Dear Gilles,

On D plus one the part of les Arcs that lay south of the rail lines was occupied by the Germans.  The 3rd Battalion completed its forced march that afternoon from the areas far to the east where we had been scattered in the drop.  Although we were not too well organized and were short the officers and men who didn't get connected to those of us who did make the march, we went into the attack on orders from regiment as soon as we arrived in the drop zone area.  Our objective was to take all of the ground south of the tracks.  We attacked from the east through a vinyard north of the tracks which was infested with German machine gun nests and well covered by enemy defenses set up behind the rail road embankments.  After we cleaned up the vinyard, Lt. Col. Melvin Zais ordered the battalion to go over the top of the tracks and a very few of us made it.  All of the others but me who got over were killed (including the first sergeant of H Company) either going over or after we made it to the other side of the tracks.  Finding myself alone and that my machine gun section had been stopped by the withering fire, I came back across the tracks while my men covered me with machine gun and bazooka fire.  They found some of the enemy fire coming from a house and silenced it. 

Shortly after I got back over the tracks Lt. Gibbons announced that they had found an underpass to the right of our position which we passed through and deployed on the other side.  We flushed out, killed or captured the rest of the enemy from the immediate vicinity and the command announced to regiment that we had taken our objective.  The next morning I convinced Mel Zais that we were about seven hundred yards short of taking the entire objective and led an H Company squad on a patrol that captured an enemy platoon and freed fourteen 45th Division men who had been captured by the Germans.  (The details of this patrol were written up by Dick Spencer and recently indexed in Mail Call as being reported in the Hamburg Reporter newspaper)  In any event that patrol completed our mission and cleared all the enemy from the south part of les Arcs.  The rest of the town had already been liberated by the other battalions of the 517th in some very tough fighting.

When I started I just intended to refer you to the things already on our website, so you may find elsewhere things said in different words about the 3rd Bn.'s part in the battle of les Arcs.

Highest regards,  Howard E. Hensleigh