The Bloody Forest: Battle for the Huertgen: September 1944–January 1945 Read online

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  1: At the Westwall

  2: The Attack Begins

  3: Into the Woods

  4: Stalled

  5: Schmidt Number One

  6: Schmidt Again

  7: Turns for the Worst at Schmidt

  8: Defeat Deepens

  9: The Grand Disaster

  10: The Start of the Great November Offensive

  11: We Were There to Be Killed

  12: Thanksgiving Celebrations

  13: Costly Successes

  14: Deeper into the Woods

  15: Overlooking the Roer

  16: Capture of the Dams

  17: Postmortems

  Roll Call

  Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to all of those veterans of the Huertgen Forest campaign who gave me their time and their recollections so freely. Their names are found in the section “Roll Call.” I would also like to thank Colonels Tom Cross, USA Ret., and Richard Cross, USA Ret., for their efforts to afford me access to the personal papers and for their recollections of their father, Col. Thomas J. Cross, who commanded a regiment in the 8th Division. Benjamin Mabry was kind enough to give me access to tapes recorded by his late father, George L. Mabry, Jr., a 4th Division Battalion CO, as well as some personal papers. John Swearingen, who served under Mabry, also answered questions about himself and his commander.

  Dorothy Chernitsky, as she has in the past, allowed me access to the sources for her book Voices from the Foxholes. John Marshall not only supplied me with his memoir and the details of his time in the forest, but also put me in touch with a number of his comrades from the 707th Tank Battalion. Al Burghardt, who fought with the 110th Infantry, responded to questions and sent me portions of his personal account of his military career.

  Colonel Henry “Red” Phillips provided me with his memories and furnished names and addresses for others in the 9th Infantry Division. Chester Jordan, from the same organization, passed along his manuscript Bull Sessions and also freely answered questions. Ralph Hendrickson supplied a wealth of information on the 5th Armored Division. Donald Faulkner shared his memories and sent me clippings and reports that went beyond his experience with the 22d Infantry Regiment. Clifford Eames gave me relevant portions of his 800-page account of a 1st Division rifleman.

  Norris Maxwell, one of the people who suggested I write about the Huertgen campaign, spoke frankly of his own difficulties as a member of the 121st Infantry Regiment and put me in touch with Stephen “Roddy” Wofford.

  The 1st Infantry Division Association printed a notice in its Bridgehead Sentinel of my interest in hearing from men who engaged the enemy along the Siegfried Line. The 4th Infantry Division Association performed a similar service in its Ivy Leaves. Bill Parsons, editor of the 78th Division Association’s The Flash, showered me with back issues, which enabled me to find memoirs of veterans from the campaign. Reverend Will Cook, from the 5th Armored Division Association, passed along copies of the Victory Division News. Bob Babcock gave me a copy of History of the 22d Infantry Regiment in World War II and newsletters issued by the 22d Infantry Regiment Society. Sidney A. Salomon supplied his monograph on the 2d Ranger Battalion, which covers the period of 14 November to 10 December 1944.

  William Peña of the 28th Division not only gave me permission to quote from his book, As Far as Schleiden, but also answered my questions and furnished me with copies of letters from the German soldier Hubert Gees. In the same vein, Harry Kemp, from the 28th, also contributed valued information through his book, The Regiment. The 39th Infantry’s Donald Lavender allowed me to quote from his monograph Nudge Blue: A Rifleman’s Chronicle of World War II Experience.

  Richard Blackburn loaned me the histories of the 13th, 28th, and 121st Regiments, among other items. Edward G. Miller was a gracious source through his book A Dark and Bloody Ground. George Wilson gave me a copy of his personal history, If You Survive. Albert Trosdorf of Merode, Germany, was kind enough to send me a copy of the memoirs of tanker Alvin Bulau. Dr. David Keough, with the U.S. Army Military History Library at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, pointed out relevant material in the archives.

  Quotations from If You Survive by George Wilson (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987) are included by permission.

  PREFACE

  In the course of research and interviews while writing a series of books on World War II, I became increasingly aware of the campaign for the Huertgen Forest. While survivors of other battles sometimes criticized the strategy and the orders they were given, there was a depth of anger about the Huertgen that surpassed anything I had encountered elsewhere. The unhappiness with what occurred and the absence of much objective coverage in the memoirs of those in the top command slots convinced me to produce this history.

  As I have reiterated in all of my books, which rely heavily on oral or eyewitness reports, there are always the dangers of flawed memory, limited vantage points, and the possibility of self-interest in such accounts. But the almost universal condemnation of their superiors’ critical decisions by individuals who were under fire in that “green hell” offers a cautionary note on the accuracy and the truths of histories that draw from the official documents and the personal papers of the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges (who apparently left little in the way of records), J. Lawton Collins and others in similar positions.

  On a personal note, the accounts of those who participated in the Huertgen combat triggered memories of my own service during World War II. I was an infantry replacement, and although I was fortunate to have spent my time in the European Theater guarding prisoners and hauling ammunition, I now realize how poorly I was trained, a condition that unfortunately pertained to many of those committed in the Huertgen and elsewhere.

  I spent a great deal of my basic training period learning how to salute and perform close order drill. I had ample practice with an M1 rifle but never touched a BAR or the standard .30-caliber machine guns. When we practiced with a truck-mounted .50-caliber machine gun to shoot at a radio-controlled model airplane, we were not allowed to use tracers, making the aiming exercises useless. (A drone was too expensive to risk having someone shoot it down.)

  I was schooled as an antitank crewman on a 57mm cannon, a weapon that was obsolete two years before I went on active duty in September 1944. At that, we had only a few days of practice with the piece. As infantry replacements, we were expected on occasion to be able to serve as riflemen. I never went through any training in house-to-house combat, which frequently characterized the efforts to capture villages in the Huertgen. I had no instruction for dealing with a pillbox. Nor did I, or anyone else I talked to, learn how to handle one’s self when fighting in a wooded area, such as the Huertgen.

  The cadre that instructed me had very little interest in how much I absorbed, because, under the replacement system, they would not go to war with me. Their lives would not be dependent upon my performance, because, while my contemporaries and I went overseas, they remained in a stateside camp. The historian Stephen Ambrose, among others, has criticized the entire replacement operation of the U.S. Army during World War II, in which individuals, often lacking even the rudiments of combat, were inserted into units rather than the possibly more effective procedure of bringing entire organizations with their own cadre of noncoms and officers in to substitute for those who required relief. That system would have ensured that the soldiers knew one another and those who led them would be aware of their capabilities.
Ambrose suggested that, at the very least, complete squads or platoons should have been brought in, and substitution of whole companies and battalions would have been even better.

  The experiences of those who were replacements in the Huertgen campaign demonstrate the awful failure of the system. But, as in the case of the command and control powers that held sway over the actual fighting, no one was ever held accountable for the disastrous consequences of tossing green, poorly schooled soldiers into the maw.

  Each new war differs from that of the past, but to ignore what happened in the Huertgen enhances the possibilities for another bitter victory, if not a defeat.

  1

  AT THE WESTWALL

  Optimism, an end to the war by Christmas, had infected the American forces by the first week of September 1944, as the Allied tide seemed poised to sweep the map clean of the Axis forces. In the Pacific, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz, MacArthur’s seagoing counterpart, had all but destroyed the Japanese navy, recaptured almost all of the islands conquered by the enemy, and begun to assemble a massive invasion force designed to carry out MacArthur’s boast of a return to the Philippine Islands. The homeland of the enemy was under siege from U.S. bombers.

  In Eastern Europe, the relentless Red Armies pummeled the forces of the Third Reich after lifting the sieges of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad at horrific cost to themselves and the Wehrmacht. In the west, having evacuated Rome, the German legions continued to retreat northward. After a state of stagnation in the hedgerows of Normandy, following the invasion on 6 June, the British, Free French, and U.S. armies had broken out in a dazzling sprint that carried them to the very borders of Germany. The columns of tanks, accompanied by swift-moving infantrymen, who were supported by massive artillery and incessant raids from the air, shattered disciplined ranks of German soldiers, destroyed huge amounts of armor and ammunition, killed and wounded tens of thousands of troops, and raked in hundreds of thousands of prisoners. At the German border, the only question appeared to be whether the rampaging advance would need to halt for a few weeks to allow adequate resupply of ammunition and fuel before administering the coup de grâce.

  First Army forces had begun to probe the enemy defenses at Aachen, and on 6 September, the First Army commander, Courtney Hodges, having paused over a two-day span to sit for nearly four hours while the Marchioness of Queensberry painted his portrait for Life magazine, predicted the imminent demise of the enemy. According to Maj. William Sylvan, Hodges’s aide-de-camp, “The general said tonight that given ten good days of weather he thought the war might well be over as far as organized resistance was concerned.”

  A sense of an approaching finale also infected some of the troops. Mike Cohen, a platoon leader in the 12th Engineer Combat Battalion, part of the 8th Infantry Division, recalled the coming of September. “We had led the advance to Rennes, then swung up toward Brest. It was truly brutal. The city was heavily defended by crack troops, granite walls, and lots of firepower. But when it was over, it was as if the war was over. The main force of the Allies had moved swiftly across France. The Stars and Stripes [military newspaper] reported that Patton had breached the Siegfried Wall in several places and the war was just about over.

  “It was a time for rejoicing. It was autumn, the weather was balmy, the guns were still. The killing was finished. It was the time of the Jewish high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and a prayer session was called on a sunny slope outside of Brest with a view of the blue harbor and a cluster of hospital tents. Despite the sincerity of my grandfather and the not-so-enthusiastic exhortations of my father [who left nineteenth-century Russia with its anti-Semitic raids by Cossacks and czarist pogroms], I was never very religious but this was very different. This was a nonsectarian emotion of brotherhood for everyone still alive and deep sadness for the guys who had been killed—our guys that is. I never could bring myself to regret the death of the enemies.

  “We had a big party for the company, hired the jubilant French townspeople to prepare a great feast, and we ate and ate and ate and ate. Then, suddenly, the peace was over. We were back in our trucks and moving east. We wound up in Luxembourg and discovered the war was still going on.”

  The American commanders, the strategists and tacticians, had neglected a number of factors in their calculations of imminent victory. Only two days before Hodges’s prediction, Sylvan had noted in his diary that, after a conference with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, head of the Allied forces, and Gen. Omar Bradley, in charge of the 12th Army Group, which included Hodges’s forces, “Both the Supreme Commander and General Bradley also are extremely worried over the gasoline situation, which is becoming more instead of being less critical.” Sylvan reported that his boss was ordered “to curl up both the VII and XIX Corps,” which, the aide remarked, handed the British ally and rival Gen. Bernard Montgomery, the “best use of east-west roads. The whole plan is not altogether to the general’s satisfaction, since he believes he can whip the gasoline problem, and that while the Germans are on the run, there should be no halt even for a minute.”

  Omar Bradley, in his well-after-the-fact autobiography, implied that if Eisenhower had not allocated scarce gasoline for Montgomery’s thrust to the north and given it to Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, the American armor early in September might have pushed well into the Rhineland, the very heart of the Third Reich, instead of halting along the outskirts of enemy turf.

  By dint of Patton’s personality and the swift progress of his troops after the breakout at Saint-Lô, the Third Army’s actions led to banner headlines and major news stories during the summer months. But the First Army, which furnished the beachhead through which Patton was able to enter Normandy, had achieved just as spectacular results. In the six weeks after the July offensive that smashed the German defenses, the troops under Hodges liberated Paris and pushed northeast to the border while contending with the largest segments of the enemy forces.

  Between the First Army and the Rhine River lay the vaunted Siegfried Line (the German name for what Americans referred to as the Westwall), a stretch of fortifications that in some areas amounted to only a thin, single belt of fortified emplacements and in others, particularly in the sector fronted by the legions under Hodges, was a parallel series of bastions. A swift strong strike could penetrate and sweep to the Rhine. Although the textbooks and manuals stressed the importance of the terrain, the strategists were confident that technology and manpower could readily overcome whatever advantages the enemy could muster.

  On 10 September, desperate to delay pursuit, the retreating Germans destroyed the bridges that spanned the Our and Sauer Rivers, which ambled between Luxembourg and the Third Reich. On that same day, on the heels of Hodges’s assertion that all that lay between a final push and victory was “ten days of good weather,” Sylvan said that a First Army staff conference described the supply picture as “extremely discouraging,” and the situation mandated a delay in any concentrated attack on the Siegfried Line for a minimum of five days.

  Nibbling at the border was the 5th Armored Division, a veteran force from the fighting in France. The combat log of the 71st Armored Field Artillery (AFA) of the division reported for 10 September: “The bridge across the Sauer River in Mersch was blown just as CCR [Combat Command Reserve, one of the three regiment-size units in an armored division] entered the town. [Battalion] registered by air OP [L-5 Piper Cubs flown by army pilots routinely as observation posts, spotting targets for artillery] and fired eight [battalion] concentrations. Expended 264 rounds. Many foot [infantry] and horses were killed and dispersed. Many horse-drawn vehicles were destroyed along with several automotive vehicles and guns. The Air Corps also had a field day attacking the retreating German columns as they raced east to the ‘Fatherland.’”

  A day later, the log of the 71st AFA reported a march of sixteen miles that bore it beyond the Brandenberg Castle in the Brandenberg Pass. “[Battalion] registered by air OP at 1630, B Battery, 71st. AFA was the
first arty [artillery] unit to fire on German soil. Battalion fired interdiction and harassing missions throughout the night and expended 230 rounds.”

  On that same 11 September, around 4:30 P.M., the 85th Recon Squadron, dispatched six GIs and Lt. Lionel A. DeLille, a Free French officer serving as an interpreter, in a peep (the armored forces designation for jeep) and scout car to explore the territory between the positions of the 5th Armored Division and the enemy. The patrol cautiously moseyed forward to find out whether Wehrmacht soldiers occupied the pillboxes that threatened any advance.

  Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger, leader of the group, recalled: “When we started out on our mission, we took my radio peep with us to keep in touch with the 2d Platoon and with headquarters. We worked our way down to Stolzembourg [a village on the Luxembourg side of the Our River]. From the citizens we learned there were no enemy soldiers in the vicinity. I have been thankful many times I could speak German.

  “The enemy had blown to some degree the small bridge that spanned the Our River. Even at that, we were able to cross on it. We could have waded the river too.” A dry summer had left the stream shallow.

  “On the German side of the river there was a pillbox camouflaged as a barn. It’s a good thing it wasn’t manned. Lieutenant DeLille and I talked with a German farmer. He told us that the last time he had seen any German troops was the day before. He also told us that if we followed the road up the small mountain behind his farm, we would be able to see the first line of pillboxes. So, Lieutenant DeLille, Pfc. [William] McColligan, the German farmer, and I went into Germany about one and a half miles, where we could get a good view. We studied the pillbox area with our field glasses. None of them seemed manned. We returned to Stolzembourg, where we reported the information [by radio] to Lt. Loren L. Vipond [his platoon commander].”