The Battlefield Explorer

The German paratroopers entered and held the ruins until May, longer than they had held the intact building.

The Germans built their defences into the slopes immediately below the walls and utilized the surrounding caves and ridge, not the monastery itself. After the February 1944 bombing, General Freyberg's prediction that it would shorten the battle proved wrong.

The fragment of the original abbey of Monte Cassino stonework below the steps is easy to miss. The hills beyond it are not. From this height, the entire Liri Valley is visible, including every route the Allies needed to advance toward Rome.

The aircraft exploded and burned for three days. When the site was finally excavated, researchers recovered only dog tags, a flattened helmet, and a watch stopped at 01:12. Every parachute buckle was still closed.

This memorial in Normandy marks where Easy Company, 506th PIR, lost its commanding officer before a single man could jump. A couple of fields away, C-47 chalk 66, carrying Lieutenant Thomas Meehan III and his entire headquarters section, was hit by flak and clipped a hedgerow at 01:12 on 6 June 1944

The fence was never repaired. I was leading a battlefield tour through Arnhem today and this is always a quiet but effective stop. The fighting here wasn't in open fields. It was in people's front gardens.

A residential garden fence in Oosterbeek, peppered with bullet and shrapnel damage from September 1944. The 1st Airborne Division's shrinking perimeter ran through these streets during the last days of Market Garden.

German engineers detonated their charges but the span refused to fall. American soldiers sprinted across under fire. The bridge held for ten days, then collapsed, killing 28 engineers working to strengthen it.

The Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen. Only the towers remain. On 7 March 1945, troops from the 9th Armored Division reached the Rhine here and found it still standing. Every other bridge had been destroyed.

It does not mention the searchlight disaster, the traffic chaos in the Oder marshes, or the 30,000 to 60,000 Soviet dead — a range that itself reflects how carefully the losses were recorded. It does mark the point where the Red Army broke through on 16 April 1945. The Reich had eleven days left.

The memorial on top of the Seelow Heights on the approaches to Berlin was built by the victors, which means it tells one version of what happened here in April 1945.

La Roche was largely destroyed in the fighting. The Achilles was essentially a US M10 refitted with the British 17-pounder, a pragmatic upgrade born from the urgent need for heavier anti-tank firepower.

A battered Achilles tank destroyer stands in La Roche-en-Ardenne, marking the 51st Highland Division's involvement in the Bulge counteroffensive. The Division had been fighting in the Netherlands when it was redirected south in late December 1944 to contain the German salient's western edge.

Patton arrived here on 19 December 1944, just three days after the German offensive began, and pivoted his entire army 90 degrees north in under 72 hours to relieve Bastogne. That redeployment moved roughly 250,000 men and their equipment across icy roads in midwinter.

The same doorway, decades apart. A composite image merges past and present at Fondation J.P. Pescatore in Luxembourg City, showing General Patton striding into what served as his Third Army headquarters during the Battle of the Bulge.

He never received it in person. A sniper killed him near the memorial on 18 September 1944, the second day of Operation Market Garden. He was only 29.

The Robert Cole monument near Best, visited today leading a battlefield tour along Hell's Highway section of Operation Market Garden. Cole was one of the 101st Airborne's most distinguished officers, having earned the Medal of Honor at Carentan for leading a bayonet charge across an exposed causeway

A German 88mm Pak 43 on a roadside near Clervaux, Luxembourg. Not captured in battle, just abandoned. In early 1945, as the Wehrmacht withdrew through the Ardennes, weapons like this were left behind by the dozen.

From this building, patrols launched across the Moder River to grab German prisoners from the opposite bank. The mission became one of the war's most debated small-unit actions, especially after it was featured in the HBO series Band of Brothers.

This beautiful house in Hagenau served as Observation Post 2 for Easy Company, in Feb 1945. The 101st Airborne had just come off the line at Bastogne, expecting some well-earned rest at Mourmelon. Instead they were trucked to Alsace, where Operation Nordwind had stretched Allied defences thin.

The 34th Division suffered over 6,000 casualties that single day, the heaviest loss of any British division on 1 July. The crater they fought to hold offered no strategic breakthrough. It simply became part of the front line.

The explosion killed or buried an estimated 300 German soldiers in seconds. British troops of the 34th Division advanced minutes later and captured the crater. But the gains were measured in metres, not miles.

In 1916, British tunnellers dug a gallery 270m under no man's land, starting 15m below their own trenches. They packed 27 tonnes of ammonal into two chambers at the end. At 7:28 July 1st, the first morning of the Somme, this was one of 19 mines detonated simultaneously beneath the German lines.

This giant hole is actually a crater of one of the biggest mine explosions of the First World War.
The crater measures 100 metres wide and 21 metres deep and sits in a field near La Boisselle in France. It was not made by a shell but by a massive mine explosion.

Several C-47s carrying troops of the 82nd and 101st Airborne went down in the surrounding area that night. The memorial lists each aircraft number, crew name, and crash site.

A C-47 crashed in the early hours of 6 June 1944 near Picauville, killing all four crew and sixteen paratroopers aboard. The engine was recovered and now forms part of the village memorial. It was not the only aircraft lost here.

The following day, after German engineers bridged the Our at Gentingen, a strong infantry attack supported by one assault gun and led by Oberfeldwebel Berkenbusch overran the position. Captain Paul barely got out.

It did not hold. On the night of December 17, German troops of GR 914 slipped through American positions using the natural folds in the terrain. One platoon of "I" Company was surrounded and shot in the back.

These broken walls near Bettendorf, Luxembourg are what remain of the advanced command post of "I" Company, 109th Infantry Regiment. In December 1944 the Niederberghof farmhouse sat 500 metres behind the American line, under the command of Captain Bruce Paul.

Identification came later. Bellesfield was repatriated and buried in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1949. The four crew members were laid to rest together in a collective grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.