Word: coblenzers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...French zone is the" smallest and worst run of the four. "The French have cut more wood in two years than the Germans cut in 50," said a German forester. A businessman in Coblenz told me: "The French had a wonderful opportunity here. We had had our noses full of Hitler. They wanted the Rhineland, and we wanted something different from what we had. They could have won us. But their tactics have lost us completely...
This week, scarcely two years later, German men were being actively recruited for military service in at least two of the occupation zones. At Horcheim near Coblenz, the French opened a Foreign Legion recruiting station, invited German veterans between the ages of 19 and 35 to join up for service in Indo-China (war criminals and former SS men were not welcome...
...units of the Third Army's 87th Division crossed the Moselle in as sault boats. Weak enemy, mortar and machine-gun fire soon died out, and later that day Coblenz was in U.S. hands. The Nazis began shelling the city from the Ehrenbreitstein fortress across the Rhine. Some 500 prisoners rounded up in Coblenz were tatterdemalion survivors of 15 or 20 different outfits. They were angry at SS troops who had scuttled for safety across the Rhine and blown up the bridges...
Coal for France. The fall of Coblenz, headquarters of U.S. occupation after World War I, was only an incident in a swift clatter of events in the southern Rhineland. The Nazis had already lost the Rhineland north of the Moselle; now they were fast losing the rest of it, from Coblenz to the Karlsruhe corner. Soon the coal of the Saar would be flowing into fuel-starved France...
...Moselle, upriver from Coblenz, Lieut. General George S. Patton's 5th and goth Divisions had carved out substantial bridgeheads on the south bank. Major General Hugh J. Gaffey's crack 4th Armored Division poured through, shot south into the Hunsrück plateau. Resistance was almost nil. At the narrow Simmer River, the tankmen found the bridges intact, pressed on to Bad Kreuz-nach, junction of three rail lines and four highways. The goth tagged along on Gaffey's left, taking mellow old Rhine towns -Boppard, St. Goar, Bingen-like buttons from a ripped-open shirt...