sterckxe
Posts: 4605
Joined: 3/30/2004
From: Flanders
Status: offline
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Hi,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25663989@N07/sets/72157607953973814/
As Arjuna has posted in here he’s currently on a Bulge tour with Richard and Mark Simonitch and company. As he stayed a couple of days at my place first this was an ideal opportunity for a gathering of the Low Countries Beta Bunnies to meet the Big Boss and drag him along on a mini-tour of their own.
So, on Friday evening one by one the Bunnies arrived, got billeted upstairs and were force-fed spaghetti Eduardo but surprisingly enough voluntarily drank the beer. It was decided we’d skip Joe’s Bridge and head straight to the Eindhoven area, from there we would go North just as far as was possible. Would Arnhem be a bridge too far for us as well ?
On Saturday morning a couple more Bunnies arrived, tons of cookies and drinks were loaded in the car and we were good to go. Think what you may, but sacrificing virgin goats to the Old Weather Gods works time after time as we’ve been having unseasonably good weather ever since Dave set food on European soil. There was some talk about sacrificing one of the Bunnies too just to make sure the weather holds, but somehow this didn’t prove to be such a popular plan. Oh, yeah, as to these “tons of cookies” – anyone who has ever traveled with Andries “Final_Drive” Verspeten knows why you *really* need plenty of them.
The pictures really tell the rest of the story : we saw with our own eyes how the tactical layout was of places we had only visited before in scenarios in Highway to the Reich and as I’ve said before : there’s really no substitute for seeing it for yourself. As a small example : I never realized that the Groesbeek heights were indeed rolling, wooded hills – and that although on a contoured map it may look as if they’re commanding the approaches to Nijmegen (as the Allied High Command thought), they actually don’t as the slope is too gentle and it’s pretty impossible to clear enough trees to get a LOS to the bridges.
Another surprise was the Waal crossing – that’s a mighty big river to cross under fire and that’s not even taking into account the hundreds of meters of open flatland you’ll have to cross to fight an entrenched enemy on higher, wooded terrain. A real Omaha beach scenario on a smaller scale really and an explanation for the very high KIA numbers there, with lieutenants, as is usual in these cases, numbering 10% of the casualties. Same thing with the Driel pontoon on the Rhine, the flatlands there and the commanding heights just a stone throw away which were in German hands. The Polish paras got massacred there trying to cross the Rhine from the South to reinforce Urquhart.
At some point in the tour we had to turn back because Mark-Jan “Grouchy” Luppens thought the had lost his wallet – this turned up later in his own car, he’ll have to face the consequences next tour when he’ll be forced to pay for all the beer – so we arrived a little late at Hartenstein, the HQ of the British at Arnhem which was turned into a little museum. The most intriguing bit on display there is the actual intel map Urquhart used during the siege – it’s highly incomplete with regard to what historians today know of the Germans surrounding him, but a good reminder of the fog of war and that a real commander only has limited intel available and has to make plans based on what he knows or suspects.
As we had run a little late the planned dinner at home was scrapped and we instead faced our most dangerous assignment of the day : survive the food served at the Oosterbeek fast food joint Mark-Jan had spotted earlier that day. There you could notice that Dave is ex-Army : he did not flinch, though presented with the worst of the worst from a nutritional point of view. He suspected a trap by his ever mischievous Bunnies as payback for all the bugs he put in the code, but they felt sorry for dragging him along for so long the day before the start of his main tour, so he got that famous Dutch haute-cuisine speciality “frikandel speciaal” which basically consists of deep fried chopped-up pig leftovers and sauce to camouflage the taste of it with a sidedish of French Fries. Yummy. Well, actually it was – the fries were exceptionally (and unexpectedly) well-prepared so the joint got the Beta Bunny Seal of Approval. If you’re ever at Hartenstein : head east on the main road, first fast food joint on your right.
After an uneventful two hour+ drive to get us to base camp again we *really* needed a couple of beers .. for some more … a lot more .. to relax and recuperate after what had been a long, tiring, but eventful day. It looks like the Bunnies really have acquired a taste for this battlefield touring as it was quickly decided that Marc von Martial’s proposal that he’d organize a little Operation Varsity / Crossing the Rhine tour next Spring was quickly accepted. He may be the next tour’s organizer, that didn’t mean he had immunity with regard to my standard wake-up system : send in the dogs to lick those who can’t get out of their bed in the morning. He had been warned. A telephone call from the Bulge tour organizers Richard and Mark that Dave had to be there an hour earlier than planned didn’t really mess things up a lot and we easily made it to the rendez-vous point where we delivered Dave in their capable hands.
Greetz,
Eddy Sterckx
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