In 1947, the French government planted 1,147 stone markers along the route that General George S. Patton's US Third Army took from the Normandy beaches to the relief of Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes. Each borne carries a carved flame rising from Atlantic waves, forty-eight stars for the forty-eight states of 1944, and the letter A for the army that fought its way across France in the summer and autumn and winter of that year. They stand one every kilometre, from Utah Beach to the Mardasson Memorial, the longest continuous war memorial on the European continent. The route is called the Voie de la Liberté, the Liberty Road.
Nobody has written a walking guide to it. There are books about Patton. There are books about D-Day. There are campaign histories covering every phase of the fighting from the beaches to the Bulge. But there is no book that treats these 1,147 stones as what they plainly are: a walkable route, marked at every kilometre, connecting one end of the liberation of western Europe to the other, waiting for someone to follow it on foot and write down what is there.
David G. Oldham, a British writer living in France and a Guardian of the British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer, follows the bornes east from Borne 0 outside the town hall at Sainte-Mère-Église, where the 82nd Airborne dropped on a lit square on the night before D-Day, to Borne 1147 at the Mardasson Memorial above Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne held a freezing crossroads town and answered the German surrender demand with a single word.
Every chapter follows the same pattern. First, what happened on the ground in 1944: the men, the units, the battles, the cost. Then, what is there to see today: the bornes, the memorials, the cemeteries, the museums, the villages that have gone back to being villages. Then, the practical information the modern walker needs: where to sleep, where to eat, how far to walk, which season to come, and what to read before setting out.
Along the way, the book covers ground that most popular histories pass over. The colonel who climbed the bell tower of Chartres Cathedral under fire to confirm the Germans were not using it as an observation post, saved the cathedral from destruction, and was killed the same afternoon. The African American truck drivers of the Red Ball Express who kept the Third Army supplied across the width of France, driving through the night without headlights, in a segregated army that would trust them with a steering wheel but not a rifle. The Polish soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division who held a hilltop above the Falaise Pocket for three days while two German armies tried to climb over them, and whose cemetery between Caen and Falaise is one of the quietest and most moving places on the route. The schoolroom in Reims, still kept as it was, where the German unconditional surrender was signed at 2:41 in the morning on 7 May 1945. The three-month siege of Metz, the hardest and costliest fight of the whole campaign, that the legend of the dash across France prefers not to remember. And the moment at Verdun, two thirds of the way along the route, where the Liberty Road meets its own ancestor: the Voie sacrée, the Sacred Way, the supply road of the 1916 battle, which had been marked with its own kilometre stones, each topped with a soldier's helmet. The two sets of bornes stand together on the same road, the helmet and the flame, and the walker who reaches them will understand why this book was written.
The book is honest about Patton: brilliant in pursuit, indefensible in a hospital tent, and the reader is not asked to choose. It is honest about the road: built backwards, numbered from a disputed zero, marked by stones that are mostly no longer the originals. And it is honest about its own limits: the Normandy section is walked and field-researched by the author; the rest is written from the best sources and will be walked and verified for a second edition.
