Lest I Forget

Newspaper clipping entitled “Yanks in Belgium Experience Winter Warfare at its Worst,” by Laurence Mascott, Stars and Stripes, 19 January 1945.
“With 83rd INF DIV, Jan. 19. This is Belgium and this is Valley Forge, and this is cruel, savage winter warfare at its worst. For four days and four nights, infantrymen of this division have attacked incessantly and made good progress in the face of bitter, last‐ditch Nazi resistance. The temperature is almost always below freezing and except for last night, all night attacks have been made in snow storms and biting winds. Drifts have accumulated to over 36 inches in depth and blankets of snow cover the icy roads. Here are some examples of probably the most miserable fighting conditions under which Americans have been engaged since the trials of Valley Forge and Trenton. Morphine syrettes freeze. It was impossible to administer the crucial drug on the battlefield until the medics hit on the scheme of keeping the syrettes warm under their armpits. Plasma also freezes and must be kept under the hoods of medical jeeps. Automatic weapons freeze over and it is only after they are worked manually a few times that they will function automatically. But they continue to fight on day and night, almost without sleep, subsisting on K rations, unshaven, unwashed, sweating out mortars and artillery, walking over snow‐covered mine‐fields, hoping that the mines will not detonate.”

5 franc Belgian banknote, issued 1938, featuring French text with a profile of King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth, who ruled from 1909 until 1934, on the front, and Dutch text with a drawing of a miner, a bin of coal, and miners’ tools, on the back.