Luxembourg was a neutral country on the outbreak of war in 1939, with only a very small standing army of a few hundred men. It sat between the Maginot Line in France and the Westwall in Germany, but on 10th May 1940 German troops crossed the border and invaded while en-route to France as part…
Tag: Sherman
M4A1 (76)W Sherman, Vielsam
This M4A1 (76)W Sherman Tank is located in the village of Vielsam in Luxembourg. It is a later pattern M4A1 with a cast hull and 76mm gun, which gave the crew a better chance of taking on enemy tanks. Indeed, tanks like this destroyed Panther tanks in the fighting around Vielsam in 1944. This particular…
Exploring Walcheren Island
The Walcheren Island in the Netherlands is located close to the port of Antwerp just across the border in Belgium and overlooking the Scheldt river estuary to the south. By autumn 1944 the port was in Allied hands but the estuary area from Walcheren across to Breskens was in German hands. This meant that shipping…
Montfaucon Sherman Tank
The battlefields of the First and Second World War criss-cross in many places and while out visiting the Verdun area today we came across this M4 Sherman in the main square at Montfaucon d’Argonne, a village that was on the line of the American advance in 1918 and also in 1944 a generation later in…
Arracourt Sherman Tank
The Battle of Arracourt in September 1944 is something of a forgotten battle of WW2. Arracourt is a village in eastern France where the US Army had been advancing since the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944. While Operation Market Garden was taking place in Holland, to the Allies surprise the Germans proved…
Ede Sherman
We ended our journey following the battles of 1945 in Holland, looking at the ground around Arnhem. Most people who come to Arnhem do so to follow the Airborne element of Operation Market Garden and examine the fighting here from a 1944 perspective, perhaps not even realising that there was a battle at Arnhem in…
World War 2 Revisited 