Moyenvic: Where the Anti-Tank Co Recovered from Op Nordwind
Erin in Moyenvic, France © Erin Faith Allen
I had been looking at this tower in WWII photographs for years.
It appears in images from the winter of 1945, when Bud's company was brought back off the line to recover after their battle in Operation Nordwind. I knew the town, Moyenvic, in northeastern France, the way you can come to feel familiar with a place through studying photographs of it long before you ever actually stand there in person.
This summer, when I took Tom Breen on the tour in his dad’s footsteps through France, Germany, and Austria, I found myself face to face with the tower entirely by accident.
I am not sure I have ever been happier in a photograph. This is what the work feels like when it gives back in a village in France on a summer afternoon with rusted farm equipment and bullet-pocked concrete and the full story of layered history is suddenly present and visible and real.
Erin Faith Allen is an investigative war historian and the founder of Fortitude Research, specializing in WWII archival research, wartime reconstruction, Holocaust documentation, and the recovery of women's wartime histories. She is a leading authority on the 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division and the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. Her forthcoming book, One Day Over the Rhine, is in active development.
All original photographs and written work published on this site are copyright Erin Faith Allen. Historical and archival images are used where they exist in the public domain.
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