Bastogne and the Battle of the Bulge war museum

Having escaped the confines of the Mechelen hotel car park, Thibault liked the idea of doing some military history on our way to Trier. So we went to Bastogne, a place I confess I had never heard of. It played a part in the Battle of the Bulge.

In fact the museum consists of a number of parts. As we had walked to the museum from the town itself, we first skirted the Mardasson American War memorial, a very substantial memorial to over 70,000 US soldiers who died in the Battle of the Bulge

Then the Museum itself. Which is very modern, very interactive  - you get headphones and hear the story of the battle around Bestogne from the viewpoint of four fictional characters, a US serviceman, a German soldier and two residents of the town. Bastogne was taken by the Germans then liberated by the Americans only for the town to be then encircled by a German counteroffensive leaving the Americans holed up in the town and shelled, over Christmas 1944

The only trouble I had with the museum was sensory overload. The stories over the headphones were great but I found it difficult at the same time to look at, and more importantly read, the exhibits in front of me

There are also some short cinema pieces, one of which was of the forest area where the Americans and Germans were dug in

And there are reconstructions of the town as it was

There is a further museum in the town which is in a base built for the Belgian army to resist invasion, but which ironically was taken very promptly and so its real service became as a base for the Hitler Youth! Then when the Germans left it became the US base. Unfortunately there really wasn't very much in the buildings to see. Mostly one's time was spent in four rooms in the basement where there were little films re-enacting the point at which the Germans in their counter offensive had encircled the town and the demanded the Americans to surrender. To which the US commander famously simply replied "Nuts" as they only had to hole up briefly before the town was relieved by General Patton with reinforcements.

Finally we drove out to a little patch of forest where amazingly there still exist the foxholes dug by US troops in the frozen ground in December 1944