Bastogne Barracks Veterans Room
by Weston Westmoreland
Title
Bastogne Barracks Veterans Room
Artist
Weston Westmoreland
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
The cross at the Bastogne Barracks Veterans Room.
During the Battle of the Bulge, the besieged 101st Airborne Division placed their headquarters at a Belgian military base in Bastogne. The base still exists and the 101st HQ barracks have been preserved through time and can be visited as a museum. This is the place where Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe answered "Nuts!" to the Germans request to surrender.
There is a room in those barracks, dedicated to the veterans of the Battle of the Bulge who have returned to visit after the war. It is called the Veterans Room and holds the pictures of over 400 men who defended Bastogne and came back afterwards. Each of them was treated as a special guest and treated with the highest honors and gratitude.
In one of the corner of the room, there is a small memorial in the shape of a cross made out of the remmanants of a light machine gun, topped with a helmet and accompanied with the Old Glory.
The 101st Airborne Division (Screaming Eagles) is a U.S. Army modular light infantry division trained for air assault operations. During World War II, it was renowned for its role in the D-Day landings, the liberation of the Netherlands and the Battle of the Bulge around Bastogne, Belgium.
In Bastogne, the 101st was brought out from R&R just a week before Christmas 1944 and hurriedly sent to resist the oncoming German attack that had taken the Allied Forces by surprise. This town was a key crossroads in the Germans Panzer counterattack aimed to retake Antwerp and cut the U.S. army from their supplies.
The men of the 101st dug their foxholes and formed a defensive perimeter in the Ardennes forests around Bastogne, resisting repeated infantry and armored attacks under terrible wintry conditions, equipped with summer clothing and very little medic support. They held on to their positions until Patton broke the siege with his tanks a week later. They had stopped the last German counteroffensive of the Second World War.
The 101st was made widely known through the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which follows the fate of the Easy company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR).
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Weston Westmoreland.
Uploaded
September 19th, 2016
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