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

by Rick Atkinson

  Yet First Army hewed to its plan for a frontal assault, afflicted by what General Thorson later called “a kind of torpor in our operations.” Hodges in late October had told Bradley that the Roer reservoirs were half empty—unaware that they were being replenished—and that “present plans of this army do not contemplate immediate capture of these dams.” It was assumed that, if necessary, bombers could blow open the reservoirs whenever the Army asked. Bradley would later claim that by mid-October “we were very much aware of the threat they posed” and that the “whole point” of the renewed attack through the Hürtgen was “to gain control of the dams and spillways.” That was untrue. Not until November 7 did Hodges order V Corps to even begin drafting plans to seize the dam sites, and not until December 4 would Bradley’s war diary note: “Decided must control Roer dam.”

  By that time another frontal assault through horrid terrain had come to grief, and officers at Spa were reduced to feeble maledictions. “Damn the dams,” they would tell one another again and again. “Damn the dams.”

  * * *

  Attacking the worst place of any now fell to Major General Dutch Cota and his 28th Division, still recovering from the September skirmishes that had revived the division’s World War I nickname, the Bloody Bucket. The 28th had regained full strength but only with many replacements untrained as infantrymen, under officers and sergeants plucked from antiaircraft units and even the Army Air Forces. Hemingway, who for several weeks would live in a fieldstone house south of Stolberg, suggested that it would “save everybody a lot of trouble if they just shot them as soon as they got out of the trucks.”

  In late October the Bloody Bucketeers—as they called themselves with sardonic pride—assembled beneath the yellow-gashed firs. GIs heaved logs into the firebreaks in hopes of tripping mines, or probed the ground inch by inch with a bayonet held at a thirty-degree angle or with a No. 8 wire. Dead men from the 9th Division still littered the forest, bullet holes in their field jackets like blood-ringed grommets. After a soldier ran over a Teller mine with his jeep, a lieutenant wrote, “His clothing and tire chains were found seventy-five feet from the ground in the tree tops. It snows every day now.” A few men had overshoes; the rest, trying to avoid trench foot by standing on burning Sterno blocks, soon lost any scruples about stripping footwear from the dead.

  Foul weather, supply shortages, and the slow arrival of two more divisions caused First Army to postpone VII Corps’s main attack toward Düren until mid-November. An offensive in the north by 21st Army Group also was pushed back. But Hodges saw no reason to delay clearing the Hürtgen and seizing Schmidt. On Wednesday, November 1, after lunch in Spa with the V Corps commander, Major General Leonard T. Gerow, Hodges made a rare visit to a division command post. He drove twenty miles to Rott, strode into the two-story Gasthaus at 23 Quirinstrasse, where Cota had put his headquarters, and voiced his pleasure that the 28th Division was obviously “in fine fettle, rarin’ to go.” The battle plan, Hodges informed Cota, was “excellent.”

  In fact, it was badly flawed. For two weeks across the 170-mile front of the First and Ninth Armies, the 28th Division would be the only U.S. unit launching an attack, attracting the undivided attention of German defenders who already knew precisely where the Blutiger Eimer division was assembling. The “excellent” plan, imposed on Cota by V Corps staff officers squinting at a map far from the front, required him to splinter his force by attacking on three divergent axes: one regiment to the north, another to the southeast, and a third to the east, toward Schmidt. Cota’s misgivings had been waved away despite his warrant that the attack had no more than “a gambler’s chance” of success. A large sign posted in the forest warned, “Front line a hundred yards. Dismount and fight.”

  At nine A.M. on November 2, a cold, misty Thursday, GIs heaved themselves from their holes like doughboys going over the top. Eleven thousand artillery rounds chewed up German revetments and flayed the forest with steel from shells detonating in the tree canopy. But the brisk brrrr of machine-gun fire from pillboxes on the division’s right flank mowed down men in the 110th Infantry Regiment—“singly, in groups, and by platoons,” the division history recorded. By day’s end the 110th had gained not a yard, and by week’s end the regiment would be rated “no longer an effective fighting force.”

  The attack hardly began better for the 109th Regiment on the left flank. German sappers driving charcoal-fueled trucks had hauled enough mines from a Westphalian munitions plant to lay a dense field in a swale across the road from Germeter to Hürtgen village. The 109th had advanced barely three hundred yards when a sharp pop! was followed by a shriek and a GI clutching his bloody foot. More pops followed, more shrieks, more maimed boys. After thirty-six hours the regiment would hold only a narrow, mile-deep salient into enemy territory, a salient almost mirrored by Germans infiltrating the U.S. ranks.

  Against such odds, and to the surprise of American and German alike, the division’s main attack won through in the center. A battalion from the 112th Infantry was pinned wriggling to the ground by enemy fire near Richelskaul, but seven Shermans churned down the wooded slope from Germeter, each trailing clouds of infantrymen holding a rear fender and trotting in the tank tracks to avoid mines. The Shermans fired four rounds apiece to dismember the church steeple in Vossenack and any snipers hidden in the belfry, and two hundred white-phosphorus mortar shells set the village ablaze. One block wide and two thousand yards long, Vossenack straddled a saddleback two miles from Schmidt, visible through the haze to the southeast. Soft ground, mines, and Panzerfaust volleys wrecked five Shermans, but before noon burning Vossenack belonged to Cota’s men, who burrowed into the northeast nose of the ridgeline.

  At dawn on Friday, November 3, the attack resumed. From Vossenack the ridge plunged into the crepuscular Kall gorge, a deep ravine carved through the landscape by a stream rushing toward the Roer. Two American battalions in column spilled down a twisting cart track, then forded the icy Kall near an ancient sawmill and emerged from the beeches limning the far ridge to pounce on the drab hamlet of Kommerscheidt. The 3rd Battalion scampered southeast for another half mile and at 2:30 P.M. fell on the astonished garrison at Schmidt, capturing or killing Germans eating lunch, riding bicycles, or nipping schnapps on the street. From rooftops in the sixteenth-century town, the entire Hürtgen swam into view, along with the meandering Roer two miles to the east and the sapphire Schwammenauel reservoir a mile south. A believing man with imagination could almost see the end of the war.

  Telephoned congratulations from division and corps commanders across the front poured into Cota’s Gasthaus in Rott, ten miles to the west. General Hodges himself sent word that he was “extremely satisfied.” The plaudits, Cota later said, made him feel like “a little Napoleon.”

  * * *

  The bad news from Schmidt reached Field Marshal Model that same afternoon at Schlenderhan castle in the horse country west of Cologne, hardly twenty-five miles from the battlefield. There by chance Model had just started a map exercise with his top commanders, positing a theoretical American attack near the Hürtgenwald. Sketchy reports indicated that in fact a strong assault against the German LXXIV Corps threatened to overrun the Roer dams that generated much of the electricity west of the Rhine.

  Model ordered the corps commander back to his post, but other officers—including two army commanders—were instructed to continue the war game, using dispatches from the front to help orchestrate the battle. Low clouds and fog had impaired Allied fighter-bombers for the past two days; with luck, reinforcements could hasten, unimpeded, on the good roads threading the Roer valley. Confrontation with the Americans would first fall to the 116th Panzer Division, which had fought through Yugoslavia and southern Russia as far as the Caspian Sea before surviving more recent battles in the west, at Falaise and Aachen. The reconnaissance battalion already was galloping toward Schmidt, followed in trace by the bulk of the division and by troops from the 89th Division.

  Three isolated American rifl
e companies and a machine-gun platoon from the 112th Infantry defended Schmidt, unaware of the Wehrmacht high command’s keen interest in them but unnerved by snipers and haystacks on a hillside that seemed to move in the moonlight. Exhausted after Friday’s trudge through the Kall gorge in heavy overcoats with full field packs, the 3rd Battalion sent out no patrols and scattered sixty antitank mines—delivered during the night by tracked Weasel cargo carriers—on three approach roads without attempting to implant or camouflage them. No panzer counterattack was considered likely given Allied air superiority and the destruction of German armor in the past two months. Oblivious to his men’s vulnerability, Cota remained in Rott; not for three more days would he visit the front. Having already committed his only division reserve to help the hard-pressed 110th Infantry in the south, the little Napoléon had lost control of the battle before it really began.

  Just before sunrise on Saturday, November 4, German artillery fire crashed and heaved from three directions around Schmidt. A magnesium flare drifted across the pearl-gray dawn, and wide-eyed GIs spied a long column of Panthers and Mk IVs snaking toward them from the northeast, easily swerving around the pointless mines. German machine-gun bullets ripped through foxholes; scarlet tank fire blew the town apart, house by house. Mortar pits were overrun, bazooka rounds bounced off panzer hulls like marbles, and yowling enemy infantrymen raced toward Schmidt from the south, west, and east, some banging on their mess kits in a lunatic tintinnabulation.

  At 8:30 an American platoon on the southern perimeter broke in panic, unhinging the defense. Soon the entire battalion took to its heels, Companies I, K, and L scrabbling through gardens and over fences, “ragged, scattered, disorganized infantrymen,” in one lieutenant’s account. Barking officers grabbed at their soldiers’ herringbone collars in an attempt to turn them, but hundreds leaked down the road toward Kommerscheidt, forsaking their dead and wounded. Two hundred others stampeded in the wrong direction—southwest, into German lines—and of those only three would elude capture or worse. By ten A.M., Schmidt once again belonged to the Reich.

  * * *

  The fight for the Hürtgen had taken a turn, though not for several hours did the command post in Rott get word that an infantry battle had become a tank brawl. Lowering clouds grounded Allied pilots for a third day, and U.S. intelligence was slow to realize that enemy observers with Zeiss optics on Hill 400, just two miles north of Schmidt, could see even a rabbit cross the meadows on either flank of the Kall gorge. Confusion soon turned to chaos, calamity to farce. A tank company trying to negotiate the steep Kall trail managed, with a great deal of winching around the hairpin turns, to get three Shermans across the ravine to help repel an initial German lunge at Kommerscheidt from Schmidt. But five other tanks stood disabled, repeatedly throwing tracks on the treacherous switchbacks and blocking the path, which at nine feet was precisely as wide as a medium tank. After nightfall, in relentless rain and stygian darkness, engineers hacked at the trace with picks and shovels—a bulldozer broke down half an hour after arriving—but even the nimble Weasels seemed clay-footed, and the ammunition trailers they towed had to be unhitched and manhandled around each sharp turn into and out of the gorge.

  In Rott, Cota’s perplexity only deepened. Radios worked fitfully, and messengers were ambushed or forestalled by descending curtains of artillery. Was the Kall trail open? No, came the reply, then yes, then no. Engineers detonated captured Teller mines in a futile attempt to blow apart a rocky knob blocking a switchback above the pretty stone bridge spanning the creek; three hundred pounds of TNT finally reduced the obstruction. Tank crews showed little sense of urgency—“Everybody appeared to treat the disabled tanks with the same kind of warm-hearted affection an old-time cavalryman might lavish on his horse,” the Army’s official history acknowledged. Not until 2:30 A.M. on Sunday, November 5, just before moonrise, were the stalled Shermans finally shoved over the brink into the gorge.

  A fretful General Gerow, the V Corps commander, drove into Rott a few hours later, clucked at Cota, and soon returned with Hodges and Joe Collins. Pulling on an Old Gold, the army commander also berated Cota and then rounded on Gerow in a crimson tirade—“tougher than I had ever heard him before,” Collins later recalled. “He was pushing Gerow awfully hard.” Cota was reduced to scribbling another order that might or might not reach the 112th Infantry: “It is imperative that the town of Schmidt be secured at once.” He ended the message: “Roll on.”

  Had the generals seen the battlefield clearly, reclaiming Schmidt would have been the least of their concerns. Enemy forces now crowded the 28th Division on three sides, threatening the Bloody Bucket with annihilation. Nine Shermans and nine tank destroyers had traversed the Kall to reach the remnants of two infantry battalions huddled in what was described as a “covered wagon” defense in Kommerscheidt. Just the rumor of another panzer attack sent spooked riflemen scouring for the gorge, but any illusion of refuge there soon vanished. On Sunday night, reconnaissance troops from the 116th Panzer clattered down the Kall creek bed past an old sawmill, through ferns half as high as a man. Army engineers grooming the trail ran for their lives, as German sappers mined the switchbacks, set up ambushes, and effectively cut off more than a thousand GIs east of the ravine.

  Dawn on Monday laid bare the American plight. Panzer drumfire from Schmidt soon reduced nine Shermans to six, and nine tank destroyers to three. GIs unable to leave their flooded rifle pits, described as “artesian wells,” were once again reduced to defecating in empty C-ration cans. Those gimlet-eyed German observers on Hill 400 lobbed twenty artillery rounds or more onto each position, shifting guns hole by hole by hole; sobbing men waited in terror as the footfall drew closer.

  A relief battalion from the 110th Infantry that had been ordered to huddle together for warmth in Vossenack—“just like cattle do in a storm,” as one survivor reported—attracted a thirty-minute artillery barrage. Men were “killed right and left as they were milling around.… Everybody was trying to jump over a bleeding body to find shelter.” One company lost 41 of 127 men, another 75 of 140. “Lieutenant, are my legs still there?” a wounded soldier asked his platoon leader. “Please tell the truth.”

  Soldiers in the claustrophobic forest debated whether they could stave off the enemy long enough to finish smoking the carton of cigarettes they carried, or merely an open pack, or perhaps only the Lucky Strike they had just lighted. Examining a badly wounded man for injuries in the dark woods, a 28th Division medic reported, was “like putting your hand in a bucket of wet liver.” A surge in head wounds stirred debate in the ranks about whether German snipers were aiming at the keystone insignia—the bloody bucket—painted on their helmets. “So this is combat,” a lieutenant new to the Hürtgen reflected. “I’ve only had one day of it. How does a man stand it, day in and day out?”

  How, indeed? The morning wore on, and the existential crisis sharpened. The 2nd Battalion of the 112th Infantry, whose two sister battalions were trapped in Kommerscheidt, finally broke after four nights of murderous shelling on the exposed nose west of the Kall gorge. An abrupt, piercing scream unmanned Company G, which fled for the rear through Vossenack, and the contagion instantly infected the ranks. “Pushing, shoving, throwing away equipment, trying to outrun the artillery and each other,” an officer reported, the men scorched up the ridge toward their original positions at the beginning of the Hürtgen battle four days earlier. A lieutenant who considered the pell-mell flight “the saddest sight I have ever seen,” added, “Many of the badly wounded men, probably hit by artillery, were lying in the road where they fell, screaming for help.”

  Officers managed to rally seventy stouthearts near the ruined Vossenack church—no one had yet seen a single German in the village—and four tank platoons rushed down from Germeter. Cota ordered two road-repairing companies from the 146th Engineers into the line as riflemen. Still in their raincoats and hip boots, the engineers battled infiltrators all night around the church; Germans at one point occupied the t
ower and the basement while GIs held the nave. On Tuesday morning, November 7, the engineers helped beat back a panzer grenadier assault, keeping Vossenack in American hands except for the eastern fringe, dubbed the Rubble Pile, which the Germans would hold for another month. The 112th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion was considered “destroyed as a fighting unit,” another unit smashed to pieces.

  * * *

  “The 28th Division situation is going from bad to worse,” First Army’s war diary noted on Tuesday. Cota could only agree. A relief force of four hundred men had fought across a firebreak in the Kall gorge to reach Kommerscheidt on Sunday, but none of the accompanying tanks or tank destroyers could bull through German roadblocks. Artillery and mortar barrages pounded Kommerscheidt through the night, and catcalling enemy infiltrators crept so close in the encroaching draws that Jewish GIs hammered out the telltale “H”—for “Hebrew”—on their dogtags. As the gray skies spat sleet, fifteen panzers and two infantry battalions renewed the attack on Tuesday morning, shooting up farmsteads and garden shacks. By midday the Americans had fallen back to entrenchments along the eastern lip of the gorge, and Kommerscheidt too was lost.