by Gerald Astor
With the approval of Hodges, Collins committed the 9th Division’s 39th and 60th Infantry Regiments to cleaning the Germans out of the Huertgen and thereby eliminating the threat to his right flank along the Stolberg corridor. The division’s other regiment, the 47th, remained busy defending itself in Schevenhutte, the farthest penetration toward the Roer.
The 39th, in the vicinity of Lammersdorf, west of the Scharnhorst Line, pressed its attack without significant success. An attempt by the 2d Battalion to envelop the defenders drew such heavy smallarms and artillery fire that the troops withdrew.
The 1st Battalion of the 60th Infantry, operating to the northeast, inside the Scharnhorst in front of the Schill, tried to take control of road junctions north of Zweifall. The plan called for the troops to pass through the Huertgen toward Germeter, cutting off the supply routes to the Germans. In the roseate view of the intelligence specialists, resistance was expected to be “negligible.” The timetable set the jump-off at noon, with arrival in the objective of Germeter by 6 P.M of the same day. It started out according to plan. The first steps through the woods went unchallenged, and the Americans delightedly passed a string of unoccupied pillboxes. Suddenly, the lead scout signaled a halt. A German machine gun opened up, and then a storm of fire ignited, much of it from cleverly camouflaged pill-boxes that housed determined defenders. The Americans advanced perhaps 700 yards against fierce resistance. They would not reach Germeter at six o’clock; they would not get there for more than a month.
As the attackers blundered about in the damp, cold gloom of the woods, it did not seem to matter which direction the attacker chose in the depths of the forest. The defenders appeared able to deploy their resources wherever needed. Complained one discouraged soldier, “The enemy seemed to be everywhere, and in the darkness of the thick trees and the confusion, the firing seemed everywhere.” A battalion commander asserted, “If anybody says he knew where he was in the forest, he’s a liar.”
Under the thick carpet of pine needles, the defenders concealed wood-cased schu mines that went undetected by metal-oriented mine detectors. The antipersonnel devices blew off feet and other parts of the lower body, leading to mordant nicknames coupled with sex organs.
Company A wandered onto the wrong trail, becoming hopelessly lost and eventually surfacing in a sector manned by the 39th Infantry. It took a day for A Company to trek to its prescribed position. A pillbox confronted Company B, armed only with grenades, rifles, and BARs (Browning automatic rifles), plus a few bazookas, rather than the appropriate satchel charges and heavier guns mounted on tanks or tank destroyers. The soldiers gamely peppered the bastion with all they had at their disposal, and the Germans obligingly surrendered. But shortly after the company commander installed his command post in the bunker and summoned his top people for a strategy session, an inexplicable explosion demolished the site, killing or wounding many. When dazed survivors staggered around outside, German soldiers from nearby positions picked them off.
The defenders mounted a strong counterattack that mingled opposing parties so closely that mortars could not be used. When the action broke off, both sides had been severely mauled. A series of these counterattacks devastated the 60th Regiment.
The towering, closely grown evergreens introduced a new source of danger—the tree burst. Although the United States was introducing its proximity fuzes, which, instead of relying on contact with a solid mass or a timing mechanism, detonated shells when they neared an object, the Germans still used the old style of explosion on contact. In the forests, the shells burst against the treetops. Men trained to drop prone on the ground then exposed their bodies to a deadly rain of shrapnel and wood splinters. Other than a well-covered foxhole, the best protection came from the lea of a tree trunk, and GIs adopted the posture of tree huggers.
Another grim lesson learned was the reduced effectiveness of supporting artillery. A battalion of field guns tried to aid the GIs but could only target 300 yards ahead of the friendlies; otherwise tree bursts would shower the American soldiers. Unfortunately, the German defenders occupied positions only fifty yards beyond the troops. The big guns could not hurt them.
The 60th Regiment continued to batter its head against the Huertgen wall for ten days. Not even with the commitment of a battalion borrowed from the 39th could the attack gain any major territory. Although the highway between Lammersdorf and the village of Huertgen had been cut, neither the 60th nor the attached battalion from the 39th possessed the strength to resume the offensive through the forest.
Southwest of the 9th Division, in the V Corps zone, the 22d Regimental Combat Team, from the 4th Division, had remained in a static position from 18 September to 3 October. The Germans counterattacked vigorously and frequently but without materially denting the American lines.
But the advance of the 4th Division, like that of other U.S. units had ended. George Wilson said, “We were, in fact, too thin and spread out for a solid breakthrough. Our wild, thrilling rampage through France, Belgium, and into the Siegfried had been too fast and far for our supply lines. We were lucky to have enough ammunition and food for the day.” With no orders to continue forward, the GIs busied themselves with refinements of their foxholes, piling logs atop them and scrounging branches to serve as mattresses on the increasingly muddy ground.
About one week after their drive bogged down near Sellerich, the 22d Regiment, with Wilson, pulled back, leaving to the enemy the bloody ground they had taken in the woods. The outfit moved northwest into the Schnee Eifel forest, a position that placed another thickly wooded area between the GIs and the Germans. While not in an attack mode, Wilson and his platoon engaged in the highly dangerous activity of patrols, both in daylight and at night. At the end of the month, Wilson’s promotion to first lieutenant, promised by Colonel Lanham if Wilson survived his first day in combat, came through. Wilson carefully pinned the silver bar underneath his collar, where it would not be seen by a sharp-eyed German sniper.
On the right flank of the 4th Division line, the 28th Division from Luxembourg continued its efforts to breach the Westwall. Bill Peña, a 1942 graduate of Texas A&M with a degree in architecture and a lieutenant’s commission through the reserve program at the university, served as a training officer for two years before the casualties in Normandy required his presence in Europe as a replacement.
Like John Beach with the 1st Division, Peña moved forward as part of a package of men to the 28th Division. Assigned to the 109th Regiment, Company I, he reached the outfit by jeep. He recalled, “On the way [to the battalion command post], the driver pointed out a small bridge over the Our River. This was the spot at which the boundaries of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany all joined. With a map I could tell where I was. The CP turned out to be a small concrete bunker on German soil east of the Our River and part of the Siegfried Line.”
Although I Company currently occupied a defensive position, only a few days before, on 15 September, the outfit assaulted the perimeter of the Westwall at Sevenig. “[That] resulted in the capture of six pillboxes to our front—some of them had just begun to be manned by the Germans. Unfortunately, the attack had weakened the company, and it was now low on ammunition. It was not able to resist the strong German counterattack which came before the position could be fully organized and strengthened. One particular enemy tank was deadly and demoralizing. One-third of the company men had been captured, killed, or wounded. The company commander was taken prisoner.”
For the following two weeks, with the front inactive except for exchanges of artillery, Peña became familiar with his platoon as it was filled with replacements and became indoctrinated in life at the front. The 13th Regiment of the 8th Division relieved the 109th at Sevenig, just over the frontier with Germany. Peña and his company boarded trucks for a circuitous trip that crossed into Luxembourg and then northward through Saint-Vith to an assembly area near Elsenborn, just behind the border of the Third Reich.
The shifting about of the various U.S. division
s signaled the end of the thrust that began in mid-September. Collins argued, “We ran out of gas—that is to say we weren’t completely dry, but the effect was much the same; we ran out of ammunition and we ran out of weather. The loss of our close tactical air support because of weather was a real blow.”
The reference to a dearth of ammunition was certainly true. From D Day on, artillery units struggled to match the requests for their firepower with their stocks of shells. Limitations on firing started early in the Normandy campaign and steadily hampered the batteries. The manufacturing plants at home could not fulfill the enormous amounts authorized for unrestricted action by the heavy guns. The pipeline through the beaches and English Channel ports also could not meet the specified allocations. The wretched weather of the Channel toward the end of September and into October further disrupted the shipments. In the howitzer class, a principal form of divisional artillery support, the inventory could never adequately feed the maws of the 105mm, 155mm, 240mm, and eight-inch weapons.
From 27 September to 5 October, the 12th Army Group cut the ration of shells to 3.8 rounds per gun, per day for the huge 240mm howitzers and 3.1 for the eight-inch guns. When the 12th Army Group issued a directive to increase the amounts to units, the commanders learned that there were no additional shells in the supply depots.
Furthermore, the organizations initially committed to the Huertgen campaign, the 1st and 9th Divisions, were short on manpower, the soldiers available near exhaustion, both physically and emotionally from their previous running battles from Saint-Lô to the border, and their equipment, trucks, and artillery were all in poor shape.
The experts in the War Department had estimated that three out of four infantrymen would be casualties in the European campaign. The planners based the need for replacements on that estimate. But the calculations fell far short of the actual demands for fresh troops. Of the roughly 15,000 soldiers in a division, riflemen would amount to almost 3,250. At the extreme, the 90th Division, which landed elements at Utah Beach just as D Day ended, lost more than 100 percent of its riflemen and 150 percent of its officers within the first two months of combat. Other organizations counted losses well in excess of the numbers foreseen by the War Department.
There was a desperate shortage of men bearing an M1, even though a startlingly high number of the wounded, out of action an average of 120 days after being hit but able to return to duty, insisted on returning to their outfits and harm’s way. The administrators of military personnel pools frantically sought to add foot soldiers to the ranks in Europe. By July 1944 the replacement system, combing through service units, eliminating slots in antiaircraft and coast artillery as no longer essential, and ending specialized programs, began to add candidates for the job of rifleman. But even though some effort to add to the pool had begun before D Day, providing the proper training and equipment required time.
The losses to the four divisions primarily employed to break through the Westwall were heavy, but the defenders had also paid dearly. Ten years later, Collins gave an interviewer the theory behind the hasty offensive against the Westwall. “If we could break it, then we would be just that much to the good; if we didn’t, then we could be none the worse.” From the standpoint of someone directing operations a distance behind the fighting, that might have been appropriate, but to the hapless foot soldiers in the killing ground the situation could hardly be termed “none the worse.”
5
SCHMIDT NUMBER ONE
Both the First Army’s venture, which hurled the VII and V Corps against the Westwall with much less success than anticipated, and Market Garden, Montgomery’s mid-September failed plunge by air into the Netherlands in the hope of an end run around the Rhine barrier, represented almost off-the-cuff strategy. It was not until 22 September that Eisenhower convened the army group commanders for a master plan to conquer the Third Reich.
The British strategists under Montgomery urged a strike by his 21st Army Group along the northern tier over the lower Rhine in Holland, bypassing the German industrial war machine’s heart, the Ruhr Valley. The strategy envisioned the American 12th Army Group as support for the thrust, protecting the right flank and halting at the German Rhine near Cologne. That plan sat poorly with Omar Bradley, ostensibly for strategic reasons, but undoubtedly the Americans strongly believed their ally was out to steal the glory.
The head of the 12th Army Group proposed a double envelopment, which, in conjunction with Montgomery’s forces, would encircle the Ruhr while also blasting through south of where the Main River flows into the Rhine.
Eisenhower, as he did so often, stroked sensitive egos and arranged to parcel out his assets to enable the competing interests to follow their desires. Montgomery retained the right to continue his drive based in Holland. With reinforcements piling up in England, the Americans introduced a new command, the Ninth Army under Lt. Gen. William H. Simpson. Considerably smaller than the First or Third Armies, it contained only the VIII Corps, and Bradley inserted the forces in what was considered a quiet zone, the Ardennes south of Aachen and the Huertgen Forest. The placement reduced the frontage of the First Army by fifteen miles. The high command shifted Gerow’s V Corps a few miles north, taking over the ground near Monschau previously reserved for Collins’s VII Corps. With the front trimmed by fifteen miles, Collins could concentrate on the 9th Division in a renewed push for the Roer. Instead of banging away at the Stolberg corridor, the 1st Division focused its attention on the city of Aachen, which, with units from the XIX Corps, it would try to clear. The Stolberg corridor devolved exclusively to the 3d Armored.
The new deployment shrank the 9th Division sector from seventeen miles to nine. That, however, was a mixed blessing, because Gen. Louis Craig’s troops now were committed to a campaign aimed at eliminating the enemy presence in the Huertgen and opening up a passage to the Roer via the woods.
Significantly, the strategy of those in charge remained concentrated on gaining ground and reaching the banks of the river. Major Jack Houston, the G-2 (intelligence officer) for the 9th Division, raised the subject of the dams. Their existence was well known; maps showed their location and aerial reconnaissance had produced photographs.
Sylvan duly confided to his diary on 29 September: “Supplies are slowly building up in desired quantities for the coming push.” On 2 October, Major Houston notified his superiors that the largest of the structures, the Schwammenauel Dam and its powerhouse, were “targets of great importance.” He pointed out, “Bank overflows and destructive flood waves can be produced by regulating the discharge from the various dams. By demolition of some of them, great destructive flood waves can be produced which would destroy everything in the populated industrial valley as far as the Meuse and into Holland.”
Houston only mentioned the largest of the dams, but several others in the system also controlled water flow. The logical conclusion based on his report was that any troops who crossed the Roer downstream from the dams could be trapped, should the enemy release the confined waters. The intelligence specialists of the First Army, however, discounted the threat, saying that even “if all of the dams [were blown], they would cause at most local flooding for about five days, counted from the moment the dam was blown until all the water receded.”
But an engineer with XIX Corps, who surveyed where that organization’s men would reach the Roer, near Jülich, calculated, “If one or all dams were blown, a flood would occur in the channel of the Roer River that would reach approximately 1,500 feet in width and three feet or more deep across the entire corps front. … The flood would probably last from one to three weeks.” Those soldiers caught by the surging water would be effectively isolated from the rest of the First Army and bridges would be wiped out. The XIX Corps officer vitiated the strength of his advisory to his superiors, observing that because the structures were all in the VII Corps sector, Collins’s forces would be expected to seize the dams because the VII Corps would also be affected.
Certainly, the question
of the dams seemed of little moment to either Eisenhower or Bradley. The latter, in his postwar autobiography, acknowledges the potential disaster of the Roer dams. “As long as he [Gerd von Rundstedt] held the huge Roer dams containing the headwaters of that river, he could unleash a flash flood that would sweep away our bridges and jeopardize our isolated bridgeheads on the plains of Cologne. Destruction of the 180-foot-high Schwammenauel Dam, engineers said, would swell the Roer at Düren by twenty-five feet and create a raging torrent one and a half miles wide. Clearly, we dared not venture beyond the Roer until first we had captured or destroyed those dams.” But the statement is clearly a revisionist effort, because there was nothing in the plans of the September, October, and November offensives concerning the dams. All of the attacks followed a course that took them two or more miles northeast of the Schwammenauel and even farther away from the second most important, the Urft Dam.
There was no recorded discussion about the subject at Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) until late in October, when interrogators learned from a prisoner taken by the V Corps that, in Düren, persistent ringing of church bells would warn that the dams had been blown and residents should immediately evacuate to escape a flood depth of as much as twenty-five feet. In his autobiography, Eisenhower talks of the relevance of the dams in conjunction with the front line position of the Americans in December, but he, too, was writing well after the fact. Until December 1944, the ground forces in the personages of the supreme commander, the head of the 12th Army Group, and the commander of the First Army and his corps leaders at most regarded the dams as a subject of interest for the Air Corps, not themselves.