Dear all
Well it has been some time since I wrote here because of all my other dings I hd to do. As some may remember, I am Juerg from Switzerland and I have my own website dealng with the WW2 memories.
As I only live 70 minutes from the French Alsace area I focused the Battle of the Colmar pocket also know as the "forgotten campaign". I visited the palaces many times during 2011 and with the help of veterans of the 36th Infantry and others I was able to write about this battles.
Among the American veterans of the 36th Infantry Division - few towns in Alsace are still vivid in their minds, but none of them who participated in the fighting during this period will forget Riquewihr, Sigolsheim, Kientzheim or Kaysersberg, nor hills such as 393, 351 or 621. To those of them who were up on these scrub-brush covered hills the Riquewihr area means days and nights of ceaseless enemy artillery and mortar shells crashing all around them, continuous enemy assaults, unforgettable bayonet charges, close-in fighting with the enemy on all sides, and the bodies of enemy dead surrounding the mud soaked foxholes.
Here was all the hellishness of war concentrated in one area — war as only the front line grunt can know and understand it, stripped of its glamour and exposed as the real nightmare that it is.
here is the link to my recent updates on Operation Hawk
.
and the bloody struggle for Sigolsheim:
Any comments are appreciate. My next subjet by the way is the Gothic Line in Italy where I will go in March 2012.
The photos shows then and now the arrival of the 1st American troops the town of Riquewihr and the Saint pierre and Saint Paul Church in Sigolsheim. More on my website.
Regards from Switzerland
Juerg
