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force was being moved into line that night.  The heaviest punch was to be delivered north of us, near Soissons, at the top of the pocket.  As shock troops there Mangin had placed the French Moroccan division and the American First and Second.  On our part of the front not so much power was being concentrated, but each division was expected to gain at least some ground.  Douglas and I were to carry out "infantry contact patrol" with the 167th French division.  I described that kind of operation in a letter to you written August of 1972.  Neither Douglas nor I had ever done it before but we had been drilled on it rather throughly.  Littauer offered to each of his choice among our pilots.  Douglas had first choice, and I have forgotten who it was.  I chose Victor Heilbrunn.  There were others more adept at handling a plane than he, but pilots were apt to balk at flying close to the ground over German territory.  On our mission that was where we would have to fly, and I knew that Victor would go wherever I asked him to.  Our orders were that Douglas was to take off as early as there was light enough to see the ground clearly from the air.  The infantry would already be moving out by then.  I was to follow exactly an hour after Douglas left.

The front of the 167th division centered on Torcy, a village just to the left of Belleau. It faced the strongest position the Germans occupied in that area.  The infantry of the 167th would first have to cross a small stream, then a narrow-gauge railroad track  Then they would have to fight their way up Hill 193 (the number simply means the altitude in meters).  The face of Hill 193 was rounded, high, and steep.  It had numerous clumps of bushes, excellent cover for machine guns, nearly all the way to the top.  Then you came to open ground extending two or three hundred yards beyond the brow of the hill.  Then you came to a village, Monthiers.

In preparation for an attack each unit had a succession of objectives and a time schedule for reaching them.  The attack schedule of the 167th would have their leading infantry halfway up Hill 193 by the time Douglas arrived on the scene.  By the time I got there, an hour later, the French were supposed to be over the brow of the hill, on open ground approaching Monthiers.  If they had been sure in advance of meeting that schedule, Douglas and I would not have been needed.  More often than not such schedules went haywire after an