My son and I are visiting Northern France and Belgium in the summer (end of June, early July)
My son (19) has an incredible thirst for British military history in this area so we plan on visiting Dunkirk, Passchendaele, Agincourt, the Normandy beaches as well as the Bayeux museum before travelling to Brussels and then out to Waterloo.
My initial plan is to take the Eurostar to Lille (as we'll be in London with relatives) and then hire a car (except for the last Brussels bit which we would do by train having returned the hire car to Lille).
So, I'm looking for advice from any of you who have been to these places. Hired a car in France and have any pearls of wisdom to help us on our way.
Many thanks in advance
Royston
How long are you there for ? Just picking one 'campaign' would give you weeks of places to visit. Cemeteries, museums, battle field sites etc.
For the Western Front, there is the Menin Gate in Ypres, the 8pm last post ceremony is a must (they have the gate covered for renovation so perform the ceremony just outside it at the moment ...well, they did last September) Also in Ypres is the Flanders Fields Museum in the old cloth house. Dozens of cemetaries within 10 miles of.
Close by...8 miles, is Poperinge with Talbot House (you can stay there and I heartily recommend it). Also in Poperinge is the site of the execution post for deserters. Tyne Cot cemetary is huge, others close by are tiny, just plots in the middle of worked fields.
For the Somme, Thiepval Memorial, Vimy Ridge (Canadian and with Canadian students doing tours of the trenches and tunnels) and obviously loads of tiny cemeteries...often at or close to the site of casualty clearing stations rather than where they fell. In nearby Arras are the tunnels at Carriere Wellington.
I've been a fair few times and will no doubt go again at some point.
WWI - go to Tyne Cot -near Ypres, langemark also good whilst they are cemeteries' , the were built into the front line so there are bunkers and field works amongst the graves. Both very moving. Hill 60 if you want to see some land left as it was. Agincourt you can walk around the battlefield though there is alot of revisionism that suggest its actually closer to Masioncelle. Wellington Museum in Waterloo is good - there is a new museum at waterloo too that they were just building when i was there last. Hougomont is worth walking around - the big fight within its grounds. Loads of stuff in Normandy Merville, the Bridges capture by the glider troops etc - I like the Utah beach museum - been around all of these on the bike - may be hire a bike. You could also do Crecy, Dieppe (if you are driving from Normandy - there loads more (not sure I would bother with Dunkirk though)
Going to keep an eye on this thread for some useful info. Been tracing a family member who voluntarily signed up as a soldier during WW1 and somehow managed to survive and then went back to help with the identifying bodies post WW1. I've also got one of the commemorative poppies with the name of a fallen soldier on it, been interesting tracing his life up to his death, he's buried just south of Arras.
Got a crazy idea to make visiting these areas part of a cycle tour from Belgium/Netherlands to Italy in late August/early September this year.
The Menin Gate is being restored, is fully scaffolded and the memorial panels are completely shrouded.
Work scheduled to complete in spring 2025, scaffolding and shrouds in place until then.
Your son no doubt has a btter idea of where to go than me but on the question of hiring a car: take high resolution photos of it from every angle and note every stone chip on the document you sign. If you pick up a car without inspection photograph every imperfection and e-mail it to them.
We've stayed in Arras quite a few times. The Carrier Wellington is well worth a visit. It's enormous. The guided tour is very good and really quite evocative.
Closeish to Arras is Vimy Ridge, where Canada came of age. Oh my word, the slaughter there was worse than many other places. There's a short underground tour as well as some lengths of preserved trenches. The monument is collosal.
Ypres and Tyne Cot are so bizarre, why were these places deemed to be so important that hundreds of thousands of people died?
The same can be said of the whole war thing I suppose. Anyway, I'm rambling.
The huge Thiepval memorial (Lutyens?) is quite impressive but the museum is astonishing. It starts with a machine gun and then shows what it could and did do.
For me though the most memorable things are the hundreds of small field cemeteries that are dotted all over. There will be a book at the gate giving details of the men buried there. Once, on a long drive back from the Dordogne we needed a place to stop so that our restless toddler could stretch his legs. At this one small site my wife (who has a very unusual family name) by chance found the grave of a soldier with that same name. It felt more than OK that our son was running around on the grass that evening.
My grandfather was on the Western Front before the end of 1914. The pic is his 1914 Star. Awarded to anyone on active service there between August and Nov 1914. I don't think he had been further south than Inverness - Fort George - before the war. At the outbreak of was he was in the Seaforth Highlanders TA which is why he was in France so soon - by October.
He would have spent time at Ypres. As above the Menin Gate is a must. Probably best after the renovations are finished though.
Don't worry about the restorations, there is still much to see, the town itself is lovely to stay in. Also, travel down the road towards Armentier, to Ploegsteert where there is a big memorial to the missing, also has a superb cafe outside! (Beer warehouse is also a stones throw). In fact that entire road has loads of cemeteries and in tact trenches..
The Menin Gate is being restored, is fully scaffolded and the memorial panels are completely shrouded.
Work scheduled to complete in spring 2025, scaffolding and shrouds in place until then.
That's unfortunate timimg, my lads band played at the ceremony when they did a music tour when he was about 14, property moving video.
The Carrier Wellington is well worth a visit.
I'd second that, we visited it along with various other battlefield sites including Vimy Ridge. So impressed that my wife is taking a school trip there later this year. You even get to wear a reproduction WWI helmet as your safety helmet for the underground tour.
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/french-flanders-artois/museum-wellington-quarry.htm
I've been to the Ypres Salient a fair few times & you can pack a lot in within a small area from the cemeteries, Menin Gate, huge mine craters, battlefield sites & museums. Hill '62 at Sanctuary Wood was particularly memorable for its trenches and collection of period stereoscopic images which put you right on the battlefield with gruesome detail. I'll never forget the one image of a horse thrown up into a tree.
We did a road trip from Brussels to Amsterdam last summer, and I made a detour specifically to see the Menin Gate. As others have pointed out it's being restored and is covered in wrapped scaffolding. The rest of the town is alright, but clearly a bit of a tourist trap with lots of "Tommy" shops packed with poppies. I wouldn't bother.
