Moving to the front
After consolidating the division and its equipment infantrymen were moved to the front, which by December 1944 was nearing the Siegfried Line, defensive fortifications protecting Germany from invasion from the west. Troops were moved to the front to prepare for another offensive in the autumn of 1944, and then redeployed in response to the surprise German counteroffensive. How they got there depended on the condition of the roads and railroads between their consolidation point and where they were needed. For example, troops in the south of France were moved first by rail, then by Army trucks, to their destination blocking elements of the German army from reinforcing and resupplying the assault in the Ardennes.
These men were first loaded onto railcars from the French rolling stock which was called 40 and 8s. The name came from the labels painted on the sides of the cars, which in French read 40 Hommes – chevaux 8 meaning 40 men or 8 horses. The cars were antiquated, dating back to before World War I, and were unheated. Many were damaged, and the Germans had left them behind as they withdrew because they considered them useless. Sanitation facilities were a box filled with sand in each car. The Americans put about twenty men in each car when they moved by train, since with their full loads of equipment they could not fit in anymore, but conditions were still crowded.
When elements of the 276th Infantry Division were moved from their consolidation camp to the front it took a journey of four days, in freezing conditions, with many unplanned stops due to conditions on the railroad and at the front. Their officers traveled on the same train, but in passenger cars, which were marginally more comfortable but also unheated. Motorized elements of the division and the supporting logistics facilities traveled by road. The 276th was not going into combat as a division, but as a task force, meaning that it was used to plug gaps in the line in response to fluid conditions during the German attack in Belgium. Thus they were deployed without artillery of their own.
The troops found that in southern France the French were friendly and welcoming, crowding around the train when it stopped in villages and towns, trading wine and bread for chocolate and cigarettes. As they approached and entered the Alsace region this welcome became less enthusiastic. Alsace had for more than a century been a region disputed between the French and the Germans, and many of the residents there were more supportive of the latter than the former. The names of the towns and villages were meaningless to the men, most of whom had no knowledge of French geography nor what their destination was.
The rifle companies of the 276th Infantry Division arrived in the French town of Brumath on the day after Christmas, 1944. They didn’t know it, but they were about 60 miles from the Rhine River, which lay to the North, and less than one hundred miles east of Stuttgart, Germany. The combat infantrymen were unaware of their mission, tired and hungry having had little food other than frozen k-rations for four days, and about to enter combat with a German division which had been diverted from the Eastern Front in order to support the offensive which had stalled in the Ardennes at Bastogne. All they learned from their officers was that it was time to travel on foot.