Word: colmar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Once, during the battle of the Colmar pocket, De Lattre's superior, U.S. General Jacob Devers, put the XXI U.S. Army Corps under his command (other U.S. officers were outraged by this move). Throughout the fighting, Devers kept up a stream of suggestions to De Lattre via field telephone. Finally De Lattre exploded: "If you want me to run this battle, leave me alone. If you want to run it, come here and take over." Devers, who respects De Lattre as a first-rate soldier, smiled: "I was wondering how soon he would say that...
Pressure in the South. Far to the south, Major General Jean Joseph Gabriel Delattre de Tassigny's French First Army (including American divisions), closed a pincers, cutting the Colmar pocket in two. Of some 10,000 Germans, all that were left of the 25,000 originally in the pocket, many were locked in the circle, others were pinned against the Rhine, whose bridges were being hammered by Allied planes. Allied troops entered Colmar...
While the Germans were trying to take Strasbourg, they were in a fair way to lose Colmar. Major General Jean Delattre de Tassigny, who last fortnight attacked the Colmar pocket on the south, last week began to squeeze it on both sides. With Tassigny's French First Army was a crack U.S. infantry division, which got bruised one day in a fight against Panther tanks. One doughfoot who hid in a rain barrel saw Alsatian villagers pointing out U.S.-held houses to the Germans. When he got back and told the story, Thunderbolts and artillery reduced the village...
From the big Colmar pocket south of Strasbourg, the Germans had already probed within ten miles of the city. Thus, in their 19-mile strip of the Rhine's west bank, the French defenders of Strasbourg were squeezed on both sides. At week's end the French in the Belfort-Mulhouse area attempted a diversion by smacking the Colmar pocket's broad southern flank. Launched in a heavy snowstorm, this attack cut a deep gash in the enemy lines before it was slowed...
...German popular esteem as a successor to the late Erwin Rommel. When the U.S. Seventh Army held and shoved back the German bulge south of Bitche, Balck attacked at Rimling, on the west shoulder of the Bitche salient. He also renewed his attacks on the French from the Colmar pocket, drove to within ten miles of Strasbourg. Considering the relatively small forces involved, Strasbourg's recapture would be a juicy political plum for the Nazis...