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The 35th Division, two miles North of
Nancy and contacting the 80th Division, now turned in
a northeasterly direction and found itself confronting
elements of the German First Army consisting of the
553rd and 559th Volks Grenadier divisions and the 106th
Armored Regiment and 11th Panzer Division. Sixty miles
to the northeast lay the iron and coal rich Sarre area,
and many of the factories that supplied Hitler’s
war machine. Little did we know that that journey would
take over three months and so many lives, so much rain
and mud, freezing and miserableness, so many ways to
die. Gov. Orval Faubus, in his book “In This Faraway
Land”, reports that the 35th Division during the
war suffered 15,406 battle casualties. The larger part
of these occurred during these next ninety days of continuous
front line duty. And many were in the same battlefields
where occurred the fighting in 1914.
On September 22, 1944, Gen. Eisenhower, now in direct
command of all Allied armies, ordered a discontinuance
of offensive operations by Third Army. A decision had
been made that Gen. Montgomery, and the American First
Army were to be the main effort of the Allies and were
to receive priority in supplies and munitions. Gen.
Patton had already, on September 20th, shifted into
the defensive, anticipating a major German counter offensive.
Five days later, the 35th Division was ordered to seize
the Foret de Gremecy sector, about fifteen miles northeast
of Nancy, and to occupy a 12 mile front. On September
26th, German artillery opened up on the Santa Fe defensive
lines. The German plan was to break through the 35th
lines to allow Gen. Mantauffel’s Fifth Panzer
Army to retake Nancy.
For four days intense fighting waged back and forth
through the wooded terrain, causing heavy casualties
on both sides, aggravated by tree bursts which killed
many. In the confusion, darkness, rain and intermixing
of the combatants, our companies and battalions, decimated
and forced back from some position, held on and refused
to be driven out of the Gremecy Forest. On the edge
of disaster, the 35th G.I.s with the support of the
6th Armored Division, mounted a final counter-attack,
at the insistence of Gen. Patton, and drove the last
of the Germans out of the woods and cleared nearby villages
to the North and East. An example of the ferocity of
the fighting was illustrated by the Third Battalion
of the 137th Infantry Regiment. It entered Gremmecy
Forest with over 900 men. Four days later only 484 were
left.
The Germans having failed in their break through attempt,
withdrew to the North and East of Gremecy and set up
defensive lines a mile away at Fresnes and in both the
forest and town of Chateau-Salin where the front lines,
except for one line straightening attack on October
8th, were to remain until November 8th. During those
several weeks, the Germans were busy constructing strong
defensive positions which were to cost the division
heavily in lives and equipment a month later. Meanwhile
the Allies along the English Channel worked feverishly
to overcome the German defenses which blocked ocean
traffic from reaching Antwerp, a large Belgian seaport
capable of receiving all the supplies necessary for
the Allies to mount a successful drive to the Rhine
and on to Berlin – the same Antwerp which would
later be a target for Von Runstedt’s winter offensive.
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