Next weekend, the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg will be hosting an event to commemorate the upcoming 80th anniversaries of the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle that American forces fought in during World War II.
First-person living history interpreters will be in uniform guiding visitors through a timeline of those battles.
Local historian Jared Frederick said, “On the eve of the largest battle of the second World War that the Americans would fight in, many of those troops were placed in an area in Belgium and Luxembourg. It was known as the Ghost Front, because it was very quiet, it was very peaceful, but that sense of serenity ended up being very misleading because those troops, in mid-December of 1944, were going to be front and center at the forefront of a German counterattack that would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. It’s the largest battle in American history. Over one million men fought in this confrontation, and it stretched over three countries.
“When visitors come here, they’re going to get a sense of two different campaigns that overlapped with each other, one of which is the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, which took place on the Belgium-German border in the Fall and Winter of 1944-1945. One reason we decided to focus on that fight was that it’s very much overlooked and overshadowed by the story of the Battle of the Bulge.”
“These campaigns of the Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge were, in many ways, Hitler’s last great gambles. These were the final efforts undertaken by the Third Reich to try and push the allies back to the sea and gain some momentum in bargaining for a conclusion to the war and, unfortunately for the troops of both sides who were thrust into these conditions, it overlapped with some of the most dreary autumn and winter weather that was on record.
“The Hurtgen Forest was overcast, it was foggy, it was dreary, and then that is followed by the Battle of the Bulge, which was the worst winter in half of a century. So, these troops had not only the enemy to fight; they had to fight an inner struggle psychologically with themselves and then perhaps worst of all they had to fight Mother Nature as well. Visitors will be moving chronologically. They will be going on a living-history timeline, and then that will expand into an even bigger story of the Battle of the Bulge, where the stories will continue. They will be meeting soldiers who will often talk to them in first-person. So, it will be a great one-on-one experience for anybody who comes here.
“Now that we are eight decades removed from the second World War, it’s incredibly important to reflect upon these stories because we, as a society, are standing at a transitional moment. At this time, less than 1% of the 16,000,000 Americans who served in World War II are still with us, and, when you go to places like Luxembourg and Belgium, and Germany, even, you really get a profound sense of how much they cherish this story here and how much they still appreciate what Americans and other allied countries did to defeat fascism in 1944, and a lot of people may not be able to visit those battlegrounds in those countries firsthand, but we encourage people to come out here to meditate with us on what this story means and why it is still relevant almost a century later.”
The event will take place on both Saturday and Sunday next weekend, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Also, on Sunday, there will be a Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremony under the large guns of the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, whose crew witnessed the attack on that day of infamy.