At the battle of Colline de Conneries, the United States 4th Infantry Division, having cracked the German 7th Army near Periers and having stranded remnants of the 15th Panzergrenadiers atop a rocky 120-foot elevation, detached units to storm the heights, but encountered stronger than expected resistance.
         Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hedmer ordered his battalion to fall back to the base of the hill to regroup and encircle the elevation. Shouting through a bullhorn, he called on the German troops to surrender, but received no response.
         Judging it best to resolve the situation before nightfall, when the enemy might manage to slip out through the thinly-spread cordon, he readied the men for another attack. But before the order could be given, the battalion came under small arms fire from the Germans, now descending the hill in great haste.
         Exposed as they were against the nearly vegetation-free hillside, the Germans took heavy casualties, and the Americans captured the remaining combatants. Two officers of the Waffen-SS, disguised as regular army soldiers, were exposed and summarily executed, and the remaining seventy-four men were sent to the Foucarville camp. When interrogated, none seemed to understand who had given the order to attack nor why, but many of them described a feeling of uneasiness about their hilltop position, and even a sense of relief to have left it to rush into the face of enemy fire.
         When the LTC’s battalion reconnoitered the height, they found no remaining Germans, but did discover one elderly Frenchman dressed in rags, who evidently lived in a narrow cave extending down into the flinty rock of the hill. His French dialect was unintelligible to the translators, and judging him to be harmless and the hill to be of no strategic value, Hedmer ordered his men to return to the general advance.
         Today there is a plaque at the bottom of the hill to mark the event, but few visitors make the climb to the top. Those who do say that the place smells of rat feces and is pitted by numerous small burrows in which an unlucky tourist might break an ankle.
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