Word: strasbourg
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...four U.S. armies facing him were on the offensive and their deployment obviously was offensive. General Eisen hower could not possibly have held an impregnable line from the North Sea to Strasbourg and at the same time mobilized sufficient strength to attack the Siegfried Line and the inner defenses of the Rhine Valley...
...Sandy" Patch sent two columns into a pre-dawn assault without the usual artillery preparation, caught the Germans napping. In two days the Seventh's men had taken Haguenau, the enemy's anchor point along the Rhine, 16 miles above Strasbourg. Beyond Haguenau was the 25-mile-wide Rhine plain. If Patch's northward thrust could be developed, the whole Saar Palatinate area would be outflanked...
...Strasbourg, the enemy fought a last-ditch battle in a five-story apartment building-from room to room, from floor to floor-and more Germans were killed than Americans...
...maneuvered out of position. He sent some 3,000 reinforcements south to counterattack near Colmar, thus let down his right guard. Jake Devers let go a stiff punch. On back trails through the Saverne Gap he sent Brigadier General Jacques Leclerc's* French armored division driving toward Strasbourg. The Germans, apparently expecting that any advance would be along the gap's one main road, again found themselves bypassed, surrounded in pockets. Leclerc's tanks brushed through a shell of resistance, reached Alsace's capital (where children cheered them in German), ran into shelling from across...
...Strasbourg was liberated (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS). But the eyes of the French nation were looking beyond the Rhineland toward Moscow, where General de Gaulle had a rendezvous with Marshal Stalin. For in this most peculiar of wars, the unfinished Battle of Germany was little more than a terrible anticlimax. The social and political future of Europe was being foreshadowed, less on the bloody battlefields or by Europe's restive people than in Moscow's Kremlin...