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

by Gerald Astor

  Task Force Lovelady resumed its drive on 14 September and rolled more than four miles through the countryside until it neared the Vechte River, southwest of Stolberg. Night had fallen, and, although the Germans had demolished the local bridge, armored infantry crossed the stream, heedless of sporadic mortar bursts and brief spurts of small-arms fire, taking advantage of the low water. They seized a clutch of the dreaded 88mm guns after the frightened gun crews hid instead of manning their weapons. Engineers next began to construct a bridge to accommodate the tanks.

  Further progress meant breaching the more formidable Schill band of fortifications. Fortunately for the 3d Armored GIs, the sector they attacked held a Landesschutzen battalion, the third-rate, hastily cobbled together defensive forces. Under pressure, these Germans abandoned their posts during the night. When the American tanks rattled across the newly built bridge on the Vechte, they encountered no fire from the deserted pillboxes. Within an hour, the first American tanks clanked past the Schill Line’s final bunkers. Task Force Lovelady had passed through both stretches of the Westwall.

  The progress of Lovelady’s unit aided the efforts of Task Force Mills—Maj. Herbert Mills had assumed command after Colonel King was wounded. At Schmidthof, the enemy, in danger of being outflanked, retreated, allowing Mills’s armor to break through the Scharnhorst relatively unimpeded. But at the Vechte, Task Force Mills, instead of a reluctant Landesschutzen, met disciplined and determined Panzers whose four tanks and assault guns drove off the Americans.

  Closer to Aachen, the 16th Infantry of the 1st Division broke through the Scharnhorst Line against token resistance, and when it took the high ground, the division surrounded the city on three sides. Karl Wolf, raised in Wethersfield, Connecticut, had entered the U.S. Military Academy as a classmate of John Beach in the summer of 1940. “I learned a lot at West Point about training and leadership that later came in handy during the war years,” said Wolf. “Also [the Academy] taught me to strive to be a perfectionist and the necessity of always checking on things and planning ahead in every small detail.” Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, classes at West Point accelerated, and Wolf graduated in three years. “With the war on, the big push among cadets was flying or joining the infantry. I failed the eye test for flying and then was determined to get into the infantry. Two of us were going to ask for the Marine Corps if we couldn’t get the infantry, [but] we didn’t have any problem getting into the infantry.”

  Wolf attended the Basic Infantry Officers School for three months, before his posting to the 76th Infantry Division. “I kept trying to get assigned for overseas combat duty, although after three months with the division, I was promoted to first lieutenant. In April of 1944, the division had to ship most of the officers overseas as replacements and I got my wish.”

  When Wolf reached England on 15 May, he was dispatched to the 3d Battalion of the 16th Infantry, 1st Division, preparing to assault Omaha Beach three weeks later. Because he came to the organization so late in the war, there was no time to integrate Wolf into a rifle company, so he headed for the beach aboard a landing craft packed with battalion staff personnel.

  The boat let them off among the X-shaped steel girders designed to obstruct landing craft. The first few men ahead of Wolf were cut down by German machine guns, which stippled the waist-deep water. Wolf glimpsed two soldiers killed by the guns and floating away. When Wolf finally climbed onto the beach, he noticed that the men around him wore division patches of the 29th Infantry Division. The navy had landed his boat a thousand yards from its designated location.

  With the senior officer killed, Wolf assembled about a dozen men and led them toward their assigned destination. Along the way he saw all of the horrors of D Day: a soldier with an entire leg split to the bone, the upper half of another body, men drowning because fifty pounds of equipment covered their flotation devices, and a half-track and its crew disappear in a single mighty explosion. Wolf later temporarily led a rifle company but returned to battalion staff duty, then in August became the executive officer of K Company.

  The outfit participated in the offensive of 12–13 September, which hacked its way into the Siegfried Line. “The Germans had been routed in Belgium and had not had time to set up the defenses in the Siegfried Line. Some of the pillboxes were not even manned. The regiment then attempted to go south of Aachen and ran into a fanatic German defense of its first major city under ground attack. The Germans used heavy artillery and mortar fire, and a new German division had been brought in to defend Aachen.”

  Wolf continued, “Our 1st Battalion had taken Münsterbusch and then had been ordered to advance on Stolberg. The battalion had lost 300 men in five days at that point. In Stolberg, which had been pretty well destroyed, the fighting was house to house. We came under fire directed from the German observation post on Crucifix Hill and the Verlautenheide Ridge. We held up our advance and dug in our positions.”

  The 1st Division had secured the flank, enabling Combat Command A to renew its advance northeast toward Eschweiler. Another battalion of those ersatz German soldiers quickly fled their bunkers, and the objective for the tankers, Hill 228 in the Schill Line, seemed ready to fall.

  Suddenly, from well-concealed positions, a bevy of German antitank guns erupted with a volley of projectiles that shattered six tanks. CCA’s commander, General Hickey, summoned reserves, including men from the 16th Infantry. After fierce exchanges, the Americans suppressed the resistance, and CCA tanks and armored infantry trundled beyond all but the final installations of the Schill Line.

  By 15 September, the overall gains for the First Army offensive added up to a pair of narrow alleys through the Westwall. Although Hodges and Collins had agreed that the Stolberg-Eschweiler passage was their top priority and Aachen a matter for later attention, they kept their intentions somewhat disguised by an almost constant barrage of artillery fire into the city. General Shack, the German Seventh Army commander, nibbled at the bait, refusing to deploy the bulk of his 116th Panzer Division under von Schwerin to meet the threat in the Stolberg corridor.

  At the start of the reconnaissance in force, four days earlier, Shack, persuaded that Aachen was in immediate jeopardy, ordered von Schwerin to take his understrength 116th Panzer Division and counterattack against the GIs of the 1st Infantry Division, now in the Aachen Municipal Forest, southwest of the city. In an embarrassing turnabout, von Schwerin, reluctantly accepting that Aachen would become a battleground, countermarched his troops to the city’s outskirts.

  Inside Aachen, von Schwerin coped with near hysteria among the citizens, a state of panic fueled by the absence of civil authorities, including the police. A committee of residents pleaded with von Schwerin to create some sort of bureaucracy to deal with administration of Aachen. Even as he considered the request, a direct edict from Adolf Hitler via military channels directed the town be evacuated, by force if necessary. The general started the process, while the Nazi functionaries and police, who previously had departed, returned. They discovered the letter of surrender von Schwerin had written and insisted he be tried as a traitor by a party “people’s court.”

  Von Schwerin obstinately declined to appear. He put his trust in his soldiers and behind a wall of troops armed with machine guns hid in a farmhouse, believing he would be needed once the battle for Aachen began. When he and his superiors at last realized that the American focus lay elsewhere, he presented himself at German Seventh Army headquarters to account for his actions. Field Marshal Karl Rudolph Gerd von Rundstedt interceded to ensure that his fellow officer faced a tribunal of his peers, rather than one of Nazi party regulars. Von Schwerin received only mild punishment, assignment to an officer pool, and eventually worked his way back to a top command in Italy.

  On 16 September, the First Army’s VII Corps detected the unwelcome presence of the fresh, fully equipped, well-schooled Wehrmacht 12th Infantry Division. When the 3d Armored sought to renew its advance on 17 September, it collided with the newcomers and a stalemate en
sued. A rain of American artillery pelted the 12th Division soldiers unmercifully, but the 3d Armored was too short of resources to continue.

  South of the VII Corps, toward the Luxembourg border with Germany, the V Corps’s 4th Division, a regular army unit that had arrived on D Day at Utah Beach, also cracked into the Westwall. Lieutenant George Wilson was a replacement with Company E’s 2d Platoon, 22d Infantry Regiment. Wilson had not expected to find himself leading a platoon, because both the marines and navy had rejected him for poor eyesight. However, after the draft swept him from Michigan State, the college he attended on a football scholarship, the army was less fastidious. In fact, almost immediately after induction, he became a member of a special training group designated as probable fodder for Officers Candidate School (OCS).

  Following completion of the OCS course, Wilson briefly served as a training officer and joined the 86th Division while it maneuvered through mud, rain, ice, and swamps in Louisiana before he and other officers shipped out as overseas replacements. On 12 July, Wilson, after several weeks behind the lines in France, rode in a truck to the headquarters of the 22d Infantry, the first 4th Division soldiers to wade onto Utah Beach.

  Wilson’s introduction to the regimental commander, Col. Charles T. “Buck” Lanham, was hardly reassuring. “He was a small, wiry man who looked as tough as he was gruff. He wasted no time in scaring the hell out of us. He stated flatly that the German resistance was very stubborn, and our losses were extremely high. He explained how tough it was to cross a field with the Germans dug in behind every hedgerow. ‘As officers I expect you to lead your men. Men will follow a leader, and I expect my platoon leaders to be right up front. Losses could be very high. Use every skill you possess. If you survive your first battle, I’ll promote you. Good luck.’”

  Fortunately for Wilson and other newcomers, there was some time for instruction and practice in the techniques to overcome the hedgerow defenses. He received his baptism of fire, like John Beach, after the massive aerial bombardment on 25 July that wrought death and destruction on both Americans and Germans in the Normandy breakout. “Just west of Saint-Lô,” wrote Wilson, “we came upon a dreadful sight. The destructive power of those thousands of five-hundred-pound bombs overwhelmed the senses. The dead from both sides lay twisted and torn, some half buried by overturned earth. Bloated cows with stiff legs thrust skyward in death lay everywhere, as did burned-out vehicles and blasted equipment. …

  “When the order to move out had first come, my muscles had been taut with fear. After a while I realized that somehow my body was moving forward behind the tanks as my platoon took the lead. It seemed to me like the first few moments of a football game. As we advanced I began to feel my mind and body working together again—still very scared, but functioning.”

  Within twenty-four hours, he had shot his first man, a German sergeant abandoning his blazing tank, underwent the trauma of seeing his own men killed and wounded, and earned a Silver Star. Exactly one month after his first day of combat, Lieutenant Wilson rode slowly through the crowded streets of Paris to a wild celebration by the citizens, some of them brandishing weapons they had allegedly used against the Germans. The 22d Regiment then continued its pursuit of the enemy, gobbling up fifty to sixty miles per day against light resistance until they approached the border and its Siegfried Line of pillboxes and other fortifications.

  “Colonel Lanham,” said Wilson, “believed the best way to end the war quickly and save lives was to attack and attack. He also believed wholeheartedly that the boys of the 22d Infantry Regiment shared his spirit, that they could do the job if anyone could. The Siegfried Line was, to him, more an opportunity than an obstacle. He wanted his regiment to be the first Americans through the line, as they’d already been first across the border into Germany.” (According to the official records, that honor belonged to the patrol from the 5th Armored Division.)

  According to Wilson, the tactics prescribed for overcoming the bunkers, which provided mutual protection through overlapping fields of fire, required a coordinated choreography. “The vulnerable part of the pillbox was its rear. The crossfire support did not reach back there, and all they had was some barbed wire and whatever rifles and machine guns could be transferred to the rear trenches. The trick was to get behind a pillbox quickly. …

  “The tanks and TDs [tank destroyers] also were to come up to within 200 to 500 yards of the pillboxes and plaster them with direct cannon fire against their firing apertures and steel doors. Artillery would fire hundreds of rounds onto the same targets. Many of the Germans thus would be pinned down and occupied with their own safety, and, it was hoped, would not be very effective against us.

  “For close support, right up beside a pillbox, the infantry had two deadly weapons, flamethrowers and satchel charges. The flamethrower was operated by one man with a tank strapped to his back. The flame from the hose was huge, but the man had to get within ten to twenty yards of his target. If he could get close enough to an aperture, he could blind or suffocate those inside the pillbox. Some of the enemy might also be set on fire.

  “The satchel charge had a long fuse attached to twelve pounds of TNT, six pounds on each side of a saddlelike bag. If it could be set off in one of the pillbox openings, it would kill or stun anyone inside. With both weapons, a man had to get in very close. Dangerous work, but it really paid off. Either close-in weapon could finish off a pillbox—providing the attacker could stay alive long enough to use them.”

  On 13 September, from positions around Saint-Vith, a Belgian town in the Ardennes, the regiment attacked and broke through, and it reached a position in the hills half a mile east of the Westwall near Sellerich. Lanham claimed that, given the go-ahead, the offensive could have been carried all the way to the Rhine. But the supply lines that stretched all the way back to Cherbourg could not feed the Allied war machine. Wilson learned later that the 4th Division possessed only enough gas to move each vehicle five miles, and only a day’s supply of ammunition was on hand. There were rumors that everything was being given to Patton’s Third Army, but, in fact, that organization also was starved for materials.

  And despite Lanham’s belief, there was plenty of fight left in the enemy. Wilson and his cohorts watched as a battalion from another division jumped off to capture Sellerich. “At first everything went exactly by the book, as tank-infantry teams performed beautifully, wiping out pockets of Germans in their path. We could see every move and heard the continual clatter of the tanks’ machine guns and the crack of rifles. We could even hear the excited shouts of men in combat.”

  But suddenly the enemy wreaked a reversal. “German mortars and artillery, which had not been evident up to that point, suddenly came down hard on the infantry and tanks as they reached a small exposed area at a crossroad. There was no cover from the terrible barrage; the Germans knew the exact range and obviously had been waiting for the Americans to reach that point.

  “The American tanks turned and raced back toward the woods to escape the slaughter, panicking the riflemen who chased after the tanks in confusion. The retreat was an uncontrolled stampede, and a great many casualties were left where they fell. Even at our safe distance we all felt sick. It could so easily have been us.”

  Although his company was forced to rely on a single map produced in 1914, on the following day the battalion attacked. At one point, Wilson and his colleagues ambushed a platoon of either poorly trained or careless soldiers. Huddled around a shelter to protect themselves from the rain, the troops had stacked their weapons some distance away. It was a slaughter.

  “We had very little time to exult. In fact, even before I had time to report to Captain [Arthur] Newcomb or confer with Lieutenant Mason, the Germans hit us with a full platoon counterattack. They seemed to come from the woods, directly across the field from us.

  “I instantly ordered my men back across the road and into the ditch, where they had some protection. The Jerries would fire at us as they ran toward us, and every few seconds t
hey would hit the ground and fire some more. We tried to pick them off every time they got up to rush us, but the rain continued steadily and the visibility was poor.

  “Some of them made it up behind the pines and fired rapidly enough to pin us down. I yelled at my men to throw grenades and return the fire. Then, Captain Newcomb ordered me to withdraw into the woods and rejoin the rest of Company E, so I moved along the line and got each squad to pull back two men at a time.

  “Between the woods and the road was a strip of a hayfield about thirty yards wide. The hay was two feet high, and most of our men crawled back safely, though the last squad lost two men. Sergeant Williams, who had been shot through the neck around D Day and was returned to action only to get paralyzed at Le Mesnil Herman back in July, had a grenade land by him, and he became paralyzed again. So we had to drag him back into the woods.

  “I yelled at one of the sergeants to hurry and get his men out of there. The sergeant thereupon stood right up in the open, for no reason at all that I could figure, and immediately was cut down by a German burp gun, a small machine pistol that fired so fast it sounded like a b-r-r-r-r-ip.

  “To my mind the sergeant’s girlfriend was responsible for the naked carelessness that caused his death. Just the day before he had shown me a Dear John letter he’d received from her. It was the most wickedly cruel letter I had ever read, and it morbidly depressed the sergeant. He was from the South, and this little wench told him, among similar tidbits, that she had been sleeping with a Negro, and that he was twice the man Sergeant Hester was.

  “The rain still came down in torrents, and the Germans made no attempt to follow us into the woods. We had seen enough action for one day, so we dug in for the night among the tall pines. Each foxhole had to be big enough for two men, with one being on guard while the other slept, taking turns every two hours all night. The tree roots gave us plenty of trouble, but we managed with a few axes.”