, etc of where we are going the following day. By the way...we are!!
Beth- thank you so much for the Tours by local suggestion, you are the third person that advised them.

Thank you all again!

As a side comment (not quite BoB related), but probably worth mentioning - a tour of WWII battlefields (at least if we're talking about the European theater) would perhaps be somewhat incomplete without visiting Moscow, St.Petersburg (Leningrad), Volgograd (Stalingrad), Kursk, Oryol/Belgorod, Sevastopol, Kerch, Kaliningrad (Königsberg) in Russia; Minsk, Bobruysk in Belarus; Kiev, Odessa, Carpathian Ukraine; Cisinau in Moldova, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Warsaw, Majdanek Lublin, Budapest, Breslau...

marie,

"He said he didn’t want to walk in Hitler’s footsteps."

Actually, Hitler didn't spend much time at the Eagle's Nest. From what I remember he only went there a couple of times. I was told that he was claustrophobic which is why the elevator is mirrored.

If you're going to visit WW-II battlefields, you're going to be walking in the footsteps of some very nasty people anyway, especially in the concentration camps. I tend to focus on the overall history and not so much on individuals.

Hi,

In Germany, if you decide to track down WW2 sites there, numerous places. I would suggest the Resistance Museum in Berlin as well as the Invalidenfriedhof (cemetery),

The Eastern Front museum in Berlin-Karlshorst located in the Wehrmacht building standing in 1945 where the Germans surrendered to the Soviets the day after the surrender in Reims was signed. Karlshorst was the last of the 4 surrenders they signed in 1945 to end the war.

If you want to see the battlefield memorial, and museum, then I suggest Seelow, the biggest battle fought on German soil.

Both in Berlin and Potsdam are German and British military cemeteries and that of German civilians as victims of Allied bombing.

All these suggestions here, I've been to them, at least once or repeatedly...well worth you time and energy tracking them down.

My family of four hired a private guide who drove us around in his van for two days seeing sights related to the American participation in D-Day events. I'm sure you could put something together on your own but you will have to contend with finding both the sights and parking. Once you are parked it helps to have an understanding of what happened there so you can bring the spot to life, and that's the part that's difficult to replicate on your own. Something unexpected: I looked at the list of sights to be covered and thought we could skip about half of them - boy was I wrong. So you're also paying for having someone put together an itinerary that is interesting and can be accomplished in the allotted time.

We did most of the logistics ourselves: flights, trains, hotels, choosing guides. We booked our guide (Dale Booth) in advance rather than arriving and then seeing who had space for us.

In free elections by secret ballot the Nazi Party by itself, ie, not in an alliance with the Nationalist Party, the DNVP, polled at its highest 37.3% of the popular vote. Hitler never got a majority, either in the two presidential elections he was part of or in the Reichstag elections.