Oct 23 -Survey-Mopech to Osweiler and Dickweiler.
Shell landed in Osweiler while we were on hill above-
Ate dinner-(hot chow brought out) in Hotel Schamine in Osweiler
People must have left in a hurry-browsed around for awhile - picked up some postcards-
Back to Herborn and surveyed over to Bech--party 1 arrived with Capt. Carter---
Buzz bombs active during day-supposed to be huge ones with no wings---according to some s/sgt. who saw one.
Small arms & m.g. (machine gun) fire rattling at intervals all day-damn close!
Noticeable lack of communications wire- (usually cluttered all over previous areas)
Some outfits here roll theirs up to prevent Germans cutting it at night.
Cliff Hope from his book: In the morning we began surveying just east of Berbourg. I was front rod man. Most of our survey paralleled the front. In many places there was a deathly silence punctuated at intervals by an American infantryman poking his head out of the woods. Winsor made the observation that the proximity to the front could be ascertained by the amount of wire laid. (Barbed Wire) We saw only one thin strand that day.
Travers continued the next day up to the crossroads: one spur led to Dickweiler and the other to Osweiler. A German shell landed near Osweiler just as we started there from the ridge, so survey was postponed for a few minutes. We ate a hot meal, brought from an infantry outfit, in a hotel in Osweiler. The hotel had obviously been left in a hurry: everything was left intact. I picked up several guidebooks and postcards and an excellent cardboard wall map of Luxembourg. As I pillaged through the hotel, I felt it was a sad and strange thing to be doing, even if the proprietor had been a Nazi sympathizer. Although the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was our ally, we considered it okay to loot from the houses of Nazi sympathizers. Returning to Aldringen four days later, we had 12 live chickens in a coop and numerous and sundry other items in the back of a weapons carrier.
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