The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  But years of neglect had ravaged the West Wall. Barbed wire, steel doors, and heavy weapons were plundered for the Atlantic Wall. Saplings and brush soon blocked firing apertures. Farmers laid roadbeds atop the dragon’s teeth to reach their fields and transformed pillboxes into tool sheds or storage bins for potatoes and turnips. Bunkers flooded, or were looted, or became hideouts for soldiers straggling back from Normandy. Dank as a troll’s lair, the fortifications seemed “more like sewage works than subterranean forts,” one visitor reported.

  Hitler in mid-August ordered the Westwall rehabilitated with a levy of “people’s labor.” Simply finding keys to locked doors proved exasperating. By September 10, the workforce had grown to 167,000, including girls from the League of German Maidens and boys from the Hitler Youth, as well as others plucked from depots, training schools, police stations, and convalescent homes. Captured weapons from the Eastern Front rearmed some bunkers, although the concussion and large barrel of the MG-42—a notoriously lethal German machine gun developed after the West Wall was designed—proved too much for many pillboxes.

  With characteristic agility, Rundstedt manned the fortifications with makeshift units rushed to the front. Even as he complained on September 10 of needing another six weeks to properly rebuild the line, he improvised with dismounted panzer crews, border guards, and training battalions. The 49th Infantry Division scooped up officers and men from more than a dozen broken battalions and moved into a ten-mile stretch of the wall. The equivalent of two Luftwaffe divisions were deployed along a sixty-mile stretch in Holland. The I SS Panzer Corps officially halted its long retreat on September 14 to help shore up defenses. Within a week, 160,000 stragglers had been redirected to the front, with twenty-one Volksgrenadier divisions and nearly eight panzer divisions stiffening the Westwall.

  Hitler demanded “a holding of the position until annihilation.” He added:

  The fight in the West has spread to the German Reich. The situation no longer permits any maneuvering. Stand your ground or die!… Every bunker, every block of houses in a German city, every German village must become a fortress.

  The question of how to breach the Siegfried Line now preoccupied Allied generals and privates alike. “It is a monument to stupidity,” Patton insisted. “Anything that man makes, man can overcome.” But the U.S. Army had little experience in reducing elaborate European fortifications; Corps of Engineer manuals focused more on makeshift fieldworks. A single bunker atop a hill south of Aachen and attacked by the 39th Infantry in mid-September showed how tough the nut could be. Sequentially and without success, GIs fired bazookas and placed pole charges; poured burning gasoline under the door; detonated a beehive explosive charge on the rooftop ventilator, followed by three dozen stacked Teller mines and eleven more beehives; and scorched the embrasures with flamethrowers. Only after three hundred pounds of TNT were tamped into a divot on the roof and detonated with a monumental roar did thirty Germans emerge under a white flag to report that the greatest inconvenience during the ordeal was the occasional snuffing out of their candles.

  Ordinary artillery barrages did little against West Wall redoubts except “dust off the camouflage.” Napalm and other incendiaries proved disappointing. Experiments showed that twenty-five to fifty pounds of explosives often was needed to break a single dragon’s tooth, and large pillboxes required half a ton. Ten to twenty rounds fired from a self-propelled 155mm gun might penetrate six-foot concrete walls, or might not. Engineers learned to use an armored bulldozer hidden within a smoke screen to entomb pillboxes; doors were sealed shut with a jeep-towed arc welder. At a minimum, heavy shelling sometimes made it hard for defenders to breathe by causing the inside concrete walls to powder.

  As Rundstedt rushed defenders into the line, two American armies poked and probed, looking for a seam to rip. Patton’s brash assurance notwithstanding, his Third Army had yet to even close with the Siegfried Line, which abruptly bent eastward in trace with the border. Reduced to Michelin maps and guesswork—200,000 aerial photos, requiring four acres of paper, would not arrive until mid-September—Patton planned to leap the Moselle and advance to Mainz and Mannheim on the Rhine. He intended to bypass the French city of Metz “if it doesn’t fall like a ripe plum,” and little resistance was anticipated short of the West Wall.

  Hitler had other ideas. German reinforcements swarmed in from Denmark and northern Italy, giving the Metz commander the equivalent of almost five divisions to shore up not only the elaborate constellation of forts around the city but also a defensive line west of the Moselle. Four armored columns from Third Army reached the river north and south of Metz on September 7 to find screaming sheets of enemy artillery and no bridges still standing.

  The next morning, a battalion from the 5th Infantry Division slipped across the Moselle from Dornot only to be counterattacked by close-order panzer grenadiers shrieking “Heil, Hitler!” Four American companies dug a last-ditch horseshoe line only three hundred yards wide with the river at their backs; wounded GIs were asked not to cry out in hopes of keeping secret the extent of the casualties. Peppered from the bluffs by German flak guns, the battalion fought off three dozen assaults in sixty hours. “This sure is a hell hole,” the unit log noted. Not until nightfall on September 10 were survivors authorized to fall back across the river, evacuating under blistering fire in three bullet-pricked boats that required two men to bail for each man paddling. Others swam with water wings fashioned from inflated condoms, or rode rafts built from empty ammunition cans. In addition to more than 360 battle casualties, the battalion sent another 150 to the hospital with combat exhaustion.

  Patton would gain other bridgeheads over the Moselle, and on September 14 the unfortified city of Nancy was captured to become the Third Army headquarters. But his barnyard aspiration—“to go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose”—had clearly been checked. He had misjudged enemy grit: a Reuters dispatch reported that captured Germans tended to “thrash about and bite.” By attacking on a broad front, Patton had failed to exploit a vulnerable if temporary gap between the German Fifth Panzer and First Armies. For now he was reduced to bluster. “I have studied the German all my life,” he told his staff in Nancy. “I know exactly how he will react.… He hasn’t the slightest idea what I’m going to do. Therefore, when the day comes, I’m going to whip hell out of him.”

  * * *

  Farther north, First Army’s prospects at first seemed brighter as three corps butted up against the West Wall on a seventy-five-mile front, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. On the army’s right wing, where Sergeant Holzinger had first trespassed across the Our, V Corps soon found itself overmatched by enemy counterblows and scorching fire from stout fortifications in the Ardennes borderlands. The 28th Infantry Division, proud to have tramped through Paris on its postage-stamp march three weeks earlier, now had so little artillery ammunition that guns were restricted to twenty-five rounds a day and only one battalion per regiment could fight at any given time. Three days’ brawling in the sinister German uplands known as the Schnee Eifel made little headway, though the Americans took seventeen pillboxes and fifty-eight prisoners in one firefight. Even this modest penetration of the Siegfried Line provoked a counterattack that cost the division fifteen hundred casualties. Once again, as in World War I, the unit’s red keystone shoulder flash—honoring its Pennsylvania National Guard heritage—became known as the Blutiger Eimer, the Bloody Bucket.

  In a sector just to the north, Hemingway on September 12 accompanied the 4th Division into Germany, where he found “ugly women and squatty ill-shaped men.” Requisitioning a deserted farmhouse, he shot the heads off several chickens with his pistol, then served a supper of fricassee, peas, onions, and carrots to regimental officers, one of whom wrote, “We all seemed for the moment like minor gods.” The moment passed. A counterattack by the 2nd SS Panzer Division sealed a six-mile gap torn in the line and inflicted eight hundred American casualties; one company broke and pelted a mile to the rear. On F
riday, September 15, the division command post shuffled back into Belgium, purportedly the 4th Division’s first retreat since the Carolina maneuvers of 1941. A promising 5th Armored Division foray also petered out, and the corps bridgehead was soon abandoned, leaving the Ardennes to lapse into an uneasy repose that would last until mid-December.

  On First Army’s left flank, XIX Corps rolled through the Dutch city of Maastricht on September 14, finding the Germans gone but for three scoundrels burning papers at the Gestapo headquarters. Three days later, the 30th Division crossed into Germany only to encounter pillboxes and fire pits newly manned by Austrians in a Volksgrenadier division. A corps offensive to seize crossings on the Roer River, nine miles distant, was twice postponed for lack of ammunition, heavy weather, and anxiety over an exposed northern flank; this gave the enemy time to entrench and the Americans time “to ponder their apprehensions,” as the Army’s official history acknowledged.

  That left the last, best chance for a quick American breakthrough in the First Army center, where Joe Collins’s VII Corps had massed before Aachen with three divisions abreast on a thirty-five-mile front. Collins knew this ground intimately from his three years with the occupation force in Koblenz after World War I. (He prided himself in correctly pronouncing German names.) He also knew that the Aachen Gap had been a major trade gateway since the Roman Empire and, as he put it, “the real route into and out of Germany” since early Christendom. For precisely that reason, Hitler had doubled the strength of the Westwall here with twin fortification belts: the Scharnhorst Line almost straddled the Belgian-Dutch border, paralleled a few miles to the east by the thicker Schill Line. Aachen sat in a bowl between the two belts, ancient and vulnerable, the city of Charlemagne and Nazi romanticism, where for seven centuries Holy Roman emperors had been crowned as heirs to the Caesars.

  Collins now made a tactical choice he would soon regret. He decided to isolate Aachen rather than capture it. Short of gasoline and ammunition, keen to avoid an urban gunfight like the Cassino bloodletting in Italy, he ordered the 1st Division to seize the hills ringing the city south and east while the 9th Division pushed through the dense woods, seven miles below Aachen, known as the Hürtgenwald—the Hürtgen Forest. Between those two infantry divisions, the 3rd Armored Division would butt northeast toward the village of Stolberg, beyond which lay open ground leading to the Roer and Rhine Rivers. With luck, Collins believed, the Germans would abandon Aachen rather than risk encirclement by fifty thousand American troops chewing through the Scharnhorst and Schill Lines.

  * * *

  The sudden appearance of VII Corps had ignited panic in the city. Antiaircraft crews smashed their gun sights and fled toward Cologne, followed by police, municipal, and Nazi Party officials. Hitler ordered the evacuation of all 160,000 citizens. Terrified of being shot as traitors if they failed to comply, shopkeepers, pensioners, and mothers pushing prams soon clogged the roads leading east.

  Into this chaos on the evening of Tuesday, September 12, came General Gerhard Graf von Schwerin, ordered to defend Aachen with the sixteen hundred men and thirty tanks remaining in his 116th Panzer Division, reinforced by two feeble Luftwaffe battalions and some local militiamen he called “Santa Clauses with fowling pieces.” A veteran of Africa and Normandy, winner of the Knight’s Cross for valor, Schwerin was a Prussian nobleman whom Hitler had described as “a splendid battlefield commander who unfortunately is not a National Socialist.” Another officer later added, “He was intelligent, but this often proved a handicap.”

  Placing his new command post in the opulent Palast Hotel Quellenhof, Schwerin on Wednesday morning did the unthinkable: with the city likely to fall in just hours, he countermanded Hitler’s evacuation order. Troops fanned out across Aachen, shooting looters and urging citizens to return to the surer safety of their homes. Then Schwerin sat at his desk and composed an appeal, in English, to be given the American commander whenever he took the city: “I stopped the absurd evacuation of this town; therefore, I am responsible for the fate of its inhabitants and I ask you, in the case of an occupation of your troops, to take care of the unfortunate population in a humane way.”

  He entrusted the letter to the only official still left in Aachen, a telephone company bureaucrat, then rushed to shore up the crumbling defenses along the city’s southeastern perimeter.

  A day passed, and then another. By dusk on Friday, the 1st Division had ruptured the Scharnhorst Line to ring Aachen on the west, south, and east. The 9th Division had pushed through the western fringe of the Hürtgen Forest, with its 47th Infantry Regiment on Saturday scooting past the last concrete bastion of the Schill Line to Schevenhütte, ten miles into Germany. The 3rd Armored Division captured a chain of villages—Roetgen, Schmidthof, Rott, Brandt—and edged to the southern lip of Stolberg, where fleeing Germans left half-eaten meals on the tables and half-packed suitcases on the beds.

  But the momentum had seeped out of Collins’s attack. Of several hundred Sherman tanks authorized for the armored division, only seventy remained fit for combat, hardly more than a battalion; after cantering across France, many now could manage only a low-gear crawl. Trucks, half-tracks, and jeeps were equally decrepit. Many GIs lived on captured rations. Resupply required a two-hundred-mile round-trip to Army depots for ammunition, and an even longer journey for fuel. Fifty rounds from a tank destroyer failed to reduce one obdurate pillbox, and in an especially vicious firefight enemy mortars and 88mm guns crippled a dozen Shermans.

  The dawning realization that the Americans intended to force the Stolberg corridor rather than assault Aachen revived the German high command. Guns and panzers were shifted, artillery recalibrated, and on Saturday morning the newly rebuilt 12th Infantry Division—nearly fifteen thousand men known as the Wild Buffaloes—poured into the fight aboard buses and trucks. Storm troopers and party officials scuttled back to enforce another demand by Hitler that Aachen be forcibly evacuated of civilians. Schwerin’s letter fell into Nazi hands, and he was advised that he would be tried for cowardice by the notorious People’s Court, known for administering justice with a noose. He fled to a farmhouse northwest of the city, protected by a cordon of motorcycle troops with machine guns; remarkably, at Rundstedt’s urging, Hitler soon forgave him with no more than a reprimand, and a few months later Schwerin would command first a division in Italy and then a corps. “Fate,” he explained, “had decided.”

  A German counterattack on Sunday with fixed bayonets across open ground south of Aachen was smashed by seven hundred rounds from the 32nd Field Artillery Battalion; dead and maimed fusiliers lay in field-gray windrows splashed with crimson. A German reporter in Aachen that Sunday described how “almost in every street a building was burning like a huge torch.” GIs poked through a cemetery where fifteen wooden coffins had been abandoned before they could be interred, each with a thumb-tacked card bearing the name of a dead German soldier in Gothic script. A fading spray of red and white dahlias included a farewell message: “To Our Comrades, a Last Greeting.”

  After five days of fighting, Collins had gashed a twelve-mile hole in the first belt of the West Wall and a five-mile rift in the second. But he lacked the strength to exploit his opening. Stolberg, a meandering stone town folded into a pinched valley, had become a house-to-house battle of precisely the sort he had hoped to avoid. Collins moved his command post into a brick building previously used as a Nazi headquarters in Kornelimünster, barely two miles from the front; here he studied his maps and field reports under nagging artillery fire—staff officers tacked blankets across holes blown in the walls—and pondered what might have been. For him too, fate had decided.

  Three German divisions soon sealed off the American salient, with five times as many panzers and assault guns around the city than had been there a week earlier. Hitler demanded fanatical resistance in what he now called “Fortress Aachen.” The battle increasingly would move to the cellars, like Stalingrad. “Each and every house will be defended,” the Führer added, “to the last
man and the last bullet.”

  A Market and a Garden

  SINCE its founding in 1835 as a military garrison on the moors of northeast Belgium, the Flemish town of Bourg-Léopold had seen fortune ebb and flow with each passing army. It was said that here the invading Germans in 1914 had first experimented with chlorinated gas. Between world wars, the cantonment became Europe’s largest and most modern, a camp for forty thousand Belgian soldiers and several thousand horses—all for naught against a new generation of German attackers, who bombed Bourg-Léopold in May 1940, then occupied the casern for four years, using the municipal woods to execute more than two hundred men, mostly suspected resistance supporters. British bombers in mid-May 1944 had accidentally slaughtered seventy-seven townfolk during a raid on the camp, but made amends two weeks later by returning to kill scores of German soldiers in their barracks.

  Now the Germans were gone, again, and Allied soldiers swarmed through the cobbled streets. The British XXX Corps had planted its headquarters outside town, near a honey farm with brightly painted wooden hives, and military policemen in brassards and red caps briskly directed dust-caked convoys to the engineer dumps scattered around Bourg-Léopold. Nine thousand sappers had assembled two thousand truckloads of road metal, bridge girders, and barge anchors, all sorted into columns with code names for quick deployment.