To crawl inside the cavity of a U-boat and smell the grease and diesel, to peer through the slit of a pillbox and feel its chilling breath, to stare upon the enormity of a military graveyard and read the names aloud. To experience such places is to walk through history.
Unfortunately for the World War II traveler, formidable obstacles await. First is distance. Unlike the relatively compact engagements of previous wars, events in the machine-driven Second World War covered hundreds of square miles, many of them in the ethereal environs of sea and sky. Furthermore, key locations couldn’t be farther apart. The war began at a bridge near Peking and at a signal station in Poland and ended in a schoolroom in France and on a battleship off the coast of Japan.
There is also the matter of destruction. Total war, with its relentless force, tended to crush whatever it handled most: flying fortresses, grand battleships, entire cities. That which was not burned or blasted away often succumbed later to drifting sands, blanketing jungles, scrap hounds, thieves, and real estate developers.
Despite the challenges, the physical legacy of the war can still be found. Among the many hundreds of possible destinations, the following drop zones are the most favorable for an effective campaign of exploration for the North American traveler. Rank is based on preservation of natural landscape and man-made structures, overall accessibility (transportation, nearby lodging, guided tours, etc.), plus quantity and quality of supporting museums and monuments.52
1. THE BEACHES OF NORMANDY
“D-day” is an operational term for the launch date of any active engagement. But to older generations in North America, Britain, and France, the word D-day can only mean June 6, 1944, when nothing was guaranteed but casualties and when perhaps the liberty of the entire free world depended on the outcome of one attack at one place on one day.
Visiting the beaches of Normandy is not so much a trip as it is a pilgrimage, and stations of reflections are bountiful. Foremost is Omaha Beach. To understand why this landing sector was the bloodiest of the five, one needs only to walk to the shoreline and turn around. Vertical bluffs to the left and right; a jagged, narrow, steep ascent to the center; concrete gun nests and pillboxes all around. Add mines, barbed wire, smoke, obstacles, and deafening weapons fire, and imagine having to run through a quarter-mile of water and sand to reach it.
Spanning fifty miles of France's north coast, the landing zones code-named Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword provide haunting visuals to what the Americans, British, and Canadians faced. The area contains lasting evidence of this great battle. Situated on a high cliff between Utah and Omaha is the strategic German position of Pointe du Hoc, which still bears the shattered bunkers and overlapping craters from Allied bombing, shelling, and direct assault. Ominous are the concrete-and-metal remains of “Mulberry B,” the artificial harbor constructed off Gold Beach after the landings. Every U.S. citizen should see the American Military Cemetery and Memorial overlooking Omaha, with its 9,386 marble grave markers and a wall containing 1,557 names of the missing.
Museums of the invasion are all around, ranging from modest private collections to large, state-run facilities. Chief among them are the Musée des Troupes Aéroportées in Ste.-Mére-Eglise featuring the exploits of the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne operations, the Exposition Permanente du Débarquement just off of Gold Beach with heavy military equipment and emphasis on the British landings, and most important, the spectacular Musée pour la Paix (also known simply as “Memorial”) in Caen, with its massive collections of hardware and state-of-the-art audiovisual displays.
Small hotels cover the coast, and larger ones of every price range can be found farther inland. Guided tours for groups and individuals are easily arranged through major hotels, museums, and online. June and July are the busiest months, so make reservations far in advance or go in early autumn when crowds are modest and the weather most favorable.
Utah Beach is not where it was supposed to be. The Seventh U.S. Corps wanted to land two miles farther north, but tides and misdirection put them off course. Just as well, since the Germans constructed much stronger defenses at the intended landing zone.
2. PEARL HARBOR
For Americans, Pearl Harbor embodies the beginning and the end. The end appears in the form of the USS Missouri. Anchored here since 1998, the largest U.S. battleship ever built hosted the official Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945. The beginning is the harbor itself, main target of the surprise attack that drew the United States fully into the war.
Remnants of the December 7, 1941, air assault traverse Oahu, but the event is encapsulated in the somber, bone-white monument resting near the Missouri. Constructed in 1961, the USS Arizona Memorial straddles the fated battleship’s submerged hull; only the iron base of Gun Turret Number 3 rises from the water. Containing the bodies of more than eleven hundred sailors, the Arizona entombs half the military dead of Pearl Harbor.
Along with this poignant alpha, Oahu possesses many stories in between. Within the harbor is the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum, which pays tribute to the thirty-five hundred U.S. submariners killed in World War II. A tour through the Bowfin is highly recommended. Launched a year after the attack, the three-hundred-foot-long submarine scored forty-five kills in nine missions.
Excellent overviews of Hawaii's military history and the Pacific War can been seen at the Fort DeRussy U.S. Army Museum, seven miles east in Honolulu, just behind Waikiki Beach. Also just east of Honolulu is the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a.k.a. “the Punchbowl.” Situated in the mouth of an extinct volcano, the cemetery holds the graves of thirty-three thousand servicemen and the names of eighteen thousand missing from World War II. It is the largest U.S. military resting place outside Arlington National Cemetery.
Transportation, hotels, guides, and group tours are abundant in this tropical paradise. For the more adventurous, a few organizations offer scuba excursions to sunken World War II boats and planes away from the naval base. Excellent in its convenience and accommodations, Pearl Harbor is supreme in its vivid illustration of the American purpose, victory, and price paid.
Of all the historic sites in the Hawaiian Islands, the most visited is the National Memorial Cemetery at Honolulu.
3. AUSCHWITZ–BIRKENAU
From Yad Vashem in Israel to Washington, D.C., there are twenty and counting major museums and memorial centers to the Holocaust. Though these facilities can induce chilling reminders with photographs, graphic text accounts, and somber audiovisual displays, they are subdued and tepid in comparison to a walk through a death camp. Forty miles west of beautiful Krakow, Poland, near the town of Oswiecim, stands the remnants of the largest and deadliest of the six major extermination centers of the Third Reich. Here, through hard labor, starvation, disease, medical experiments, shootings, and gassings, ten thousand Russians and other nationalities, well over one hundred thousand Poles, and at least one million Jews perished between 1942 and 1945. Initially a labor and incarceration facility, Auschwitz eventually grew into a leviathan of forty subcamps designed to kill and cremate. Today the two largest sections, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II–Birkenau remain relatively intact and are open for public viewing.
Miles of barbed-wire walls, guard towers, and a dead-end rail line greet visitors to this cold, still, colorless landscape. Auschwitz I is the nucleus, holding the commandant’s and SS quarters, medical facilities, and prison barracks. Situated two miles to the west is Birkenau, where most exterminations took place. The gas chambers and crematoria lay in ruins, destroyed by SS guards just before Soviet liberation of the camp in January 1945. Still standing are rows upon rows of buildings, mostly barracks, which once housed skeletal inmates stacked like cordwood upon hard, cold shelves.
Guides are available. During the warmer months bus shuttles run hourly between the two former camps. A few moderately sized hotels are available in Oswiecim, but Krakow forty miles to the east has better accommodations. Take a car or bus from Krakow to reach the site. Rail service stops within a mile of the facility; unlike during the Nazi era, trains do not enter the camps.
Auschwitz–Birkenau averages about two thousand visitors per day. At their peak, the four Birkenau gas chambers could “process” six thousand prisoners per day.
4. LONDON
Winston Churchill made it a point to call the Allies “the United Nations.” Bitter differences over war aims and resources tested this union, but without doubt the city of London served as its capital. The monarchs of Belgium and Denmark, the elected heads of Poland and Czechoslovakia, and a host of other governments in exile came to call London their wartime home. Thousands of Commonwealth soldiers also converged there. In early 1944 more American men bivouacked in and around the English city than resided in Nebraska.
For all that was done in and to the city during the war, very little external evidence remains of a struggle. London's World War II history resides mostly in display cases, museums, and hangars. Fortunately, the city has easy access to a multitude of such sites and is one of the most tourist-friendly regions on the planet.
The mother of military collections is the Imperial War Museum. Focusing primarily on the First and Second World Wars, its highlights include Marshal Montgomery’s command tank for the African campaign, remnants of Rudolf Hess’s plane, a Spitfire, intact V-1 and V-2 rockets, numerous tanks and artillery pieces, visiting authors and displays, and a section of track from the India-Burma rail line built by Allied POWs.
Anchored in the Thames within the shadow of London Bridge is the HMS Belfast. The Royal Navy cruiser ran support missions for arctic convoys and laid down fire support off the Normandy beaches on D-day. A self-guided tour reveals almost the entire inner workings of a fighting vessel—its main guns, hospital, mess, communications, and its three-story pipe-labyrinth of a boiler room. Unfortunately, much of the ship is inaccessible for people with physical disabilities.
Among other sites are the National Army Museum and the Cabinet War Rooms. The latter (thirty feet below King Charles Street near Number 10 Downing) was the actual bunker from which Churchill and company directed the country during the war.
Hotels are abundant, as are restaurants, historic and entertainment attractions, and tour packages. If time is available, travel fifty miles north of the city to Duxford Imperial War Museum. It boasts perhaps the finest collection of historical military aircraft in the world and features every major type of fighter, bomber, and cargo plane used in the Second World War.
When traveling through London, the Underground provides quick and easy access to nearly every place of interest. The Tubes are important to see for another reason—the subterranean stations served as bomb shelters during the war.
5. CORREGIDOR
On Christmas Eve 1941, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Philippines president Manuel Quezon, and supporting troops left besieged Manila and headed for the safety of Corregidor. Three and a half miles long, crowned with artillery, and veined with underground tunnels, the mountainous island fortress and its thousands of soldiers were poised to protect vital Manila Bay and the Bataan Peninsula.
Though no explosive could penetrate the deep man-made caverns, hope was limited. MacArthur and Quezon left for Australia in February 1942. By April, Bataan had fallen, allowing the Japanese to bomb and shell Corregidor almost continuously. In May, the Japanese landed. Short of food, water, and ammunition, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and eleven thousand troops and civilians surrendered, facing years in Japanese internment.
Today, the island is dedicated to the preservation of the fortress and to the memory of its defenders. A day tour is available, though the traveler is at the mercy of its tight schedule. A wiser use of time is an overnight trip, with a stay at the island’s hotel or resort (both operated by Sun Cruises). Several gun emplacements, memorials, caves, old barracks, monuments, and scenic ocean views are within reach of rigorous walks, jeepney rentals, and open-air bus rides. The island’s pièce de résistance is eight-hundred-foot-long Malinta Tunnel, which served as arsenal, headquarters, and a thousand-bed hospital for the Allies and the Japanese.
A night tour of Malinta Tunnel is amazing but not for the claustrophobic or squeamish. In 1945, Japanese soldiers killed themselves in the tunnel rather than capitulate to the returning Allies.
6. THE ARDENNES
Scattered and diminutive monuments, comparatively small museums, and a dearth of road markings make this region a touring challenge, to say the least. But here the landscape becomes the story.
Covering southern Belgium and northern Luxembourg and consisting of tightly folded hills, carpets of fir trees, thin and wandering roads, and deep vocal rivers, the Ardennes appear to be impassible for a logging truck, let alone a panzer division. Viewing the area as a natural barrier, the French did not bother to extend the Maginot Line behind it. But through this vast tank trap Hitler launched his two major western offenses in 1940 and 1944. On both occasions he caught his opponents by complete surprise for obvious reasons.
As stated above, museums are few. Principal among them are the small but impressively equipped December 1944 Museum in La Gleize, Belgium, with a rare Tiger tank parked outside; the Musée D'Histoire 1944–45 in Diekirch, Luxembourg, hosting numerous tanks, artillery pieces, and life-size military dioramas; and the Historical Center in Bastogne, Belgium, with an average collection of weapons and uniforms, a superior film showing footage from the actual Battle of the Bulge, and the three-story outdoor monument called Mardasson, touching in its sheer gratitude to the American liberation of Belgium.
Less visited and more important are the American, British, German, and Polish cemeteries in the area, and there are several. The Bulge was the bloodiest battle of the war for the United States, with nineteen thousand dead, most of whom are buried near Neuville en-Condroz and Henri Chapelle, Belgium, and just outside of Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.
In recognition of the courageous American defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, every major road entrance into the city is “guarded” by a Sherman tank turret.
7. VOLGOGRAD (STALINGRAD)
Mamayev Hill was vital high ground during the battle of Stalingrad. A perpetual target of artillery, air strikes, tanks, and close-quarter fighting, its soil was often reddened with blood and forever inundated with shrapnel.
Today nearly a square mile of the rise is home to Mamayev Memorial, commemorating the tremendous losses and immeasurable gains of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Opened in 1967, the memorial is an elaborate progression of monuments lining the famous hillside. Winding upward on granite walks (signifying permanence), through rows of poplar trees (the stalwart defenders), past flower beds and pools of water (eternal life), stand a series of statues and sculptures, each dedicated to a particular facet of the fight. Among other effectively titled places for reflection are the Square of Those Who Fought to the Death, the Square of Heroes, and the Square of Sorrow. Past the last station, a gravesite holding tens of thousands killed in the battle, stands one of the most striking sculptures ever constructed. Towering from the top of Mamayev Hill is Motherland, a saintly female figure brandishing an enormous saber. Colossal, idyllic, and awe-inspiring, it is the most visited memorial in Russia.
Also in Volgograd is Russia’s second most complete World War II museum (behind the sprawling Great Patriotic War Museum in Moscow). Refurbished and recommissioned on the fortieth anniversary of V-E Day (simply known as V-Day in Russia) in 1985, the seventy-year-old Volgograd State Panoramic Museum houses four thousand displays set in eight galleries, most of which exclusively feature the battle of Stalingrad. The museum also has a lifelike panoramic painting two stories tall and the length of a football field entitled the “Defeat of Fascist Armies at Stalingrad.”
From the United States, it costs twice as much and takes three times as long to fly to Volgograd as it takes to reach Paris. Getting around the Russian city is not the easiest endeavor for English-only tourists, though a few tours are available. Yet the effort is rewarded in full, if only to see where history profoundly and unquestionably changed course against the “Thousand-Year Reich” of Nazi Germany.
At more than three hundred feet in total height, Volgograd’s Motherland is the tallest freestanding statue on earth.
8. ARNHEM
In the September 1944 OPERATION MARKET-GARDEN, the British First Airborne plus elements of the First Polish Airborne along with Dutch Resistance planned to take the town of Arnhem by air drop and then secure its priceless bridge across the Rhine until help arrived. Unfortunately, the plan went “a bridge too far.” Today the key stop on this tour is the Airborne Museum, housed in the hotel that served as battle headquarters for the British First Airborne. It boasts an excellent collection of uniforms, relics from the battles, dioramas, video presentations, and a comprehensive 3-D map.
In Arnhem proper, Museum 40–45 depicts the desperate four years of occupied Holland and the fight for the city during Market-Garden. Also significant is the bridge itself. Destroyed after the battle and rebuilt to the same blueprints in 1950, it is now known as the Col. John Frost Bridge, named after the brigade commander who led the doomed attempt to take the span.
The Airborne Museum and other organizations offer walking and coach tours. In September paratroopers reenact an airdrop. To truly appreciate the difficulty facing the British Armored Thirty Corps, it may be enlightening to drive the seventy miles to Arnhem from the Belgian border (Highway N69 to N271) over its single narrow road crossing nine bridges.
In September of each year, the children of Arnhem gather at the Airborne Cemetery just west of town and adorn the British and Polish gravestones with flowers in honor of their sacrifice.
9. CASSINO
One look at Italy begs the question why the Allies considered this the “soft underbelly” of Europe. A spine of mountains down its length, a choice few roadway arteries up its coasts, and a thick skull of frigid Alps, the country was born for defense.
Deep in the shin of the Italian boot, between Naples and the capital, stands Cassino, where the Allied march on Rome came to a bloody halt. To wrest this high ground from the Germans, the Allies launched attack after attack—Americans in January 1944, New Zealanders in February, Indians in March. Finally, Poles and French in May.
The city today should be called New Cassino. The original town rested higher up the hill and was erased during the battle. Crowning the hill is Montecassino, the sixth-century monastery that was controversially and—as it turned out—pointlessly destroyed by Allied bombers in February 1944; rubble from the raids made for better defenses. Fortunately, the sprawling, looming abbey has been nearly restored and can be visited today, provided the tourist arrives properly attired (no shorts or short-sleeved shirts). Some of the original religious trappings survived the battle and are on site.
Surrounding the abbey are grave reminders of the international struggle that took place. Nearby is a Polish cemetery, accessed by stairs, holding more than one thousand troops. Just outside of town is a Commonwealth cemetery with more than four thousand resting places, plus four thousand names of the missing. Farther north is a German cemetery with twenty thousand bodies.
The site is an hour south of Rome. Hotels are plentiful, but the land is rugged and steep. If walking is undesirable, renting a car may be the best option, although Italian motorways are not for the timid.
Ten miles southeast of Cassino is the village of San Pietro Infine. Though tourists visit, it has no inhabitants. All its residents were killed or driven off during a fierce battle there, and the ruins of the town remain as they were in 1943.
10. HIROSHIMA
On any given day, the atmosphere at Hiroshima's Peace Park is strangely relaxed, surrounded as it is by a bustling metropolis of one million people. Straddling the river Motoyasu, about five hundred yards square, the park is a collection of memorials, a burial mound, temples, and other shrines of solemnity. Most of them impart the “Spirit of Hiroshima,” an internal and international appeal for everlasting peace. Across the river in the park's northeast corner stands the decaying cadaver of the “The A-Bomb Dome,” once known as Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall, above which occurred the air burst. Just north is the T-shaped Aioi Bridge, used as the aiming point for the Enola Gay.
Central to the complex is the three-story Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Engrossing may be the operative word here. Text is in English and Japanese. There are charred and melted relics of the blast, before and after pictures of human bodies, films of the damage, and video testimonials from survivors. Present is a rare acknowledgment of the Japanese army’s 1937 Rape of Nanking. Of the Hiroshima bomb itself, the museum implies that its use was racially motivated. A heavy emphasis is placed on the ensuing nuclear arms race.
Hiroshima is on the largest Japanese island of Honshu. Direct flights to the city are expensive. The better route is by way of bullet train from Tokyo, then by streetcar to the park. Though everything can be covered in a day, the city is home to a bustling nightlife and a major baseball team. Many signs are in English, and hotels are abundant.
In 1946, several prominent Japanese from the Hiroshima area gathered to discuss plans for reconstructing the city. One person suggested preserving the vast wasteland as it was to serve “as a memorial graveyard for the sake of everlasting world peace.”53