The guns fell silent long ago, but interest in World War II remains strong. The Luxembourg cemetery, maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, attracts some 150,000 visitors each year. At all its 17 burial grounds in Europe, the commission estimates that 3.2 million visited last year, up 30 percent since 1998, with Americans probably accounting for around a quarter of that. “A few years ago, we were saying all this would quiet down as the veterans died off,” says Walter Frankland, who heads the commission. “That just isn’t happening.”
By some counts, American veterans are now dying at the rate of 5,000 a week. But some still make the pilgrimage to Europe. Their children and grandchildren also come, as a way of educating the next generation. “There is a lot of emotion,” says James Dickey, a retired U.S. general who runs a battlefield-tour business from Paris. “Every veteran knows it’s a matter of luck who survived and who didn’t.” Germans come, too. For pathos, it’s hard to match Luxembourg’s austere German war cemetery, where almost half the 10,915 bodies lie in a single communal grave.
Topping the visitor lists are the Normandy beachheads, where the American cemetery at Omaha Beach–the last resting place for 9,386 servicemen–lies on the actual battlefield. But the whole course of the Allied advance into Germany is rich with history. Luxembourg alone boasts not only museums dedicated to Patton and the Battle of the Bulge, but just across the Belgian border there’s the small town of Bastogne, where the U.S. 101st Airborne Division checked Hitler’s last great offensive. The Bastogne Historical Center offers a film account of the battle using newsreels from both sides.
Gratitude and patriotism are part of why people visit–especially since 9-11. On one afternoon, Willie Benton was leading a tourist group from the Hawaii Air National Guard at the American Memorial at Bastogne. “This,” he says, “is a time to reflect on what we do and why we do it. We have been passed the baton.”
