Electronic mail message from Gene Stahl (esteel@sprintmail.com) taken from "Dickinson Press" in 1945

I thought I would share this item from the Dickinson (ND) Press, from March 6, 1945, page 2.

"New England Man Kept Busy Cleaning Roads of Logs and Germans"

Between working and fighting Germans, Corporal Anton A. Reisenauer, New England, ND, and members of a tank dozer crew to which he is attached, spent a busy 62 hour period in the recent thrust through the Vosges Mountains to the Rhine River. Corporal Reisenauer is the son of Mr. & Mrs. Ignatz Reisenauer of this city.

The tank dozer crew had cleared a log roadblock and was leading a string of tanks into an important Alsatian town when they found another roadblock. While reconnoitering the block a body of Germans were seen moving on them through the trees. Reisenauer and Pfc Edward W. Munday of Liberty, West Virginia, went to work on the Krauts and soon had them on the run. This continued for a matter of hours. The crew would work on roadblocks for awhile then take time off to fire into the Germans. They repeated this until "the supply of squareheads ran out."

My cousin Anton survived the war and returned to North Dakota. From the Vosges Mountains you proceed east to cross the Rhine River. After crossing the Rhine you reach the village Malsch (a few kilometers south of Karlsruhe). In 1809, Anton's/our ancestor left Malsch for the Beresan District of Russia. Johann Reisenauer was one of the founding members of the colony Karlsruhe in what is now the Ukraine. Reisenauer descendants still live in the Malsch area of Germany, as I'm sure they did in March of 1945.