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Lieutenant-General Jacob L. Devers, commanding general, 6th Army Group later commented that the Battle of Hatten-Rittershoffen "was one of the greatest defensive battles of the war." The 14th Armored Division was nominated for four Presidential Unit Citations for its actions at Hatten-Rittershofen. Of these, two were awarded.
Hatten was on the route of the German columns and thus, the village had found itself at the heart of the battle. During the fierce tank battles between the Germans and the Americans that had taken place over the course of twelve days in the middle of January, 350 of the 365 houses which had inhabited the village had been destroyed. Along with ...
By 21 December 1944, the German momentum during the Battle of the Bulge had begun to dissipate, and it was evident that the operation was on the brink of failure. It was believed that an attack against the United States Seventh Army further south, which had extended its lines and taken on a defensive posture to cover the area vacated by the United States Third Army (which turned north to ...
The 79th beat off German attacks at Hatten and Rittershoffen in an 11-day battle before withdrawing to new defensive positions south of Haguenau on the Moder River, 19 January 1945. The division remained on the defensive along the Moder until 6 February 1945.
Two weeks of heavy fighting in the villages of Rittershoffen and Hatten followed. Luck recalled to Stephen Ambrose fifty years later that the battle was "one of the hardest and most costly battles that ever raged". [10] On 25 January 1945 the division was reformed as a much reduced Panzer Division and operated on the Eastern Front.
Albert C. Smith was born on June 5, 1894, in Warrenton, Virginia, as the son of Eugene Albert and Blanch Baker Smith.Following the graduation from the Gordon Military Institute in Barnesville, Georgia, he sought for an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, but it was hard to come by, so he entered the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia ...
Rittershoffen is a commune in the Bas-Rhin department in Grand Est in north-eastern France. [3] The commune was the scene of fierce fighting during Operation Nordwind in January 1945. See also
The module focuses on the first five days of the fighting inside Hatten, as panzer units sought to break through to the open terrain of Alsace that lay beyond Hatten and Rittershoffen. These capture the portion of the battle where an intense combined-arms struggle between a few handfuls of infantry companies and tank platoons of both sides ...