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

by Gerald Astor

  These considerations aside, and persuaded by Collins, Hodges authorized both of his corps commanders to crack the Westwall. Collins, champed at his bit, giving the responsibility to a pair of combat commands from the 3d Armored and two battalions from infantry regiments of the 1st Division. The initial plan posed what might generously be labeled an “incongruity.” While the top U.S. commanders plotted a drive toward Koblenz coordinated with the Third Army, and if V Corps hewed to a close association with Patton’s bunch, it would be well split off from the bulk of the First Army.

  Collins hoped to snatch the prize of Aachen, a town celebrated in German history, before the Nazi armies could regroup. Not only was the capture of Aachen valued because of the city’s renown (it was the coronation city of the Holy Roman Empire and Charlemagne’s capital), but it also would be the first major conquest on enemy soil. Furthermore, it held strategic worth because of its location in the Aachen Gap, an avenue through difficult topography to the north and in the southeast dense pine woods, the result of forestry preservation by the Nazi government. The Americans called this the Huertgen. The line that separated the VII and V Corps ran through the miles of these stalwart, packed stands of trees. On the southwestern outskirts of the sector was Monschau, which anchored another rough avenue toward the Roer River.

  The German Seventh Army commander believed that his opposition would pinpoint Aachen as the major objective in an attack. Generalleutnant Friedrich August Schack, the officer responsible for the area that included Aachen, as well as the territory immediately south of the city, could muster only beat-up German divisions to counter any blows from the combined efforts of the American VII and V Corps. His 105th Panzer Brigade could field only ten tanks, and that tiny group had been shot up in its first encounter with U.S. armor on 11 September. The 9th Panzer Division, reorganizing after a drubbing in France, scrambled to defend Aachen but arrived piecemeal in small increments as the battle for Aachen seemed about to begin. Another division existed only on paper; all that was left of it was the headquarters staff. Retention of the entire Aachen sector devolved upon engineers, a few artillery batteries, a training regiment, a handful of local security people, and some remnants from armor and infantry outfits.

  In charge of the actual defense of the city was Generalleutnant Gerhard Graf von Schwerin, who would fall victim to an incredible piece of mistiming. As he tried to move his hodgepodge of fighting men into place, von Schwerin discovered that the burghers of Aachen perceived the desperate state of their city and were panicky over a directive from Hitler that civilians evacuate the city. Although the Nazi dictator ordered the city emptied of noncombatants, he showed no inclination to abandon Aachen. He had personally ordered three full-strength divisions toward Aachen.

  Von Schwerin, after vainly attempting to deploy his motley group of soldiers, decided the whole affair was fruitless. He foresaw a swift victory by the Americans menacing the city and no advantage in ejecting its inhabitants. Perhaps unaware that Hitler himself had demanded the people leave, the general tried to organize the local police to stop the evacuation but quickly learned that the local Nazi officials and the police had already fled. Army officers assumed the task of urging the populace to stay home.

  Von Schwerin took it upon himself to write a letter in English to the American commander, whom he expected to enter 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 by your troops, to take care of the unfortunate population in a humane way. I am the last German commanding officer in the sector of Aachen.” Von Schwerin entrusted the missive to a telephone service manager, the only official he could locate who was still at his post. Unfortunately, at the very moment the Wehrmacht general chose to offer a surrender, the Americans turned away from Aachen. Von Schwerin’s letter, preserved by the telephone bureaucrat, would haunt him.

  Although not opposed by any significant enemy strength, Collins’s reconnaissance in force, which he renamed an attack, stumbled. Roadblocks, the unfriendly ground, and small but sharp resistance from bands of stubborn defenders prevented the GI invaders from penetrating the Westwall. One battalion of infantry from the 16th Regiment, however, pushed well into the Aachen municipal forest, where they triggered a surprise counterattack from some eighty Germans. The 16th Infantry soldiers warily dug in to await further orders.

  John Beach, a Californian who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in June 1943, recalled, “I was a typical replacement officer when I joined the company on June 22, 1944. The company had been taken out of the line in our sector and enjoyed a brief lull in the action. The army, with considerable astuteness, had estimated the casualties on Omaha Beach would be 50 percent. It prepared for this by grouping replacements into packages of fourteen men each. Each such package had riflemen, machine gunners, and automatic riflemen. One platoon of these groups had been already assigned to the various units, even during the assault on the beach. They were fed into the gaps that existed. After the beachhead had been established, our package went through the regular chain of command before being assigned to Dagwood Red Charlie. Dagwood stood for the 16th Infantry, Red for the 1st Battalion, and Charlie for Company C.

  “Our company was resting to the rear of the 1st Division near Caumont, dug in along the hedgerows that were so characteristic of this part of France. When I first saw Capt. Victor H. Briggs, he was occupying the only comfortable chair in the area, the front seat of his jeep, his long legs leisurely stretched over the dashboard onto the hood, as he enjoyed a cigarette. ‘Good to see you, Beach,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘We need replacements.’ He pointed to a water can on the ground near the jeep. ‘Have some coffee.’ Captain Briggs’s smiling face did not show the iron that was beneath. He had already been awarded two Silver Stars for his actions in North Africa and Sicily, a DSC for deliberately drawing fire on himself so his company might advance.

  “I was given command of the first platoon, which held the right flank of the company. Technical Sergeant Floyd Newman from Seattle, my platoon sergeant, had been a private when the platoon entered Oran. My platoon guide, SSgt. Jim Dyer, from Indiana, was a veteran of Africa and Sicily. Charlie Company’s rest was a short one. We moved up and occupied foxholes of a company we relieved. The sector was so quiet it was hard to realize the Germans were only about 300 feet away.”

  Beach gradually became friendly with another platoon lieutenant, James Horace Wood, a Georgian and former marine. Wood apparently thought the War Between the States was still an issue. “He would fight the Civil War at the slightest opportunity,” recalled Beach. “He’d go back fighting Lee’s battles when there was a lull.”

  Caumont may have been a peaceful scene, but Beach and his associates knew something big was in the air. Patton was reported to be in the vicinity, and there was talk of entry into Paris by the middle of July. The breakout occurred on 26 July, when 15,000 tons of bombs were dropped. Beach and his platoon fought their way toward the frontier, incurring casualties all along the way.

  In September, he observed, “We moved through a town crossing the German border. A few kilometers beyond, Sgt. David Fehrenbach was the first man in the 1st Division to cross the German border, in the woods this side of Aachen. Immediately after that, we ran into a few enemy pillboxes and entrenchments, but they were not fully manned and the enemy surrendered after a brief struggle. We engaged a few firefights around Aachen, and I lost four men in the Aachen Forest. … There were now ten left from the forty which had started with me [at Caumont]. My platoon was down to twelve. When we pulled out of there, the next day I received sixteen men as replacements, which brought [the] platoon total to twenty-eight. We drove southward toward the city of Stolberg, southeast of Aachen. The atmosphere was entirely different. Now we were in the enemy’s home territory. No longer were there cheering crowds when we passed. For the most part, the houses had white flags hanging from them. The people were obviously not welcoming us b
ut offered no resistance. The fight appeared to have gone out of them, with the exception of the children who hissed at us as we went past.”

  As the 1st Battalion of the 16th Infantry pushed deeper into the Aachen forest, they suffered further losses. The Germans captured Fehrenbach and his squad. In Company C a platoon leader went down, and Briggs assigned Wood as his replacement, naming Jake Lindsey to be his platoon sergeant. Continued casualties in and around Aachen due to intense fighting brought more replacements, and soon Beach, whose complement had dropped as low as fifteen, had forty-four men under his command. Activity gradually lessened in the 1st Battalion sector.

  The 26th Infantry dispatched its 1st Battalion, aided by air strikes, to smash through the Scharnhorst Line with the aim of seizing hills overlooking Aachen. Tanks from the 3d Armored Division and armored infantry sought to break through on the right flank and take the high ground near Stolberg, about three miles or so east of Aachen. Colonel William Lovelady of Combat Command B (CCB) merged his 2d Battalion from the 33d Armored Infantry with most of the 2d Battalion from the 33d, plus a recon company, a tank unit, a platoon of armored engineers, a platoon of tank destroyers, a battery of M7 self-propelled howitzers, and a maintenance unit to form Task Force Lovelady. It jumped off around noon from Eupen in Belgium, traveling northeast toward Roetgen.

  Moving slowly over muddy ground, Lovelady’s lead element reached the unmanned customs station on the Belgian-German border shortly before 3 P.M. Lovelady radioed CCB headquarters that the task force had crossed the frontier. Brigadier General Truman E. Boudinot, CCB chief, told his radio operator, “Tell Lovelady he’s famous! Congratulate him and tell him to keep on going!” Roetgen, a tiny enclave, passed into American hands with little resistance. It was the first German town to be occupied by the U.S. Army in World War II. From their vehicles, the history-making GIs saw frightened faces peeking out from their drawn curtains as the armor rolled through the main street. As in Eupen and thousands of other settlements, villages, towns, and cities, the ubiquitous white flags, often bedsheets, hung from the buildings.

  On the far edge of town, the column approached a crater in the middle of the road. On the left, row upon row of dragon’s teeth barred a detour in that direction. Steep hills blocked any opportunity to evade the gaping hole on the right side. When troops dismounted to examine the crater, a sniper’s bullet cut down a company commander and signaled an outpouring of fire from other well-concealed German soldiers. GIs with machine guns in their trucks, jeeps, and tracked carriers could not roust the enemy, and the accompanying artillery could not drive off the foe. Despite orders to continue, Task Force Lovelady could not budge.

  Elsewhere, the 3d Armored absorbed limited but stinging punishment. The task force of Combat Command A (CCA) encountered well-concealed antitank guns that knocked off three Shermans, temporarily halting further movement. A giant pit in a road walled by an adjacent cliff, solidly built roadblocks, mines, and the phalanxes of dragon’s teeth shut down the other combat command.

  To resume its attack, engineers with Task Force Lovelady filled the huge hole in the roadway with dirt but that quickly changed to impassable muck. The artillery then blasted an opening through the dragon’s teeth on the left and the tanks rumbled toward the first objective, the village of Rott. En route the attackers approached eight pillboxes or bunkers. In every instance, the handful of Germans in residence immediately fled.

  The GIs crashed through the relatively thin crust of the Scharnhorst Line and set their sights on Rott. But there they encountered a much more defiant defense. A Mark V tank, backed by antitank guns, opened fire. Task Force Lovelady quickly had four Shermans and a half-track knocked out. Only the superiority of numbers enabled the 3d Armored people to silence the Mark V, and once bereft of that weapon, the Germans retreated. A blown bridge across a stream near Rott stalled the advance for the night.

  A few miles north of Task Force Lovelady, a smaller group, led by Lt. Col. Roswell H. King, moved toward Schmidthof, another village just beyond the Scharnhorst emplacements. There, however, pillboxes were clumped in greater density from behind a cordon of dragon’s teeth. In addition, Schmidthof provided enemy observers excellent vantage points from which to call down artillery and mortars upon the Americans. Task Force King, with only sixty infantrymen, attempted an attack that was repulsed by the accurate and heavy German response.

  A third punch, deploying tanks, tank destroyers, and an infantry battalion directed by Col. Leander Doan, hammered at positions to the northwest, closer to the Stolberg corridor.

  Mortar shells denied engineers an opportunity to create openings in the dragon’s teeth blocking Task Force Doan’s tanks. Foot soldiers sifted through the concrete barriers only to meet withering machine gun fire from positions safely out of reach of the stranded armor.

  The tankers discovered a rough roadway of stone and earth that allowed passage through the concrete antitank pylons. Led by a Scorpion (flail) tank, they proceeded slowly for fear of mines. The Scorpion floundered in the soft dirt, and only the intrepid action of its crew and a platoon leader who hitched up two mediums (Sherman tanks) to drag it out enabled Task Force Doan to maneuver past the dragon’s teeth and start a rampage against the machine gun bunkers. But the infantrymen already pinned down could not disengage to protect the armor. The Germans, using the deadly panzerfaust (a one-shot rocket) disabled four of the tanks. To add to the attackers’ problems, a German assault gun unit, committed to meet the threat of Task Force Lovelady, had detrained at Aachen and was diverted to contend with Task Force Doan. It arrived on the scene in time to destroy several more tanks. Within an hour, the task force had lost ten Shermans, half of its complement.

  Combat Command A, the parent of Task Force Doan, summoned reinforcements, two more platoons of tanks plus a battalion of infantrymen from the 26th Regiment. German gunners quickly trained their sights on the additions, but, under cover of darkness, both tanks and foot soldiers advanced without serious losses. A torrent of shells from the armor killed, wounded, or drove off the opposition at the village of Nuetheim, just beyond the first band of the Westwall. There the task force paused for the remainder of the night.

  The modest successes achieved by the 3d Armored’s task forces were not replicated by infantry troops that attacked closer to Aachen. Two battalions of the 16th Infantry engaged in firefights around a series of roadblocks and coped with skillful delaying tactics by German units, which exacted a toll as they retreated.

  Collins decided that, however tempting the jewel of Aachen, if he committed his forces to a drawn-out, house-to-house battle for the city, he might lose any opportunity to overrun the Westwall. Years later, he commented, “By this time we had a limitation on gasoline and a limitation on ammunition, and a serious question arose as to whether or not we would make our main effort to crack through the Siegfried defenses or to capture Aachen, which was just inside of my zone of action.

  “I discussed it with [Maj. Gen.] Huebner [commander of the 1st Division], who urged that they go ahead to take the high ground overlooking the city.” Huebner observed Aachen from one of those heights and remarked that it would be a “hard nut to crack.” Collins ordered the 3d Armored, led by Maj. Gen. Maurice Rose, to press forward and breach both the Scharnhorst and Schill Lines, while the 1st and 9th Divisions’ advances protected the flanks. Still confident he could defeat anything the enemy cared to risk, Collins, in recognition of the logistical difficulties facing the First Army, directed that the advance should go no farther than the west bank of the Roer River.

  Bypassing Aachen, the VII Corps struck out in a northeast vector toward the town of Stolberg and a corridor through the Scharnhorst and Schill defenses. At the same time, the deployment of the Americans threw a cordon around Aachen itself. For the attack, the 1st Division received the assignment of isolating Aachen and protecting the left flank of the 3d Armored plunging directly toward Stolberg with the ultimate goal of taking Eschweiler. The new plan focused attention on t
he right flank of the main thrust toward the Roer, the Monschau corridor, a four-mile-wide, seven-mile-long plateau extending northeast. The ridge was in the midst of the dense wooded preserve known as the Huertgen Forest, and it was lightly sprinkled with small towns and villages—Huertgen, Schmidt, Vossenack, Hamich, Kesternich—names that would become terribly familiar to American soldiers.

  Collins chose the 9th Infantry Division, another veteran of the North Africa campaign and commanded by Maj. Gen. Louis A. Craig, to secure the Monschau corridor and the right flank of the tanks and armored infantry aimed at the Stolberg corridor. The 9th’s participation required a hasty move forward before it could enter the Huertgen Forest and the Monschau corridor. Once on the line, the 9th drew the difficult task of penetrating the Huertgen Forest, beyond which lay Düren, a city on the Roer.

  Temporarily, the V Corps remained inactive except for a feint executed by the 5th Armored. The history of the division, Paths of Armor, notes, “V Corps ordered a show of strength to be made against the enemy’s border defenses. At three in the afternoon all of the division’s big guns, including the artillery pieces, tank and tank destroyer cannons poured out a thunderous barrage of steel that rocked the Siegfried fortifications. From Germany came no response.” Instructions for a genuine offensive by the V Corps, coordinated with that of its neighbors to the north, arrived late. It was not until that evening that the 5th Armored commenced a bona fide attack, with the mission to capture the high ground south of Mettendorf, more than five miles inside Germany.