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

by Gerald Astor

  When Cross assumed his new post, he wrote in his diary, “The regiment has had a splendid reputation but has not done well in this fight. I hope I may lead it well and do my best as a leader.” During the night, engineers busied themselves clearing the roadway of mines and brought up bridging materials to enable the armor to rattle over the larger craters. Cross commented, “Heavy mortar and artillery fire continuously rained on our position. Many inaccurate reports received during early morning hours, causing confusion.” Although the official journal for the day claimed that CCR rolled off on schedule, Cross said they went out late. The deployment fell behind schedule and foundered almost immediately, with four tanks victimized by mines, antitank guns, and infantrymen. They stalled at a bend in the road.

  Rumors of imminent relief lifted the spirits of George Wilson with the 22d Regiment, but when he was ordered to battalion headquarters late in the afternoon of 29 November, Colonel Kenan announced, “Regiment insists we take Grosshau tonight in order to relieve B Company and also because possession of Grosshau is vital to tomorrow’s attack plans.

  Wilson said, “Night attacks are very difficult and usually require a lot of planning. To control and direct men so they shoot the enemy and not their own is a major concern. Exact directions and signals that are easily seen or heard must be worked out. Radios and other equipment must be secured and checked, passwords have to be assigned, the order of movement determined. With experienced men and officers who know them well, night attacks are still one of the worst assignments possible.

  “We did not have any of the proper qualities and time was also against us. Our only advantage was the ability to move in the darkness. I hoped my new officers would be able to follow instructions and that I would be able to stay in contact with them.” In addition, he had to gently disabuse F Company of its hope to be relieved, and in the dim illumination of twilight, he said he saw shock and dismay on faces.

  The initial objective was to make contact with the 1st Battalion’s B Company, hit hard, pinned down outside of Grosshau, and without radio contact. By sheer luck, Wilson’s scouts stumbled into a small group of B Company walking wounded on their way back to the aid station and several stretcher cases borne by German prisoners. A wounded sergeant agreed to carry a walkie-talkie to his company commander. Within minutes, Wilson was speaking to his B Company colleague. From him came vital intelligence on the location of the main German defenses.

  Wilson quickly constructed a plan of attack, showing his officers the layout on a map illuminated by a flashlight under the cover of several coats. Crouching to avoid any silhouettes against the night sky, his troops sneaked across the open fields on the southern side of Grosshau. To the company commander’s delight, the leading forces reached the edge of the town without a single shot fired or any alarm. They fell upon the Germans from their rear, taking them completely by surprise. “Apparently, they were exhausted themselves,” commented Wilson. “I couldn’t understand why they had no defense at all on their south flank, but I was deeply grateful.” So was battalion commander Kenan when apprised of the success, as he “was profuse in his congratulations.”

  Captain Donald L. Faulkner, a graduate of the University of Illinois and its ROTC program and already thirty-two years of age, led a 200-man packet of replacements onto the continent and reached his new command, E Company of the 22d, on the eve of the offensive against Grosshau. “I was a new man, a replacement, and I didn’t know a soul. They were all my buddies, but they didn’t know who the hell I was. My new trench coat was a nice dark green. I took my captain’s bars off, put them in my pocket, and put mud on the captain’s insignia on my helmet. I had no pack, no blankets. We had left our gas masks and our luggage back at regiment by their orders. We had our weapons and ammunition. I had a new carbine and a lot of ammunition in my pocket. I hadn’t fired a shot yet. So, we sat waiting for orders.” That night at the company CP, Faulkner dug in with his weapons platoon leader, Lt. Lee Lloyd, and a sergeant.

  “We got replacements and one of the new squads, a BAR rifle team up front, saw a patrol come across the field in front of them, and they fired, which I don’t believe they should have done. Within about a minute and a half, I could hear the incoming barrage, enemy artillery or perhaps mortar fire. There was also some other kind of shelling. It sounded like a railroad express train roaring into the woods, hitting trees. We stayed in our hole. I heard screaming and would have gone out, but Lee Lloyd said ‘no,’ and Sergeant Willard said, ‘If you go you will never come back.’

  “When morning came, I got out of the hole at first light. There was a patrol of several men that we had put north, guarding a stream draw, which would have been an entrance into our position. They had, it appeared, gotten out of their holes and run toward ours and had been cut down. The man who almost made it to our hole had been sliced in his thigh, and his whole artery was burned out by the shell fire, deader than a door nail. We lost a good deal of our company during the night’s shell fire.”

  When the instructions arrived for E Company to move north, temporarily attached to the 1st Battalion in the attack against Grosshau, Faulkner counted seven officers, most of whom were replacements like himself, and a paltry sixty-five enlisted men, barely one-third the normal enrollment.

  “We worked our way along the left side of the woods. Obviously, we were seen, because mortar fire started to come in and then the heavy stuff; 88mm shells were roaring into the woods. When we came to the stream draw, almost immediately I knew we should move out of there, but the mortar shells started dropping in and everybody hit the ground. We lost a few more men in that stream draw and got out of there.

  “I led the company then on the run through the woods in the direction of Grosshau, up to a scene of terrible carnage. There were many, many wounded lying along the trail and in the woods, Krauts and American GIs. Some moaning, a lot dead.

  “We moved to a piece of woods just in front of Grosshau. There was a lieutenant I had met aboard ship when we landed on Omaha Beach. He was a retread from the Coast Artillery, and he was the most scared person I had ever seen. He was yelling and shouting and I realized why. We were being fired upon by small-arms fire from the village, and this was not the place to be.”

  With Lieutenant Lloyd, Faulkner shifted the outfit’s positions, deploying the platoons where they could dig in. The two officers discovered a well-protected hole with timbers over it and dirt piled atop the roof, where they established a command post for the night.

  On the following day, Faulkner received orders to send a patrol into Grosshau. “That seemed stupid to me. We knew what the situation was. They were there and we were here. But orders are orders. We got a small patrol organized under one of the new lieutenants, and in the dark they started out toward Grosshau. It didn’t take more than a few minutes, going alongside the road toward the entrance of the town, before they came galloping back like a bunch of big-tailed birds, followed by burp gun and rifle fire. They made it safely back to their holes.

  “We were told replacements were coming in and to expect 100 to 120 men. They came in the dark, and Sergeant Willard and I counted noses as they arrived, and we then sent them to foxholes up front. We received ninety men. That meant we had lost twenty to thirty already as they made their way up through shell fire.

  “The weather of the 29th November was sticky, intermittent fog, and chilling rain. We had no blankets, no sleeping bags. The journal of the 22d records that at 11:06 that morning, the S-3, Col. [John] Ruggles talked to Col. Kenan [battalion commander] on the radio, advising him the outfit would not attack but consolidate positions in the Grosshau vicinity, and on the following day, under a white flag with a German-speaking soldier, attempt to persuade the defenders to give up. ‘Tell the commander [of the Grosshau garrison] that Huertgen and Kleinhau have fallen, they are surrounded, and the hills east and northeast of Grosshau are in our hands. Also that 150 surrendered in Huertgen.’”

  Less than ten minutes later, a new order directed that
Grosshau be taken immediately with infantrymen buttressed by tanks and tank destroyers. Faulkner’s E Company drew the lead role. “During that morning,” said Faulkner, “I looked for a good, big fellow to carry our radio, and I found one by the name of [Lawrence] Sussman. He was from the Bronx, New York. I asked him if he knew anything about a radio, and he said ‘no,’ so I showed him where to turn the switch on in order to talk with it and told him to stay with me. He did, all the way through the Huertgen Forest and beyond. He did a great job.

  “We jumped off for the attack, and the [lead] platoon moved out of the edge of the woods through a small field toward the village. Suddenly, all kinds of fire started coming in. Automatic rifle fire, burp gun fire, artillery fire, 88mm and mortars. Sussman and myself dropped into the ditch at the edge of the woods and almost immediately an artillery shell hit the edge. The pieces went over our heads, and Sussman and myself were safe for the moment.

  “Lieutenant Lloyd said later, ‘I saw the shell with your name on it come over the town and land right on you. But you were not there. What made you lay down in that ditch?’

  “I reported back by the radio that we were stopped. Colonel Kenan came on, and I advised him we had one platoon on the left, and they could not get out of the woods. Our front platoon was pinned down, and the same thing happened to our reserve platoon. We were stuck. I needed artillery fire. Our forward observer could not get the artillery to fire close enough to us to hit the edge of town. Colonel Kenan, whom I had only met once, said, ‘You will take Grosshau, or else! Help is coming your way. Look for the big boys from the south, and you will have several tanks coming up the road on your left. Roger and out.’

  “Almost immediately, I could see seven tanks crossing the field to our right, and as I watched, two of them were stopped because their treads were blown off by mines. That didn’t look so good. I told Lieutenant Lloyd to take his weapons platoon around to what would be the south side of the village, and we would use two of our rifle platoons to go through the village on the left when the tanks came up.

  “Almost immediately, two tanks did pull up. The front one was on fire. I could see their blanket rolls and sleeping bags tied to the tank aflame. A young lieutenant coolly got out of the turret, took the ramrod used to clean the gun, and started beating the flames with it. I got up, walked over to the tank, and started talking to the lieutenant, whose name was Yeoman, about how we were going to attack this damn town. He said, ‘I can’t, because this tank is going to burn up. My second tank, under my sergeant will have to lead.’ It came up and off we went.

  “The tank moved across the field, which was only about 100 feet from the road, and from there it was another fifty yards to the edge of town. Sergeant Ivey jumped up on the tank and spotted a strong point off in a bit of woods to the northwest of Grosshau and got the tank to fire on it. I brought my command group behind him, waving on the platoon. Almost immediately, a rifle landed on my shoulder, pointing in the direction of town, firing. It almost blew my ear off. One of the new replacements was using me as a support for his M1.

  “As we moved along, I saw a group of some six new replacements standing around a GI who pulled a pin on a hand grenade. He tossed it through the window of a house and they all went in. Great, we were off to capture Grosshau! Down the street I thought I saw firing from the top of the church steeple. It would also be a beautiful observation post. To communicate with the sergeant in the tank turret, I tossed half a brick up. When it landed in the turret, he poked his head out. I pointed at the church steeple and he got the idea, swinging his .50-caliber machine gun around and spraying it from top to bottom. We moved through town. It was regular movie stuff, stopping and firing, moving again as the squads went from building to building, throwing grenades. By then it was dark. We stopped at the eastern edge of Grosshau. Lots of PWs.

  “Lieutenant Lloyd and myself walked about thirty yards to the road junction that ran through the town, with one road east and another toward Gey on the edge of the Cologne Plain. We agreed we had gone far enough and better turn back to dig in for the night. When we checked the map later, we saw we were perhaps a mile further out from the Allied line from Holland all the way down through France and that was too far ahead.”

  Faulkner set up a command post in a house with a reinforced basement. While prowling the premises, he discovered a German nurse in a white uniform, and very dead. “I had spotted a wire running from under her body toward the front window. As far as I was concerned, she was going to explode if anyone tried to disturb her, so we put a guard at the front door.

  “When I crossed the line of departure with Sussman, I prayed to the Lord. I didn’t ask that He save me or us. I asked that He give me good judgment and wisdom to lead this company so that as few as possible would be killed or wounded. After that, I said He was my guide, and we were very thankful when we got to the edge of town that, although we’d had a lot of wounded, we didn’t have too many killed in action. We did, however, have quite a few battle fatigue cases and that’s understandable.”

  While Faulkner and his men occupied Grosshau, George Wilson had barely settled down for some rest when he was roused by a messenger from his artillery observer. “I found Lieutenant Caldwell quite bothered and upset. The forward observer agitatedly pointed to the ridge out front and slightly southeast of town and asked if that didn’t look like Germans to me. With the help of field glasses, and in the light of what was by then a very bright moon, I clearly made out a column of what could only be enemy soldiers. They were wearing German long coats and were marching in single file toward the northeast, about 500 yards to our front.

  “Caldwell complained that he had fired a couple of rounds at them, but that when he had ordered a barrage, his battery had turned him down. His commanding officer explained that his map showed that the hill was being held by Americans.”

  Wilson took another look through the binoculars at the troops and again by observation of the greatcoats and long-handled shovels identified the column as the enemy. He contacted Kenan and asked for his permission to open fire. The battalion head denied the request, stating that after checking the situation, he learned that the 5th Armored Division claimed their people held the ridge. When Wilson vehemently protested, Kenan told him to send out a patrol for confirmation.

  While Wilson focused field glasses on them, a small band from his F Company sifted through the darkness to within fifty yards of the marchers and radioed back these were indeed Germans. Still, Kenan demanded further proof and directed Wilson to send a patrol to a 5th Armored CP. “The patrol leader returned in about an hour and reported that the CO there stated flatly that his men were dug in on that hill and he was sending more people up there. I was frustrated and disgusted; Caldwell was furious. The 5th Armored didn’t know how to read its map, but absolutely nothing could be done about it. I went back to sleep.”

  On the following day, F and G Companies, hewing to a plan based on the assumption that the friendly forces from the 5th Armored occupied the ridge ahead, started an attack toward an objective some two miles off.

  “As we headed across the open slope, I kept my men spread way out and watched the ridge line very sharply. It seemed odd to me that the American troops on the ridge were not at all visible from the rear as we approached. Our progress the first 300 yards was almost a stroll. … Then it happened. The sky fell in, and we were in hell. German artillery and mortars, machine guns and rifles, and the murderously direct fire of the tank-mounted 88s all hit us at once. Everyone dove to the ground and then crawled to the nearest shell hole or depression. There was no time to think; we simply reacted. Our infantrymen began to fire back with the M1s, and Lieutenant Caldwell set about to get some artillery on the Krauts, who were well dug in. Now we were paying for the inexcusable stupidity of that armored captain who couldn’t read a simple map.

  “This battle raged on insanely, impossible, for hours as we slowly moved forward. In my five months of considerable combat of all kinds, I had never h
ad to endure such a heavy, mercilessly accurate barrage of shells and bullets.” The enemy had very cleverly allowed the Americans to advance far enough into the open area from where in daylight they could not simply retreat to cover. Instead, they could only scramble for the limited protection of ditches and depressions created by exploding ordnance.

  Wilson himself became a specific target, as the foe’s forward observer could not help but notice one individual moving about the battlefield, obviously attempting to rally his forces while trailed by a radio operator bearing a telltale antenna. “It was almost a game and the German FO [forward observer] was very good at it. No sooner had I changed position and allowed twenty or thirty seconds for the range on his cannon to be adjusted, than the shells would start dropping in all around me.”

  Equally malevolent was a mortar unit that also zeroed in on Wilson. “Once my radioman and I plunged into a shell hole about three feet deep and six feet across, and we had hardly settled when the mortars began to explode very close to us. Even if it had been possible to hear their vertical descent, the other battle noises would have drowned them out. This became my single worst experience of the war. Because the shells came in so fast, I judged they must have had eight or ten mortars zeroing in on us. About 100 shells came down in an area that couldn’t have been much more than fifty feet on a side. Why they never got a direct hit, I’ll never know.

  “A third man piled in on top of us, and we tried to bury ourselves in the bottom of the hole, praying out loud as we held on for dear life. Handfuls of dirt, chips of stones, and spent shell fragments kept hitting me in the back. The only thing that saved us was the softness of the plowed fields. There could be no tree bursts out there, of course, and the soft dirt let the shells penetrate before exploding and then absorbed much of the force.