FROM JUNE 16 to July 1, Professors Peter Hahn, Peter Mansoor, and David Steigerwald led thirteen guests to World War II and Cold War sites in London, Bletchley Park, Normandy, Paris, Kraków, and Berlin. This was the seventh version of this program, begun in 2011, which acquaints guests with the global education program in the Transnational History of World War II and raises scholarship funds to make possible participation by future students. Throughout the tours, the three professors engaged the tour guests with lectures on the history of the war and the sites they visited, making The Ohio State History Department version of this World War II tour very special indeed.
Professors Mansoor and Steigerwald led a small cohort of four guests to Bletchley Park, home of the codebreakers, as a pre-tour event on Friday, June 16. Once home to the top-secret Ultra program, Bletchley Park has been restored as a world-class museum, showcasing the life and times of codebreakers such as Alan Turing, inventor of the Bombe machine that cracked the Enigma cypher and father of the discipline of computer science. During the war the British Code and Cypher School transformed Bletchley Park into a massive intelligence factory, providing Allied high command with decoded Enigma messages that among other successes helped the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic, interdict Axis supply lines in the Mediterranean, and provide vital confirmation of the success of Operation Fortitude, the Allied deception plan that convinced the Germans that the cross-Channel attack would come at the Pas de Calais and not in Normandy.
The main tour began on Saturday with a reception in the Strand Palace Hotel, followed the next morning by a visit to the Imperial War Museum. The curators used the COVID period to update the Great War and Second World War galleries, which our tour guests thoroughly enjoyed. More somber were the Holocaust galleries, the first of several opportunities for our guests to learn more about that horrific historical event.
The tour transitioned to France on Monday, June 19, with a ferry ride from Portsmouth to Caen and then a short bus ride to the Hotel Churchill in Bayeux. Over the next four days we toured Pegasus Bridge, taken by glider-borne assault on the early morning of June 6, 1944; Arromanches, where the remains of an artificial Mulberry Harbor can still be seen; Angoville-au-Plain, scene of a heroic act by two medics (one of them a former Ohio State student) to save more than eighty American and German lives on D-day; Utah Beach, successfully assaulted by the 4th Infantry Division on D-Day; St. Mère Église, taken by the 82nd Airborne Division in a heroic nighttime airborne jump; Point du Hoc, whose cliffs were scaled on D-Day in a famous U.S. Army Ranger assault; and Omaha Beach, where the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions struggled mightily to get ashore in the face of fierce German resistance. The group also examined how different nations honor their fallen with visits to the German military cemetery at La Cambe, the Commonwealth military cemetery in Bayeux, and the American military cemetery at Coleville sur Mer, where tour guests planted Ohio State and American flags on the graves of the twelve Buckeyes buried there.
The tour next traveled to Paris, where we examined the French Army Museum at Les Invalides and learned about the life and times of Charles de Gaulle and his Companions of Liberation, an order created by De Gaulle to honor those “people or military and civilian communities who have distinguished themselves in the work of liberation of France and its empire.”
On Sunday, June 25, we traveled by air to Kraków, Poland, where we toured the factory operated by Oskar Schindler, now a museum dedicated to the pre-war and wartime history of Kraków, and the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a break from the chilling history of the Holocaust, the group enjoyed the warm hospitality of this wonderful city, which having never been fought over has maintained its medieval and early modern splendor.
Our final stop from June 28-30 was Berlin, where the group undertook a wartime walk of the city, including sites in the Tiergarten, the Soviet War Memorial, the Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial, the site of Hitler’s wartime bunker (location of the classic scene of Hitler’s rant as his world crashes down upon him from the movie Downfall), and the Topography of Terror, a museum of the SS and its crimes against humanity. Our final day in Europe featured a tour of Wannsee House, where German military and civil leaders planned the execution of the Final Solution; Cecilienhof Palace, location of the meeting of the “Big Three” at the Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945; and the 1936 Olympic Stadium, where Buckeye great Jesse Owens was awarded four gold medals in the 100- and 200-meter dashes, the 4x100 meter relay, and the long jump.
After two weeks we sadly parted company with our tour guests, but given the success of this and past tours, we are already planning for our next trip abroad, to the battlefields of the Pacific War in 2025. Those interested in hearing more about this upcoming tour can reach out to Amanda Budreau at budreau.5@osu.edu. The funds raised by past tours provide meaningful support to nearly two dozen students who enroll in the Transnational History of World War II each year. ■
Written by Peter Mansoor, Professor, General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History
Photos courtesy of Richard Raymond
