Walk Where They Fought

As an avid fan of Armchair General (I stumbled upon the first issue in an airport and saved each one since), I have been waiting for the chance to follow one of the Walk Where They Fought tours. Being stationed in Germany gave my family and I a perfect opportunity for Veterans’ Day.

ACG was our tour guide for the Battle of the Bulge (May 2005) area. What a great way to teach our kids about real heroes. I would highly recommend one site not mentioned in the tour. The Hoesdorf Plateau near the Luxemburg border is well worth the effort of the three mile hike. I hope to see more Walk Where They Fought articles in the future.

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Thanks ACG for all you do and helping me teach my children what freedom is all about.

Mike Petro

Landstuhl, Germany

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Dear Mike,

Thanks very much for your email and the feedback concerning your trip to the Ardennes and the Battle of the Bulge sites. I wrote the article based upon a staff ride that I led my artillery battalion officers (around 40 went) on in December 1987 and am pleased you found the article useful for your own trip.

Thanks for the tip on the Hoesdorf Plateau. There’s so much to see there and we had to limit the article to 3,500 words to fit in the magazine, so were not able to go much beyond the tour stops in the article.

Coincidentally, just yesterday I ran into a subscriber and his father who told me they used the article to conduct their own trip to the Bulge area last year and also found it useful.

While you’re stationed in Germany, maybe you can try to do the Walk Where They Fought on the Battle for Berlin, 1945 by Rick Armstrong that we featured in the May 2006 Armchair General issue. With the travel restrictions into former East Germany now lifted that might be a great family trip. Also, for a change of pace from World War II sites, you might want to try to do the Walk Where They Fought on the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald (9 AD) that I wrote for the November 2005 issue. That’s the area of northern Germany where I was stationed for 5 years, but it’s a region that not many Americans get to see.

Are you stationed at the medcom/hospital there in Landstuhl? I haven’t been to Landstuhl since around 1989 during a trip to Pirmasens where our brigade headquarters was located.

Thanks again for your email and comments.

Jerry D. Morelock
Colonel, US Army, ret.
Editor in Chief, Armchair General Magazine