For those who cannot bear the expense of traveling to distance countries, but who have the desire to see where historically significant military events took place, we have developed a new tool that takes you there. Virtual Battlefield Tours allow armchair military enthusiasts to place themselves in the actual location of famous engagements and heroics actions on northern Europe’s numerous battlefields.

The basis for these tours is the free Google Maps web site and it does not require any additional computer software or expense. These maps can be viewed from computer, smart phone, tablet, or any device that can access the internet.

Google maps is a wonderful tool to view the world. Its satellite view option permits seeing the chosen site from directly above, thus allowing one to see the seashore, lakes, rivers, villages, and forests as they exist today. Move to street view by clicking on and dragging the little yellow man icon to get right down to ground level to see buildings, fortifications, memorials, street signs, road intersections, or anything that a camera can pick out on the ground. Additionally, little blue dots indicate those locations where others have posted photos onto the map to show things what sometimes is not visible with the Google streetview cameras.

Like any technology, there are a few caveats: for the most part, streetview is not available in Germany or Luxembourg and small details are outside the resolution of the streetview cameras; many of the inserted photos are not placed in the exactly correct location, people have been a little sloppy about that; and, finally, you have to know where battlefield events took place.

That’s where Virtual Battlefield Tours come in. French Battlefields, utilizing its extensive directory of battlefield locations developed during the writing of Fields of War: Fifty Key Battlefields in France and Belgium, has identified these exact locations. Customized Google maps now identify terrain features, memorials, historic buildings, museums other features pertaining to the battle and mark them with its custom icons. Each icon is accompanied with a brief description of the site and, in most cases, photographs of the site. Clickable links offer instant access to museum or tourist office websites.

Now, from the internet website http://www.frenchbattlefields.com/ or our corresponding blog site at www.frenchbattlefields.com/blog you can find the battle of your interest and see what the participants saw, what remains of fortifications, and how the battle has been remembered and commemorated. On the website, click ‘Maps’ to be taken to a menu of wars and engagements. On the blog site just click ‘Categories’ on the right hand column, then scroll down. Click on ‘Virtual Battlefield Tours’ and all of the tours will appear. In both cases, a small version of the map is below each summary; click on the link below the map to take you to the Google custom map location. Enjoy wandering the fields and villages of Europe.

This massive undertaking is an ongoing project and only a limited number of battlefields are currently available. On the blog site, click ’Entries RSS’  at the bottom of the screen to be automatically notified by email of new additions to Virtual Battlefield Tours.

03f Battle of Formigny 15 April 1450
Département: Calvados
Region: Basse-Normandie
Country: France

A French Battlefields “Virtual Battlefield Tour” [This battlefield is not included in Fields of War.]

Summary: Hostilities recommenced in June 1449 with the reorganized French Army taking advantage of the weakened English by capturing major cities in Normandy including Rouen, Harfleur, Honfleur and Lisieux. Their next objective was Caen.

The English gathered a small army of about 3,000 men under the command of Sir Thomas Kyriell and left Portsmouth for Cherbourg landing there on 15 March 1450. Kyriell marched south to capture Valognes as the 5,000-man French Army, under Charles I de Bourbon, Comte de Clermont, marched towards Carentan. Kyriell circled around Carentan, refusing to offer battle, and was heading for Bayeux when he entered the village of Formigny on 14 April. The main French force under Charles followed from Carentan towards Bayeux along the later famous National Road 13 as a smaller, but French force of 1,200 fully mounted men under Arthur de Richemont was approaching from St-Lô.

View Battle of Formigny: 15 April 1450 – A Virtual Battlefield Tour by French Battlefields (www.frenchbattlefields.com) in a larger map

The English, now numbering about 4,000 men, established defensive positions behind earthworks with their backs to Ruisseau de Formigny, west of the village.  Their formation was the long successful Crécy formation with 800 dismounted men-at-arms between three wedges of longbow men. To their front, stakes had been driven into the soft spring earth and water-filled holes dug to repel mounted knights.

Clermont attacked the English flanks with little effect. After three hours of skirmishing and a perhaps historical first French use of cannon bombardment, Richement appeared over the rise to the south to take the English in their left flank. Kyriell attempted to form an “L” formation partially straddling the stream. The need to defend in two direction substantially thinned the English line and they had no time to prepare fortifications to protect the archers.  The stronger French force shattered the English line and they fled from the field. Kyriell was captured. The English suffered an estimated 2,300 killed with the remainder captured or scattered against an estimated 200 French casualties.

The Battle of Formigny was a major defeat for the English and one from which they never recovered. All English possessions in northern France fell with the exception of Calais. The battle was decisive, and although other engagements occurred in the south, the English had lost France forever.

Ypres was a provincial town whose glory days were in the Middle Ages. It was seldom thought of outside the region until the opening months of the war. The initial German invasion of 1914 had carried across most of tiny Belgium before being stopped at the gates of the city by an Allied Army of French, Belgian and British soldiers. However, the action had left Ypres at the base of a protruding salient into enemy lines under continuous observation from enemy controlled high ground. For the next four years the German Army tried to eliminate the salient and the British Army defended it.

Ypres Menin Gate

Ypres was shelled, bombed, cursed, and died for thousands of times over. In military texts the battles around Ypres are given numerical titles; the 1st Battle of Ypres, the 2^nd Battle of Ypres, the 3^rd, the 4^th. To the survivors, however, the battles have other names; the Gas Attack – the first use of poison gas in warfare in April 1915; Messines Ridge – the simultaneous explosion of nineteen mine shafts under German lines which obliterated 10,000 soldiers; and the ultimate obscenity – the Battle of Passchendaele.

Passchendaele was trenches filled with water by seemingly unending rainfall; it was continuous artillery bombardment creating a moonscape of mud and water filled shell craters; it was the suffocating necessity of wearing gas masks; Very lights illuminating the barren landscape at night; enemy barbed wire needing to be cut or friendly wire needing to be repaired; machine guns spattering across the mire during the night. It was the total absence of dry clothes, warm feet, hot food, and sleep. Passchendaele was wounded men slowly slipping down the side of ditches to drown in the mud.

After the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission erected a memorial to the men whose bodies had not been recovered from such a hellish battlefield. At the exit of Ypres towards Menin, Belgium, the passage closest to the battlefield, they built the Menin Gate Memorial. On the memorial’s walls, white limestone panels list the names of those men who died in the Ypres salient and have no known grave. After 54,896 names, they ran out of room.

We had been on the Ypres battlefield for several days when we heard the story of Ivan Sinnaeve, better known by British battlefield visitors as Shrapnel Charlie. He lived in Sint-Jan, actually in no man’s land as it turned out. Sint-Jan was so obliterated during the war that returning refugees had difficulty identifying its original location. Charlie’s family located their house by a chest containing his grandmother’s broken dishes.

As therapy after his crippling accident, Charlie obtained some molds for the making of lead soldiers. He started to turn lead balls that had been used with such deadly effect in shrapnel shells into lead soldiers. His soldiers, carefully and painstakingly painted to present the uniform of various regiments, became popular. So much so that the local farmers made it a regular habit to collect the lead balls as they cleared their fields for the spring planting. Visiting regiments were frequently presented with a company of Charlie’s soldiers, mounted and in military formation on finely finished wooden plaques.

They were for sale at a very moderate price and we wanted to visit the now famous ‘Shrapnel Charlie’. We knocked on the door of a pleasant home on the main street of Sint-Jan. Charlie’s wife, Marie Claire, answered the door and invited us into their kitchen. They were just finishing breakfast you see, but Charlie wouldn’t miss an opportunity to chat with some Yank visitors.

Charlie was a mile-a-minute story teller who graciously showed us his collections, his molds, and the foundry in his little garden shed where the castings were made. With great pride, he walked us through his garden to the concrete pole in his yard that his father had covered with broken fragments of his mother-in-law’s ceramic dishware. ‘He never liked her anyway’, he jokingly added.

Often, after retelling stories of the war, Charlie’s father had advised him, “Make sure that nobody ever forgets what has happened here in the past and what men have done to each other.” Charlie’s objective became to make one lead soldier for every name inscribed upon the Menin Gate. He felt that if he did so, the men would no longer be lost and that they could be taken home. Their bodies would continue to exist in his gaily decorated lead models. A little existentialist, perhaps, certainly over-ambitious.

Although Charlie did not have any ‘Yanks’ in his inventory, he did have a mold for them. Nine months after our visit a packaged arrived – post marked from Ieper. It contained two beautifully executed, appropriately decorated, American infantrymen.

Charlie passed away on 13 March 2012 at age 58.  We don’t know if he ever achieved his goal of 55,000 lead soldiers, but he accomplished plenty.

Thanks, Charlie.

 © 2012 French Battlefields
PO Box 4808- Buffalo Grove, Il 60089-4808 USA
contact@frenchbattlefields.com or Fax: 1-224-735-3478
http://www.frenchbattlefields.com

Fighting northward through Varennes-en-Argonne, the Americans confronted a series of strong German defensive lines, or Stellung, given the names Hagen, Giselher, Kriemhilde, and Freya after characters in Wagnerian operas. The third of these was the most extensive and presented attackers with an almost continuous 10-mile belt of machine-gun positions and barbed wire. The terrain provided numerous opportunities for mutually supporting cross- and enfilade-fire and it exposed attackers to shelling from artillery hidden in the forests.

It was mid-spring 2005 and I had been in the area for several days reviewing the sites relating to the battle. On one particular afternoon, I drove the roadways near Brieulles-sur-Meuse to view the Kriemhilde Stellung terrain. Beside the road was a stone monument to the US 4^th ‘Ivy’ Infantry Division, which had suffered 7,412 casualties in the brutal local fighting. I wanted a photograph and, contrary to my normal policy of finding a safe, public area to park, I instead turned onto muddy, farm track. After all, it was a quiet afternoon and nobody was about.

Struggling to get a perspective of the monument with the forests and hills of the stellung in the background, I climbed up a 7 foot verge and walked 300 feet or so along it. No sooner had I positioned myself, than I heard the rumble of heavy farm machinery. I knew immediately that it had to be coming down the farm track now blocked by my parked rental car. I hastened along the top of the verge and slipped down the steep incline in time to meet the tractor that had stopped just inches away from the car’s front bumper. I prepared myself for a tongue-lashing in French, or worse. The tractor’s driver stepped out of the cab and climbed down – presenting me with what I thought must be the largest farmer in northern France.

As he approached, I bravely stuck out my hand accompanied with the obligatory ‘bon jour’. He responded in kind. I mumbled the few French words that I knew including ‘premier guerre’, ‘monument’, and ‘Américain’. He smiled and responded with a few sentences that I barely understood. No matter. With an abrupt signal for me to follow him, he climbed back into his tractor and restarted its motor.

I followed him into the village to his farm where he again signaled for me to join him. He led me into a small room attached to the side of his barn. It was a narrow enclosure, perhaps eight feet wide and twenty feet long; probably originally meant to store tools and farm implements. However, now it was this French farmer’s private First World War museum. Benches covered in recovered artifacts bordered a narrow aisle; on the walls were hung weapons and wartime photographs. It was all neatly arranged; here a collection of rusted rifles with their wooden stocks completely rotted away; there groupings of colorful German wine bottles or belt buckles or shell casings. He had all the paraphernalia of the battlefield; bayonets, glass jars full of bullets, cooking pots, helmets, German beer mugs, brass knuckles, and more – anything that might be used in the deadly hand-to-hand trench warfare or in the mundane daily life of their inhabitants.

It seems that he owned woods and fields through which the Kriemhilde Stellung passed. Cutting lumber or plowing fields exposed these artifacts and he collected the remnants, cleaned off the mud, and started his own museum. As I wandered around the room, he proudly pointed out his most prized pieces. He spoke no English and I very little French, but no matter. We bonded over our common interest. His grandfathers stared out from two large photographs near the rear of the room; both served in the French Army and one was awarded six medals during the war at the cost of one leg.

After about one hour, I took my leave, but not until after I photographed the friendly French farmer standing proudly amidst his wartime collection.

© 2010 French Battlefields
PO Box 4808
Buffalo Grove, Il
USA

contact@frenchbattlefields.com
or Fax: 1-224-735-3478
web: French Battlefields

03e Jeanne d’Arc Birthplace, Domrémy-la-Pucelle
Département: Vosges
Region: Lorraine
Country: France

A French Battlefields “Virtual Battlefield Tour” [This battlefield is not included in Fields of War.]

Summary:  Domrémy dates from Celtic times, but the small village is noted as the birthplace of Jeanne d’Arc. In Jeanne’s youth the area was subject to conflicting forces as it lies between the lands of the Duke of Burgundy, a vassal of the king of England, and those of the Duke of Lorraine, a vassal to the emperor of Germany. Yet it remained loyal to the future Charles VII. As a youth, Jeanne tended livestock in pastures and wandered in forests atop the hills lining the Meuse River valley. During those lonely hours, she developed her strong religious beliefs and convictions that she was ordained to liberate France from English occupying forces.

View Jeanne d’Arc Birthplace – A Virtual Battlefield Tour by French Battlefields (www.frenchbattlefields.com) in a larger map

Rouen was one of the most prosperous cities in medieval Europe and it is a fascinating city to visit. Although extensively bombed during the Second World War, the city center offers many half-timbered buildings of traditional Normandy design, medieval churches, and the actual location of Jeanne’s execution.

03d Execution of Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen
Département: Seine-Maritime
Region: Haute-Normandie
Country: France

A French Battlefields “Virtual Battlefield Tour” [This battlefield is not included in Fields of War.]

Summary:  Jeanne d’Arc was bought from the Duke of Burgundy by the English ruler of occupied France, John Lancaster, Duke of Bedford. She was brought to Rouen on Christmas Day 1430 and imprisoned in the Château Bouvreuil built by Philip Augustus in 1205. After a lengthy trial, she was found guilty of heresy. On 30 May 1431 she was burned at the stake in the place du Vieux-Marché and her ashes were scattered in the Seine River.

View Execution of Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen- A Virtual Battlefield Tour by French Battlefields (www.frenchbattlefields.com) in a larger map

A French Battlefields “Virtual Battlefield Tour” [This battlefield is not included in Fields of War.]

Summary: After her capture at the gates of Compiègne by Count Jean II of Luxembourg, Jeanne d’Arc was held captive at several locations while negotiations for the payment of a ransom took place. Eventually the Duke of Bedford purchased her from Count Jean and she was released into English custody.
This Virtual Battlefields Tour traces Jeanne’s route as she was moved towards English held territory along the Channel coast, then as the English moved her to Rouen, their capital in France.

View Jeanne in Captivity- A Virtual Battlefield Tour by French Battlefields (www.frenchbattlefields.com) in a larger map

Compiegne, one of the earliest royal cities in France, retains numerous large buildings that date from the 15th century or earlier. The city provides an opportunity to view original structures dating from this period.

03b Capture of Jeanne d’Arc at Compiègne: 18 June 1430
Département: Oise
Region: Picardy
Country: France

A French Battlefields “Virtual Battlefield Tour” [This battlefield is not included in Fields of War.]

Summary: In March 1430, Jeanne left the court to help with the defense of Compiegne against attack by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, an English ally. On 23 May she led a sortie against the besiegers. Jeanne became trapped and taken prisoner by the men of Count Jean II of Luxembourg when the gates closed during her force’s retreat.

Charles made no attempt to rescue his heroine, mainly due to court intrigue against her by those jealous of her increasing influence. In November, she was sold by Jean to the English, as was the custom of the time for important captives.

View 03b Capture of Jeanne d’Arc at Compiègne: 18 June 1430 in a larger map

While we did not get to Australia, that country’s history, legends, and flavor can be had by reading Cynthia Clampitt’s book Waltzing Australia. Through reminiscences of her six months criss-crossing the country, Cynthia helps us Yanks understand the personality of this rugged and slightly in-your-face country. While not strictly a travel guide, anyone thinking of visiting Australia, or just doing some ‘armchair traveling’ should read Cynthia’s book for her keen observations on interesting people and beautiful places. There is a lot more to the country than Crocodile Dundee and Sidney Opera House. You might even learn something about yourself in the process. In addition, her short observations on Australia and other topics can be found on her blog site, Waltzing Australia.

We started our series of Virtual Battlefield Tours with those of the Hundred Years War in celebration of the 600^th anniversary of Jeanne’s birth in 1412 - the exact date is not known. Jeanne d’Arc appeared at the court of as yet uncrowned Charles VII at Chinon begging for an opportunity to defend France from English invaders. She was determined to eliminate the English from French soil and to have the Dauphin, Charles, crowned as king of France. To her, it was a holy quest; the result of divine guidance. Her military aggressiveness revitalized French forces and leadership. Despite her untimely capture and execution, her inspiration eventually led to a French military and political victory twenty-two years later.

Our signature volume, ‘Fields of War: Fifty Key Battlefields in France and Belgium’, only includes one Jeanne d’Arc battlefield, the lifting of the Siege of Orléans. Blogs, however, offer the opportunity to present additional material. Thus, we have already posted a Virtual Battlefield Tour of the Battle of Patay, where French forces including Jeanne routed the English survivors from the Siege of Orléans. Several other Jeanne locations will follow shortly. We hope that you will find them of interest.