The P-47s roared low over GI foxholes pitting the five-mile crest of Spichern Heights. After the fighters had strafed German positions and wheeled back to their base, U.S. artillery followed up the airstrike with a thunderous ten-minute barrage.

On the Heights, three companies of U.S. infantrymen stuffed their ears against the din and tensed for a jump off. Chewing slowly on an unlit cigar, Lieutenant Ed Crowson squinted through the curtain of dawn mist and battle smoke.

If you could shut out the war and forget it was March, 1945, you could appreciate the view. From the American-held crest, a slope ran down maybe half a mile to a wooded ravine slashed by a railroad track. Just beyond lay the pretty little town Stiring Wendel. It was a lot like the hilly country back in Crowson's home state of North Carolina. Big difference was. the natives here weren't as friendly.

The broad Metz Highway cut through the lower hall of Stiring Wendel and snaked eastward into Germany. Until the mist thickened, Crowson could see the gleaming ribbon of the Saar River three miles beyond town. The jackpot prize stood on the river's far bank: Saarbracken, key city to Adolf Hitler's richest stretch of real estate, and number one target for the 70th Infantry Division spearheading the Seventh Army's drive into Germany.

"Once we're sitting on those heights," Divisional brass had said confidently, "it will be a milk run into Saarbrucken."

Taking the Heights had been a bloody business. The 274th Regiment had to shoot, stab and hack through masses of desperate German defenders to gain the crest. By then Intelligence reports to Division HQ had changed a few minds about the upcoming "milk run."

For one thing. loss of the industrial Saarland would mean the total collapse of Hitler's back-to-the-wall struggle against the attacking Allies. The Fuehrer had ordered the pillbox and dragon's-teeth defenses beefed up and 125,000 Volksgrenadiers of the Nazi First Army to dig in on the west bank of the river for a fight to the death.

But tradition, too, dictated that the Germans strengthen this stretch of the Siegfried Line. Though part of the territory was French, in the rigid Prussian militaristic view all the ground from Spichern to the Saar was sacred soil, nourished by the blood and bones of Bismarck's warriors who had died and been buried here during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

On Christmas Day, 1939, the Fuhrer himself had stepped over the frontier and walked a few hundred yards into France and back. That clinched it. Thereafter, to most Germans, no more hallowed ground existed in all Europe.

"Holy ground, hell." Lieutenant Crowson removed his cigar, looked out over the valley and spat. Long-dead Krauts buried on this hill didn't scare him, he was more worried by what had been planted here more recently: deadly little shu-mines specially made to rip your legs off. To add to the suicidal flavor of the descent, the slope was almost bare of any cover, except for scattered bushes near the base.

Flanked by Item and Love, King Company jumped off on schedule. Clyde Rytting was already halfway down the slope on a reconnaissance mission. Rytting was a burly lieutenant with a contempt for danger. As coolly as if he were working a potato field back in his native state of Idaho, he zigzagged on his belly across a wide stretch of earth stuffed with shu-mines and signaled course alterations to the advancing GIs. Rytting was smack in the middle of the minefield when a machine gun stuttered from somewhere down the hill and bullets chopped a straight line right across the slope. Rytting froze.

The pillbox housing the enemy gun wasn't far ahead of him; he could see its squat shape in the undergrowth. The gun kept firing long bursts. Five hundred years up the hill behind Rytting, platoon sergeants rapped orders. GIs swinging down in line abreast spread left and right and hit the dirt. With King Company pinned in front of the pillbox, the flanking outfits, couldn't move either without running the risk of creating a dangerous gap in the lines.

A t H-Hour plus 22, the attack was already stymied.

Out in front on his own, Rytting figured since he was closest to that bunker he had better do something about it - quick.

Rytting readied a hand grenade and fishtailed forward some more, his attention riveted on the bulky gray blur of the camouflaged bunker. So much so that he momentarily forgot the mines.

The ground suddenly blew up under him, tearing one of his legs off. From where it was pinned up on the hill, Company K's lead platoon could see the lieutenant's writhing on the ground. Someone yelled, "Medic!"

Pfc Fred Kinsley, platoon aid man, jumped to his feet and started to run, crouching, down the hill. Gunfire still raked the slope, but not a bullet struck Kinsley. At last he was kneeling beside Clyde Rytting's torn and bleeding body.

The lieutenant was fully conscious. Kinsley gave him a shot of morphine, then began to work on him. He had just finished when somewhere up the hill another voice screamed: "Medic!" Kinsley collected his equipment, patted the lieutenant's shoulder reassuringly, and moved on. Gonna be a busy day, he thought. But not for Fred Kinsley.

He had gone maybe twenty yards from Rytting when his foot triggered a shu-mine. The blast ripped off one leg at the knee. Howling as much from anger as pain, Kinsley struggled to rise and repeatedly flopped over. A litter squad trotted down the hill toward him.

"Goddam, no," Kinsley groaned. They were barging straight for the patch of ground where the shu-mines were sown thickest. Kinsley tried to shout a warning, but his voice choked on it. He struggled to wave them off. The litter squad figured he was beckoning them to hurry. They hurried.

Kinsley cursed, dug his elbows into the ground and dragged himself painfully up the slope. He cleared the minefield seconds before the squad would have blundered into it.

Lieutenant Colonel Karl Landstrom, CO of the 3rd Battalion, was directing the assault from a CP on a ridge which gave him a grandstand view of the battlefield. Only, it wasn't quite a battlefield, wouldn't be until he got his men moving. He contacted his three rifle company commanders.

"I'm fetching up a tank to knock out that bunker," he told them. "In the mean-time, we can't just lie around on our bellies."

He ordered them to push on, bypassing the pillbox if they could and skirting the minefield - if they could. It was a chancy order to issue, but this was a chancy-as hell war. No American officer from the Ardennes south to the Swiss border knew that better than Karl Landstrom.

Three winter months of continuous slogging combat against a fiercely desperate enemy had transformed his outfit from a bunch of green and cocky kids into a tough-as-nails fighting team A vital part of that transformation was the readiness of a field officer to issue difficult orders when he had to. Landstrom was able to do so only by constantly reminding himself that the main purpose was to bring victory that much closer.

The valley reverberated with the sound of killing, maiming gunfire. The Americans plunged into it; King Company caught the brunt. "The long line of GIs must have been visible to every Kraut OP from Stiring Wendel to the Saar River. Rockets, machine gun and rifle slugs, mortars, even heavy 88s from batteries across the river, poured down on the slope in a blazing cataract of steel. Glaring explosions punched holes all over the hillside. Shrapnel spun in every direction.

Lieutenant Crowson stared left and right through the hell of smoke and geysering earth. Men who hadn't been hit were dropping anyway, clawing the earth for some slight cover. But there was no cover and if they all flattened out here where the slope was steepest they would make perfect targets for the Krauts to massacre at their leisure. They would be picked off just as surely if they tried to turn back, but that possibility didn't worry Crowson. He knew damn well retreat was one word which, some time during the past three savage months of fighting, had vanished from Company K's vocabulary.

Crowson snatched the dead cigar out of his mouth. "Keep moving!" he roared. "On the double, now!"

He jabbed the cigar back in place and started to run, head down.

"What are you guys waiting for?" snarled one sergeant to his faltering squad. "You gonna let a goddam lieutenant beat you into Germany!"

They swept into the valley behind their cigar-chomping lieutenant. They were getting brisk support now from 60 mm mortars trained on the bunkers shielding Stiring Wendel. In addition, light machine guns and BARS were crackling along the whole length of the ravine. Ed Crowson's GIs raced forward until the ground began to level toward the bottom of the hill.

Crowson rapped orders, his noncoms relayed them, and the infantry men pitched prone, seeking what cover they could. Ed Crowson huddled behind a boulder. Sweat poured down his face; his heart hammered. Chewing rhythmically on the cigar, he glanced up and down his ranks, at men he had led through one murderous action after another. He had a notion that before the present brawl was over his outfit's previous fights would seem like Saturday night USO parties by comparison.

From the set expressions on their faces, his men thought so too.

The route immediately ahead lay through a forest of firs and tall pines, then across an open field to the railroad track. Just across the track a scattering of houses marked the outskirts of Stiring Wendel. Those houses would be crawling with Germans; crossing the field under fire would be a nightmare. Always assuming they reached the field, Crowson thought. For all he knew those trees immediately ahead were alive with Germans too.

Ten-hundred hours. The line moved forward again.

As they entered the woods, an eerie silence descended. Treading carefully, a tommy gun cocked for trouble, Ed Crow; son felt his scalp tingle. [tight and left of him, his men were slipping from tree to tree, silent' as ghosts. The depths of the forest were midnight-dark. Crowson's cigar-chomping quickened. Fie fought a harrowing notion that any second some GI's foot would trip a whole string of she-mines, or that a screaming horde of Germans would leap suddenly from behind the trees and chop what was left of Company K to pieces.

But they got through the woods unopposed. The Germans hadn't bothered to stage an ambush. All they had to do was sit in their bunkers and shell-battered hideouts fingering the triggers of rifles and machine guns ... waiting for the Americans to break into open country.

In the woods, Lieutenant Crowson saw light glimmer ahead where the trees thinned out. He halted his men, unfolded a sketch map and summoned his platoon leaders. "We'll cross the clearing where it's narrowest." He tapped the map with the tip of his cigar. "We'll take it in short rushes, ten steps at a time." He straightened. "And make sure the bastards know we mean business." He bit on his cigar. King Company bounded out of the wood firing from the hip and whooping like mad-men. At ten paces they hit dirt, a split second before the first enemy rounds came whistling at them. After a twenty-second pause, Crowson bawled, "Off and up, move, move!"

They raced forward again, but this time some were hit almost immediately. Halfway through the third spurt, German bullets struck a sergeant in the head, a private trotting beside him in the chest, the next man in the stomach, and a fourth in both legs. During the next two rushes, Kraut fire traced similar bloody patterns. The line wavered. Again men were dropping who hadn't been hit, and they showed no particular desire to get up again.

Crowson swore: it only needed one more dash to get them over the railroad track.

The chill morning air vibrated with the hum and swish of flying lead. Ignoring it Crowson heaved himself erect and addressed his men in a North Carolina drawl. "Now come on, goddamit." He paced up and down the faltering line. "Let's really show those bastards, huh?"

He rammed the cigar back in his mouth and stalked forward.

Five ashen-faced men in Sergeant Barney Rice's squad hung back. They had seen the rest of their squad blasted all over the field. They had secured a shallow depression. The closest thing to a foxhole in sight, and now they clung to it for dear life.

"Too goddam bad you gotta leave," He bellowed at them. "Let's go now, on your feet. Move!"

He took a few steps after Lieutenant Crowson and a bullet smashed his elbow. He staggered, looked back, cursed as he saw his men still hesitating.

"I said move goddam you!" They moved.

A second bullet struck Rice in the throat, another between the eyes. He advanced six more paces before he dropped. A GI shouted, 'Medic!" and dashed to his side. But it was too late for that, so the GI rejoined his buddies. He had to run like hell to do it. The survivors of Sergeant Barney Rice's decimated squad had gone charging ahead, howling for vengeance. The fighting-mad remnants of Company K took the railroad track like Olympic junipers. By noon they were battling for the outskirts of Stiring Wendel, and three U.S. tanks were laying a heavy fire on the line of bunkers. Now Ed Crowson's immediate objective was the Metz Highway slicing through the lower half of the town.

Tommy gun blazing, Crowson cleared one street single-handed, selected a half demolished hotel midway along another street for his CP. He was booting his way through the splintered door when a rifle bullet streaked from a house opposite and ripped through his left leg. Without losing his grip on his gun, Crowson rolled swiftly over the plaster-strewn lobby floor into what must once have been an elegant lounge and peered through a broken window.

Lieutenant Jim DeLorme, his exec, was sprinting low across the street, making for the hotel. The hidden sniper drew a bead on him too. Three bullets kicked up dust at DeLorme's heels. The sniper never had a chance to fire the fourth. Ed Crowson caught sight of a fleeting blur in an upstairs window opposite and triggered a tommy gun burst, taking out the sniper.

Jim DeLorme scrambled into the room, crouched beside Crowson and grinned his thanks. Then he saw the widening pool of blood around Crowson's legs. "Jesus!" he gasped, and yelled for a medic.

While his wound was being attended to, Crowson talked things over with his exec, trying to assess the present strength of the Company. In addition to casualties from street fighting, he was still losing men back up the hill where medics and litter-bearers, working up and down the slopes, were repeatedly stumbling into minefields.

By mid afternoon Lieutenant Crowson knew that at least one-third of Company K had been annihilated.

But the defenders of Stiring Wendel were paying a heavy price too. German dead littered the base of Spichern Heights, were piled on street corners in the town and sprawled on the floors of shrapnel scarred buildings. Three more U.S. tanks had rumbled downhill to pump shells into stubbornly held bunkers, and the two companies which had come down with King were fighting like tigers for toeholds on the town in their sectors.

By 1600 hours, all three companies were fighting in Stiring Wendel. Measured in distance, GI gains hadn't been spectacular, but in terms of German dead and enemy positions overrun or destroyed, the day had been a success. By sundown, a squad of Company K men backed into a century-old manor overlooking the Metz Highway.

Hugging the walls, Ed Crowson limped along the streets under the sniping guns of German soldiers and pro-German French civilians. He ducked into the manor, squinted through its shattered windows at the highway. Gunsmoke rolled over it. On the other side, he could see a small cobblestone square with a dried up fountain in the middle. Beyond the square, the town hall spire marked the center of Stiring Wendel.

Lieutenant Crowson finally lighted his cigar. He took a long drag and turned to his GIs "An hour before daybreak, we jump across the highway to strength. . ."

A tank was to escort them over, but a mortar shell exploded between its treads and left it burning in the middle of the highway. The first wave of infantrymen pushed on without armored protection and were cut down by deadly automatic weapons fire.

A second wave followed and most of them made it to the ditch on the other side.

From farther up the road, a sudden strange murmuring swelled to a chorus of barely human voices. Soon the Americans could see a procession of half-naked, grotesquely thin men advancing towards them. Nerves stretched taut, a few GIs leveled rifles.

"Hold it," barked a sergeant. "Those ain't Krauts."

The straggling mob surged nearer, their croaking voices and shreds of uniforms marking them for mostly Russian, with some Czechs and Poles. They had broken out of a big POW camp east of town. There must have been a thousand of them; many were crippled. It was like a parade of living dead, but liberty and the sight of fighting Americans lit their terribly gaunt faces with a glow of hope. They began to run, arms outstretched, toward the awed Yanks.

Then the Germans in Stiring Wends started firing. The Americans' amazement turned to horror. The firing was indiscriminate. Dozens of the escaped prisoners collapsed in a ghastly pile of spidery arms and legs. Scores more hobbled in terror off the highway. Many who managed to crawl uphill toward Spichern were blown to bits in the minefields.

When the firing died, the Metz Highway was covered for half a mile east and west with the shattered bodies of Americans, Russians, Czechs and Poles. Even the most combat-hardened GIs watching felt sick with horror. The feeling passed, leaving a cold-blooded determination to get at the Germans in town--now.

The little square with the waterless fountain opened on to the Metz highway. Houses framed three sides of it. Streets ran off leading into the town. Directing operations from the manor on the Spichern side of the highway, where Gls were massing waiting to cross, Lieutenant Crowson ordered a mortar barrage on the houses around the square. But when a squad of Americans tried to follow up the shelling, leaving the ditch and darting into the square, small arms fire from battered buildings chopped them down.

An M4 tank lumbered tip and leveled its long gun. Shell after shell pulverized the buildings and the GIs swarmed into the square after the tank.

House by house, street by street, the Americans pushed deeper into Stiring Wendel. At 1300 hours, the whole town was in their control, and a U.S. artillery barrage of 155s, and 4-inchers was crashing on the bunkers east and west of it. Few prisoners were taken: the streets choked with dead and dying Germans.

Three miles down the railroad track, though, a hundred fanatical storm troopers defiantly held out in a gun-bristling coal plant known as the Simon Mine. Each time heavy guns shelled them from Spichern Heights, the Germans scuttled down into deep subterranean passages, returning to the surface in time to shoot down any Americans moving in on the plant to flush them out. King and Love Companies were switched from town and handed the job of clearing out the Simon Mine.

Lieutenant Crowson immediately called for a couple of tanks to shatter the surrounding iron fence, so his men could move in. But each time the tanks rolled up, anti-tank guns blasted them back.

In a series of forward spurts, the two companies got to within fifty feet of the fence before machine gun fire pinned them down.

Two hours passed and the Americans were still outside the Simon Mine. Then a sergeant named Cathy volunteered to crash the mine by riding in on a tank. The tank pushed the fence down and rolled over it, pumping 75 mm cannon shells at the plant walls. Sergeant Cathy hung on grimly to its turret until German bazooka shells whooshed out of the mine buildings and a hail of shrapnel swept him off his perch and dumped him on his back in the middle of the yard. The tank managed a clumsy turn under fire and trundled out of there.

German riflemen took potshots at the helpless Cathy. Three GIs scrambled over the fence to haul him out of range, but a murderous fire beat them back. Three tries by a litter squad failed too.

Toward evening, Sergeant Kohn went in after the sergeant. Taking advantage of the growing darkness, he inched close to Cathy and muttered, "You hear me?"

Cathy was still conscious. He nodded weakly.

Enemy rifle fire broke out then and a machine gun joined in, but the fire was concentrated on a spot forty feet from the sergeants where GIs just outside the fence were deliberately kicking up a commotion to draw the Germans' attention. KOHN whispered, "Lock your arms around my neck. 'Tight."

Cathy struggled to speak. "Can't move 'em. Broken."

"Okay," Kohn grabbed the wounded man by the neck of his jacket, "let's try it this way."

He dragged Cathy for thirty rubble strewn feet. Getting him over the twisted mass of iron fence in the dark was sheer torture, jagged metal caught in Cathy's open wounds. Hauling on him as carefully as he could, Kohn could feel the other man straining to suppress the screams which threatened to burst from his throat.

"Easy, now," breathed Kohn. "Not far to go."

It was another ten yards in fact. To both men it seemed like ten miles. But they made it, and on the other side of the fence company medics were waiting. Word had flashed back to Division HQ, meanwhile, that the Simon Mine would require a special effort to knock out. Next morning, the pale dawn light showed the mine ringed by a heavy concentration of steel and high explosive-from tommy guns and bazookas to mortars and tanks.

Every gun opened up at once. Glaring explosions smothered the mine. When the shooting stopped, every rifle company of Karl Landstroms' 3rd Battalion charged forward through a curtain of smoke, bayonets fixed. But the enemy holdouts had used up the last of their foodstocks. Hunger and the terrific barrage had broken their resistance. They staggered out of the mine waving white flags, holding their hands high.

Through the hole smashed in the German first Army defenses at Stiring Wendel, the 274th Regiment crossed quickly into German territory. Landstrom's battalion was still the spearhead. Soon his combat-hardened GIs were entrenched along the west bank of the Saar River, scowling across at an unbroken series of bunkers and fortified houses in front of Saarbrucken.

Using a 150-foot watertower for an OP, Colonel Landstrom directed a fierce artillery strike on the bunkers. But when he sent his first patrols out in rubber boats under cover of darkness, German tracer shells, followed by 50s, and 88s, blasted them out of the water.

Armored spearheads of General George Patton's Third U.S. Army were slicing from the north into the German's right flank, and the Seventh was increasing its pressure from the south. A hundred thousand Germans would have to retreat from the Saarbrucken sector, if they didn't want to fight their way out of a sack.

At 0210 on March 18, 70th Division orders to Colonel Sam Conley, commanding the 274th, were relayed on down to Colonel Landstrom: Utmost importance your crossing begin now.

"Hell, the Krauts are still over there in strength," argued Landstrom. It was one thing to order men on a suicide mission when the stakes justified the gamble. But if the Germans were known to be planning an imminent withdrawal anyway, what was the point of a gamble at all?

"We've got our orders," snapped Corehey. "We're not to wait."

"It'll be just plain murder," growled Landstrom.

Conley's rejoinder was brief. "Get over there."

When Landstrom's patrols tried again, shells promptly zeroed in on them. Landstrom reported to Conley. The Regiment CO snorted impatiently. "According to Intelligence," he snapped, "the Krauts have already packed up and left."

"Then who the hell is shelling us?" yelled Landstrom.

Actually, shells were dropping into the 3rd Battalion sector from both sides of the river. Landstrom not only refused to believe the Germans had already abandoned their side of the river, but he demanded divisional assurance that his men wouldn't be battered by their own guns during the crossing. Conley offered his personal guarantee on this point, but Landstrom wasn't satisfied.

Conley exploded. "All right, dammit, I'll get someone else to do the job. I'm relieving you of command."

Unhappy about the whole deal, Landstrom's exec took over from him and sent out three packed boatloads of men. From the opposite shore a devastating fire erupted immediately. The lurid glare of shellbursts showed all the American boats capsized and dozens of equipment-burdened men floundering helplessly in midstream.

Before that grim night was over, Landstrom heard from Regiment CP again. Conley rumbled gruffly, "Consider yourself reinstated."

More howitzers and 3-inch TDs were brought up. Soon American guns were massed almost hub to hub along the riverbank. They roared simultaneously, barrels leaping back in recoil. Assorted caliber shells. hurtled across the water. A wall of smoke disgorging hunks of flying concrete blotted out the German strong points. When the smoke thinned a white flag was visible, fluttering from the church steeple that the Germans were using for an OP.

Conley contacted Battalion. "How about it, Karl?" He added, "And in case the sonsabitches try to pull something when you're halfway over, I've got two thousand more rounds of artillery to back you up."

At 0400 on March 20, 36 rubber boats loaded with men and guns shoved off across the Saar. They met no resistance. By 0510, Landstrom was able to report that his outfit was about to march on Saarbrucken. Leaving behind their dead and wounded, the last Germans had fled their defenses just two hours before the American crossing.

Saarbrucken had been abandoned, too, left to swarms of rats and a few frightened civilians. The weary Americans slogged through a ghost town, but none of them gave a damn. Now they could relax, briefly, and with pride, especially the unit which had suffered the most casualties: Lieutenant Ed Crowson's Company K. On one day alone during the battle for Stiring Wendel, it had earned seven Silver Stars and fourteen Bronze Stars, a record for the Regiment.

But many who marched in quiet triumph through the deserted streets of Saarbrucken were replacements for those who had died fighting to win it. A Company noncom had greeted the newcomers in Stiring Wendel with a short lecture: "Half this outfit was wiped out taking this town," he told them. "That's why you're here, to fill the boots of the men we lost." He paused, then went on softly, "And let me tell you, that's gonna be a goddam big job."