Word: saarlautern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the Aachen salient to the Third Army's drive into Germany at Saarlautern, the U.S. lines were thinly held by divisions resting from combat. At the last minute, when ground reconnaissance finally picked up traces of a German concentration, the 101st Airborne Division was moved to Bastogne to strengthen the line along the German-Luxembourg frontier...
...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...
...bomb-wrecked Saarlautern, the Germans set up their guns in the streets, fired between the flaming buildings to kill some more Americans...
...scuttling back to their heavy forts. Behind them they left land mines which, when the French artillery did not find them in time blew up the advancing tanks. Also encountered were robot machine guns, operated electrically by remote control. Swarming through the Warndt Forest between Saarbrücken and Saarlautern, the French found the woods "full of destruction and traps of all kinds." But by week's end that forest and the Bienwald farther east was theirs. Several Moroccan regiments and at least one British division were said to be in the Saar advance. The fighting got down...
| 1 |