11-day LONDON TO CHANNEL ISLANDS

After our orientation dinner, we will start our visit to iconic sites of the British war effort in the United Kingdom’s capital, London. The best museum to do that is the Churchill War Rooms, the secret underground headquarters of the War Cabinet from where Prime Minister Winston Churchill led Britain to victory against Nazi Germany. Having left London, we will continue our journey at Littlecote House, a 15th-century manor which was used as the regimental headquarters for the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st “Screaming Eagles” Airborne Division. Easy Company was part of this regiment, and they took off from here during the night of June 5-6, 1944, as part of the Normandy Invasion. Our group will be invited to enjoy a lovely British afternoon tea comprising delicious sandwiches and sweet treats. On our way to the southern coast, we stop also at one of the British cultural icons, the prehistorical standing stones of Stonehenge.

We travel to the southern coast of England to experience the D-Day Story Museum in Portsmouth. You will have the chance to walk on board the last surviving Landing Craft Tank from D-Day and see the Overlord Embroidery, the modern-day counterpart of the Bayeux Tapestry telling the story of the Normandy Landings. Our visit to Portsmouth would not be complete without seeing the Historic Dockyard that is home to HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. We will visit Southwick House also that served as the headquarters of the Allied supreme commanders before and during D-Day, with the original operational maps still on its walls today. We will then spend an entire day exploring the Bovington Tank Museum, that houses the largest collection of tanks in the world, including Tiger 131, the world’s only running Tiger I tank. At the end of the first leg of the trip, we will take a ferry to the Channel Islands, the only British territory under German occupation during World War II.

On the second leg of the tour, we will travel to the British Crown Dependencies of Guernsey and Jersey. The group will stay and experience the unique local British and French-Norman culture in the two islands’ capitals of St. Peter Port and St. Helier. We will explore the rich history of the Channel Islands with a focus on the invasion and the eventual liberation at the end of the war. The German Occupation Museum and our local guides will tell how the locals endured the five long years of Nazi rule. We will visit vast underground military tunnels, coastal batteries and other fortifications of the Atlantic Wall featured only on these islands. Many of them were built by the foreign prisoners held captive under inhumane conditions in the work and concentration camps on the Islands. We will witness also astonishing medieval strongholds further fortified by the Germans, such as the 800 years old Mont Orgueil Castle. We conclude our journey with a farewell dinner. The next day, our Passengers are brought to Jersey Airport to catch their flights.