This is the last day of our Rhine cruise. We are spending the morning in WWII remembrance in Colmar before heading into the Black Forest in the afternoon.
Everyone agrees that especially for Europe, nationalism and WWII was Hell. The biggest hero to go into Hell and return was Audie Murphy. He is one of the most remarkable stories to come out of World War II. Born in 1925 into a dirt-poor sharecropping family in Texas (one of 12 children), he lied about his age to enlist after Pearl Harbor and then the Marines and Navy turned him down for being too small and underweight, so he joined the Army instead.
He turned out to be an extraordinary combat soldier. Fighting in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany, he became the most decorated American combat soldier of the war, earning every U.S. military combat award for valor available at the time, plus French and Belgian honors… 33 awards in total, including the Medal of Honor.
His Medal of Honor action came in January 1945 near Holtzwihr, France (part of that same Colmar Pocket we visited today). His unit was nearly wiped out by a German assault; Murphy ordered his men to fall back while he stayed forward, climbed onto a burning, abandoned tank destroyer, and used its .50 caliber machine gun to hold off roughly 250 German infantry and several tanks, single-handedly, while calling in artillery on his own position. He was wounded but kept fighting for about an hour before finally retreating and then immediately led a counterattack. We stood on the very spot where he took his stand.
After the war, his boyish good looks got him into Hollywood, where he starred in over 40 films, most famously playing himself in To Hell and Back (1955), based on his own memoir. But he struggled badly with what we’d now recognize as PTSD with nightmares, insomnia, depression and spoke openly about it at a time when almost no one did, which is part of why he’s remembered as important beyond just his combat record. He died in a plane crash in 1971 at age 45, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where his grave is one of the most visited there.
Our whole morning has been of the Colmar Pocket campaign. After the Allies raced across France in the fall of 1944, the German 19th Army got trapped in a large bulge, called the “Colmar Pocket” on the west bank of the Rhine in Alsace, roughly 30 miles wide and 25 miles deep, anchored around the city of Colmar. Rather than retreating across the Rhine, Hitler ordered it held as a bridgehead, and it survived through the winter even as German forces were pushed back everywhere else in the west.
The French First Army had the lead role which is a point of real pride for the French military, since most of the liberation fighting had been dominated by American, British, and Canadian forces. Eisenhower reinforced them with the U.S. XXI Corps including the 3rd, 28th, and 75th Infantry Divisions and the 12th Armored Division. On the German side, the 19th Army, fought back with roughly 5 divisions.
The offensive launched January 20, 1945, in brutal conditions during one of the coldest winters of the war, deep snow, frozen ground that made digging in nearly impossible, and thick fog that grounded Allied air support for days at a time. Progress was slow and costly; this was infantry-and-armor grinding through fortified villages one at a time.
Audie Murphy’s famous Medal of Honor stand near Holtzwihr (Jan 26, 1945) happened during this campaign, as German forces mounted a counterattack trying to hold the pocket’s shrinking perimeter. His memorial is set on the side of the road on a small path through the dense forest.
French and American forces converged on Colmar itself, which fell February 2. The remaining German forces retreated toward the Rhine, and by February 9 the pocket was eliminated, with most German troops managing to escape across the river rather than being captured or destroyed. The campaign was significant in that it secured the entire Alsace region and the Rhine’s west bank, denying Germany a foothold for future offensives in the area and setting up the final Allied crossings into Germany itself weeks later. Casualties were heavy on both sides given the terrain and weather, lesser often cited (compared with the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest) as some of the harshest fighting conditions Allied troops faced in the European theater.
On the ride back to the boat, we passed by Neuf-Brisach, a star-shaped fortress town just a few miles from Colmar (about 10 miles southeast, near the German border and the Rhine). It was built starting in 1698 by Vauban, Louis XIV’s legendary military engineer, as the archetypal example of his fortification system, a nearly perfect octagonal star shape with massive earthworks, bastions, and a fortified town laid out in a precise grid inside the walls. It’s considered one of the finest surviving examples of 17th-century star fort design anywhere in Europe, and it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It saw real use in later conflicts too, including fighting during the Franco-Prussian War and both World Wars. It sat right in the thick of the Colmar Pocket fighting we just discussed, given its location. After Colmar fell on February 2, the retreating German 19th Army pulled back toward the Rhine, and the final fighting of the campaign centered on covering that retreat and securing the crossing points. The key location was Chalampé, where Allied forces defeated the last organized German rear-guard positions on February 9. The remaining German troops retreated back across the Rhine which finally closed out the Pocket. Neuf-Brisach and Breisach (the twin towns on either side of the Rhine, with Neuf-Brisach’s star fortress on the French side and our boat docked at Breisach) were also part of that final push. French forces advanced from the northwest toward Neuf-Brisach as one of the closing thrusts of the operation. The Rhine crossing near Breisach was the natural chokepoint for the German withdrawal, since it was one of the few fixed crossings in the area. So fighting there in early February effectively was the last stand, in the sense of the final rear-guard action covering the German retreat across the river, even though the fortress itself dates back to Vauban’s era, not WWII. There was not a single dramatic “last stand” battle at one spot, but the last week of fighting (Feb 3–9) was essentially the German 19th Army fighting a rolling rear-guard action back to the Rhine, with Chalampé and the Neuf-Brisach/Breisach crossing as the final chapter.
Then on and up into the Black Forest. After a cuckoo clock and glass-blowing stop, we headed down into the Höllental (“Hell’s Valley”), which is a dramatic gorge in Germany’s Black Forest, about 18 km southeast of Freiburg, between Hinterzarten and Buchenbach-Himmelreich. It’s roughly 9 km long, with rock walls rising up to 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) in places. Why “Hell”? The narrow, dark passage makes travelers feel like they were moving underground. For centuries it was the main route through this part of the Black Forest, and its steep, shadowy walls earned it the ominous name. Despite that, it’s now known for striking natural beauty: gorges, waterfalls, and towering cliffs rather than anything sinister. My recurring thought about Europe is that the continent fell prey to the “dark side” of human nature and paid the price through devastation and destruction.
After 80 years of rebuilding and far more prosperity than we could have ever imagined, we seem to be back at knocking on the door of the “dark side”. AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) is Germany’s far-right, anti-immigration party, currently one of the country’s most prominent political forces that is doing the knocking. That’s troubling and directly links to the history we’re seeing today, but the really scary bit is what Trump is doing to our good friend and neighbor, Canada. We are effectively at war with Canada. Do we really need to go to hell and back to relearn these lessons?