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Fort du Salbert

On November 19, 1944, the Germans occupied the fort and blocked Allied access to the town. An attack is mounted against it: at night, 1,500 men of the Commandos d'Afrique, machine guns in hand, grenades in belts, slip single file into the Salbert forest, silently obliterating German guard posts as they go.

The ditches are lowered with ropes, the ramparts climbed using demountable ladders. After five hours of marching, without having given the enemy any warning, the column surprised the fort's garrison and quickly overpowered it.
At dawn on November 20, racing down the slopes of the Salbert, the commandos, soon followed by the tanks, entered Belfort.

After two days of street fighting, the city was liberated, on November 22, 1944.
Source Wikipedia
Photo credit Thomas Bresson , CC BY 2.0, Link

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