Visit to Meuse

Last week we went to the Meuse and St Mihiel area in France.

We went to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. More than 14.000 peolple are buried at this cemetery. Most of them died during the Meuse-Argonne offensive that started on September 26, 1918 and ended with the armistice. But if you look close, you will find even graves of infants, nurses and civilian labourers.

Sgt Willis Burnworth participated with the 145th Infantry Regiment at the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Therefore we traced the places he went with his unit. They started the offensive September 26th, 1918 at Avocourt and covered 4 kilometers of the Woods of Montfaucon. But they could not capture the hill. The next day, they manged to take the hill and reached Ivoiry. When they reached their end objective: Cierges, they were relieved by the 91st Division.

During our visit we had a good impression what they had to endure, especially if you consider that it rained the days before and during their assault. The terrain is full of little hills and they had to climb under machine gun fire and artillery bombing.

When they were relieved they went to the Pannes sector where they stayed eight days at Bouillonville in trenches and lost a lot of their comrades.

At the St Mihiel American Cemetery are more than 4.000 graves.