by Gerald Astor
Beach suddenly remembered a German pistol in his pocket. He quickly pulled it out and tossed it as far as possible. Later that night, several German soldiers discovered him. Using a blanket from the combat pack of an American casualty, they improvised a stretcher to carry him to a building with a large room filled with the Huertgen fallen. He watched a priest give last rites to a number of men, while medics gave injections to the wounded and changed bandages, occasionally signaling to two men with a litter, who would move quickly and remove the body of someone who had died. The place just vacated would be occupied by another man brought in from outside. Beach was subsequently removed by ambulance and taken to a hospital to receive treatment for his wounds before entering a POW camp.
The Germans counterattacked seven times on 16 November but were beaten off each time. Months later, in a prisoner of war camp, Jim Wood related to Beach what happened to him while his platoon was engaged alongside Beach’s. “I got what was left of your platoon, Beach. But there were only four men left. My own platoon was down to six, while the 3d Platoon had seven. The machine gunners had been wiped out and the mortar section badly hit by artillery fire. I had dug a foxhole for myself under a fallen tree, and it wasn’t long before shell fragments had chopped away most of the log.
“Youngman was a casualty. He had gone down in a blaze of glory, his hands tightly clutched around the throat of an enemy he had killed with his bare hands. Then the artillery let up, and the German tanks started to move in on us. The men I had placed on the left flank pulled out of their holes and came to my command post. One of them cried, ‘Lieutenant Wood, there are five tanks coming up the road. They will wipe us out! We’re getting out of here before they kill us! What are you going to do?’
“What could I tell him, Beach? My orders were to stick. I was just as scared as he was. I could see the tanks moving up. They had started to shell us. We didn’t have a bazooka to fight back with. I couldn’t think of anything to say and finally managed to answer, ‘I’m going to stay right here.’ It must have been the right answer. No one wanted to be called a coward and desert one’s post in the face of the enemy. It was a pretty serious thing, and they all looked unhappy about it. Staying there seemed like nothing but suicide, but they knew they had to. Finally, one of them spoke. ‘Well, if you’re sticking, I guess I will, too.’ They got back into their holes. Beach, we held those bastards. We got a hold of a few rifle grenades. We knocked out the lead tank. We held them. I don’t know how ten men held off five Jerry tanks.
“[Jake] Lindsey, my platoon sergeant, was with me in my hole during a particularly heavy part of the barrage. Lindsey said to me, ‘Seeing you tremble like that makes me realize I’m not the only one who is scared.’ ‘Scared,’ I answered him, ‘I am scared silly. I don’t know when I have been so scared.’ We both laughed and felt better.”
The account by Wood does not describe heroic acts by any of the soldiers under him. More than a month later, Sgt. Jake Lindsey was credited with single-handedly destroying a pair of enemy machine gun nests, forcing the withdrawal of two tanks, and driving off marauding enemy patrols. While wounded, he allegedly engaged eight German soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, killing three and capturing another trio while two fled. As a result, he received a Medal of Honor. However, his purported deeds would become a matter of controversy after Beach and Wood were liberated from a stalag.
Wood reported to Beach, “Naturally, during those days there was no way of bringing up supplies, and it wasn’t long before there were only a few cartridges left. During the last few days, I had only half a can of C ration to eat, and my canteen was dry.” Still, by late afternoon of 19 November, the 16th Infantry occupied Hamich.
At its headquarters in Verviers, the First Army staff digested the messages from those in direct communications with the legions engaged in the November offensive. While the troops in the Huertgen Forest were a major part of the overall plan, equal attention focused on the renewed effort to blast through the Stolberg corridor to the northwest. The diarist Sylvan described the great effort: “The attack for which Gen. Hodges had waited impatiently, and Gen. Bradley believed would bring the last big offensive necessary to bring the Germans to their knees, started at 12:45 Nov. 16 with a coordinated attack by 104th, 3d Armored, 1st Div., and 4th Div. started with use of unprecedented number of heavy bombers; 1,100 in number saturated the area in the vicinity of Eschweiler and Langerwehe, started at 11:15 and from 1:30 to 3:30, 700 of our bombers struck at eight other sites and targets. The RAF wound up the afternoon by sending over 1,150 Lancasters. Although we could hear the American heavies, we could not see them [and they couldn’t see the targets]. It was not until the overcast cleared into spotty sunlight in the late afternoon that we could see the British Lancasters flying low over the CP. Rockets were used in preparations for the attacks, very important in that [for the] first time there were no shorts [bombs or shells falling on friendlies]. So effective was the counterbattery and bombing that during the first four hours only seven shell reps [enemy responses] were reported. However, the enemy troops dug in close to our line were not affected by the bombing and aided by the heavy minefields and barbed wire, considerable arms and mortar fire at our troops as they started out. The Gen. said you can’t tell anything about an attack of this nature until passage [of] forty-eight hours. At midnight, the main progress was made by the 3d Armored Task Force Mills, 1st Bn., 33d Armed Inf. advancing outskirts of Hostenreid. Task Force Lovelady, 2d Bn., 33d Armored captured Werth. 1st Div., 1st Bn. of 47th Infantry to outskirts Gressenich, where bitter house-to-house fighting. 4th Div. made very little progress in the dark against camouflaged positions. Impenetrable woods. 104th Div. limited gains up to 500 yards. Ninth Army’s gains were more considerable.”
At best, Bradley and Hodges could draw satisfaction from the progress in the Stolberg corridor by the 3d Armored and the lesser successes of the 104th Division and Simpson’s Ninth Army troops to the north of them. The Huertgen nut hardly cracked that opening day. On 17 November, the 3d Armored Division again gained its objectives, while headquarters groused about the failings of the 104th Division. Although there was little evidence of significant advances in the woods, when Hodges visited VII Corps he found, in Sylvan’s words, “Gen. Collins optimistic despite the limited gains thus far reported. Gen. Collins stressed he had told the 104th Div. in no uncertain terms to get moving and moving fast. At the VII Corps the Gen. met with Gen. Barton [whose 4th Division had been inserted into the Huertgen campaign], with whom he had not talked for a long time. The Gen. said it was the worst topography he had seen in a long time, but he was under the impression they were going about the attack in the wrong way, running down a road as far as they could, instead of advancing through the woods tightly buttoned up yard by yard. Gen. Barton said the resistance was fanatical. One platoon, which had tried to infiltrate into our lines, was killed to the last man.” The critique by Hodges indicates an absolute ignorance of the terrain. As those on the line testified over and over, no one was “running down a road,” and the belief that the men could travel through the dense stands of trees “tightly buttoned up” was nonsense, in light of the skillful placement of German defenses.
The cheery optimism continued at the upper echelons. Though recognizing that the enemy was putting up a fierce fight, Sylvan mentioned that the 104th began to pick up its pace as the Germans abandoned their positions. “Gen. Collins told Gen. Hodges that with two more days of good weather, the enemy crust could be smashed. Today, he said there were signs it was giving due to the 1st Division’s strong pressure. Tomorrow and the day after will bring excellent results.”
That was hardly the experience of the 1st Division soldiers, like George Wallace. Born in 1914 and raised in Buffalo, New York, he struggled through the Depression and entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1931; he dropped out for several years to earn his annual $400 tuition before he finally graduated in 1939. He worked as a page boy and then in sales for NBC, and the navy refused
him for poor eyesight. He failed his first draft exam, but in 1942 he was deemed fit for duty. Through a friend of his wife’s father and with his educational background, he received an appointment to OCS, where he memorized the eye chart in order to qualify.
As a replacement officer, he crossed the Channel on D Day plus six for his assignment to A Company in the 1st Division’s 16th Regiment. “I was so green, I couldn’t tell the difference between incoming and outgoing. I learned on the job.” By the time he reached the Huertgen, however, he had gone through the hedgerow fighting and been treated by medics for injuries from butterfly antipersonnel bombs dropped by German aircraft.
“In the Huertgen, we held a more or less defensive position. The Germans had a way of holding a line, then pulling back, and you would occupy their holes. But they had [by artillery and mortars] registered those holes. My foxhole was half full of water. We must have had 30 percent of our men disabled by trench foot. I kept my radio in a tree, and I got cut across the face by splinters caused by our own artillery. You always smelled the cordite [from explosives], it was constant.”
While Wood and a handful of survivors of the 1st Battalion had been pinned down without conquering the objective of Hamich, and Wallace with the 3d Battalion held a static line, on the morning of 18 November, the 16th Regiment dispatched the 3d Battalion to seize Hamich. Karl Wolf, executive officer for K Company, recalled that along with L Company his outfit led off. “By noon, they got into town, where there were German soldiers and three German Tiger tanks, as well as six more German tanks with infantry coming down the ridge from the northeast. The Germans put up a fierce defense and continued to counterattack. Our planes dive-bombed the German tanks, hitting some, but two of our planes were shot down.
“I set up K Company’s command post in the basement of a house about a half block from the cross street in the town that had a row of houses, which K Company had been able to reach before holding up and digging in. The town had not been cleared of all Germans. That night we were in for some excitement.” During the earlier engagement, the duels with enemy armor and antitank weapons disabled five of the accompanying Shermans and tank destroyers, leaving only two tank destroyers and a single tank to repel a counterattack.
“The enemy came down on K Company from the northeast to reenter Hamich,” said Wolf. “Five German tanks and 200 infantry got into town. In our command post about 2200 hours, I got a telephone message that a German tank had gotten through the platoon lines and was headed down the road toward our command post location. I made the men turn off all the lights and be quiet. Sure enough, the German tank rolled up and stopped outside our house while we were in the basement. I was afraid they would put a round through the basement window, and we could become a statistic.
“After waiting about fifteen minutes, there was suddenly a big explosion and flames outside. Next, a German officer came running down the stairs screaming. Private First Class Carmen Tucharelli, a bazooka man, had worked his way back from his front line position and fired his bazooka from a second-story window across the street into the German Mark VI tank. This caused the gas tank to explode as well as the ammunition in it. It lit up the sky and caused the German tank officer to be severely burned. This was what he had been screaming about. He was our prisoner in the basement until he could be evacuated after things settled down.
“During this night, some posts of our platoons that were in foxholes or buildings were overrun by Germans, both foot soldiers as well as tanks. The platoon leader would radio back the situation, and we, in turn, at the company command post would advise the battalion headquarters. When we were certain we could pinpoint on the map the exact position of the Germans, I would radio back to battalion to get artillery fire on that position. Several times that night I had to call down artillery fire on our own positions to prevent being further overrun. This action was pretty extreme, and I had a difficult time convincing battalion that I had not made a mistake on map coordinates, because they knew we had previously reported being in position at those coordinates. I figured that our soldiers were well dug into defensive position, and we might well catch the Germans moving in the open. Finally, I told them on the radio that I knew the location was correct and that we did have our troops located there, but we needed the fire desperately. They finally ordered the shoot and it worked. I didn’t hear of any casualties among our men, and it had driven off the Germans. Sometimes in battle, risks must be taken, and this was one of them.”
According to an American summary made well after the great offensive, the attackers captured 114 German defenders of Gressenich and Hamich on the opening day of the November deployment. During the penetration of Hamich by the 3d Battalion of the 16th, the report insisted, “Enemy losses were very high, but the enemy had no intention of permitting our occupation of his critical block without dispute. … Hill 232, that constant thorn, was finally reduced in the afternoon by the 2d Battalion, 16th U.S. Infantry, following an artillery barrage, which can best be described as stunning. Fifteen battalions laid on an area no more than 500 yards square and included a high percentage of heavy artillery. When it was over, the 2d Battalion took the hill without a conspicuous struggle. Many prisoners were taken, most of them from the 12th Fusilier Battalion and all of them in a dazed condition.” Exploring their new turf, the GIs found a honeycomb of dugouts and tunnels under construction with the obvious intent of further strengthening the natural defenses.
Determined to restore their positions, the Germans plotted a massive counterattack, spearheaded by a large number of tanks. But, said the analysts after the fact, the tremendous artillery that fell on the Wehrmacht troops and the difficulty of relieving the most badly battered organization with fresh units created considerable confusion. To confound matters further, the lieutenant chosen to lead one group of tanks accompanied by foot soldiers in the dark over rugged terrain was unfamiliar with the area. He set off in the night and soon lost his way in the woods. He strayed straight into positions held by C Company of the 16th, and the GIs leveled heavy fire on the armor. The German officer reversed course only to track again in the wrong direction, where U.S. forces rained down artillery on the column, killing the tank guides and many of the soldiers with the armor. The tank with the lieutenant now clattered down the main street of Hamich, and it was this Mark VI that fell victim to the second-story bazooka round with its hapless officer, seriously burned and seized by the GIs under Karl Wolf.
Desperate to retake the most advantageous terrain sites, the Germans continued to hurl counterattacks that originated from Langerwehe. A German general declared, “All guns will fire to the last shell, and once the last shell is expended, the gun crews will fight as infantry. Only when there is no longer ammunition for the infantry weapons will an order be given to destroy the guns.” Entire companies that numbered something less than 100 men were annihilated along with five Mark V tanks, a couple of self-propelled assault guns, and other vehicles.
But the defenders stubbornly refused to yield, extracting their own substantial toll. Colonel Frederick W. Gibb, the 16th’s commander, sent a message to division headquarters three days after the attack: “I will need 500 more replacements. We had 491 evacuated, between 120 and 125 killed. I am hurt for leaders. In B Company we have only two officers and thirty-two men left. C Company has three officers and thirty-five men.”
Oswaldo Ramirez, an 81mm mortar section leader for the 16th Infantry when it first touched Omaha Beach, became the 3d Battalion’s liaison officer with regimental headquarters in an effort to improve coordination. As dead and wounded from the battle for Hamich piled up, a shortage of line officers limited effectiveness. Regimental Commander Gibb, after debriefing Ramirez on the situation, dispatched him to serve as a line officer under Capt. Everett Booth, CO of K Company and the shards of the 3d Battalion.
Said Ramirez, “Commanding remnants of the 3d Battalion [Captain Booth] had led an attack on an enemy position on the high ground north of Hamich, captured the hill, and was
holding out in the basement of a shattered castle. By requesting artillery fire on his own position, he had managed to repulse a number of counterattacks by enemy tanks. However, he was uncertain as to how long he could hold out.
“I arrived at this place early in the evening, after a long and perilous trek punctuated by constant enemy artillery fire. I found the basement crowded with wounded soldiers, all strangely silent, nursing their own wounds and gashes. Captain Booth promptly gave me my specific assignment. I was to take charge of the men surrounding the approaches to the position. The men were deployed in foxholes guarding against possible enemy counterattacks. This was exactly the same charge that Lieutenant Lazo had when he was hit by a direct mortar shell a few days before.
“Captain Booth [said] I should move out and assume charge right away, and that an artillery observer, already familiar with the ground, would accompany me in case I needed to call for artillery support. As he and I started to climb out of the basement, an enemy artillery shell exploded right over our heads, striking the artillery man and blasting me from the top of the ladder to the floor of the basement, where I remained unconscious for a while. Upon regaining consciousness, Captain Booth suggested that I wait until morning.
“By morning the situation had changed. Elements of the 2d and 1st Battalions had cleared the woods in our immediate area, and the enemy seemed to be pulling out altogether. Captain Booth and I reconnoitered the grounds and identified the bodies of 2d Battalion men killed during the assault on that hill. This was a required operation for Graves Registration purposes. It was heartrending to find bodies of comrades with bandaged lacerations, men who had stayed with the attack despite their wounded conditions.”