Citizen Soldiers [Condensed]

by Stephen Ambrose

  Overall, the Northwind offensive was a failure. The Germans never got near Strasbourg, nor could they cut US supply lines. Seventh Army's losses in January were 11,609 battle casualties plus 2,836 cases of trench foot. German losses were around 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing.

  IN THE Ardennes, K Company, 333rd Regiment, 84th Division, was the spearhead for First Army's drive on Houffalize. One member of the company. Private Fred "Junior" Olson, had come in as a replacement on, New Year's Eve. He remembered that no one gave him any advice or information: "It was as if there was no way to explain it, that I would find out for myself in due time."

  Over the next week Olson had enough experience to make him a hardened veteran. In his first firefight, on January 7, a German got behind his foxhole. Olson was eating "one of those damn chocolate bars out of the K ration" and never noticed. His buddy. Sergeant Paul Zerbel, saw the German when he was ten feet away. Zerbel beat the German to the draw. After killing the German, Zerbel said it was time to haul ass. "We were going single-file down through the trees," Olson recalled, "and I tripped." As he did, a machine-gun burst cut the branches off right above his head. His life flashed past him. "It didn't last long, just a matter of seconds. I still know in my own mind that if I hadn't tripped I'd have been killed."

  When Zerbel and Olson reached the company lines, Olson was greatly relieved. "It was past midnight and January 7th had been my birthday. For some strange reason I had persuaded myself that if I could live through my nineteenth birthday, I could make it all the rest of the way;

  that somehow everything was going to be all right. Here it was, January 8th, and I'd made it."

  The company continued to attack. On January 13 Lieutenant Franklin Brewer protested to the company commander, "There is not one man in the company fit to walk another mile, much less fight." But division headquarters said that as the company had just spent a day in a village, where it had "rested and reorganized," it was fit for duty. That meant the men had found the ruins of a house to break the wind, huddled down in frozen overcoats, and fallen into an exhausted sleep. At 0330 it was up for tepid coffee and Spam and cheese sandwiches, then a march towards Houffalize.

  That morning the lead squad came under fire from log-covered emplacements. The GIs did what came naturally to them by this stage- they called in the artillery. Within minutes more than a hundred rounds of 105 shells exploded against the German position. "As the barrage lifted," the company history records, "we moved forward quickly and built up a firing line within forty yards of the Germans. The small-arms exchange lasted only a few minutes before a white rag on the end of a rifle was waved frantically from a hole. The Germans-eight or ten of them crawled out of their holes, stretching their arms as high as possible as they trudged apprehensively towards us through the snow."

  Moving forward. Captain Leinbaugh came across a German major propped against a tree. His right leg had been cut off at midthigh. The German said to Leinbaugh, quietly and in good English, "Please shoot me." Leinbaugh kept on walking. Further on, one of the sergeants caught up to Leinbaugh and asked if he had seen the guy with his leg cut off.

  "Yeah. He asked me to shoot him."

  "Yeah. He asked me, too."

  "Did you?" "Hell, you know I couldn't walk off and leave the poor son of a bitch to die like that."

  That same day Major Roy Creek of the 507th PIR, one of the heroes of D-Day, met two men carrying a severely wounded paratrooper back to the aid station. Creek took his hand to give him encouragement. The trooper asked, "Major, did I do OK?"

  "You did fine, son." But as they carried him away, Creek noticed that one of his legs was missing. "I dropped the first tear for him as they disappeared in the trees. Through the fifty years since, I still continue to fight the tears when I've thought of him and so many others like him. Those are the true heroes of the war."

  ON JANUARY 14, K Company advanced to within a half mile of First Army's final phase line at Houffalize. When the linkup took place the following day, the companies faced east and attacked again, this time to breach the Siegfried Line. January 15 is generally considered the last day of the Battle of the Bulge, but no one could have convinced the GIs of that. They still had a hard push ahead to get back to positions they had held one month earlier.

  It was a disheartening experience to have to fight for ground once held. The 4th Infantry Division had been in continuous combat since D-Day, June 6. 1944. Lieutenant George Wilson joined the 4th just before the St. Lo breakthrough. Now, in January 1945, he found himself fighting for terrain that was becoming more and more familiar. "We were retracing the route we had taken when chasing the Germans over four months before. Our overall mission was to penetrate the Siegfried Line at the exact same spot." Wilson was struck by the thought that of the thirty-odd officers in his regiment in September, only three remained active. In addition, the regiment had lost many replacement officers. Wilson "could not help reflecting how many lives had been lost for what appeared to be no gain after almost five months of hell."

  The total of American casualties in the Bulge was 80,987. More than half came in January. Thus January 1945 was the costliest month of the campaign in northwest Europe for the US Army. Total German casualties in the Bulge are estimated from 80.000 to 104,000. The battle had political consequences of the greatest magnitude. Hitler's decision to strip the Eastern Front to seek a decision in the West led to the crushing of the depleted German forces in the east, beginning January 12 with the Red Army offensive. The Red Army overran eastern Germany and Central Europe, which led to a half century of communist enslavement. The man responsible for this catastrophe was the world's leading anti-Communist, but he chose to sacrifice his nation and his people to the Communists instead of defending against them in the East.

  At the end of January, American armies in northwest Europe were again at the German border. Surely, this time they would get across the Rhine.

  Chapter Ten

  Closing to the Rhine: February 1-March 6, 1945

  AT THE BEGINNING of February the front lines ran roughly as they had in mid December, but behind the lines the differences were great. On December 15 the Germans had crowded division on top of division in the Eifel, while the Americans in the Ardennes were badly spread out. On February 1 the Americans had division piled on division in the Ardennes, while the Germans in the Eifel were badly spread out. The Germans felt the Americans were not likely to attack into the Eifel, which was heavier forest than the Ardennes. That, however, was exactly what Patton and Bradley wanted to do. With most of First and Third armies already in the Ardennes, it made sense to conduct an all-out offensive from there. For the soldiers of ETO that meant another month of struggling through snow or mud to attack a dug-in enemy.

  Conditions in February were different from January, yet just as miserable. A battalion surgeon in the 90th Division described them: "It was cold, but not quite cold enough to freeze. Rain fell continually and things were in a muddy mess. Most of us were mud from head to foot, unshaven, tired and plagued by severe diarrhoea. It was miserable. As usual, it was the infantrymen who really suffered in the nasty fighting. Cold, wetness, mud, and hunger day after day; vicious attack and counterattack; sleepless nights in muddy foxholes; and the unending rain made their life a special hell." They were hungry because, much of the time, supply trucks could not get to them. Between heavy army traffic and the rain, the roads were impassable. The engineers worked feverishly day and night throwing rocks and logs into the morasses, but it was a losing battle.

  What was unendurable, the GIs endured. What had been true on June 6, 1944, and every day thereafter was still true: the quickest route to the most desirable place in the world-home!-led to the east. So they sucked it up and stayed with it and were rightly proud of themselves for so doing. Private Jim Underkofler was in the 104th Division. Its CO was the legendary general Terry Alien; its nickname was the Timberwolf Division; its motto was, "Nothing in hell will stop the Timberwolves."

  "That might
sound corny," Underkofler said in a 1996 interview, "but it was sort of a symbolic expression of attitude. Morale was extremely important. I mean, man alive, the conditions were often so deplorable that we had nothing else to go on but your own morale. You know, you're sitting there in a foxhole rubbing your buddy's feet, and he's rubbing yours so you don't get trench foot. That's only an example of the kind of relationship and camaraderie we had."

  THE STRAIGHT line between Aachen and Cologne lay through Diiren, on the east bank of the Rur River. But rather than going directly, Bradley ordered the main effort made through a corridor some seventeen kilometres wide, south of the dreaded Hurtgen Forest. By so doing, the Americans would arrive at the Rur upstream from the dams and, once across the river, be free to advance over the Cologne plain to the Rhine without danger of controlled flooding. The first task was to get through the Siegfried Line. And every man in an ETO combat unit was well aware that this is where the Germans stopped them in September 1944.

  The generals were all enthusiastic for this one. General Walter Lauer, commanding the 99th Division, paid a pre-attack call on Sergeant Oakley Honey's C Company, 395th Regiment. Honey recalled that Lauer stood on the hood of a jeep and gave a speech, saying we had fought the enemy "in the woods and the mountains and had beaten them. Now we were going to get a chance to fight them in the open." Honey commented, "Whoopee! Everyone was overjoyed. You could tell by the long faces."

  On February 4, C Company pushed off into the Siegfried Line. Honey recalls "charging into a snow storm with fixed bayonets and the wind blowing right into our faces. After moving through the initial line of dragon's teeth we began encountering deserted pillboxes. At one command post out came ten Germans with hands in the air offering no resistance."

  Private Irv Mark of C Company said the enemy troops "were waiting to surrender and the one in charge seemingly berated us for taking so long to come and get them. He said, 'Nicht etwas zu essen' (nothing to eat). Strange we didn't feel one bit sorry for them."

  Few companies were that lucky. Sergeant Clinton Riddle of the 82nd Airborne was in Company B, 325th Glider Infantry. On February 2 he accompanied the company commander on a patrol to within sight of the , Siegfried Line. "The dragon teeth were laid out in five double rows, staggered. The Krauts had emplacements dotting the hillsides, so arranged as to cover each other with cross fire."

  Returning from the patrol, the captain ordered an attack. "It was cold and the snow was deep," Riddle recalled. "There was more fire from the emplacements than I ever dreamed there could be. Men were falling in the snow all around me. That was an attack made on the belly. We crawled through most of the morning." Using standard fire-and-move-ment tactics, the Americans managed to drive the Germans beyond the ridge. "When we reached the road leading through the teeth," Riddle said, "the captain looked back and said, 'Come on, let's go!' Those were the last words he ever said, because the Germans had that road covered and when he was half-way across he got hit right between the eyes. There were only three of us in our company still on our feet when it was over."

  Another twenty-five men turned up, and the new CO, a lieutenant, began to attack the pillboxes along the road. But the Germans had been through enough. After their CO fired the shot that killed the American captain, his men shot him and prepared to surrender. So, Riddle relates, "when we reached the pillboxes, the Germans came out, calling out 'Kamerad.' We should have shot them on the spot. They had their dress uniforms on, with their shining boots. We had been crawling in the snow, wet, cold, hungry, sleepy, tired, mad because they had killed so many of our boys." The Americans were through the initial defences of the Siegfried Line, and that was enough for the moment.

  THE 90th DIVISION reached the Siegfried Line at exactly the spot where the 106th Division had been decimated on December 16. At 0400, February 6, the 359th Regiment of the 90th picked its way undetected through the dragon's teeth and outer ring of fortifications. Shortly after dawn pillboxes that had gone unnoticed came to life, stopping the advance. A weeklong fight ensued.

  The Germans employed a new tactic to confound the Americans. Captain Colby explained it: "Whole platoons of infantrymen disappeared as a result of the German tactic of giving up a pillbox easily, then subjecting it to pre-sighted artillery and mortar fire, forcing the attackers inside for shelter. Then they covered the doorway with fire, blowing it in. The men soon learned it was safer outside the fortifications than inside."

  Patton inspected a command pillbox: "It consisted of a three-storey submerged barracks with toilets, shower baths, a hospital, laundry, kitchen, storerooms, and every conceivable convenience plus an enormous telephone installation. Electricity and heat were produced by a pair of diesel engines with generators. Yet the whole offensive capacity of this installation consisted of two machine guns operating from steel cupolas which worked up and down by means of hydraulic lifts. As in all cases, this particular pillbox was taken by a dynamite charge against the back door." To Patton, this was yet another proof of "the utter futility of fixed defences. In war, the only sure defence is offence, and the efficiency of offence depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it."

  That point was equally true when applied to the Atlantic Wall. At the Siegfried Line in February, as at the Atlantic Wall in June 1944, the Germans got precious little return on their big investment in poured concrete.

  LIEUTENANT John Cobb, 82nd Airborne, had arrived in France on January 1. By the end of January, he was a veteran. On February 8 his platoon was to accompany a squad of engineers using mine detectors to clear a trail across the Kail River valley.

  The site had been the scene of a battle in November in which a battalion of the 28th Division took a terrible pounding. Cobb's was the first American unit to move back into the valley, dubbed by the 28th "Death Valley." Cobb described what he saw: "Immobile tanks and trucks and the bodies of dead American soldiers were everywhere. The snow and cold had preserved the dead and they looked so life-like it was hard to believe they had been dead for three months. It was as if a snap-shot of a deployed combat unit had been taken, with everything as it was at a given moment in the past. The command posts, the medical aid station with men still lying on their stretchers, and the destroyed supply trucks were all in their proper places just as if someone had set up a demonstration from the field manual-but the actors were all dead."

  By February 8, Ninth Army, north of Aachen, had gotten through the Siegfried Line and closed to the Rur, but it could not risk an assault across the river so long as the Germans held the upstream dams. First Army, meanwhile, was working its way through the Line south of Aachen. On the tenth, V Corps won control of the dams, only to discover that the Germans had wrecked the discharge valves, thus creating a steady flooding that would halt Ninth Army until the waters receded.

  While they waited, the GIs sent out reconnaissance patrols and practised river crossings. For Company K, in the centre of Ninth Army's front, that meant sending squads at night in rubber boats over the flooding Rur. Engineers worked with the infantry on assault-boat training and demonstrated the use of pontoons, rafts, smoke generators, and how to shoot communication wire across the river with rockets and grenade launchers.

  D-day was February 23. After dark on the 22nd, tanks drove to the river's edge. Engineers lugged the 400-pound assault boats through deep mud to assembly areas. Huge trailer trucks with girders and pontoons for the heavy-duty bridges ground forward to final staging areas. In the 29th Division the shivering men gathered beside the boats to huddle together in the mud and water.

  The river was two- to four-metres deep, 300 to 400 metres wide, with currents running more than ten kilometres per hour. On the German side the banks were heavily mined from the river to the trench system that commanded the river. Conditions were similar along the whole stretch of the Rur.

  At 0245, February 23, the Rur River line, 35 kilometres long, burst into fire. It was one of the heaviest barrages of the war-every weapon the Americans had, hurled against the enemy;
a 45-minute deluge of bullets and high explosives designed to stun, kill, or drive him from his position. Ninth Army alone had more than 2,000 artillery pieces firing 46,000 tons of ammunition.

  "In the middle of it all," a lieutenant in the 84th wrote, "a lone German machine gunner decided he'd had enough. He fired a long burst of tracers at his tormentors. It was his last mistake. Every tank, every antiaircraft gun, every machine gunner within range returned the fire. Waves of tracers and flat trajectory rounds swept towards the hole, engulfing it in a single continuous explosion. We cheered lustily, and Captain George Gieszl commented, 'Now that's an awfully dead German.'"

  At 0330 the first assault waves shoved their boats into the river. In the 84th, assault companies had several boats overturn, but most of the men swam to the enemy banks, many without weapons (there were only thirty rifles in one 130-man company). The troops moved inland. Behind them engineers worked feverishly to build footbridges and to get a cable ferry anchored on the far bank. By 0830 the job was done, and ammunition, supporting weapons, and communication wire were ferried across. By 1030 elements of the assault companies had entered the town of Dtiren.

  By the end of February 24 the engineers had treadway bridges over the Rur, allowing tanks and artillery to join the infantry on the east bank. K Company crossed on a narrow swaying footbridge that night. It beat swimming, but it wasn't easy. The men had 30 or 40 pounds of gear. Half the duckboards were under water, and there was a single strand of cable for a handhold. The Germans were pumping in artillery, close enough to be disconcerting. Sergeant George Lucht recalled his dash across the bridge:

  "The Germans had regrouped and their artillery was falling on both sides of the river, and I was thinking. Boy, this is just like Hollywood."