The battle around Drusenheim was devolving into a standoff. Von Luck said, “Suddenly, we could make out the first bunker, which received us with heavy fire. There was hand-to-hand fighting with knives, room-to-room fighting with pistols, rifles, and bazookas. As we stood there, the tank rumbled right up to the house and put the muzzle of the gun in the window where we were standing. Late in the day of December 31, the left side of the American line near Sarreguemines suddenly trembled as the Germans opened fire with a well-placed barrage of artillery rounds, followed by a charge of 2,000 men of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division heading straight for the 397th Regiment of the 100th Infantry Division. As events would prove, it was not Strasbourg that the Germans wanted to capture but rather the entire Alsace-Lorraine region. After his guns were knocked out, Carey took it upon himself to organize a patrol and rescue two of his squads that were about to be surrounded, evacuating those who had been wounded. Ordering tank support, he hopped aboard one of only two Shermans that responded, grabbed the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on its turret, and directed the armored beast up the icy trail that led to his surrounded companies. Like someone trying to spread a single pat of butter to cover an entire loaf of bread, Patch’s six infantry divisions had to cover a front of 126 miles. On June 6, the vanguard of a million-man offensive that began as Operation Overlord was spreading eastward across France, crushing all German attempts to stop it. Then one could see the dark monsters [the bunkers] looming up out of the snow. The fort’s German defenders would hold out until December 20. As the 314th’s 3rd Battalion moved up to take over the positions back in Rohrwiller that had been evacuated by 2nd Battalion, it came under the heaviest artillery barrage it had received to date. More importantly, Germany’s losses in men and materiel could not be made up. In that operation, a dozen of the battalion’s Shermans had been knocked out and 11 others damaged, leaving only 29 tanks operational. Whereas the Allies would later call the first of the two operations the “Battle of the Bulge,” Hitler called it Unternehmen Wacht-am-Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine), after a well-known German song. If I were smarter, I might have dropped a hand grenade down the muzzle. In an effort to contain the penetration, Patch released the 12th Armored Division’s Combat Command B to VI Corps. But we should never have gotten in that situation.” Pride’s entire battalion was captured at Drusenheim on January 20. In Drusenheim, the enemy moved freely through the town, wiping out any points of resistance and overrunning 2nd Battalion’s command post. In recognition of their extraordinary efforts, the 3rd Battalion, 397th Infantry Regiment (plus Company H, 397th) also was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for their defense of Rimling. Now it was the Germans’ turn to counterattack. These were soon out of commission, either destroyed or overrun. On December 24, Patch received a warning from Devers’s headquarters: “Excellent agent sources report enemy units building up in the Black Forest area for offensive. Hitler saw the ideal place for his counter-offensive: the same hilly, heavily treed, “impassible” Ardennes-Eifel region through which his armies had plunged in 1940 to invade Belgium, Holland, France, and Luxembourg. There have been countless thousands of published works devoted to all or of it. But that is not important. Cancel anytime. Cancel anytime. “We moved in and our GIs were fighting and defending this town from windows and houses. The German armaments industry, too, had been demolished by incessant Allied air raids, and the production of tanks, guns, ammunition, and aircraft was reduced to a trickle of what it had been earlier in the war. “We used to take trips back in our jeep [to and from Rohrwiller] and as we came into the town, the Germans would shell us with artillery. For this only a few engineers were available and young replacements, soldiers of 16 and 17.”. Company F at the factory, along with Company E sheltering in the eastern part of the Bois de Drusenheim, were ordered to advance into Drusenheim to assist Company G. Company E arrived at Company G’s position without a problem, but when Company F tried to execute its move, it fell under heavy fire from artillery positions on the highway embankment and was sent wading back across the icy Moder to Company E’s old position. I sort of touched the muzzle as I turned around to talk to Howard. At Colmar, Generalleutnant Siegfried Rasp (he had just replaced Wiese) had his Nineteenth Army standing by. It is more important, as I said before, to destroy his manpower.”. Staff Sergeant Howard C. Pride, a communications wireman with Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 314th, recalled his battalion’s time in Drusenheim. FlightConnections is open on another device or browser. Repeated attempts by 12th Armored to drive the Germans out resulted in failure and the loss of hundreds of men and scores of pieces of armor. The fighting in Rittershoffen would not end until January 21, when Seventh Army ordered the surviving troops to withdraw by fighting their way out. Northeast of Sarreguemines was General Max Simon’s XIII Corps (commanding the 17th SS Panzergrenadier and 36th Volksgrenadier Divisions, backed by several artillery units). In late 1944, with American, British, Canadian, Free French, and Polish forces lined up along Germany’s border with Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France and ready to plunge into the heart of the Third Reich, it seemed that the predictions that the war was nearly over were about to come true. Just moments before, the steeple had been Company M’s observation post; luckily, the spotters had evacuated the OP just prior to the action.

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