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

by Gerald Astor

  Subsequently, G-2 at headquarters of the 5th Armored Division scrawled a transcription of a brief radio message received from Combat Command B, one of its three regiment-size armored units: “Dismounted patrols crossed into Germany at … 1815 hrs.”

  The frontier had been breached, but Holzinger’s patrol returned to its base without occupying enemy turf. Subsequent probes confirmed the paucity of German troops, although one expedition from the 5th Armored observed soldiers leisurely marching in from the north, bearing machine guns and taking up residence in formerly deserted pillboxes.

  The thinness of the foe’s ranks whetted appetites for continuing the prewinter drive to the Rhine. The Allies were well aware of the most immediate obstacle to progress, the well-publicized Siegfried Line. The thickest fortification was along a radius anchored by the historic city of Aachen and enveloped a number of good-size towns—Stolberg, Düren, Eschweiler, Schmidt—and villages and hamlets, some no more than a crossroads, as well as some sizable rivers and tributaries with heavy forestry. The strongest section of the Westwall consisted of two chains of defenses, the Scharnhorst Line, closest to the Allied troops, and the Schill Line, the deeper and more substantial array several miles back.

  German engineers had artfully sited the more than 3,000 pillboxes, dugouts, and observation posts to exploit the full benefits of terrain—the lakes, streams, hills, gorges, forests, and other natural features. Within the confines of the biggest forts were living quarters for troops, arms and ammunition storage, concealed entrances, and, of course, firing embrasures. The concentration of such redoubts reflected the knowledge that Aachen and its surrounding territory acted as a gateway for the shortest route from the west to Berlin.

  Some of the massive pillboxes, many of which were circular, would cause artillery and tank shells to glance off if they hit a rounded area. The structures were made of steel eight to ten inches thick, covered by a layer of concrete a foot deep. Concrete gun casements employed walls eight to ten feet thick. The German engineers artfully masked the apertures with mounds of dirt, which would cause 155mm rounds to ricochet. Machine gun bunkers covered open areas. Tank obstacles included ditches, eight feet wide and twenty feet deep, that were covered by pillbox weapons and rows of stalwart, six-foot-high, reinforced concrete barriers known as “dragon’s teeth.” Craters blasted in roads blocked vehicular passage. The defenses duly impressed intelligence specialists and strategists, but the first patrols revealed that the reeling Nazi armies had fallen back in such a disorganized rout that they had left much of the Siegfried Line unmanned or staffed with skeleton crews. When the fortifications were constructed in 1938, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda machine trumpeted the Westwall as impregnable, a characterization swallowed by military leaders in England. That sense of inviolability helped convince the British to appease Hitler at the 1938 Munich Conference.

  Unlike the French, who blindly trusted their equivalent Maginot Line to protect them against any invaders, the German generals understood that the Siegfried’s major contribution to defense of the Fatherland lay in its power to delay an offensive until reserves could be rushed to the point of attack. And the demands on the Russian Front and in Italy and in France emptied the bunkers of even housekeeping crews, to say nothing of eliminating the mobile reserves expected to back up the defenses. To the top American commanders, the reports of those first patrols in September indicated that the Siegfried Line was a waste of concrete.

  Even as Hodges plotted the offensive that would smash into the heart of Germany, on 8 September, only two days after his uncharacteristically confident boast, Sylvan informed his diary that Bradley was urging Hodges to dispatch some of his armor to the rescue of Third Army forces to the south: “The Boche had sent tanks into a Third Army Division CP and captured valuable documents.” The 12th Army Group leader attributed the setback to the failure of Hodges’s V Corps to drive ahead. Hodges alibied that the lack of gas stalled his troops. He insisted that the First Army should not be held responsible for Third Army problems.

  The primary objective of the First Army was control of the Roer River, a stream that originates in the hills of the Ardennes, meanders through Monschau, a town near the Belgian border, broadens as it picks up a network of tributaries while passing through the city of Düren, and then curves northwest to flow into the Meuse River of the Netherlands. Beyond the Roer in Germany was a plain that extended to the last natural defense in the Deutschland—the Rhine. A few lone voices from intelligence suggested that the command consider the strategic importance of a group of dams, particularly the pair known as the Schwammenauel and the Urft. These dams controlled the flow of the Roer and several of its larger feeder streams. By opening the gates on the largest of these dams, the Germans could create massive flooding that would critically interfere with any offensive. But the plotters, from Eisenhower down through Bradley, Hodges, Joe Collins, and Leonard Gerow, basically ignored the threat posed by opening the floodgates and concentrated instead on the capture of real estate. There is, for example, no mention in Sylvan’s meticulous notes of any intentions concerning the dams.

  General J. Lawton Collins, V Corps commander under Hodges, when asked many years later whether the intelligence people considered the dams an important objective, responded, “They didn’t, and they didn’t recognize the threat they posed. We all knew there were some dams. We had not studied that particular part of the zone. They came as a surprise to most of the intelligence people in the army. There were two or three of them [actually, a system of seven such flood control structures].”

  Poised to make the final blow at the Third Reich, what promised to be a swift triumph turned into a fiasco, as the American brass combined dubious strategic decisions with tactical blunders, which were compounded by a disregard for basic military axioms, an appalling ignorance of the situation, and the deadly germ of hubris. The competition to conquer the most land, score the highest body count, and collect the most medals is a not unexpected theme among military units at war. But, occasionally, that zeal overwhelms good judgment and results in deadly consequences. At the heart of the disaster that began to unfold in September 1944 was a great patch of densely packed, towering fir trees known as the Huertgen Forest, a man-made preserve. Actually, the seventy-square-mile area consisted of several forests—Huertgen, Wenau, Roetgen, Monschau, and smaller woods—but Americans lumped the entire sector under the name Huertgen.

  Harry Kemp, who commanded a heavy weapons company for the 28th Division during its ordeal in the woods, said, “If one were to see it from the southeast outskirts of Aachen … it appears as a seemingly impenetrable mass—a vast undulating blackish-green ocean stretching as far as the eye can see.” The official U.S. Army history covering this period, in which Americans confronted the Huertgen, states: “Upon entering the forest, you want to drop things behind to mark your path, as Hansel and Gretel did with their bread crumbs.” Within this enormous stand of conifers, there was grim gloom. Sunlight rarely penetrated through the near cheek-to-jowl, interlocked branches. On the carpet of pine needles, American GIs bled in unprecedented numbers during a horrendous, five-month campaign that scourged seven infantry divisions, an armored division, and assorted other units. Referring to a World War I slaughter, Ernest Hemingway, who accompanied a regiment devastated in the Huertgen, christened the Huertgen “Paschendale with trees.”

  2

  THE ATTACK BEGINS

  When General Hodges uttered his prediction of victory in less than a fortnight, the front of his First Army lay along a 35-mile-long axis from the Belgium-Netherlands border through Aachen, south through the Ardennes into Luxembourg. While the British war chief Sir Bernard Montgomery, to the north of the First Army, painstakingly marched toward the enemy border, the invasion of Hitler’s Third Reich lay within Hodges’s domain, because Patton’s Third Army had stalled inside French territory, south of the Forest of Ardennes, some miles from the frontier.

  As a cadet at West Point, Hodges had fallen victim to geom
etry during his first year. After he enlisted as a private, he earned a commission and received a Distinguished Service Cross for leading a reconnaissance into enemy lines while with the American Expeditionary Forces during the Meuse-Argonne battles of World War I. He progressed up the ranks until 1941, when Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall named him chief of infantry at the War Department in Washington, D.C. Once the shooting began, Hodges was assigned as deputy chief of the First Army under Gen. Omar Bradley. When Bradley assumed command of the 12th Army Group, Hodges succeeded him as commander of the First Army. Bradley commented, “He was essentially a military technician whose faultless techniques and tactical knowledge made him one of the most skilled craftsmen of my entire command. He probably knew as much about infantry and training as any man in the army.” Although Bradley offered such high praise, he also commented, “Courtney seemed indecisive and overly conservative.” Bradley said that he hoped “my veteran First Army staff … would keep a fire under him.”

  Now a fifty-six-year-old lieutenant general, Hodges was a stolid, meticulous planner and cherished the role of armor with as much conviction as his close friend and one of his West Point classmates in 1904, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. He held a similar faith in the virtues of artillery. Unlike his flamboyant chum, however, Hodges built a reputation of concern for the well-being of his troops.

  His First Army consisted of three corps and numbered more than 256,000 officers and men. Approximately half of these filled the ranks of combat units, although even within that category many soldiers performed service and supply functions. Between his two armored divisions and the attached separate tank battalions, his table of organization included 1,010 Shermans, but in actuality the number on hand added up to perhaps 850, with many badly in need of repairs or maintenance work. On the other hand, his troops were backed not only by their division’s big guns, but by forty-six separate field artillery battalions and three chemical (4.2-inch) mortar battalions.

  The XIX Corps, which occupied the most northern left flank facing Germany, would not play a role in the offensive that involved the Huertgen. It was expected to remain in place until Montgomery advanced to the German border.

  At the center of the First Army positions stood the VII Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Joseph Lawton Collins, a West Pointer who sharpened his combat teeth leading an infantry division on the islands of Guadalcanal and New Georgia in the South Pacific. According to Collins, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, “My first love was the navy. But I realized if I went into the navy, I wasn’t going to see very much of my family for the rest of my life.” While a freshman at Louisiana State University, he earned an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy class of 1917. An exuberant, forceful advocate of his own opinions, Collins never flagged in self-confidence. Like Hodges, Collins had caught the attention of George Marshall, who helped him rise more quickly than others from his West Point class. Bradley held a similarly high opinion of Collins, offering the backhanded compliment that Collins “was not a deep thinker or strategist. He was a ‘doer,’ an action man. … One of the most outstanding field commanders in Europe, Collins was without [a] doubt also the most aggressive. With a handpicked staff to help him, he seasoned an unerring tactical judgment with just enough bravado to make every advance a triumph. To these qualities, he added boundless self-confidence.” Not everyone who encountered Collins would put such a positive spin on his character.

  Collins was the sort of man Bradley expected to ignite the kindling under Hodges. He had a reputation for making frequent tours of the front and boasted, “Every day I was out in the field visiting as far [forward] as I could the critical point of action. Where the crux of the fighting was likely to be was the place I headed for.” In the first days of September 1944, Collins directed the 4th Cavalry Group, the 1st and 9th Infantry Divisions, and the 3d Armored Division.

  On the right-most southern flank, Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow led the V Corps. Another West Pointer, Gerow had been a member of an advanced infantry officers’ class at Fort Benning with Bradley, and they had graduated first and second, respectively. Gerow preceded Eisenhower as chief of the War Plans Division of the General Staff while Ike served as his deputy. He had almost no experience as a field commander (Eisenhower had none). When Gerow, a detail-obsessed draftsman with none of the bonhomie of his successor, was given responsibility for direction of the V Corps during its Normandy landings, some questioned the choice. However, Gerow’s meticulous approach was augmented by an unexpected sense of the flow of battle. In the few months since 6 June 1944, he appeared to have the grasp of combat command well in hand. There was no doubt that he possessed a considerably less dynamic personality than his counterpart at the helm of the VII Corps or certainly the rambunctious Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., head of the Third Army who was then butting heads against a stubborn enemy defense on Gerow’s right flank. Gerow’s troops played a principal role in the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, and within the ranks were the 102d Cavalry Group, the 4th and 28th Infantry Divisions, and the 5th Armored Division.

  Directly committed to work with First Army operations was the IX Tactical Air Command, a component of the Ninth Air Force. Its fighter-bomber groups flew missions specifically requested by the ground forces and roamed the skies on “armed reconnaissance,” swooping down on any enemy spotted from the air or in response to radioed requests. The Ninth Air Force furnished further aid with groups of medium bombers. The Royal Air Force also contributed its bombers to the effort.

  During the staff conference on 8 September, where, according to Sylvan, the supply experts described dire shortages, Hodges’s aide noted the arrival of the V Corps commander, Gerow, at 10 A.M.: “He was closeted with the general [Hodges] in an occasionally rather tempestuous discussion of V Corps Tactical Approach to the border. The general, knowing the importance that Gen. Bradley placed on the strength of the right flank [adjacent to the Third Army’s positions], ordered the 112th Infantry to assemble in the area of the 5th Armored and generally layed [sic] out to Gen. Gerow the plan which he wished to see adopted for the attack. Gen. Collins came by car at 3 o’clock and for two hours they were closeted in the map trailer discussing the VII Corps’s approach to the border.”

  On 11 September, Sylvan reported, “Shortly after 8:15, news from the V Corps that elements of the 5th Armored had crossed the frontier, approximately at the 42d horizontal. Gen. Hodges at once called Gen. Gerow who denied the fact, but later in the evening it was established beyond a doubt that patrols had crossed the border and stayed across the border. They had been joined in their respective sectors by patrols from both the 4th and 28th Divisions. No one claimed that the Siegfried Line or what there is of it had been pierced, but the fact remained that we were in Germany, the first to have that distinction.” Within a few hours, the 16th Regimental Combat Team of the 1st Division [infantry working with armor from the 3d Armored Division] also trespassed on the Siegfried Line, capturing several pillboxes. But the advancing GIs reported that heavy obstacles lay ahead. Collins’s organization had become the second corps to cross the border.

  On 12 September, Hodges conferred with General Patton and the G-4 representatives, the staff responsible for supply. Sylvan noted, “It seems likely that we will have to halt for at least a short period.” Sylvan also observed that in Eupen, a Belgian border town captured by the VII Corps, all of the civilians hung white flags from their windows and shops, “but were coldly indifferent to our troops in contrast to the reception given up to that point. Eupen was in disputed territory with a population that was strongly pro-German.”

  The hostility of the Germans was expected, but it also meant that the Allied armies could no longer, as they had in the past, count on much information from civilians. Based on what intelligence specialists could gather from such patrols as that led by Sergeant Holzinger, the experiences of the 16th Regiment troops, the questioning of a few prisoners and civilians, and intercepts of German communications, the First Army staff concluded
that the Westwall emplacements were garrisoned mainly by service and second-line recruits of limited value for front-line combat but trained to man fixed defensive posts. Such troops were designated as SOS.

  In his meeting with his superior, the ever-eager “Lightning Joe” Collins argued for his VII Corps to seize the initiative and plunge into Germany. To assuage Hodges’s uncertainty, Collins proposed “a reconnaissance in force,” which the army’s basic manual on combat doctrine calls the “best means of clearing up an uncertain situation.” In effect, the reconnaissance in force could probe defenses and mount attacks. The option of actually occupying territory would depend on the resistance offered.

  Captain Armand R. Levasseur, the plans and operations officer of the 1st Division’s 26th Regiment, wrote in a monograph well after the fact, “The men generally realized that the picnic, wine, and flowers campaign of France and Belgium was at an end. Now at least, the German was fighting on native soil, so resistance was expected to stiffen.” However, Levasseur wrote, “the end now seemed within our grasp. Optimism was high, in fact too high in view of the tough battles that lay ahead. Sound tactical doctrine dictated that the enemy’s defenses, reached at the close of a pursuit, which had turned into a rout, be penetrated as rapidly as possible. The enemy was to be given no breather to recover from the staggering blows struck in France and Belgium. For this reason no time was available for specialized training so valuable to the success of an attack on permanent type defenses. Also, at battalion level little was known as to the nature of construction, strength, or depth of the fortifications.”

  While the enemy was obviously gasping for breath, the First Army was also breathing hard, with many organizations like the 1st Division badly winded after more than ninety days of battle. Vehicles were worn out or seriously damaged, maintenance was far behind schedule, and the supply problems continued. Levasseur’s comment about the lack of specialized training for dealing with the redoubts of the Siegfried Line is only partially correct, because the 1st Division, having fought in North Africa and Sicily and having confronted pillboxes and bunkers during the Normandy invasion, was an experienced outfit, although casualties had reduced the number of veteran soldiers. More to the point would be the absence of any significant instruction or experience in combat in a dense forest that housed massive permanent defensive positions.