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

by Gerald Astor

  In the V Corps, Gerow also sent the 28th Division, led by Maj. Gen. Norman “Dutch” Cota, into the Westwall. Cota had been the deputy commander of the 29th Infantry Division when it hit the very bloody Omaha Beach on D Day and earned credit for having played a major role in spurring the men to vacate the killing zone at the shoreline. Like the 4th Division, the 28th also paraded through Paris upon its liberation. The division continued northeast to seize a Belgian rail and road hub named Bastogne before crossing into Luxembourg on the right flank of the 4th Division.

  Ralph Johnson, a member of the Pennsylvania-based 28th Division, originally a National Guard outfit that was federalized as the war clouds darkened, had been asleep in a Virginia cornfield while snow covered his blanket when a nearby radio awakened him. “I cursed the operator of that little black box—tried to go back to sleep but the blast persisted, so I uncovered my head and tried to listen: Pearl Harbor—bombed.”

  Warrant Officer Johnson was assigned the job of assistant adjutant for the 110th Infantry Regiment and recalled the happy parade through Paris, which actually ended in a deadly firefight with rear guard elements evacuating the city. “As we hit the Siegfried Line early in September, the thought was that we would quickly reduce the bunkers and pillboxes, smash through the dragon’s teeth and push to the Rhine River. During the early attacks on the pillboxes, it was necessary to send to the rear for a truckload of satchel charges of TNT, so named as the blocks of TNT were wired together with a handle similar to a small suitcase. As the load of charges was dumped in the Company F area, Capt. Robert H. Shultz had the nasty job of furnishing a detail to work the charges forward to the jump-off point for the attack. The mortar section was the only one immediately available, and Lt. William Whiddon and his men were tagged for the job. As they proceeded to move the charges, a tremendous explosion occurred and Lieutenant Whiddon and his entire detail of sixteen men were literally blown to bits. The cause of the explosion was never determined; however, it is thought that some Kraut slipped into the area and put a booby trap in the trailer containing the charges, and when the first one was moved, it detonated.

  “Company F, 2d Battalion, commanded by Captain Shultz, was assigned the task of attacking and capturing a pillbox near Grosskampfenberg, Germany, by Maj. Harold R. Yeager, regimental operations officer. This was a stupid attack at the outset, as it did not have sufficient artillery support to succeed, and it cost Company F a total of 145 casualties, sixteen of the company remaining after the smoke had cleared away. That night, Captain Schultz and the remaining men of his company holed up in the pillbox, and during the night, the enemy counterattacked with flamethrowers and recaptured the pillbox. Captain Schultz and the others were taken prisoner.”

  Glen Vannatta had picked up his bachelor of science from Indiana University in April 1943 along with his second lieutenant’s commission through the ROTC. After serving for a year with the 69th Infantry Division in Mississippi, he entered the stream of replacement officers pouring into England.

  “I went to Normandy in early July and joined the 28th Division early in August, after they had five days of combat. I was assigned as CO of Company D, 110th Infantry Regiment, and started fighting in the hedgerows the next day. Initiation into combat was very confusing with hedgerow-to-hedgerow fighting, where enemy rifle and machine gun fire coupled with mortar and artillery made every move life threatening. My emotions were to be scared all the time but driven to do my duty regardless of risks.

  “During the Siegfried battle, while I was in temporary command of B Company [rifle], we received a group of perhaps twenty replacements, who got caught in a German artillery shelling behind us and about half were casualties. The others were put into foxholes and their ‘buddy’ gave the ‘orientation,’ probably with considerable profanity. I believe but cannot assert that many of them seldom or never fired their weapons.”

  Communications Sergeant Ed Bergman, a member of the illfated F Company of the 110th Regiment, recalled, “We crossed the border into Germany at Supach, when my company was designated as the point company and reinforced with armor and given the task to probe eastward as a reconnaissance in force with the regiment deployed behind us. Company F met stiff resistance at the town of Heiderscheid and was troubled by roadblocks. We continued on until we made contact with the Germans’ Siegfried Line at Grosskampfenberg.

  “On September 13th the 2d Battalion launched its attack. After penetrating through the dragon’s teeth, we came up against the line of pillboxes. My Company F fought for and captured six pillboxes in its assigned sector by September 13th. The next morning the Germans counterattacked. They killed off our outside security. We were unable to defend the pillboxes from the rear side [the Americans occupied those they captured]. They then blew in the rear doors with their version of the bazooka, backed up tracked vehicles with mounted flamethrowers, and cremated what few survivors were left. The company commander then surrendered what few survivors were left.”

  Obviously, the Germans could no longer be regarded as impotent and the 28th had a taste of the misfortune that lay ahead. Nevertheless, Sylvan’s diary reported apparent progress: “4th Division advanced over German soil through heavily mined areas and successive roadblocks. Artillery fire was heavy here, as nowhere else. 28th Division found similar situations. Both the 4th and 28th Divisions six to seven miles inside enemy territory.”

  The foe along the Westwall now offered increasingly stiff opposition, even though the defenders mainly came from the Landesschutzen, or home guard. They were far from crack, experienced troops, but the pillboxes, bunkers, interlocking fire, dragon’s teeth, barbed wire, and mines transformed them into a deadly enemy. The American strategists underestimated the strength of the Westwall. The First Army apparently believed in the World War I doctrine that an attacker with a three-to-one advantage in numbers could overwhelm fixed emplacements. Many German experts theorized it would require a six-to-one ratio. The U.S. tacticians had not reckoned with the enormous amount of concrete poured into the structures. Both the new 90mm antiaircraft gun, developed to match the excellent German 88, and the 75mm and 76mm guns mounted on tanks and tank destroyers chipped at but did not rupture the walls of the pillboxes. Many of the camouflaged emplacements were so artfully concealed that intelligence had not detected their presence. And as Levasseur remarked, the situation at the Siegfried Line demanded that GIs have the knowhow to come close enough to their targets before they could destroy them.

  Although the offensive had already slowed and the men up front knew they faced an uncertain future, a mood of optimism percolated through the command headquarters and overflowed to shape the public perception. Radio stations in the United States and music halls in England sounded a new tune, “We’re Gonna Hang Our Washing on the Siegfried Line!”

  But on 17 September, an action hundreds of miles away brought direct consequences on the First Army drive toward the Roer. Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, in a daring and, for him, an uncharacteristically radical plan, mounted Operation Market Garden. Thousands of paratroopers and glider-borne troops struck behind the enemy lines in the Netherlands, while British armor attempted to crash through the German defenses. Although the Allies had liberated the deep-water port of Antwerp in Belgium, it was useless, because the Germans still held the Schelde estuary, a fifty-mile passageway that lay between Antwerp and the North Sea. If Market Garden was a success, Antwerp, a lesser distance to the front than Cherbourg, could be used to funnel supplies and reinforcements. Furthermore, once the region was secured, it offered a pathway to outflank the Westwall and the Rhine and act as a shortcut to Berlin. Hastily plotted and activated, Market Garden took top priority when it came to fuel, ammunition, and air support, which would have a direct impact on the ability of the First Army to muster sufficient strength to continue its advance.

  3

  INTO THE WOODS

  Strategic and tactical planning on the most elemental level stresses the absolute necessity to protect the flank of a
unit as it attempts to advance. As veterans of World War I, Hodges and Collins could recall a devastating attack in 1918 on the American Expeditionary Forces’ flank from an enemy that swept down from the Argonne Forest. On the right flank of the drive toward the Roer, via the Stolberg corridor, was what American soldiers called the Huertgen Forest. The dense trees extended over a seventy-squaremile triangle formed by Aachen, Düren, and Monschau. Through the forest, a pair of ridges, separated by the deep gorge of the Kall River, ran from the southwest to the northeast in the direction of the Roer. The high-ground timber had been cleared, making both ridges excellent observation and artillery sites.

  To negate a possible flank attack from this area, Hodges and Collins tossed in another blue chip, the 9th Infantry Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Louis A Craig. A regular army outfit bloodied in North Africa, and further experienced through hard fighting across France, the division was well below its normal strength. It had moved so swiftly across France that replacements could not catch up. The crossing of the Meuse River on 5 September had all but wiped out the entire 2d Battalion of the 60th Infantry, which could account for only twenty-five men from the three rifle companies, two machine gun platoons, and part of the communications unit deployed during the fighting. With a single experienced company commander and four noncoms still on their feet, the 2d Battalion lacked adequate leadership. Unable to draw from its depleted brother battalions for replacements, the 2d could only appoint people from the scant number left and any promising newcomers. Most of these were soldiers drafted from antiaircraft units and less schooled in infantry tactics. The other battalions of that regiment could barely muster about 40 percent of what was listed in the table of organization. Neither of the brother regiments, the 39th and 47th, could field anything close to full companies. The dearth of infantrymen persisted despite an increased flow of replacements.

  Making things more dangerous, training the latest arrivals was nearly impossible, because the regiments were almost constantly engaged with the enemy. The supply and fuel shortages mentioned by Sylvan altered the combat effectiveness of the outfit. During an engagement just before the start of the First Army offensive, a lack of gasoline denied support for the 60th Infantry armor. There was not enough ammunition available for a major battle, and some GIs had to supplement their K and C rations with food captured from German soldiers.

  In its weakened condition, the division nevertheless was responsible for a seventeen-mile-wide sector, far more than field manuals list as the maximum. Furthermore, the overall mission called for the 9th to carry out an incredible feat—clearing the entire seventy square miles of forest, from a starting point at Monschau along a northeast axis toward Düren. The strategists were emboldened by intelligence that reported much of the forest soldier-free, and where units of the Wehrmacht were detected, they seemed staffed with recruits still in training, men otherwise unfit to serve in normal combat duties, so-called “volunteers” from occupied lands on the eastern front and skeletal organizations short on artillery and ammunition.

  On 14 September, the 47th Infantry Regiment entered the campaign on the right flank of the 3d Armored. The foot soldiers, following in the wake of Task Force Lovelady, struck along the edges of the Wenau and Roetgen Forests in an effort to widen the breach in the Schill Line. The most immediate objectives were the towns of Vechte, Zweifall, and Schevenhutte, and the ultimate goal was the city of Düren on the Roer.

  In the division history, Eight Stars to Victory, the narrative describes conditions that increasingly bedeviled the combatants. “The weather was anything but favorable on September 14th. A steady drizzle which began during the preceding afternoon had grown more heavy by the hour. Gradually the continuous rainfall increased in intensity, becoming a ‘drenching downpour’ which kept its strength until about noon of the 14th. By then the ground was a cold mass of mud; the damp, wooded areas had assumed a more forbidding appearance and the going became tougher on the foot sloggers, who had to keep continually alert for signs of the enemy.”

  The regimental commander, Col. George Smythe, a former West Point quarterback, directed the column that crossed the frontier at Roetgen and continued perhaps a mile and a half, where the 3d Battalion peeled off, heading due east into the Roetgen Forest. The two other battalions trekked toward Zweifall at the confluence of the Vechte and smaller Hassel River. There was little opposition and, unhampered by enemy fire, engineers quickly erected a temporary bridge over the Vechte to replace one destroyed by the retreating Germans. While the 1st Battalion occupied Zweifall, the 2d leapfrogged ahead, engaging in brief skirmishes with defenders, apparently acting as rear guards for a general withdrawal.

  In the forest, a platoon sergeant, Charles A. Karnak, of the 3d Battalion, moved along a narrow road and spotted a well-hidden pillbox. A pair of enemy soldiers, apparently unaware of the oncoming GIs, lounged at the entrance. Karnak yelled at them to surrender and they complied, along with another fifteen inside the emplacement. A brief firefight ensued farther into the woods, but the Germans yielded swiftly, and the battalion bagged another forty prisoners.

  Pushing farther, the lead elements of the regiment finished their day, six miles northeast of Roetgen, and the outfit was all the way through the first barrier of the Westwall. Shortly before dawn of the second day, nearly a battalion of Germans launched a counterattack against an American roadblock. Denied in their request to withdraw, the greatly outnumbered GIs put up enough of a fight to detour the foe in another direction. As the Wehrmacht soldiers marched in closely packed ranks, they blundered into the main body of the 3d Battalion of the 47th. First to see them approaching was SSgt. James La Barr. He aimed his carbine at the officer in the lead and put a bullet between his eyes. Other GIs opened fire and Pfc. Luther Roush, on a tank destroyer, turned a .50-caliber machine gun on the Germans. Within an hour, the Americans shattered the entire unit, inflicting heavy casualties. The 47th advanced another three miles, fighting off counterattacks and infiltrators. On its way toward Vechte, the regiment discovered a map on a prisoner. It showed the exact locations of every emplacement in the Zweifall area, which helped the attackers capture Vechte and its surrounding hamlets.

  Lieutenant Chester H. Jordan, son of a disabled father and a mother who worked in a beauty parlor in Dallas, led a platoon for Company K of the 47th Infantry. Jordan had entered Texas A&M University in 1939. He volunteered for military training while in high school and spent two summers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in a citizens’ military training camp, where he learned field artillery. But after being called up while at Texas A&M, Jordan entered OCS, where he obtained a commission in the infantry.

  In July 1944, as a replacement officer, Jordan joined the 9th Division on the eve of Cobra, the Normandy breakout operation that would be proceeded by a massive air strike. “Waiting for the bombers gave me some time to talk to Sergeant Sheldon [3d platoon sergeant and a veteran of the North Africa and Sicily campaigns]. I told him what he already knew—I didn’t know poodly-shit about combat, and though I would take the responsibility and issue the orders, I wanted him to tell me what to order. I also said that when I felt like I knew what I was doing, I would probably ask less questions, but he should feel free to tell me what he thought whether I asked or not.”

  Jordan had barely finished his brief dissertation on their relationship when the heavy bombers began to unload, with one of the first explosions hurling both of them into the air. In one of the worst cases of friendly fire, the overtures to Cobra dropped thousands of tons on American soldiers. Jordan’s company commander said, “I think the bastards got me, look at my right leg.” Jordan examined him and found that a piece of shrapnel had pierced his canteen, and what he thought was blood was water flowing down his leg.

  The newcomer turned to Lieutenant Squires, the executive officer who had earned a Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star with cluster, and several Purple Hearts, of whom he said, “The men not only respected and loved him, yes, loved him, they were in awe
of him. One of his most recent exploits was jumping on the top of a tank from a hedgerow, catching armed grenades thrown to him and dropping them down the hatch. Lieutenant Squires was on his knees next to the captain with his head bowed as though in prayer. I couldn’t see a wound or blood anywhere on him, but he wasn’t moving. A medic came up and asked him if he needed help, putting his hand on Squires’s shoulder at the same time. When the medic touched him, Squires fell over stone cold dead.” The executive officer was one of 111, including Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair, killed by the errant bombs, with another 490 wounded.

  As the organization approached the border of Germany, Jordan had became accustomed to the grim life of a combat soldier. He recalled crossing the frontier on 14 September. “[It] didn’t amount to much more than a freight station with a sign saying ‘ROTT’ hanging on it. We entered the Huertgen Forest, where we were to stay for the next two months. Most of the Huertgen Forest is a tree farm. The firs are planted in rows about eight to twelve feet apart. The trees are planted so close together in the rows that some mature trees form an almost impenetrable wall. At regular intervals both parallel and across the rows are firebreaks—a 150- to 300-foot-wide strip that was cleared of vegetation. Every so often we came to a cut-over area that had been replanted in seedlings. It was a crackerjack place for defense, but it wasn’t worth a damn for offense.

  “For two days we saw nothing but trees. We saw no Germans, no buildings, nothing. On the second day, we were so close to Zweifall that their air raid sirens sounded as though they were in the next row of trees. Our radios picked up their air raid warning—Achtung! Achtung! Nord-Oest Deutschland—et cetera. We were skirting civilization narrowly. I was reading The Bishop’s Jaeggers [a racy novel by Thorne Smith] and enjoying it so much that I was delighted we had nothing to do but walk. But I worried that my laughter might alert the Krauts.