World War 2 In Review

Soldiers assigned to a cannon company in the 90th Infantry Division fire an M3 105mm howitzer during fighting near Carentan, France, June 11, 1944.  by Ralph Bennett By the beginning of July 1944, the invasion was hanging fire. Cherbourg had fallen, but St. Lô and Caen—primary objectives of the Americans and British respectively—still resisted capture and the bridgehead was nowhere more than twenty-five miles deep and occupied only a fifth of the area planned for the first month. It was not yet clear how gravely the British attack across the river Odon ( Epsom ) had weakened the German armor, nor that it had in fact forestalled their last effort to break the Allied front, and an American attempt to seize the St. Lô–Coutances road as a start line for further operations failed on 3 and 4 July. Churchill was accusing Montgomery of going too slowly and Eisenhower warning him to avoid stalemate—a charge soon to be repeated by newspapers in the United States. The first exhilaration of ...

Infantrymen man their .30 caliber machine gun, 84th Infantry Division, Odrimont, Belgium, 6 January 1945. by Theodore Draper, Sergeant, U.S. Army If we did nothing else in the Ardennes, we de­stroyed the myth that the woods and hills of that historically famous battle region are “im­pene­trable.” The Ger­mans began the dem­on­stra­tion in 1940 but their feat was too one-sided to be con­vinc­ing. They proved it was possible for an army to go through the Ardennes but they did not prove it was possible to fight through it. They met real opposition only twice and both times it was a fight of a few hours in clearings within the forest. Above all, the Germans carefully chose the very best time of the year, in May, as if to emphasize that special con­di­tions were necessary. In January 1945, however, we had to fight for practically every hill, wood, village, and road, in the very worst time of the year, on ice as slick as grease and in snow waist-high, against skillful and stub­born op­...