In the Footsteps of the 222nd Infantry Regiment

Standing in the foxholes of the 222nd Infantry Regiment, 42nd Rainbow Division, along the Moder River, Alsace. December 2019. © Erin Faith Allen

I have been researching this story for nearly two years. I know the vague imprints of the villages and forest that the stories give me. I know the streets and the houses. I know what happened during Operation Nordwind through stories and books and interviews.

Now it was time to walk the ground in person.

My French historian colleagues Damien Bauer and Materne Schaerlinger welcomed me to Schweighouse-sur-Moder and took me through the combat ground of the 42nd Rainbow Division's front lines during Operation Nordwind. The foxholes are still there in the forests.

All along this front line in January 1945, the 42nd Infantry Division was stretched to its limit. The Germans had been hammering their positions and the regiments were green, stretched thin, and freezing.

Damien and Materne took me out to the main line of resistance outside of town, to the ground where the 222nd held the line against the German advance. I stood at the edge of the Moder River and looked across at the field on the other side. In January 1945 that field was covered in snow and in the bodies of hundreds of German soldiers dressed in white.

The foxholes of the 222nd are still there around me, still hollow after seventy-five years. The river is still moving. The soil under my feet has absorbed everything that happened here and given nothing back.

Anyone who has spent time in the presence of combat veterans can draw on their stories and imagine what it feels like to stand on ground like this. It is a hush and a thunder at the same time. You feel the boots charging forward in the thumps of your own heartbeat. You hear the accelerated pulse of men offering their one precious lives to ground that would hold the memory long after they were gone.

It is 2019. There is stillness now. But chaos soaks this soil still, seventy-five years later.

Through researching this story for so long, I have imagined this ground long before I ever stood on it.

But being here now and standing on it is something else entirely.