I did feel adequately equipped. I carried five or six eight-round clips for my M-1 rifle, a first-aid packet, a canteen, and a shovel on my cartridge belt. Slung over my shoulders were my gas mask and two bandoleers, each containing six additional clips of M-1 ammunition. In my raincoat pockets were one concussion grenade and two fragmentation grenades. My augmented combat pack, containing items of varying value, weighed thirty-five pounds or so. I was as prepared as possible for whatever destiny might demand.

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We reached the valley bottom to find that the’small stream’ the briefing officer had mentioned was not merely a simple bubbling brook. Rain swollen, the stream had become a swift torrent four or five feet deep. We lowered ourselves into it and gained the opposite bank. After we crossed the stream, the open fields of the valley floor, laced by barbed boundary fences, lay before us. The whole north slope, including the two German bunkers, was in sight.

Soon I saw my first enemy soldiers. On my right some twenty yards away, fifteen or twenty men in yellow raincoats moved about. The sight struck me as incredible. Here I was, trudging through a marshy field, climbing barbed-wire fences, drenched to the skin, trying to focus on all that was happening around me, and worrying about sticking to my unit, and then, suddenly, there was the enemy. But then I hesitated. Were they our own men who had unexpectedly gotten in front of us? The fear of firing on comrades was in my thoughts during my entire time on the front line; I could imagine nothing worse. Pushing aside my uncertainty, I fired at the left-most raincoat-clad soldier. He fell. Then, perhaps moved by the excitement of my first shot fired in anger, I fired four more rounds into his presumably lifeless body. The other soldiers in yellow were giving up. We moved on.

Continuing across the valley, I fired the three rounds left in my rifle at nothing in particular and inserted a fresh clip. Steady artillery fire hammered the two north-crest bunkers. Then their garrisons ran outside with white flags, and the shelling ceased. That was a relief; if the garrisons had fought seriously, we would have suffered heavily. Hugh Cole’s The Lorraine Campaign notes that ‘these works were now in a poor state…[and] the Germans had little time to familiarize themselves with the Maginot system.’

We climbed the north slope, bearing to the right of the bunkers. Cole quotes Generalmajor (Brig. Gen.) August Wellm, commander of the Thirty-sixth Volksgrenadier Division, as attributing its collapse to our artillery. Wellm mentioned ‘the coolness displayed by the American infantry, who advanced calmly through the thickest fire ‘with their weapons at the ready and cigarettes dangling from their lips.” My weapon was certainly ready like the riflemen he described, but I did not smoke.

A tank trap in the form of a deep trench now appeared across our front and slowed our advance. The sides had collapsed from the incessant rain, and the bottom was deep in mud. I got stuck in the glutinous mess and was rescued by a luckier comrade.

I then climbed the final slope to the crest. The advancing companies were mixed together, and I saw no one I recognized. I inspected one of the bunkers that had just surrendered. Its steel door was open, and the interior was dimly lighted by sunlight peaking through the door and the two firing embrasures. An enemy soldier had left a bread crust on a table. I was hungry, not having eaten since the day before, but the bread was hopelessly inedible.

We had also seized another bunker near a small forest, from which rifle fire could be heard–both ours and the enemy’s (the flatter sound of the German Model 98k carbine was easy to recognize). A favorite status symbol of GIs was a captured German pistol. An officer’s Walther P-38 was the pistol of choice, though any kind would do. With this hidden objective in mind, I moved down the wood line toward the sound of gunfire. Then a lieutenant shouted that the Germans in the woods who were firing at us were ready to surrender. Here was my chance.

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