TESTIMONIALS
Every battlefield tells a story. Every visitor takes something different away. Here, guests share what it meant to explore these historic places with Honour ✝︎ Legacy.
EXPERIENCES THAT STAY WITH YOU
“IT BECAME OUR FAMILY'S JOURNEY”
We came to Normandy because a member of our family had fought and died there. We wanted to stand where he had actually been.
Peter understood immediately that this wasn't simply a sightseeing trip. He took the time to understand our family's story and then helped us place that individual within the much bigger story of D-Day.
Walking the ground where he had fought was incredibly emotional. We had questions, Peter had answers.
There were moments when we simply stood together in silence. That was perhaps the most powerful part of the whole experience.
Peter didn't simply take us to Normandy. He helped us find our family within its history.
- Jane Chipchase 2019 -
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES. SHARED EXPERIENCES.
“A tour unlike any other.”
“An exceptional guide.”
We have visited Normandy before, but this experience was on another level. Peter's military background brought a depth of understanding that you simply don't normally get from a conventional battlefield guide.
He didn't just tell us what happened. He explained why commanders made the decisions they did, how the terrain influenced the battle, and what the soldiers felt.
Peter's knowledge is exceptional, but it is his respect for the men who fought here that really stayed with us.
We came to learn about D-Day. We left with a much deeper understanding of the people who lived it.
Antonia Pullen 2024
Peter's Falklands experience gave him unique insight into amphibious operations.
When he described what the soldiers faced coming off the landing craft, you could tell he truly understood.
An Exceptional guide.
Richard Pemberton, Devon
We followed my grandfather's route from
Sword Beach to Caen.
Colonel Peter researched his unit's movements and we walked the exact ground he fought on.
It was the most meaningful trip our family has ever taken.
The Harrison Family, Hampshire
THE STORIES BEHIND THE BATTLEFIELDS
What makes a battlefield tour a pilgrimage? In this podcast conversation, Peter discusses military history, personal remembrance and the powerful connections between people, places and family stories.
.
A summary is below:
Battlefield Tours and Battlefield Pilgrimages: What I Learned from Peter Bates. Psychology of Pilgrimage Episode 64
In the most recent episode of Psychology of Pilgrimage, I had the opportunity to speak with retired Colonel Peter Bates, who had a long career in the British Army with the Royal Marine Commandos and the Airborne.
We discussed what makes a battlefield tour a pilgrimage?
Peter described that a tour explains why a bridge mattered, whether the plan succeeded, and what the tactics and equipment were. A pilgrimage, however, asks who this person was, what happened to him and his mates and his family, what the sacrifice cost, and whether (and to what extent) any of it still matters.
Peter brings his own military experience to the overlap between battlefield tours and pilgrimages. He came ashore in the Falkland Islands at dawn on 21 May 1982, a twenty-three-year-old artillery officer in the first helicopter
sent ahead to find a gun position before a hundred men, their guns, and their ammunition followed. He calls it his D-Day. Some of the sergeants under his command were forty years old and told him they had spent their entire careers preparing for that day. With that background, Peter can tell a group on a Normandy beach what was likely in the minds of the men who landed there.
His connection to the D-Day beaches is also a family one. Peter's grandfather, a former schoolteacher, commanded a company on D-Day. On his first day of operations, he was killed advancing toward an objective, which was codenamed Hillman. Peter has visited Sword Beach, the place where his grandfather died, many times. His most personal story about visiting this beach involves his mother, who he took on a twenty-four-hour round trip by ferry from Portsmouth to Caen. She used a wheelchair, and he pushed her up the sunken lane that her father would have crawled up. Based on the war diary's account, she stood within one to five meters of where her father was shot and where his body lay until evening. There is no doubt this was a pilgrimage and not a battlefield tour. The personal connections are key.
While Peter's mother was at Hillman, she wrote a note on a small card and left it with a flower at the monument. She had been ten years old in 1944 and had not seen her father in fifty years. Years later, Peter met the Frenchman who runs the Hillman site, and when Peter told him about the note, the man said he knew it. He had read it two or three days after she left it. Peter summed it up this way: "In amongst the horror and the death, there is that." In the language of continuing bonds theory, the card is a relationship maintained across death through a physical place. It also carries a ripple effect. When we see how attached others are to the people who stood on a piece of ground, we become attached to that ground as well. Peter's children later surprised him with a trip to Normandy for a milestone birthday, and four generations of the family gathered at his grandfather's grave with his medals.
About another family on another battlefield, Peter shared with me a story about Patricia, who was eighty-nine when he took her, her son, and his cousin to retrace her father's steps on the Somme. Her father, Leslie Gill, had lied about his age to enlist at sixteen and survived being gassed and bayoneted. He came home, raised a family, and never talked about the war. Peter led the group to the trench area where he would have gone over the top on 1 July 1916. Patricia became emotional, as did the others with her, and she told Peter that her father had never told her about this. Peter offered a simple explanation for veterans' silence. They talk with the mates who were there and spare everyone else. Walking the terrain gave Patricia a sense of what her father might have seen and felt, and it filled gaps in her own history that she had not known were there. This is another vivid example of how the personal connections differentiate a pilgrimage from a tour.
LISTEN TO THE FULL CONVERSATION ON THE YOUTUBE LINK ABOVE