Saturday, February 19, 2011

The Tiger of Celles

We discovered this memorial today on one of our drives around the neighborhood in a small village called Celles, it's about 15 kilometers from our house.

If I can summarise part of the sign you see in the last picture, on December 24, 1944 Germans were trying to get to the Meuse river that runs by our house near Dinant. The tank in front drove over a mine, and they came to a stop. They were told by the local people that the roads were mined by the Americans all the way to Dinant, so they stopped coming. This was a lie of course, but the Germans believed it, and it was the closest point they got to us during the Battle of the Bulge. The picture below is the tank after it drove over the mine.


After the war this woman had it brought in to Celles and opened a cafe behind the tank, which is still there today.


1 comment:

william said...

thank you for this post!