SINGLING
4th ARMORED DIVISION
6 December 1944
"Background of the Attack
The impromptu attack on Singling, 6 December 1944, by Company B of the 37th Tank Battalion and Company B of the 51st Armored Infantry Battalion represented the farthest advance northeast of the 4th Armored Division in its slow, difficult drive toward the German border which began 10 November from assembly areas just east of Nancy. From the military standpoint, Singling is important not as a town but as a terrain feature. An agricultural village of some 5 0 squat stone houses, it is strung along about half a mile of the highway from Achen (near the Sarre River) east to Bitche and the German border. Around the simple square church, the brown stone schoolhouse, the market square, cluster the houses whose concreted walls are painted white, red, yellow, blue, pink, and roofed with red tile. As in most Lorraine villages, the stables are on the main street and the manure piled in the front yards. But the picturesque insignificance of Singling conceals a military reality. Some of these farm houses have 3-foot reinforced concrete walls; the garden walls are high and thick; concrete pillboxes stand guard at the entrances to town east and west, on the hills and in the valley north, and on the ridge south. For Singling is in the Maginot Line, and its position along a southwest-northeast ridge is tactically important. In the Maginot fortification scheme, oriented north and east, Singling was a focal point in the secondary system of forts. For the Germans defending south and west, it was admirably placed as a fortified outpost for the defense against attack from the southwest toward the cities of Rohrbach, an important rail and road center and military barracks area, and Bining, which controls the approaches to Rohrbach from the south.
Rohrbach and Bining, both located in the valleys dominated on three sides by high ground, are themselves tactical liabilities. But control of the cities through occupation of the ridge to the north was especially important at this time both to XII Corps, which ordered the attack, and to Seventh Army (XV Corps), which was on the 4th Armored Division's right flank (Map No. 1, page 178). The principal objective of the XII Corps was Sarreguemines, an important city on the Sarre River and the German border. Through Rohrbach pass a railroad and one of the main highways east out of Sarreguemines to Germany, The 4th Armored Division was to seize this escape route while the 35th Infantry Division attacked Sarreguemines. Rohrbach had an additional importance as an objective at the time, because it was a focus for roads north out of the large forest area (including the Forêt-de-Lemberg and Forêt-de-Montbronn) then under attack by XV Corps units."
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opens the box on a Battlefield in a Box house.
