## The 3rd Infantry Division’s Road to Alsace
To understand what Company B, 15th Infantry faced on January 26, 1945, it helps to follow the 3rd Infantry Division’s path to Alsace — a road that began in North Africa in 1942 and ran through Sicily, Italy, and southern France before it reached the Colmar Pocket.
The 3rd Infantry Division was not an ordinary American formation. By the time Murphy and his depleted company stood at the edge of the Bois de Riedwihr, the division had been in combat longer and in more theaters than almost any comparable American unit. It had landed in North Africa when the Allied campaign there was still in its early stages. It had fought through Sicily in the summer heat, across the boot of Italy in autumn rain and mud, at Anzio in the peculiar frozen-clock misery of a siege that lasted months, and up through southern France after Operation Dragoon.
The cumulative cost of that campaign record was the specific arithmetic of Company B on January 24, 1945: beginning the advance into the Bois de Riedwihr with 120 enlisted men, losing 102 of them killed or wounded before the company reached its defensive position, arriving at the south edge of the forest with 18 men and one officer.
The 3rd Division’s nickname within the Army, “The Rock,” was a marker of institutional identity — this was the unit that did not give ground. The practical implication of that identity was that the division was assigned the hardest objectives and expected to take them. It was used as an assault unit in ways that more cautious commanders might have rotated to other formations after the losses of Anzio alone.