Yves J. Bellanger

THE 5TH INFANTRY DIVISION

"RED DIAMOND"

 5th ID Patch

EAST WARD HO

 

Having proved its ability at Angers the division was ordered to proceed eastward. The 11th Combat Team went to Château-Gontier in XX Corps reserve while the division, less the 2nd Combat Team, moved in an all-night march of the 12th August a distance about 104 miles to St Calais. The 2nd CT remained in Angers area to mop up until relieved by the 80th Division on 14 August. The 11th CT, after reaching Château-Gontier, remained in Corps reserve for four hours, then made an all-night motor march of 94 miles to the division concentration area in St Calais. After outposting a perimeter OPLR, the division bivouacked for the night, then picked up and moved twenty-five miles northeast to Authon, bivouacked for the night again and headed east toward Chartres, gateway to Paris, on the 15th and 16th.

In such manner, did the division move, tired troops pushing themselves to move and refreshing themselves with forty winks in every possible moment. They learned to sleep bouncing along the highway under a hot sun while sprawled on a jeep trailer or with an arm hooked to a support on a tank. Reconnaissance elements seldom rested there was so much territory to cover.

These items became familiar sights in the seven hundred mile saga as the Red Diamond swept through wooded hills, rolling plains, liberating thousands of villages and larger towns:
Item: Streets of liberated cities lined with old men and women, young girls (but seldom young men as the Nazis had exported them for labor or had killed) and children, all shouting "Vive l'Amérique" and throwing flowers and bottles of cognac, calvados and wine at passing jeeps and command cars or running out of the crowd with a bottle and glasses to pour drinks for the thirsty Americans.
Item: An occasional German or French collaborateur, with jaw set, unseeing eyes staring straight ahead, clothes torn, being led through the streets of a town with a French crowd at his heels, jeering him with all the contempt of four suppressed years as they conducted him toward a quick rendez-vous with death or, if he was lucky, just jail.
Items: The pathetic figures of some French women having their heads shaved for having been friendly with German occupation troops; officers studying maps at ill-defined cross-roads and studying the blue-colored phase lines on the map as the vehicular radios crackled with orders from higher headquarters to advance to the next phase line or patrol the flank; little kids tugging at Yanks' shirtsleeves or running alongside jeeps yelling "cigarette pour papa" or "bonbon pour moi" or a hopeful "chocolat"?; old men, grateful for deliverance from the German yoke no matter what the cost, stepping over their dead livestock, killed by American artillery or mortars, to offer soldiers a drink of "vin ordinaire" or the throat-tearing calvados or mirabelle; truckloads of German prisoners amazed at the equipment of the Americans; French families trundling their most precious possessions out of a battle area in baby buggies and homemade carts and then trundling them back again to shell-torn, bomb-blasted homes; bicycles of all types and sizes being ridden by Frenchmen and women of all types and sizes; swastika flags being torn down and the French Tricolor, U.S. Stars and Stripes and the British Union Jack being hoisted.

Those and countless other little human dramas made up the kaleidoscope of scenes as the 5th Division swept eastward.

 

Pages 13 and 14 of the History booklet of the 5th Infantry Division, published at Metz, France,
in December 1944.

The story continues in Battle of Chartres page.
Battle of Chartres

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Created in July 2001

Updated July 20, 2001 by Yves J. Bellanger