The Shores Family in... Frankfurt: Yet another post!

Did I lie?

So, another long(ish) weekend, another trip. This time, the wife took Friday off and we drove to Bastogne Belgium, the site of the Battle of the Bulge. Gonna be a bit of history in this one, but I'll try to get it out of the way early. How early? Let's just press through it now...

After the push from Normandy (after D-Day) toward Germany, the Allies paused to regroup in the Ardennes area of Belgium. The location was easily defensible due to geographic factors (thick forests and sparse roads), and General Eisenhower chose the area as a rest area for the 1st Army. The Germans had an area immediately across the border that they were using as a rest and refit area for their own troops; taking those two factors into account, the area was expected to be fairly safe.

The German High Command hatched a plan to stop the Allies use of the port of Antwerp, punching through the Allied line into Belgium (which would split the Allied line in half), and allowing the Allied forces to be surrounded while the main German force drove straight up to Antwerp. They committed over 400,000 men to this effort. The weather and poor road conditions were on the side of the Allies, and after 40 days, the Allies handed the Germans their biggest defeat of the war, breaking the back of the German war machine.

One important part of the story (at least to the people of Bastogne): On December 21st 1944, the American forces in the town of Bastogne (about 23,000 men) were surrounded by two tank divisions and an infantry division - about 54,000 men - and conditions in the town were rough. Most of the medical supplies and personnel had been captured. Food was scarce. Ammunition was being rationed: 10 rounds per gun per day. The German commander sent a message into the town, requesting its surrender. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, the acting commander of the 101st Airborne onsite, sent back a one word reply: "NUTS!" It had to be explained to the Germans that that specific term was an American slang term essentially meaning (at that time, of course!) "Go to hell!"

While researching this post, I discovered an entry in one of my favorite online resources about part of the city (which I'll touch on in a moment): Atlas Obscura. That's one of the places I look to find weird things to see in the cities we visit. That link tells the "Nuts" story, better than I could hope to.

The Battle of the Bulge was the largest and bloodiest battle fought by the United States in WWII. The Allies took around 81,000 casualties, with over 8,400 of those being KIA.

Anyway, we rolled into town and checked into the hotel. I haven't talked about hotel showers for a few posts, but this one gets a special mention. One of the things that we've found to be all too common over here are what I'll call "half walls." Whether there's a tub or just a standalone shower, a lot of the hotels that we've stayed at over here have no doors, just plexiglas or glass for half of the width of the opening. Every time I encounter one of these, I dread taking a shower and go about my business. The setup in this hotel though - it deserves special mention.

That's not an optical illusion. They cut a corner off of the bathtub so the door would open. Here's a better shot:

Water pressure was outstanding in the showerhead, I'll give them that. Water pressure was so high in the showerhead that you couldn't turn the faucet all the way on, or else the showerhead would spray water all over the bathroom - no real shower door or curtain, remember? So, you had to leave the pressure very low, barely shooting out. Which meant that you had to wedge yourself into the skinny area of the tub to shower. Every single movement, you'd rub against the water line for the showerhead and move it around, paranoid that it would start spraying all over the place again.

I hated this shower.

Returning to the story though, the boss had to do some work, so I ventured to the main square downtown to get my bearings.

One of the reasons that Bastogne was such an important objective for the Germans was its location at the intersection of several different roads. While all of those roads don't directly lead to the main square, it's still pretty impressive, with the four largest roads in town (that we saw) all meeting up in one place, in a square with a bit of parking in the middle, and the square lined with restaurants - with traditional cafes, full blown sit-down restaurants, and fast food all represented. Leading down one of the main roads was a little shopping area, but there weren't a lot of "tourist" type shops. In all of the sections of town that we ended up exploring, there was one single tourist shop that we saw. There very well may have been more shops of that type, but I doubt it, as the rest of the city didn't feel very walkable - everything was pretty tightly grouped around the main square.

Of note: their City Hall has some interesting decorations on it. As we discussed above, the Siege of Bastogne was in December of 1944. Our visit was in April of 2026. There was a prominent sign above the door to city hall celebrating the 81st anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. Either they've been slow to take down the signage, or a sign just stays up there all the time and they periodically increment the number.

Taking into account the decorations on the rest of the building, I'm inclined to believe that they just leave the decorations up - but honestly, I just don't have enough information. I would just be extrapolating from a non-representative sample set. If you've visited Bastogne, I'd love to hear:

What time of year did you visit?
Were these posters (or similar ones) on City Hall during your visit?

Also, there was a (what appeared to be permanent) display in the lobby of City Hall, but... well, just take a look, and tell me if you think something's awry:

I don't remember reading about Ukrainian participation in the battle, and I really would expect for the flag of Belgium to be there instead - but I'm not a historian or professional memorial designer, so there's a good chance I simply don't know what I'm talking about.

In the main square, there was a Sherman tank on display, next to a bust of General McAuliffe. The tank was disabled by an anti-tank weapon, and the farmer on whose land it was found refused to let it be cut up for scrap - not for any altruistic reasons, but for fear that leakage of the fluids inside would poison his well.

I walked back to the hotel and (im)patiently waited for the boss to finish her work. Once she was done, we walked down to the main square and found a place to eat. Evidently, she'd seen something on some travel show or other about one of the restaurants, and we were able to get a table (despite not having a reservation). Part of the restaurant is built with converted train cars.

The next morning, we drove to the outskirts of town to the War Museum:

Very well done museum. One thing they did is introduce you to 4 different "narrators" on your audio guide as you enter: An American soldier, a German soldier, a young Belgian teacher (and member of the resistance), and a Belgian child. As you traverse the museum, the audio guide would tell you parts of the story from each of their perspectives, humanizing this part of the war.

There were several different films presented in the museum, and I made the mistake of sitting through the first one. Turns out, it was in 3D, and the glasses gave me the beginnings of a headache. I skipped the rest of them, but it turns out that the other films were traditional films, with some special effects (fog machines blowing fog through the trees, etc.).

Behind the museum is the Battle of the Bulge Monument, maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. It's a 40 foot tall five pointed star, with arms about a hundred feet long. All 50 48 state names are engraved around the top. It was begun in 1946 and dedicated in 1950 - there were only 48 states back then. Of course, that didn't stop me from expressing my righteous indignation to the boss that they'd missed the biggest state (with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek). Unfortunately, it was closed for renovations when we were there, so we didn't get to climb the stairs and walk around the top.

As part of our museum ticket, we also got tickets to a couple of other sites, so our next stop was the "War Rooms." This was the site of the command post where General McAuliffe received the communique from the Germans, and where he wrote his response. The upper floor of the building was a very well done museum, followed by a trip through the "bunker" downstairs. As good as the museum was, I was quite disappointed with the setup downstairs. You'd walk into an empty room with a translucent screen. Because of the lights behind the screen, you could see through the screen that there were sparse furnishings behind the screen, perhaps a table and chair. You'd sit on a bench for a few minutes, then the lights would go down behind the screen and a little show would project on the screen, walking you through a short scene. One of them was of one guy writing a letter home before going on watch, talking to the watch supervisor and the soldier he was replacing. I'll give them credit for trying, but it was a swing and a miss for me.

After coming back up from the bunker, there was a temporary exhibit of the B-17 bomber, Bull Session. This plane was shot down in January 1945 while on a bombing mission to Cologne, killing 8 of the 9 crew members. The survivor was captured by the Germans and was sent to a POW camp, and held for 105 days before being rescued by Patton's army. The wreckage of the plane was finally found in 2017, and to date they've recovered around 8,000 pieces of the plane, including equipment and personal effects belonging to the crew. They had (what I found to be) a quite moving exhibit set up almost like a work room where they displayed some of the pieces they've recovered. There was a display with pieces of the ball turret assembly mounted into a frame to show where the pieces belonged, and they had a mockup of part of the fuselage set up with recovered artifacts installed in the proper places within the fuselage. For some reason, this particular exhibit had more of an affect on me than most of the other museums we saw that weekend.

Here, you can see the frame with the parts of the turret mounted in their approximate layout

The inside of the mockup of the fuselage

We decided to go ahead and head to the battlefield (the third site from our museum tickets) that afternoon, as we didn't have anything else planned. If you've ever done any reading about the Battle of the Bulge or seen Band of Brothers, you know exactly what the battlefield looked like. For those of you who aren't familiar with it...

Now, whether this is the actual site or not - I'm just not certain. All of the material from the museum led me to believe that this is the site where "Easy" Company was stationed during the battle, but I had a conversation with a gentleman in the parking lot who told me that he'd been a tax collector in that area for years, and that this site was just used for filming and to give tourists a place to crawl around, with the actual battlefield a couple of miles away. My research on the internet wasn't able to get me any clarification one way or the other.

Regardless of whether this is the actual site, people seem to treat is as such, as evidenced by the mementos and crosses that visitors have left here:

The museum developed an Augmented Reality app that you could use while at the battlefield to look around. The way it works is that you point your camera at things, and the app puts additional items/people on your screen, to let you look at what it was "really" like.

Unfortunately, this was a swing and a miss for me too. Nice idea, but there was no way to change the language of the app, so the whole introduction was in French - which, if you've paid attention in the past, you'll know that I don't speak. Additionally, the actors portraying the soldiers were Europeans (Belgians, French, not sure which one), and I couldn't get past their strong accents. They sounded like Pepe le Pew, and it completely pulled me out of the right mindset to appreciate the battlefield.

That night, had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar, before wandering back through the town trying to decide where to eat. We got all the way through the business area before deciding on a local restaurant. Unfortunately, the waitress spoke no English, and... we've already talked about my French... so we translated the menus with our phones and ordered by pointing.

The next day, we headed back, and on the way out of the region, passed an interesting feature, which we had to look up. We didn't manage to capture a picture as we passed, so... here's the next best thing, Google Street View!

Turns out, there's a story there - who would've thunk it? More history ahead - sorry.

In the late 1930s, seems like everyone in Europe knew it was about to get messy. The French installed a defensive feature called the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line was a system of fortifications meant to keep German forces out of France, and allowing the French time to mount up a response force to a German attack, while pushing that attack into Belgium or Switzerland, avoiding a repeat of the trench warfare scenarios that played out in WWI.

In response, Germany built a defensive fortification between itself and the west (France, Belgium, the Netherlands) called the Westwall, but referred to by the Allies as the "Siegfried Line."

Here's a picture from Wiki of another section of the Siegfried Line:

Turns out, there was an eight month long portion of WWII where almost nothing happened on the western front (of Germany). Allies and Germans essentially stared at each other from behind their respective defensive fortifications from September 1939 to May of 1940. This portion of the larger war was initially called (with typical British wit) the "Bore War." This was supposed to be a punny reference to the Boer War of 1899-1902. Their name for this period caused nothing but confusion, so everyone started calling it the Phoney War - yes, the same "phony" that's spelled without an 'e' nowadays.

Anyway - the Siegfried Line. Turns out, there are still portions of it that you can see, and that's what we drove past at a random traffic circle in Gouvey, Wallonia, Belgium.

Of course, we knew none of that at the time, so we kept driving toward home, and stopped for lunch in the Moselle Valley. Interestingly enough, we had lunch at a monastery that we'd taken a picture of just a week before!