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Show Cedar Man Writes I Interesting Letter of Action In France The following letter was reeeiv-, cd recently by Sgt. Hank Renn-au. from Ids brother St. Donald Ren-! neau, who entered service with the Cedut City Battery of the Utah' National Ouard, and who ls nowj serving with that group somewhere m France; France, July 29. 1944 IXur Brother: J Heard from you a couple days ago and very glad to know all is well. We're having a bit of fun also at the present time Jerry ls retreating bout as fast as we can move n-head, n-head, his planes come over every night but don't seem to do a bit of damage. Saw one of his get hit last night and it made the prettiest pret-tiest fire as it fell and broke into several pieces of burning ember. ' The early part of the week our boys sent over a force bigger than I thought we had and those planes oure made a pretty picture as they dropped load, wave after wave, on '.he target 12 or 15 miles from our position. We could feel the concussion concus-sion for that far. I can't see how our infantry ever .nade it through this country. Nothing Not-hing but guts could make them go is they have. I Imagine the people in the States were a little down icarted at the progress, but our wys had a blgg r obstacle than In onfronted In the So. Pacific These Hedge rows are poison. They are banks of dirt about 4 foot high, overed with trees and brush. Its iext to impossible to see whats on the other side. These hedges are ifcout two hundred feet apart with nothing in between but grass and an occasional orchard, each hedge was in itself a young fort and ar-enal, ar-enal, covered by many manchlne suns and oth"r automatic wea-K)iis, wea-K)iis, each h"dge had its own ammunition am-munition dump. Thousands of rounds of ammunition are spread ind scattered on the ground. These Krauts are better than experts at "amoriauue, They've built the most beautiful and treacherous holes, where. If possible, they could have lived In for weeks. The holes are targe but all the dirt had been hauled awny. heavy timber made their roofs and had been covered with sod and underbrush. They couldn't be seen until too late Some ire furnished with chinaware and blankets that were probably taken from the French. Several boys from other outfits in our group have been finding some pretty good keepsakes with the larger part of them booby-trapped. Am glad now we lectured so much against these articles of allure. al-lure. The French people seem happy mough to have been liberated, hough not all can be trusted. The Krauts have been in the area so long that some have marrrled Into the French families. The younger ones probably can't remember any other life than what the Oermns have set up, and its a pleasant surprise sur-prise on the kids part to receive a piece of candy rather than be called names or mistreated. Those French are moving back into what used to be called homts which are now just a mass of rocks and shell holes, where many bombs have dropped and thousands of rounds of artillery have hit, sometimes some-times not a building has been left untouch) d, some places only part of a wall and a pile of rock and steel show where a home had once been, but these people still can send a wave or put a smile your way when an American soldier goes past them. I guess they feel that not all ls lost. We've been fortunate as hell as yet we've not been find on, so no casualties. Observation of fire can only be conducted by air. We have so many ships in the air and so many Anti aircraft units that it would be foolish and a suicide run for the Krauts to send a plane up at night but the ack ack fire keeps them very high or out of the area so we're on comparatively safe ground, no hills in this si'ctlon to be used as observation posts, so looks like we'll have the run of things for awhile. We over here don't know how long this is going to last, we're hopeful, hope-ful, but trying not to be too over confident, because those boys are tricky, but we'll win out one of these days and will be back to drink up all the Rye your saving. Well Id' better quit, work to be done, and perhaps a bit of rest to catch up on before those three planes come over (was four last night). Take care of yourself and drop a line. I may not be able to write as often as I'd like to but 'things aren't the same now, perhaps per-haps you better drop a line to the (rest of the family and let them (know that everything Is OK. I'll write them when I can. |