Travel date
"Battle of the Bulge"
Travel dates:"Battle of the Bulge"
01. 06. 2006
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French Cuisine & Lost Battles
60 years ago this was the location of Hitler's last great offensive, today it is a picturesque landscape with an overbearing past: the Ardennes in Belgium and Luxembourg.Indulge yourself at top-flight four-star hotels, enjoy the finest cuisine and view impressive sites of hard-fought battles.
Four days in which you will learn the true story about a gamble of risk without equal.
Historical background to this trip
On December 16, 1944, at 0530 hrs, 20 divisions numbering 250,000 men were sent into action in the "Wacht am Rhein" (which the western Allies refer to as the "Battle of the Bulge"). The battle for the Ardennes had begun.
The Seventh Infantry was to muster near Vianden and Echternach, while the Fifth Panzer Army had orders to take St. Vith and to advance as quickly as possible through the southern Schnee Eifel region. The Sixth Panzer Army, led by SS Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, comprised four strong tank divisions and five infantry ones; their task was to spearhead the push for Antwerp.
Dietrich's advance ground to a halt at Christmas however, and his advance guards, especially the first regiment of the First SS Panzer division, was wiped out.
The Fifth Panzer Army surrounded parts of the US 106th Infantry division in the Schnee Eifel and occupied St Vith. On December 19, German troops surrounded the town of Bastogne, which had been reinforced by the American 101st airborne division at the last minute.
Hasso von Manteuffel sent the majority of his motorized forces on towards the Meuse river. On December 24 intelligence units from the 2nd Panzer division arrived in Foye-Notre-Dame, just six kilometres from the Meuse, the westernmost point the offensive ever reached.
Till then, bad weather had protected the German troops from attack, but it cleared up, aiding the Americans and British in cutting German units off from each other and destroying them. By the end of January the Germans were back where they had started and the battle was lost.