90^th Infantry Division

The 90th Infantry Division entered combat in Normandy, the 359th Infantry Regiment attached to the 4th Infantry Division for the Utah Beach landing on June 6, 1944, while the rest of the division attacked on June 10. After difficult early fighting in the bocage — including the Battle of La Haye-du-Puits through mid-July — the division crossed the Taute at Périers and helped close the Falaise-Argentan Gap on August 19 before being withdrawn for rehabilitation.

Campaign map image

World War II Campaign Map of the 90th Infantry Division. Map courtesy of HistoryShots.

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Advancing into Lorraine, the division cleared Thionville and then entered some of the most sustained fighting of the autumn campaign along the approaches to Metz. The 358th Infantry Regiment crossed the Moselle at Malling on November 9 and fought the three-day Battle of Fort Koenigsmacker, while other regiments battled in the fortified suburbs and conducted the house-to-house fighting in Maizieres-les-Metz that lasted into late October.

Moving to Luxembourg in January 1945, the division fought through the Ardennes salient and then pressed through the West Wall, crossing the Prüm, Kyll, and Moselle before capturing Mainz on March 22 and crossing the Rhine two days later. The division raced east through Frankfurt and across central Germany, crossing successive river lines into Czechoslovakia, where it ended the war — its campaign spanning the full arc of the Western Front from the Normandy hedgerows to the Czech frontier.