Fort Schiesseck

This started out as another cool damp day. We loaded on to the bus and were joined by a French artillery officer on his motorcycle, who guided us with some backing and turning to a side road on the edge of a field. The fort is on French military land.

We walked up the tractor tracks on the side of the field to an opening and cut into the woods, where we promptly encountered some of the fortification, still there. This was part of a field of barbed wire with the posts still there and plenty of barbed wire.

We also received stern warnings to not stray off the path that the major would take us down. He showed us the sharp rusted metal spikes that were everywhere among the barbed wire posts. He said they were called "pig tails."

I asked him to point it out with his boot, but he put his boot right on top of it--yikes!!

Later, Dave Smith found a pig tail laying on top of the ammunition entrance to the fort. They are truly nasty and effective when one pictures infantry running in under fire.

As we followed the trail, we passed a hunting blind in the tree--used for wild boar. The front is smeared in blood from the hunt.

Then we came across the turrets of Fort Schiesseck, like huge disturbing mushrooms in the forest growing up and over it. Apparently some of these were able to rise and fall and rotate not that long ago.

Bob Heller and Armer provide perspective on the turret as George, Diane, Harriet, Isabelle, Liz and John Sommer inspect them. There was a gouge on the side of this one. John says this is the gouge (bigger than my hand) that a 75 mm shell would make. They speculated that an anti-tank shell bounced off it.

Across the way from this one, there was one that had been cracked apart and filled with concrete to hold it together. Shep pointed out that it had clearly been blown up from the inside--the handiwork of the engineers. I think that had to be Company A and the 398th Infantry that took on this enormous fort.

Further on, we encountered a different style nest of them, including small ventilation shafts.

The large one was covered with scars from machine gun rounds, the opening is riddled with the traces of bullets and a blast of some kind at the bottom of the opening. Bill Glazier was explaining that the person operating these was 15 feet down, operating the gun remotely, so he was all but impossible to reach from outside.

We reach a bunker and go down a set of concrete stairs in the hill.

The front was protected with port holes for machine gun fire, and openings where mortars could fire out. The major discusses it with Bob Hamer, while George, John, Dave, and Armer listen.

Dave and Wendy climb up over the other side of the fortification.

We head back down to the bus.

Freudenberg Farm

Our next stop was the Freudenberg Farm, scene of a battle that Bill Glazier was in with his anti-tank gun. The farm was rebuilt and looks much as it did. The barns were used for barracks by the Germans.

Bill said the farm burned for six days in the fighting.

Out there in the next meadow from the barnyard were two pillboxes--part of the Fort Schiesseck fortification and the larger Ensemble de Bitche. These were free standing--unconnected underground. The doors had been taken off in the last two years by the French military, no doubt to make them safer to the stray passer-by.

We walked down the slope, into the trees, to see what signs there were that a conflict raged here. The local citizens, some baby bulls, walked over to the fence to find out what was going on.

Over behind their pasture, Bill said there was a pig infirmary, which was clean and dry--they holed up there out of the weather at one point.

College de Bitche

We went on to a reception at the school buildings that sit on a rise above the town, the site of Mike Escalera's adventure and a coup when the Century captured it.

We were welcomed by the current principal. Sixty years ago, the school was a Catholic seminary. Now it's a Catholic high school and the principal is a woman. The whole building was redone, and the walls covered with student copies of great modern French paintings.

The chapel had once been a whole wing of the school, but that wing has been remodeled in an imaginative way for various purposes, with a small chapel preserved. The organist came and played for us. It sounded wonderful.

We had a champagne reception in a room with several wonderful old pieces of furniture. And a reporter showed up. Speeches were made and Mike Escalera remembered how he'd been stringing a radio line between his company and regimental headquarters. He'd started from the headquarters end of things and at one point he ducked for cover into the school, only to realize there were Germans there.

He ran out the door and down the cellar stairs. Down in the cellar, he'd found that the hot air heating ducts were enormous, so he crawled inside to avoid detection and started crawling up them. He got to a hot air register into a room and he could see the Germans. He radioed headquarters and said, I'm inside the school. They got excited and the regimental commander, the colonel, grabbed the phone and asked how many. Mike said, 8. I could throw a grenade in, but I couldn't guarantee that I'd kill them all and then I'd be in trouble. So they told him to get out and they sent in men to take the school. Once when Mike was telling the story, he said, "and that's how things were done, stumbling around by dumb luck."

A friend of Mike's was killed in the attack.

The Citadel

We finally headed up for a tour of the Citadel, but Liz had gone herself on her day off from the tour and warned me about it--since the weather was finally sunny and I was sure that being underground--especially with olfactory experiences provided and the sounds of the 1870 siege--wasn't what I wanted to do.

So we stayed up top and looked out over the countryside and looked at the really interesting little museum there about the history of the town and area. I bought several books in French, so I will see about adding some of that background later.

At the top of the citadel is a plaque to the Century Division. It reads, "The plaque is dedicated by the city of Bitche and the 100th U.S. Infantry Division to the nearly 3000 soldiers of the division who were killed, wonded, missing, or captured during the battle for the Maginot sector known as the Ensemble de Bitche between December 3, 1944 and March 17, 1945. The plaque is also dedicated to the 34 citizens of Bitche who lost their lives during the battle and the 119 persons who were injured as well as the 41 members of the Resistance who were deported to Germany during the war."

Rimling

For once the ceremony was done in sunshine and warm weather and it was so much better. The band looked smart in their dark red uniforms. Bill Moseley and John Sommer held the flags in the town they had fought in. Bob Alcorn laid the wreath. He'd been in a crew fighting here, but over the German border--that's how close to Germany the town is. The mayor (Eric Hemmert) and Bill gave speeches. The mayor's speech was read in English by someone from the town. Liz and I commented how well the translator knew English--only to find out later that he was from York, England.

This was where Sgt. Kerry won the Medal of Honor. His story is in the Story of the Century. Bill had been in Kerry's unit.

The town held a wonderful reception for us--and provided the most wonderful hors d'oeuvre--a large bread hollowed out and filled with small squares of bread with caviar, lox, and cheese on them. Excellent bread and as always excellent wine. There was quite a crowd that gathered--and a number of people spoke English very well, so for once we got to talk with people. That was really interesting. It's clear too how close they are to Germany--one of them worked in Germany.

We had this at several of the receptions, but I think the best food was in Rimling. This is from a post card for Kougelhopf. There's a recipe on the back of the card. I'll try to translate it.

The mayor promised us a surprise, but we didn't know what it was. They invited Bill to read the story of Marie--a story I'd heard read at the Florida reunion last May. It's the story of how a local girl named Marie had helped the GIs by climbing up in the church to spot artillery and checking out in the street to see if it was safe before they left cover. We had just been hearing about how intense the fighting was, so this was incredibly brave. But I wondered if it was a legend and whether the people of Rimling were wondering why we were making up stories about them. And then the mayor brought forth the surprise--Marie herself!!! She's standing between Bill and Bob Alcorn in the picture.

Marie-Louise Krese was so happy to meet us. She seemed very kind. Though once more we had the beastly absence of language, we communicated with her somehow and felt a really warm connection later during the reception.

Her efforts were heroic and so helpful. John remembered that in town, they only knew where the Germans were when a shell exploded. In a cellar, the flash of a shell lit up the back of a German right in front of him.

Then the reception was over. We climbed ino the bus and pulled up into a corner of the street--waiting for John, Bill, Shep, Nancy, and Armer to return from their search into the hills. Sitting there, it was so hard to imagine what had happened in such a peaceful place, gazing out onto the plain ahead.

As it turned out, the gentleman from York--Steven-- helped them out, showing them where the foxhole had been in his own backyard and taking them around the town with the help of Shep's maps. They went clockwise around the town to where John's foxhole was. He thinks he found the exact one, but there was too little time. He felt the busload waiting for them. The unit he relieved--K--had the thousand yard stare after getting hit from three directions by the Germans. It was along the road out of town. Then John, Bill, and the others came into town just as they did that time. The fighting had been bad because it was hand to hand. The troops in town were all mixed together, not the distance they usually had. They were hit from the north and the west at once, there was no cover, so they thought as bad as it was, they'd head into town.

To the left of the bus was a yellow house where a woman lived who had been there at the time. When they returned, they went over to talk to the woman--In the twilight it's hard to see, but that's John Sommer, Bob Heller, Lise Pommois, Bill Glazier, and the man from York talking with her on her stoop.

I believe that this house on the crossroads was one where John Summer dove into the cellar after the horrific attack on the hill. They ducked into the cellar at night. It was pitch black. He felt a soft seat in the absolute blackness. It was long--a sofa! So he sat down in relief. Suddenly the sofa started moving. He thought he'd lost it! Especially after the fighting on the hill, where he relieved the men with the thousand yard stare. It was a cow! The houses there were half house, half barn.

The woman in the house had been 22 during the war. The shells set her house on fire and it burnt down. She had to be evacuated.

John had gone inside a bunker at one time and was sleeping on his back like someone dead, when he woke to a start with lights and talking and stared straight at the back of a German overcoat.

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