In a short documentary (watch below), created by Battle Guide on YouTube, blends original wartime footage with new video filmed in Aachen, Germany, today. It powerfully retraces how the U.S. Army’s 26th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division fought its way into the center of the city during the Battle of Aachen in October 1944.

Using real combat film shot during the battle, the documentary shows American infantry and anti-tank gun crews fighting block by block through the ruins. These 57mm anti-tank guns – like the one manned by Irvin Schwartz, a Pennsylvania soldier whose wartime letters we’ve shared in our Letters from War project – were used not just against German armor, but to break through walls and fortified positions in the close, brutal fighting.

In his letters written after Aachen, Schwartz described the exhaustion and danger of that kind of combat. Seeing it brought to life through this restored footage and modern-day perspective connects his words to the real streets where those battles unfolded.

Schwartz recalled in a November 1944 letter to his hometown newspaper:

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“[W]here our anti-tank gun could cover wide areas out in the open we at no single time could protect more than a single stretch of street in the city. Occasionally an intersection which not too long ago was the busy shopping district of downtown Aachen.

‘All the advantages of war are definitely against us, men,’ as our platoon sergeant, Tech. Sergeant Dorsey McDaniels from Oxford, Mississippi, put it shortly after moving into the outskirts of the city.

Here I lost three of my very best pals and all were old soldiers who faced the Germans’ superiority in North Africa, Tunisia, and Sicily and in addition came all through France and Belgium unscratched.

What is more horrible than a veteran as these losing his life by a lone sniper in Aachen’s shopping district? But such was the Battle of Aachen, and day by day the doughboys moved in, taking the houses and stores one by one. Like that, the battle went on for days, with our planes strafing and bombing, and our artillery shelling ahead of our line troops.”

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The Battle of Aachen was one of the fiercest urban fights of World War II, marking the first capture of a major German city by Allied forces. For men like Schwartz and his comrades in the 26th Infantry, it was a defining and costly victory.

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Read more about Irvin Schwartz and his World War II letters

Letters from War – “Our Battle for Aachen,” 1944

Letters from War – The first letter from inside Hitler’s crumbling “Third Reich,” October 1944

Letters from War: Irvin Schwartz’s World War II correspondence with the West Schuylkill Press-Herald

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