December 3, 2016
We hired Edwin Popken of Battlefield Discovery Tours to act as our guide while visiting the Ardenne region of Belgium in late October of this year. ... read more I was interested in tracing the footsteps of my Uncle who fought in the “northern shoulder” of the Battle of the Ardenne Forest (Battle of the Bulge) in 1944 and 1945 with the 2nd Army Division. From reading about this part of WWII I had only sketchy ideas of the geography and terrain of the area and the names of the towns and battle areas were familiar but in a fragmentary way. Edwin was able to bring all this together by providing us a detailed tour of the areas where the 38th FAB would have been positioned throughout this campaign. The thoroughness of his knowledge about military history and this particular battle area was invaluable in bringing the fragmentary aspects of the battle engagements during that time into a meaningful whole. There is NO possible way (even with extensive reading and studying) that we could have found these locations and understood the movements of this Division, Regiment, and Battalion without Edwin’s expert guidance. Communicating with him before our visit was invaluable and he was responsive and thorough in his answers to my emails. He designed a tour SPECIFICALLY for us and understood the kinds of information that would be not only of great interest but also of great personal meaning to us.
We hired Edwin for a one day tour but felt we could easily have extended that to two or three. Edwin picked us up at our hotel in Malmedy and this worked perfectly. We were driven to all the sights in Edwin’s car. The day was full; we saw amazing sights and locations that only an experienced guide could bring us into and the accompanying historical information was thorough and excellent. We cannot say enough about the quality of the experience, the attention to detail of the tour, the personal nature of the tour, the ease and promptness of our communications with Edwin, the overall value of the day we spent, and the amazing experience of the bringing to life of what we had only read about. If you are looking for a guide to military sites during the course of the Second World War, we highly recommend that you will have the good fortune of hiring Edwin.