Word: monschau
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When the Americans marched into Monschau on the German-Belgian frontier last September, pretty Maria, a 17-year-old German, watched them in stony silence. But she confided her feelings to her lover, Peter, an SS man, in letters which she could not mail to unoccupied Germany. The letters were discovered when Maria was arrested last week for talking to a would-be Nazi saboteur...
American divisions had hammered the bulge flat. In retaking Monschau, the troops regained the last of the German towns taken by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's winter offensive. Krewinkel, the last German-held town in easternmost Belgium, fell. Now a new phase was opening...
...Bastogne (see below), which confined Rundstedt's columns to secondary roads north and south of the town. The 82nd Airborne had put up a fierce defense around Stavelot, the 7th Armored between Saint-Vith and Vielsalm, the 1st Infantry at the north shoulder of the salient below Monschau, and the 4th Infantry at the south shoulder, around Echternach. The two infantry outfits had prevented Rundstedt from widening the salient's base. They were pegs that did not pull...
...this week the northern flank appeared to have been stabilized, at least temporarily. Heavy battles raged for the wedges the Americans had been able to hold in the Monschau-Malmédy-Stavelot area and to the west of Saint-Vith. But they were perilous triangular salients. Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges' First Army had apparently stopped the spearhead closest to Liège, focal point of U.S. supplies...
Rundstedt also attacked, drove desperately and skillfully at Monschau, at the northeast corner of Luxembourg, and at two points farther south, not far from the Moselle. First Army headquarters declared that some penetrations were "sealed off" (a familiar cliché in German communiques), but the enemy slid away from the seal-offs, advanced alongside. Prisoners, of whom the First seized more than a thousand the first day, said they had been told they would be "in Paris by Christmas.'' Some Germans were so inflamed with savagery by the switch from retreat to attack that they murdered U.S. prisoners...