Word: aachener
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After nearly a month of cruel and costly fighting, the U.S. First Army's line, inching up to the Roer River, was just twelve miles east of Aachen-which was taken four weeks before the offensive started...
...enemy the Saarland was now no longer an arsenal, but a fortress to be held at whatever cost. Saarbrücken, the ''Little Pittsburgh,"* was apparently to be another Aachen, a building-to-building battleground. Saarlautern, the area's second city, was already a flaming ruin-the target for more than 6,000 German shells, because Major General Harry L. Twaddle's 95th Division had seized its chief bridge intact. In Dillingen, where Patton's men had overrun a major steel plant, the Americans were able to advance only a few hundred yards in five...
Correspondents quoted a "high" U.S. officer who has closely studied the German operations since Dday: "If Hitler were running the Army now, he would probably be screaming to his generals to retake Aachen by 6 o'clock tonight, instead of allowing them to conduct the highly skilled defense they are making. . . . The use the Germans have made of the past two months to recover, and their remarkable resurgence of military power, show no amateur is now in charge, but shrewd professional soldiers...
...Germans fought for the Roer River, between Aachen and Cologne, as if it were the Meuse, the Marne and the Somme of the last war all rolled into one. German radio broadcasts called it "the most terrible and ferocious battle in the history of all wars...
...start of Patton's push a week ahead of the Cologne offensive on the chance that Field Marshal von Rundstedt might shove reserves into the southern breaches. Rundstedt did not yield to this incitement. Instead he crowded more men, fire power and armor into the sector east of Aachen...