Buddy The Liberty Dog

Buddy's Trip to Normandy - Omaha Beach and Hill 122 near St. Lo

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Hill 122 Ceremony / 35th Memorial 134th Regiment / at le Mesnil-Rouxelin Normandy / July 17th 2021

A visit to the woods southeast of Bastogne, on the border with Luxembourg.

Due to the virus situation, this years Memorial Day Ceremony - Monday 25th May- will have a small group attending at one of the American Cemeteries in Belgium and will be shown live:

6 pm Belgium
12 pm NYC
11 am Chicago
10 am Denver
9 am LA

A unique way to see how the ceremonies are conducted each year by the American Overseas Memorial Day Association (AOMDA) and the US Embassy Belgium. Broadcast and details in the link below:

Honored to say I’m attending Belgium’s online Memorial Day ceremony. Since 1923, Belgians and Americans have honored America’s fallen on Memorial Day. Not even Covid-19 can stop this time-honored tradition. Join me in remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice for liberty.

Great reporting from TV LUX Belgium. This is the local TV station in the Ardennes area of Belgium. The report is on the US Embassy Belgium funded project to help commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. This project pays for Belgian high school students to visit Bastogne, the museums and parts of the battlefield. This is the Buddythelibertydog project.

L'ambassade américaine permet à des jeunes de découvrir le Bastogne War Museum Un citoyen américain, vivant à Bruxelles depuis 20 ans, a lancé un projet avec son ambassade pour offrir à 550 jeunes belges l'opportunité de visiter le Bastogne War Museum. Les premières classes à en profiter sont celles d'une école hôtelière de Bruges.

Great trip with the Ter Groene Poorte Hotel School Brugge !

First school trip today from Brugge, Belgium, The Hotelschool Ter Groene Poorte!

Buddy - De beste hond ooit! Mijn naam is Buddy. Nou, dat is wat die Amerikaanse soldaten me noemden. Dat was mijn nieuwe naam toen ze me vonden begraven onder de stenen en houten balken die vroeger onze schuur waren. Ze zeiden: "Hé Buddy, hoe gaat het?". Natuurlijk begreep ik ze niet meteen - mijn oren rinkelden nog van de ex...

Here are the schools that will be visiting Bastogne as part of the US Embassy Brussels commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge:

School Agenda - Visit 2020 Here are the schools and dates :

First school trips this week !

Buddy - Le meilleur chien de tous les temps! Je m'appelle Buddy. Eh bien, c'est ainsi que ces soldats américains m'ont appelé. C'était mon nouveau nom quand ils m'ont trouvé enterré sous la pierre et les poutres en bois qui étaient notre grange. Ils ont dit "Hey Buddy, comment ça se passe?". Bien sûr, je ne les ai pas compris tout de s...

Meanwhile...In Bastogne today

première partie

Here is Final List of Schools for the Trip to Bastogne:
Please follow as well @ https://www.buddythelibertydog.blog/

It was common during the war that soldiers would find and adopt pet dogs. During the chaos of battle families had to flee their homes and left behind their pets and animals. Here are some pictures of soldiers with their dogs from the US National Archives (NARA).

It was common during the war that soldiers would find and adopt pet dogs. During the chaos of battle families had to flee their homes and left behind their pets and animals. Here are some pictures of soldiers with their dogs from the US National Archives (NARA).

Bastogne WW2 - Battle of the Bulge

Rrrr.. the big guy took me a few months ago to see the Bois Jacques - or Jacks Woods - which was made famous by the Band Of Brothers book and movie series. These are the woods on the edge of the town of Bastogne, Belgium. In December of 1944 Hi**er had one last gamble to play: to cut through the approaching Allied advance into Germany. At first the gamble paid off. In the first days the Allies (US & British) were totally caught by surprise. They thought the Germans had been defeated since being pushed back in Normandy with the D-Day landings.. no no no... Hi**er had pulled back his best troops from France and had planned a new offensive through the Belgian mountains of the Ardennes. During the first couple of days of the battle the US Army lost one whole division - nearly 10,000 soldiers were captured, killed or went missing. All hell broke loose. To stop the offensive the Allies threw everything they had to stop the Germans and the focal point became the sleepy little Belgian town of Bastogne ,deep in the heart of the Ardennes forests. Into the fray was sent the 101st Airborne soldiers - not by parachutes but by trucks, which the US had a lot of. The 101st were also accompanied by a Armored Division (10th) so they had firepower and tough troops. Their mission was to hold Bastogne. And they did. They dug foxholes into the frozen ground at the edge of the forests and waited for the Germans to advance across the snow swept fields. This they did with their tanks and artillery shells. Assault and counter assaults were the order of the day. For a month the fighting raged around Bastogne until the final assault in January 1945 when Patton's tanks and Infantry reinforcements (35th Infantry among them, Uncle Clem's Unit , the first Infantry into Bastogne to relieve the 101st..) arrived. Yep, they barreled their way into the town to break the siege and push back the German troops into Germany. Each side lost around 80,000 men thanks to Hi**er's last gamble. The German army was now on the run, but the war would continue another five months as the Allies and the Russians closed in on Hi**er's headquarters in Berlin. Deep in his bunker, Hi**er and some of his closest companions committed su***de. Then the nightmare of Hi**er's N**i state finally died.

The woods have not changed much since 1945. These ancient forests have been replanted for centuries by local woodmen. The fox holes and the bombed out depressions are slowly fading away but they are still visible. Re-enactors keep them alive each December as they try to replicate in some small way what happened in those woods.

In Ypres, Belgium (WW1) ..Rrrr...I should have known that the big guy was up to something. He got up early this Sunday (Nov 11), made that damn coffee, and while the girls were getting ready for the Scouts, packed me up into the car. He even took my breakfast in a bag which was super weird. Then we drove and drove on the big roads with the big trucks and just before noon (10:45) we arrived in the middle of a village (Messiness/Mesen). Ha ! We couldn’t have gone any further because the road was blocked by a bunch of people with loud horns and drums milling about for something. As soon as he opened the car I could smell it. There was something in the air I didn’t like. The smell was so strange, a mix of toxic chemicals, explosives, dead bodies of all sorts of humans and all sorts of animals. You might think I’m joking but us dogs can smell a 1000 times more than you humans. The stench is still there. The dogs in the trenches that were used to catch rats and the dogs used as sentries that got the first whiff of the mustard gas and chocked to death alongside their soldiers buddies. Yeah it might have been a 100 years ago today but the stench is still there. And of course the big guy walked me by those places up on the hill where so many humans were buried in nice rows with white and black stones with their names and regiments chipped into the stone. What about all of those animals? Horses, donkeys, dogs of all types and pigeons. Yeah they did the dirty work pulling canon through the mud, delivering messages from the front lines and us dogs went out searching for the wounded as those damn shells flew just over our heads screeching and lighting up the sky. Yeah we found the wounded men, just barely alive and laid down beside them as they cried and fell asleep for the last time. Then we got cut up by shrapnel, limped back to our lines. When we died we were lucky if we were thrown into a ditch and covered up with the next bomb blast. This place stinks and I want to go home.