This Nov. 11, we offer you a Veterans Day column from correspondent Jeff Tolman, who spent time recently in an area near Colmar, France.

While the Battle of the Bulge raged on the west coast of Europe, a few hundred miles east U.S.-French combined forces were fighting to break the Colmar Pocket, Germany’s stronghold on the Rhine blocking an Allied entrance to eastern Germany. The campaign from the Vosges Mountains into Colmar, which began in November 1944, was hill by hill, village by village, often house to house.

Many lives were lost and sacrifices made before the Colmar Pocket was defeated in February 1945. It is here Audie Murphy (“To Hell and Back”) and the great American, Sen. Daniel Inouye, earned their Congressional Medals of Honor.

Driving back from Colmar, we stopped at the German cemetery in Bergheim where 5,308 German soldiers, participants in the Colmar Pocket battle, are buried, three to a grave, their graves all facing Germany. The oldest person’s headstone I saw was 51, the youngest 18.

The oldster, instead of bouncing grandchildren on his knee every week-end, was fighting in his Second World War. The youngster, who should have been seeking his first kiss or entry into a university, instead spent his young adulthood, to his death, lobbing grenades at opposing soldiers.

The show stopper, though, was at the Ludwig Papst-Heinrich Weirach-Siegfried Kukbauer grave, where a German flag had been recently placed, along with a 70-plus year-old photo of a young soldier, with a note written on the photograph in German. After 71 years, a friend, relative or loved one had remembered one of these three men and had come to a hard-to-find hilltop outside Bergheim, France, to do so. What an honor to that soldier and the character of those who still love him today.

On a hill in nearby Sigolsheim, we walked in the French cemetery for those who died in the area’s battles. There, 1,589 men are buried, including 792 North African and 15 Jewish soldiers. The venue had once been known among the commands as “Blood Hill” for the ferocity of fighting to capture and hold that land mass.

Laying the French soldiers to rest on a plot so many sacrificed for seemed a natural connection. My roaming and respects were stopped by a pot of new, blooming yellow and purple flowers at the foot of Albert Willis Chevallier’s grave. Mr. Chevallier died on Nov. 23, 1944 fighting the Nazis for control of Colmar, the Rhine and an eastern entrance into Germany. The fresh flowers told that he was still loved and missed seven decades later.

Nearby is a U.S. memorial from the French, thanking our soldiers for their sacrifices in that hellish campaign. The forces involved included the 36th, 3rd and 28th Infantry divisions of the U.S. Army.

Wartime editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin wrote of the men in the Colmar campaign:

“They wish to hell they were some place else, and they wish to hell they would get relief.

“They wish to hell the mud was dry and they wish to hell their coffee was hot.

“They want to go home. But they stay in their wet holes and fight, and then they climb out and crawl through the minefields and fight more.”

As we celebrate this Veterans Day, may each of us stop for a moment of silence to thank those men and women who sacrificed so much, many their lives, for our daily freedoms. The freedom to worship. The freedom to speak as we choose.

Each of them earned it. They deserve it. We owe a moment of respect to each of them. A small way of saying “thanks” on this day of national reflection.

— Jeff Tolman is a municipal court judge and periodic columnist for the North Kitsap Herald. You can contact him at jefft851@gmail.com.