GIs of the 69th Infantry Division take a well-deserved rest in a bed in Germany, March 1945. Judging from their boots, uniforms (heavy on the coveralls), and prevalence of M3 Grease Guns, they are likely tankers, perhaps of the 69th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop (Mechanized) or the division’s two attached armored units: the 777th Tank Bn or 661st Tank Destroyer Bn.
L-R: Gerald A. Garrson, Donald Meyers, Stuart Brent, Bill McGough, and Alva Goodwin. Time LIFE Archives photo
The “Fighting 69th” was formed on 15 May 1943 at Camp Shelby and arrived in the ETO late in the war. It hit the front in February 1945 and spent 86 days in combat. Nonetheless, on its tear across the Rhineland and Central Europe, the division suffered 1,506 battle casualties. Notably, the Holocaust Museum denotes it as a Liberator Division, having liberated Leipzig-Thekla, a subcamp of Buchenwald, in April 1945.
After several months of occupation duty, they were sent back to the States and were deactivated in September 1945.
The Disson M1917 and later M1918 trench knives, or “knuckle dusters” were a uniquely American item in the Great War
In February 2018, a French undertaker working in a cemetery in Villers-sur-Fere, a village about 60 miles northeast of Paris, discovered a set of undocumented remains. The fallen warrior was found with assorted field equipment that included a steel helmet, a trench knife, and an ammo belt full of 30.06 cartridges.
The undertaker contacted authorities and, it was discovered that American forces battled German forces in the village in the summer of 1918. This led to calling in a Great War archaeology expert and the American Battle Monuments Commission.
ABMC historians consulted the memoir of famed Army Chaplain Francis P. Duffy, which describes the burial of U.S. Soldiers from the 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division in the location where the remains were discovered. Notably, three Soldiers of the 42nd’s 150th MG Battalion earned the Distinguished Service Cross at Villers-sur-Fere in July 1918, one posthumously.
They were not the only ones, as the main color in the Rainbow division in France was red.
During its time on the Western Front, the 42nd participated in six major campaigns across 264 days in combat in 1917-1918 and incurred 14,000 casualties– a whopping one-out-of-sixteen casualties suffered by the American Army as a whole during the war. The fallen included poet Sgt. Joyce Kilmer– -the author of the poem “Trees“-who was killed in action.
The ceremony is reportedly the first burial of an unknown U.S. Soldier from World War I since 1988 and the first burial at Oise-Aisne since 1932.
Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade carry a casket with the remains of a World War I unknown soldier at Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France, June 7, 2023. Photo By: Russell Toof, American Battle Monuments Commission. VIRIN: 230606-D-GJ885-005
Notably, Kilmer, who was killed near Oise-Aisne, is buried at the same cemetery, (Plot B, Row 9, Grave 15).
With that, Kilmer’s “Rouge Bouquet,” a tribute to the 19 Americans killed by a German artillery bombardment in the Rouge Bouquet wood near Baccarat, France in March 1918 comes to mind. An excerpt reads:
