Remembering WWII’s Hardest-Fought Battle: 100k Dead at Hürtgen Forest | Observer: "Nowhere was this reality more painful than in the Hürtgen Forest, a dark and hilly patch of woods just inside the German border next to Belgium, a 50-square-mile piece of hell for the American soldiers fighting there. Despite being the longest and hardest-fought battle for the U.S. Army in the Second World War—G.I.s moved into the forest in mid-September 1944 and didn’t clear it of the enemy until early February 1945, nearly five months later—the fight for the Hürtgen Forest has been all but forgotten. While most Americans have heard of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, historic victories, perhaps one citizen in a hundred would recognize the name of the battle that, according to the army’s official account, cost over 100,000 G.I.s dead, wounded, missing, and crippled by illness.
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