Photos Photos of the US Army in the ETO

A French woman welcomes an American soldier two days after the liberation. Strasbourg, France, November 1944

some other ones

and again

B-26 Marauder from the 322nd BG... first USAAF aircraft in the ETO to make 100 combat missions.

607th Tank Destroyer Battalion-A 3" towed anti-tank gun outside Metz, France. Pfc. Sol Shalat is the third guy from the left, holding the next round. Cpl. Russell L. Kunz (Gun Commander), Leland, WA. is on the left per this article: T/4 Orville C. Zink is loading the round into the gun. The men slept in the hay lofts at the farm in the background.
Standing behind Orville is Robert L. Davis. He was from Chesterhill, Ohio and, later, was the gun commander of the TD that Sol served on. No ID on the other men. Obviously a staged photo, probably taken in early November, 1944. The 607th began conversion to the M36 GMC around mid-November. Photo from the Sol Shalat collection.

A U.S. Army Commissioned Officer is greeted by an elderly French farm couple with a selection of bottles of wine during the Battle of Normandy. Colleville-sur-Mer, Calvados, France. June 1944.

Boy......those were the days huh!!

WWII. France. 15 December 1944. Troops from the US Seventh Army inspect the "Bloc 13" of the "Gros Ouvrage du Hochwald", of the Maginot Line at Climbach.

89th Infantry Troops, Worms, Germany, March 20, 1945

Staff Sergeant Joseph "Sonny" Arnaldo of New Bedford, Mass., Of Company A, 331st Infantry Regiment, 83rd Infantry Division is pictured leaving the line after 10 days of successive fighting. Hood and face covered in snow, Arnaldo had recovered from temporary blindness when an 88 mounted on a German tank was pulled a few feet away from him.
Joseph J. "Sonny" Arnaldo died on April 28, 1977, he is buried in the rural cemetery in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was 59 years old. Let us not forget that.

89th Infantry Division, crossing the Rhine at St. Goar. March 25, 1945.

T/3 Richard Montgomery of the 165th Signal Photographic Company at Brandscheid, Germany. 21 September 1944.

On March 24th 1945, the 89th Infantry Division made their major combat crossing of WWII, crossing the Rhine at St. Goar and Oberswesel, near the famous Lorelei rock. I was lucky enough to join my father and about 75 of his comrades to visit the crossing during the 89th Society's 1991 'Tour of Remembrance'.
Throughout the morning of 25 March the 89th Division commander, General Finley, watched progress of the 87th's attack with the hope that part of his division might use the Boppard crossing site and sideslip back into its own zone, thereby obviating another direct amphibious assault. As the day wore on, he reluctantly concluded that congestion and continued enemy fire at Boppard meant he had to go it alone.
The experiences of both assault regiments of the 89th Division turned out to be similar to those of the 347th Infantry. Time and places were different (0200, 26 March, at St. Goar and Oberwesel), and the details varied, but early discovery by the Germans, the flares, erratic smoke screens, and the seemingly omnipresent 20-mm. antiaircraft guns were the same.
As at Rhens, for example, a battalion of the 354th Infantry at St. Goar came under intense German fire even before launching its assault boats. Flares and flame from a gasoline-soaked barge set afire in midstream by German tracers lit the entire gorge. Into the very maw of the resistance men of the leading companies paddled their frail craft. Many boats sank, sometimes carrying men to their deaths. Others, their occupants wounded, careened downstream, helpless in the swift current. A round from an antiaircraft gun exploded in Company E's command boat, killing both the company commander, Capt. Paul O. Wofford, and his first sergeant.
Although their ranks were riddled, the two leading companies reached the east bank and systematically set about clearing the town of St. Goarshausen. Most of the 89th Division's casualties (29 killed, 146 missing, 102 wounded) were sustained by the 354th Infantry.
Perhaps the most unusual feature of the 353d Infantry's crossing upstream at Oberwesel was the use of dukws for ferrying reinforcements even before the crossing sites were free of small arms fire. Word had it that an anxious, determined, division commander, General Finley, personally prevailed upon engineers at the river to put the "ducks" of the 453d Amphibious Truck Company to early use. Capable of carrying eighteen infantrymen at once, the dukws speeded reinforcement. They also made less noise than power-propelled assault boats, and when noise more often than not invited enemy shelling, that made a difference.
Having organized two light task forces for exploiting the crossings, General Finley was eager to get them into the fight. When by noon he determined that both regimental bridgeheads still were too confined for exploitation, he arranged to fall back on his earlier hope of using the 87th Division's site at Boppard. There a bridge was already in place.
In midafternoon the first of the two task forces began to cross at Boppard. Almost coincidentally, resistance opposite both St. Goar and Oberwesel beban to crumble, revealing how brittle and shallow was the defense. In late afternoon, following a strike by a squadron of P-51 Mustangs, riflemen of the 354th Infantry carried rocky heights near the Lorelei, eliminating the last direct fire from the St. Goar crossing site. A few minutes later they raised an American flag atop the Lorelei.

GIs at the grave of a fallen comrade. Margraten, The Netherlands, April 1945.

US tanks in the ETO.

332nd Mission to Berlin
On March 24, 1945, the 332nd Fighter Group escorted the 5th Bomb Wing on a mission to Berlin. It was the longest mission flown by the 15th Air Force. It was a 1,600-mile round trip from Ramatelli, Italy. Drop tanks located under the wings made it possible by providing extra fuel for the aircraft. The tanks would be jettisoned when the pilots encountered enemy fighters. On the mission they encountered 30 Me-262’s and Me-163’s, jet propelled aircraft. (Captain Roscoe Brown always said that he was the first to down a jet fighter). They also conducted a fighter sweep over Berlin. As a result of their actions, they earned Distinguished Unit Citation.

MG Carl Gray Jr., director general of the Military Railway Service in the ETO, dedicates a locomotive to Pvt. Harold J. O’Brien, killed at Liege, Belgium.
Pvt. O’Brien was attached the 741st Railway Operating Battalion and was killed on December 24, 1944. He is buried in the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial.

An original colour slide. U.S. 4th Infantry Division members boarding a Higgins boat bound for Normandy, 1944.