Why the Front was in Fremifontaine

My Father's War in Real Time

Oct 27, 2024

My father arrived at the front on November 1, 1944. Here’s how the front had arrived in the Vosges Mountains.

While Dad, who had been drafted in April 1941, had been training and training and training some more, the war had been grinding on. Roosevelt had promised Stalin a second front in the West to draw some of the heat from the Eastern Front where millions of men and women were engaged in the biggest and most desperate battles of the war. Early in 1942, the United States, faced with a two-theater war and pumping materiel into both the Soviet Union and Great Britain, just didn’t have the manpower and equipment to land in France in force. Churchill, who remembered the British Army’s flight across the English Channel at Dunkirk, opposed a cross-Channel landing in France. Churchill favored a focus on control of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal--the short route to the British Empire in India. To appease Stalin, the Allies carried out the air war over Germany and opened a relatively small front in North Africa. The troops involved then moved to Sicily and then up the Italian peninsula. By summer of 1944, the 36^th, the 45^th, and the 3d Divisions and the 442^nd "Nisei" Regimental Combat Team had been fighting for years. They’d been pinned down and decimated in the botched landing at Anzio and at the murderous crossing of the Rapido River. They had confronted the mountain impasse at Monte Cassino. So many in these units had become casualties—killed in action, wounded in action, or deathly ill--that they’d already been replaced several times over. Some of the replacements had come from the thousands of men removed from the 100^th Division in the spring of 1944. There were few survivors from when the 36^th “T-Patch” Division had been the Texas National Guard, the 45^th“Thunderbird” Division had been the Oklahoma National Guard, and the Third “Rock of the Marne” Division had been part of the peacetime Army.

Map created just after the war showing the path of the 45th Division after it left North Africa.

After two and a half years of the American war, the big show on the Western Front in Europe—the cross-Channel invasion of France—finally happened in June 1944. The idea in France was to hit Normandy so hard with so many men that there would be no chance of another failed landing. Once ashore, they would move rapidly eastward in a straight broad front, reach the Rhine after eliminating all the Germans east of the Rhine, and then capture the industrial complexes at the Ruhr and the Saar. The problem was that nothing was rapid in Normandy—due in large part to an astounding failure in intelligence. No one had bothered to consider the terrain, which any tourist could have told them consisted of hedgerows, the towering impenetrable tangles of tree roots formed across a millennium around every field, creating perfect defensive barriers. The fighting in Normandy lasted far longer than planned, from hedgerow to hedgerow, pushing the sequence of events deep into the summer. Finally, when the Allies broke out and the Germans fled eastward, the Army raced to the east as well. However, the supplies for the Allies were trickling in through the improvised port facilities on the Channel and the truck convoys stretched for hundreds of miles, burning up precious gasoline to deliver gasoline and the other goods an army needs.

Another port was needed and a shorter supply route, so the generals turned once more to the idea of landing in the south of France. Eisenhower wanted a continuous front from Belgium to Switzerland. Patton’s Third Army would be the hammer swinging in from the west to strike the anvil of the Seventh Army coming from Marseilles that would close off all of Vichy France to the southwest. That's not my metaphor. For a while the landing was called Operation Anvil.

There was considerable opposition to the invasion of the Riviera by those who argued that it was a sideshow with no real strategic purpose other than to protect Patton’s flank. A sideshow it was to Eisenhower and a sideshow is how it’s been portrayed, if it was mentioned at all. Eisenhower preferred to ignore it, partly because he personally disliked the commander of the 6th Army Group, Jacob Devers, ever since they had met at West Point, and partly because half of the 6^th Army Group was composed of the ever irascible French 1st Army, which was an ad hoc mix of colonial troops (North Africans, Berbers, and sub-Saharan Africans loyal only to individual commanders), units of converted maquis, many of whom were Communist Party members who got directives from Stalin and not Eisenhower, and the remnants of the regular French Army, which had once served the Vichy government, the only official French government.[1] If they answered to anyone, it was DeGaulle, who had simply elected himself as the French leader. None of the French forces felt their primary allegiance was to Eisenhower and the allied command.

I had no idea what kind of combat my father and his friends had been in because it was a history that literally hadn’t been written when I started. There wasn’t a single mention of the 7th Army or the 6th Army Group in any of the war programs I watched with Dad in the 1980s on the History Channel. Never once could he say, that’s where I was. After Dad died, I turned to the various “complete” histories of World War II to learn more. I was lucky if there was a single sentence that mentioned the Vosges Mountains. Most of the time there was no entry at all. I hadn’t expected a lot of detail in the general histories—it was, after all, a very big war—but I was baffled that it was so hard to find out anything at all.

One of the themes I stumbled into was the question of who gets to write history. I found out that part of the problem started during the war. General Patch, commander of the 7th Army, disliked the press. We know so much about Patton and the 3rd Army in part because he had public relations officers on his staff to make sure the reporters knew what he was doing at all times. General Patch did not. He had no use for reporters. He just wanted to get the job done. Patch’s superior officer, General Devers, commander of the 6th Army Group, also kept reporters out. Perhaps he was trying to keep his difficulties with the French First Army and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), aka Eisenhower, out of the news.

With no reporters to create a narrative at the time, the exploits of the 7th Army never entered the public consciousness, but, as I found out later, there were other reasons for the silence, when they got to Strasbourg. And yet, some of the voices that defined the experience of being in the European Theater of Operations were in the 7th Army. Audie Murphy, the most decorated enlisted man in World War II, memoirist, and actor, was in the 3rd Division. Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was in the 45th Division. And Paul Fussell’s widely influential books about the war came out of his experience in the 103rd Division.

At first, the 7th Army had only three divisions—the 3^rd, the 36^th, and the 45th—and some smaller units like the 442nd. They landed on the Riviera in August to comparatively weak opposition. Of course, part of their PR problem was that landing on the Riviera sounds like a joke. Once ashore, they made rapid progress up the Rhône River valley, dubbed the Champagne Campaign because they were moving through wine country. That too felt like a joke.

As the 7th Army pushed north, closing in on Patton’s Third Army, groups of German troops and Nazi functionaries fled from the southwest of France where the Vichy government had been, racing to get through the gap between the two armies so they could reach Germany. The groups consisted of German military units, Vichy bureaucrats like Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, Gestapo, and military police, hurrying on foot, on bicycles, on horse drawn vehicles, and on motor transport toward the closing gap. Transportation was divvied up according the men’s military value to the Reich. Their orders were to take anything of military value with them and destroy everything else—food in the fields, town infrastructure, bridges. The regular German army in the Rhône fought a delaying action as it retreated up the valley, holding the corridor open as it moved toward defensive positions in the Vosges Mountains.

This was why Dad and his friends witnessed the chaotic path of destruction as they rode north. On September 3, the hammer of the 3rd Army hit the anvil of the 7th Army at Épinal as the 45^th and 36^th Divisions fought across the Moselle River. The Sixth Army Group had now fulfilled the only role Eisenhower could conceive for it—it completed his line from Belgium to the Swiss border.

The French forces, however, and some of the Sixth Army Group’s general staff saw an opportunity to attack through the Belfort Gap in the Vosges Mountains to reach the Alsatian plain along the Rhine while the Gap was lightly defended. However, the word from SHAEF was that they were not to leap forward. The purpose of the Seventh Army was to protect Patton’s flank.^[2] After the war, the German commander said that he didn’t understand why the Allies hadn’t struck through the Belfort Gap in September, but he was very glad they hadn’t.^[3] It saved the German forces from disaster.^[4] By the time SHAEF allowed the Allied forces to fight at Belfort, the defenses had been reinforced. Even then, the French had a plan to reach the Alsatian plain through the gap at Gérardmer and attack the Germans from behind, but this was also vetoed.^[5]

In fairness, the Germans in September seemed to be defeated. The front as a straight edge bulldozer plowing everyone back seemed to be an adequate strategy. That September, however, with the Russians at the Polish border and the Americans nearing the Rhine, Germany closed all the universities, technical colleges, and senior schools and put all the boys and older men it could round up into Volksgrenadier divisions—the People’s Army. They also closed down Luftwaffe training centers and U-boat units. There was therefore a large influx of men into the German Army. As some of the officers told their units, “The enemy stands at our door, and you already know what to expect from the Bolshevik workers’ and peasants’ paradise, and the British and Americans who are bombing our cities.”^[6] It wasn’t just the ardent Nazis or the professional army who felt they had to defend their homes in the fall of 1944.

In addition to the influx of men, the highest production of tanks, planes, and guns for Germany happened in September 1944—in spite of years of Allied bombing, which, for all the hype, had really only succeeded in stiffening the German will. In addition, Hitler promised new weapons that would turn the tide. Super weapons did keep showing up. They weren’t capable of turning the tide, but they were discouraging. One of the GIs at Epinal lamented, "why don't we ever have super weapons?" The Sturmtiger—a monster Tiger tank with a rocket mortar on the front that could launch an 800-pound charge at 800 feet per second on the battlefield was introduced at Epinal. It was terrifying—“great snake fingers were poked into the sky, followed instants later by the banshee-like howl of the huge canisters hurtling down.”^[7]

In that September, Hitler ordered a defensive line from Switzerland north to Luxembourg along the western edge of the Vosges Mountains and ordered the units there to hold the line to the last man.^[8] Unfortunately for the German commanders, the units on paper did not represent the reality on the ground. Having a patchwork of old professional units and undertrained draftee units, the German general in the Vosges resorted to a simplified but effective tactic: a relatively thin outer line of defenses, a strong inner line of defenses, and “fire fighting” units in reserve. When an attack came, the outer line would give way, the attackers would occupy that position, the artillery zeroed in on that spot, and the 88s, mortars, and dug-in machine guns would let loose. If the inner line started to buckle, the “fire fighters” would be thrown in. With the infusion of manpower, the promise of super weapons, and a will to defend the homeland, captured German soldiers in September revealed that they believed fervently that they would still prevail.

In other words, the Champagne Campaign was over. By October, the opposing German commander saw that the American front was approaching a town called Bruyères, where a road cut through a mountain pass to the big town of St. Dié and the Alsatian Plain beyond. The Germans dug in on the mountains surrounding the town, guarding the pass.^[9] And so the 36^th Division and the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team were thrown into the mountains, where the woods were mined, gasoline and ammunition were in short supply, and the rain poured down. One of the regiments in the 36^th Division had 900 casualties in nine days.^[10] The now famous fight by the 442nd to conquer the hills at Bruyeres and then liberate a trapped battalion from the 36th Division was raging at the end of October and into November. The Germans on their mountain tops were dug in behind log and concrete bunkers, built by conscripted labor from the Alsatian towns. The American tactic was always the same and always predictable—to fire off an intense artillery barrage—“a fiery steamroller”—just before the infantry would advance straight on, even if straight on meant fighting straight up hill. With the excellent defensive works, the American steamroller frayed nerves but created few casualties. On the other hand, the barrage let the Germans know that a ground attack was coming. The Germans would wait for the infantry units to get close and shoot the point men. That always stalled an American attack, long enough to pull up the “fire fighting” units. As the German officer in charge of the Vosges said, the Americans “obliged us by bravely attacking from the front, day after day.”^[11]

The men who had fought in Italy agreed—the fighting in the Vosges was worse, worse even than Anzio. All three of the American divisions in the 7th Army had been on the line for three months and were badly chewed up. Eisenhower wouldn’t reassign any men from the 1st or the 3rd Armies to relieve them. Instead, the convoy of 42,000 green men (the 100th Division, the 103rd Division, and a number of smaller units) were rerouted to the Seventh Army.

And that’s why General Patch turned to the 100^th Infantry Division as it got off the boat and asked for a regiment that could be rushed forward to relieve a regiment of the 45^th Division. General Burress, commander of the 100^th Division, turned to the three regiments under his command and asked which regiment could get the cosmoline off their gear and get to the front the fastest. The colonel in command of the 397^th, who had been a professor at Virginia Military Institute but had never seen combat, protested that removing cosmoline was under the purview of the ordinance units so he had to wait. No one else knew how to proceed. The colonel in command of the 398^th, who had been an instructor at West Point and who also had never seen combat, agreed that protocol required trained specialists and his regiment had to wait. When General Burress turned to the colonel in charge of the 399^th, Colonel Tychsen, Tychsen said he’d be ready in a couple of days. Tychsen had commanded a machine gun unit in the Vosges in the First World War and he knew that protocol was useless in combat. When they were Stateside, he’d sent officers and enlisted men to cosmoline training centers so they could deploy quickly. And so, on October 26, the 399^th regimental combat team left the rest of the 100^th Division behind and dropped off their trucks in Fremifontaine under the temporary command of the 45^th Division.

I might have stood on the very road that Dad once stood on. When my sister and I were on the 2009 battlefield tour with the Friends and Family of Nisei Veterans, we went to a ceremony held by the village of Fremifontaine at their monument to the 45th Division. It was just a spot in the trees where two rural roads cross.

The Things They Left Unsaid

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