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

by Gerald Astor

  To fill out its thinned ranks for the offensive, the 28th absorbed hundreds of replacements, including GIs from other branches as well as those with little more than basic training to qualify them as combat infantrymen. Jerry Alexis, a twenty-year-old native of Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania, had completed four academic quarters at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia when he was called up with the Enlisted Reserve Corps in April 1943. He had finished his basic, served briefly as cadre, and then lost an opportunity to be an Air Corps flight crewman when the army washed out thousands of such candidates as “surplus.”

  At the end of October, Alexis reached the headquarters of the 28th Division in Rott, where he was assigned to B Company of the 110th Infantry. “After the other replacements and I had been interviewed by the commanding officer (and we had some personal talk after he found that I came from western Pennsylvania, the home of the 110th in its National Guard days), I was told to get some sleep in one of the nearby foxholes before we were taken up to the front-line platoons after nightfall. In the one I picked, I discovered a GI apparently already asleep. I shook him without rousing him, and when I drew back my hand it was covered with blood. He had been killed by artillery shrapnel from a tree burst, despite the log covering that we always tried to use in the Huertgen Forest to protect ourselves from this hazard.”

  Along with the batch consigned to B Company, which included Alexis, was the Chicago newspaper feature writer Ed Uzemack. At twenty-nine, he was old enough for the eighteen-year-olds drafted along with him to be referred to as “Pop,” had he not been gifted with a boyish face. He entered the service in July 1943, leaving behind a pregnant wife. “I didn’t see my son until he was seven months old, and I didn’t see him again for another eleven months.” Initially trained as a radar technician, Uzemack received reassignment to the infantry to meet the demand for riflemen.

  “The packet I came up with was dumped about midnight on Halloween in the Huertgen Forest. We slept on our shelter halves that night as ordered. When roused at dawn, I found I had placed the head part of my shelter half on a pile of feces. There were bodies of Germans killed in action scattered throughout the area we temporarily occupied. I learned that the division had enemy on three sides; we came darn near being completely surrounded.”

  As part of the plan to strengthen the 28th’s attacks, the 707th Tank Battalion moved into the general vicinity of Hahn to add its firepower to the attack of the 112th Infantry against Vossenack. Originally an element in the 5th Armored Division, the 707th split off in September 1943 to become one of many independent tank battalions that would be shuffled about among the infantry divisions. The 707th had three tank companies, A, B, and C, each with fifteen Sherman medium tanks armed with 75mm guns. The short-barreled 75mm cannons of the Shermans lacked the muzzle velocity to penetrate the heavily shielded German Mark IVs, Tigers, and King Tigers. Only a shell through an aperture could damage the massive pillboxes. A fourth element, Company D, operated light tanks equipped with a 37mm cannon that was only useful against soldiers in an exposed position or nonarmored vehicles. All of the companies possessed recovery and maintenance equipment. Headquarters company fielded four assault guns, 75mm short-barreled howitzers mounted on M4 tank chassis. In addition, the command unit had a couple of tanks. Because the 707th had no amphibious instruction, it did not participate in the D-Day Normandy Beach landings. Except for some shelling of enemy Siegfried Line positions in mid-October, the 707th, commanded by Lt. Col. Richard W. Ripple, and which disembarked in France on 1 September, had no combat experience.

  Howard Thomsen, a Nebraska farmer drafted in June 1941, went through basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. During this period, he signed up for the tank mechanic class, and although after graduation he was qualified to be an instructor who would never leave the States, Thomsen preferred to soldier in a line company. He started with the 81st Armored Regiment in the 5th Armored, undergoing many months stationed in California’s Mojave Desert before reaching England in February 1944. In addition to his duties as a mechanic in B Company, Thomsen also served on an 81mm mortar crew.

  As a maintenance man, Thomsen rode a tank retriever on the LST that ferried his unit across the Channel at the end of August. “What a feeling when they let the door down on the LST and you start moving out, not knowing how deep the water was. For luck it was only three or four feet deep.”

  “When we landed in France,” said Jack W. Goldman, who was a radio operator and loader with B Company in the 707th, “Patton had run out of maps, gas, and tank treads. Our immediate job was to piggyback tank treads for Patton’s medium tanks by attaching them to the back decks of our tanks. This arrangement made our vehicles fishtail, and at least one tank had a fatality. [A snapped chain lashed Thomsen above the eye, and he had to see the medics to repair the damage.]

  “We had a successful trip, including a quick view of Paris,” said Goldman. “When we reached our destination, we delivered Patton’s supplies and were quickly ushered into the Huertgen Forest. Things were quiet at first, and B Company was busy setting up for a future indirect fire mission by working with division artillery. A few of us began to wonder what was going on up at the ‘front,’ and we decided to take a peep [the armored forces name for a jeep] and see for ourselves what to expect. We took the only road until we spotted an infantryman in a foxhole situated about fifty yards from the road. We innocently drove toward him, but he shouted, ‘Get the hell out of here! The Krauts are just across the valley!’ By this time we realized that we were just stupid and were risking our lives. We turned the vehicle around and gunned the engine just as a mortar shell landed right in the same spot we had just occupied.”

  John Marshall, from the small town of Lincoln Park, New Jersey, had worked in a defense plant but nevertheless his draft board summoned him. He remembered, “Eddie’s father drove Eddie and me along with four other guys to the draft board eight miles away in Boonton, New Jersey. The war was to deal a cruel hand to us six inductees in that car; four were killed, Eddie was injured and lost an eye, and I beat the odds.”

  Shipped to Camp Hood, Texas, Marshall discovered he was in a tank destroyer outfit only when they issued the shoulder patches. “For the next twelve weeks I learned about the blind sides and the unmaneuverability of a tank and how one man could knock out a tank single-handed. In short, a tank, I learned, is an iron coffin. The training was rough, and we had quite a few fatalities through negligence of the cadre. Cadre are a special brand of loudmouths that train and teach you how to kill in combat, but they never get to go themselves, because they are so good at shouting they have to stay behind where it is safe.”

  Marshall and some eighty others, plucked from a group of 2,000 recruits, boarded a train. “I had gotten good marks on my army induction aptitude tests and the other guys with me didn’t look like a bunch of klutzes, so I assumed we were being sent to officer training school or some special instruction.” Instead, he found himself a member of the 707th, at Pine Camp, New York, a few miles from the Canadian border. Furthermore, he discovered that he was now a tank crewman. In Company B, 2d Platoon, he became an assistant driver. An independent type, Marshall pulled more than his share of company punishments, but he paid attention to the duties of a tanker and could handle any of the tasks.

  Although not overly impressed with many of the officers and noncoms, Marshall noted, “We had maintenance Technical Sergeant Howard Thomsen that knew tanks and any vehicle in the battalion from end to end. He was so knowledgeable that he was able to adjust the tank motors in B Company to go five miles faster than the tanks in other companies, for which he was almost busted by the battalion CO. Five miles an hour faster doesn’t seem like much, but in combat, if a Kraut shell explodes in front of you and the next one in back of your tank, you better move the tank quickly, as your tank has been bracketed and the third shell is probably on its way already and is going to hit you.

  “Halfway through France, our tank motor conked out on us while in convoy, and unl
ike a car, you don’t roll over to the side. The rest of the convoy went around us. Thomsen pulled up with his crew and pulled the old motor out and replaced it with a new one in less than two and a half hours!” Indeed, the only way that Thomsen had been able to keep pace with the outfit in his slow-moving tank retriever was by disregarding the rules and overriding a governor set to limit its speed.

  While the 707th rolled across Europe toward its destiny in the Huertgen Forest, the battalion detached Marshall for a special task. Driven all the way back to the French beaches, he saw “thousands of vehicles of all descriptions and what looked like a sea of tanks stretching from the water’s edge to the foot of the cliffs. We were told we were to drive thirty command cars and forty-nine tanks to the front lines. A sergeant said, ‘Take whatever one you feel like driving.’ I could see some tanks were a newer model, so I hurried down to the beach and climbed into the nearest tank. It was a dream compared to the M4 our crew had. Ours had a radial airplane engine; the clutch brakes and steering demanded raw strength to operate. This tank [an M4A1] had a Ford engine; power brakes, clutch, and steering; and a better, bigger gun.

  “This trip was going to be a picnic. Just start the motor and move out. We formed a convoy and started back. We were told to stay fifty yards apart, but on the second day it rained, and I found by staying just a few yards behind the tank in front of me that his exhaust would keep me warm and dry. I was to pay for this disobedience. When we stopped for the night, I became very sick and could hardly gas up the tank and add the oil. I felt that I was going to die. I have never been that sick in my life, including to this day. Later, I realized it was carbon monoxide poisoning.

  “I looked at the tank and it was a formidable, unclimbable mountain. I did not have the strength to lift my feet, my eyes burning in my head. I thought if I just lie down and rest I may feel better so I laid down in an L-shaped furrow, placed my head on the high part, and closed my eyes. It seemed like only minutes later I heard someone shouting, ‘Mount up, prepare to move out.’ I opened my eyes, it was daylight and raining. It had rained all night, my furrow was full. I was completely underwater except for my head. I had slept through a thunderstorm and missed breakfast.” Muddy and soaked, Marshall climbed into the tank and took his place in the convoy, carefully maintaining the prescribed fifty-yard interval.

  “When we got to the front lines, six or seven of us had to drive our tanks to a further location. Within an hour, we came to the Siegfried Line, the dragon’s teeth. The engineers were blasting a lane through these concrete spears. When we arrived the Germans were shooting at the engineers from a pillbox. They sneaked back somehow after being ousted the day before. There were no heavy guns available. Our tanks had no ammo and no one to fire the guns if they did. It was a stalemate and vehicles behind us began to pile up.

  “Then an engineer private started creeping from tooth to tooth toward the pillbox, while pulling a heavy amount of explosives. He crawled right up the vision slit; the Krauts couldn’t depress their guns to get him. All they had to do was roll a grenade out, but they didn’t. He brazenly stood up as he walked to the aperture and placed his explosives. When he came away he decided the safest place for him would be on top of the pillbox. He scrambled up, and when the charge went off it flipped him face down among the teeth like a wet sack of rags. A moment later, he stood up apparently unharmed and waved his arm in a gesture as though saying, ‘Come on, roll ’em.’”

  The 707th initiated itself into battle starting in mid-October, acting as artillery to harass enemy soldiers and perhaps damage West-wall emplacements. Both John Marshall and Jack Goldman recall an unusual deployment to carry out the mission. Marshall explained, “The company set up for indirect firing, seventeen tanks side by side about 100 feet apart from tank number one to tank number seventeen, a total distance of about a third of a mile. We had dug a trench about three feet wide and six feet long and then backed our tank over it. We would take turns, two men at a time, sleeping in it, as it was a luxury to sleep stretched out prone. The tank would protect us from shell bursts. Gilbert Burgess, a driver from another tank, asked us if he could have a log lying close to our tank. We were tired of stumbling over it and told him to take it. As he leaned over and picked one end up, he detonated a German pressure mine placed under the log, tearing up his legs and stomach. John Alyea [an Indiana farm boy and the driver of Marshall’s tank] and I were standing within ten or twelve feet from the log and never even got a scratch.”

  Goldman noted, “Suddenly mortar fire tore through the whole company from one end to another. No one was hurt, but our duffle bags, containing all our clothes, et cetera, had been severely shot up. They had been stacked on the back decks of each tank. This was not serious, but it indicated that the enemy knew exactly where we were and our bodies were next. Most men now stayed inside the tanks for protection. We were learning how to survive.”

  Unlike the situation with the 1st and 9th Divisions, where the foot soldiers and attached armor had learned to rely on one another, the 707th joined the 28th Division only a few days before they would be required to work in concert. Alyea, an original member of the 707th who was drafted in November 1942, had qualified to drive a tank. In the crew as assistant driver and loader was John Marshall. “Not too much happened before we went into combat in the Huertgen,” said Alyea, noting that in concert with the 229th Field Artillery and his outfit’s assault guns, they shelled enemy positions east of Krinkelt in mid-October. “On October 12th, the first platoon, the one I was part of, moved back to receive assault training with the 110th Infantry Regiment for two or three days.”

  Lieutenant Raymond Fleig, a platoon leader in Company A, remarked, “You’d never know we were in the same army. We married up with the infantry on the run. There was little or no coordination of communication, routes of attack, et cetera. Even though each tank had an external telephone for ground forces to [use], the infantry didn’t know that. The phone was in a box at the rear of the tank and painted the same color as the tank. The usual method of communication was to bang on the side of the tank until you got the tank commander’s attention and then point to the target. Often the infantry would not approach the tank because they feared that it would draw artillery and mortar fire.”

  American tankers labored under a severe communications handicap. Aside from the unfamiliarity of their partners with the external phone, the armor relied upon SCR506 [or later versions] line-of-sight radios that depended on a clear path for transmissions. Mountains, hills, and thick stands of trees interfered with the signal. “If the antenna touched a branch of a tree,” said Fleig, “it grounded it.” Furthermore, the external aerial, necessary for any distance, often was damaged by enemy fire or from simply plowing through obstacles. According to John Alyea, the radios in most tanks could only receive orders and lacked ability to call back. Only the tanks carrying a platoon leader or a platoon sergeant had two-way radios.

  Originally, the attack by the 28th, in a strategy dictated by V Corps and the First Army, was due to begin on the last day of October, but rain, fog, and poor visibility postponed the offensive for two days. Although conditions continued to be dismal, there could be no further delay because of the timetable for subsequent attack of VII Corps forces.

  Elements of the 28th had begun to press forward as early as 29 October, according to Bill Peña, to secure a line of departure for the advance to Schmidt. “The entire battalion attacked through the forest early in the morning. We were to move to the high ground half a mile north of Germeter. During the attack a single American fighter plane, a sleek P-47, made a couple of low passes coming from our rear. I was in a firebreak lane, otherwise it would have been difficult to see it from within the thick forest. I wondered if he knew whom he was striking on the first pass. On the second pass we all ducked when he dropped a big object we expected to explode within our line—since it didn’t explode, we guessed it was an empty gasoline pod.

  “The German outposts had already been spotted by
reconnaissance patrols and were easily overcome. When I came up to one of them, the fighting was over. What was left in the wake was a pitiful sight. The bodies of three dead Germans didn’t bother me; it was the sight of a wounded German boy, looking not over seventeen years old, crying for his mother. This was war. I shouldn’t allow myself the luxury of compassion. Traska, our medic, came up in his easy manner and began taking care of him. He stopped crying, but I couldn’t erase the picture of his poor frightened face for a long time.”

  The wounded youth probably lived in one of a couple of houses located by a sawmill on a hill. One of the buildings became an observation post for the mortar section, with the tubes near the crest of the slope. An enemy gun that the mortars could not silence covered an open area between platoons. Peña and his associates detoured through a wooded area when traveling between the units. “I was coming back from the 2d platoon,” said Peña, “walking leisurely through the woods. Suddenly I came up to a uniformed German man sitting against a tree. I almost shot him before I realized he was dead—from the fracas a few days ago. I would have felt ridiculous shooting a dead man. This wasn’t the first time I’d walked through these woods; I was surprised I hadn’t run into him before.” Peña did not realize at the time just how difficult it was to see anyone or anything more than a few feet off in the forest.

  Although most of the American cast of characters changed for the November offensive, the Germans could not afford to rotate their troops. Hubert Gees, the runner for the Fusilier Battalion of the 275th Infantry Division, still defended against the GIs in the Huertgen and recalled, “At the end of October, there was another change of position from the right wing in the valley to the left wing of the Fusilier Battalion, bounding here at the Haptstrasse to the edge of the forest before the Wittscheidt sawmill. Americans held the main road Germeter-Richelskaul-Raffelsbrand-Peterberg after heavy fighting since mid-October.”