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

by Gerald Astor

  “And it was on that terrible open slope beyond the hamlet of Grosshau that young Lieutenant George Wilson [himself] … came to the very edge of his breaking point. I had to fight with all I had to keep from going to pieces. I had seen others go, and I knew I was on the black edges. I could barely maintain the minimal control I had after fourteen or fifteen days of brutally inhuman fighting in those damned woods; I had reached the limit of my physical and emotional endurance.”

  Abruptly, the storm of explosives terminated and the tears and pleas of his radioman to be sent to the rear snapped Wilson back from his own imminent collapse. While accepting that the hysterical soldier had reason for his behavior, Wilson pointed his rifle at him, saying if he heard another word, he would shoot. “He stopped bawling instantly. A few minutes later in the next barrage, as a kind fate would have it, this radioman was wounded slightly in the arm, and I had to send him to the rear. I became my own radioman.”

  Wilson’s GIs inched forward in the face of devastating fire. The cannonade of artillery, mortar, and tank shells spared no one, striking medics and litter bearers trying to rescue the wounded. Wilson could only tell casualties that their one chance lay in crawling back to an aid station on their own.

  G Company lost its commander and the soldiers drifted back to the safety of Grosshau. Wilson, with F Company, continued to fight forward into the teeth of tanks nestled in the woods. Forward observer Caldwell called in some heavy artillery on them, and Wilson enlisted P-47s, whose dive-bombing drove the armor deeper into the forest where it was less effective.

  “During what may have been the peak of the shelling, the man leading my left platoon went berserk and had to be sent to the rear. This forced me to call forward a young officer who had just joined me that morning before we jumped off. Since he had no chance to get acquainted with his men, I had left his platoon in reserve. Now I needed him and told him to bring his platoon. … He immediately began to cry, and he sobbed that he couldn’t do it. Coming in fresh and going out on that hill looked to him like an execution. He might have been right. But I had no choice in the matter and had to send him to the rear.”

  There were no officers other than Wilson left and hardly any noncoms still on their feet. With no unit in support and highly vulnerable to a counterattack, Wilson on his own chose to withdraw to a former German trench, which the GIs quickly deepened until they dug down as much as five feet. “We had started out that morning with about 140 riflemen, a couple of medics, three noncoms, four company officers, one attached artillery officer, and one attached sergeant from H Company. We had lost all the medics, all the noncoms, three of four company officers, and the artillery observer. And we had lost ninety riflemen. This was, and still is, the most terrible day of my life. The ordeal was beyond human endurance, and I cannot understand how fifty of us survived.

  “On top of the sickening pain of our losses was the nagging bitterness that it probably all could have been prevented if Lieutenant Caldwell, the best FO I ever saw, had been permitted to wipe out the Germans before they could dig in. The losses at G must have been similar to ours. If that armored infantry captain had only been able to read his map, that particular battle would never have taken place.”

  Don Faulkner began that day as an interested observer of the deployment of F and G Companies. “I stood behind Colonel Kenan on the south edge of town as F and G Companies moved out on this field with about 800 yards to cross. They didn’t get very far, perhaps a couple of hundred yards, when all hell broke loose. I described the artillery time fire as little black guppies coming in from the sky just above the men’s heads. I understood time fire because we had worked with it when I was at the artillery school at Fort Sill. It is murderous, and in this case the men were all exposed in an open field. They dug in; they went forward and apparently there were fewer and fewer of them. This could have been like Pickett’s last charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.

  “Colonel Kenan went back to his command post and I got a message. Be ready to attack to go to F Company’s rescue. As we were getting organized, another message said it is going to be too dark for a companywide attack. Use your first platoon.”

  Advised that there would be tanks available, Faulkner met with the platoon in the backyard of the house. “I asked how many had ridden on a tank. Nobody. I said, here is the way you’re going to do it. Stay on the offside and ride behind the turret. Hold on and when the tank slows or comes to a stop, it will turn. Then get on the blind side and proceed from there. We will let you know when to go. The tanks were pulling up when they got a message from the 2d Battalion to call off the attack because it was too dark.”

  Faulkner and his associates returned to the command post until new orders again directed them to aid the beleaguered F and G Companies. Vaguely certain of the location on a map, Faulkner said, “I led the company single file, through a line of tanks and TDs that were acting as artillery. We got out of the woods and headed toward the field where [the GIs] were supposed to be. I talked with them on a radio and said I couldn’t find them and to send a runner. He found us. He was scared stiff but led us across the plain.

  “We found Lieutenant Wilson and Lieutenant Greenlee, who said they had twelve men left, no officers and no sergeants. They didn’t know where G Company was. They had a horrible, horrible day, losing well over a hundred of their men.” For that matter, Faulkner’s own E Company was little more than a shell. He could count no more than fifteen to twenty soldiers in each of his platoons along with three officers.

  The First Army continued to feed in unbloodied troops. On the day after Thanksgiving, Frank South noted that the meager ranks of the 2d Ranger Battalion’s B Company withdrew to the rear bivouac area, where a reorganization that included the reception and training of replacements began. On that same 24 November, platoon leader Jim Wood of the 16th Infantry Regiment noted the arrival of 150 replacements, “fresh from the States and had a whole week to get them ready for combat.”

  Mines, the omnipresent explosive devices, presented a paramount impediment to the progress of the Huertgen offensive. Responsibility for neutralizing the threat lay with such specialized units as the 8th Division’s 12th Engineer Battalion. Its B Company drew the task of clearing the roadway between Germeter and Huertgen of any mines that blocked the deployment of tanks. Platoon leader Mike Cohen, an “ancient,” thirty-four-year-old OCS graduate, had become an army engineer, because a clerk filling out his enlistment papers, noting a 1935 degree in English from Colby College, jotted down the abbreviation “Eng.,” which subsequent classification personnel interpreted as engineer. Fortuitously, in civilian life Cohen had prospected for gold in the Mojave Desert, where he became proficient with explosives, a valuable skill in the engineer trade.

  According to Cohen, the men of the 12th Combat Engineer Battalion brought uncommon skills to the task of disabling mines. “Back in Camp Forrest, somebody gave me a German field manual with pictures, descriptions, instructions on every German mine then in use. It was written in German, but we had a man named Schleiser, a German-born American who had been a cabinetmaker in civilian life. With a couple of helpers, Schleiser made wooden duplicates of every mine, right down to the igniters with safety pins. Then, with several copies of every mine we held a ‘country fair’ training procedure, booths set up with mines laid out for the men to handle, explore, become familiar with. The instructors behind the booths were changed over and over again, so that every man in the company was at one time or another instructing on every mine. We then moved out from our company to the others in the battalion, and when Division found out what we were doing, we went to the infantry I&R platoons and ran our dog and pony show for them.

  “All the time we were in the States, all the time we were in Northern Ireland,” recalled Cohen, “the infantry ignored us. This all changed as soon as we got into Normandy. They never made a move without getting the engineers in there first.” From Cohen and his cohorts, the foot soldiers demanded safe passage through the ubiquit
ous schus, Bouncing Betties, Tellers, and boobys. “Sometimes,” continued Cohen, “they told us where they planned to go tomorrow morning and would we clear a path for them tonight? I remember a time outside of Brest [a savage campaign] when we were passing the infantry front lines to get to a hedgerow to blast an opening so tanks could accompany the foot soldiers. It was dark and rainy, and I heard an infantryman say to his buddy, ‘Boy, look at those engineers going up there in the dark. I wouldn’t change places with those guys.’ After we had done our job, as we came back through that same infantry front line position, I heard one of my guys say, ‘Boy, look at those infantry sitting up here in those holes in the rain all night. I wouldn’t change places with those guys.’”

  By the time he reached the Huertgen Forest, the euphoria of a Jewish high holy day celebration in early September had faded. Cohen said, “I had a very clear notion of what was ahead of us. We replaced the 28th Division, and they moved into our positions in Luxembourg. I talked to some of their advance people when they came to Hosingen, and they, badly bloodied from Schmidt, left nothing out. Then I was part of our own advance party to Germeter, and I got more of the same. I didn’t really know where I was. Sure, it was the Huertgen Forest, but where the hell was that. Of course, it didn’t really matter. When I was told I would be responsible for clearing the road from Germeter to Huertgen, I assumed it was very important, and I had no doubt that the people giving the orders knew what they were doing.”

  On the morning of 24 November, Cohen led his people on their mission. “Everything was quiet. I ordered my first squad to clear the booby traps and antipersonnel mines off the trees the Germans had strewn across the road. The second squad was ordered to clear the hundreds and hundreds of mines off the surface of the road. The third squad was to fill in the holes in the road so vehicles could travel safely. Together, we would move the big trees off to the sides.

  “The most worrisome part of the project was that the road had been subjected to many days of artillery fire. The mines—most of them antivehicular types—had taken a pounding. Some had blown. But most were still there, but not intact. Had their shear pins been partially severed? Would the touch of a man’s finger set them off? We didn’t have time to explode each mine in place, the field manual way. We had to take our chances.

  “Thinking nobody was watching me disobey my own rules, I tested a mine, lifted it, carried it gingerly to the ditch at the side of the road. I tried another. One of the sergeants saw me, tried himself. Some of the men saw us. The sloppy technique spread. We moved up the road breaking all the rules.

  “We came to the bend in the road, just before the tank ditch. Now the enemy was awake. I saw a German raising his rifle to take aim at me and heard at the same time the crack of the rifle of one of my guys, and I saw the German fall. Now, all hell broke out, and I scooted to the ditch on the far side of the road. One of my men, Bill Sobieski, was out ahead of me with a mine detector. I hollered for him to slide back past me. Mine detector men do not carry rifles because of the metallic interference. A German ran across the road to get a shot at us, but I was lying there, ready, and I shot him. A second and a third came across the road about forty feet away, and I shot them like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery. They were firing machine guns from a hiding place somewhere off to my left now. Next would be mortars. We had only our rifles. Mine-clearing exercises were over for the day. I sent the word, ‘Let’s go home, fellas.’ Mortar fire and then howitzers followed us back. The score: German casualties at least four, ours zero.

  “We had no sooner got back to the cement-ceilinged basements of Germeter than a tremendous artillery barrage began. The explosions were continuous, not just one at a time but solid, endless noise. Sitting opposite me were a couple of infantry replacements, just arrived, a couple of kids. They were weeping with uncontrollable terror. For two or three hours, we sat there in the fury and watched the two kids slowly crumble as the ground shook and powdered cement drifted down from the walls and ceilings.

  “At a meeting later that afternoon, I was reminded that the Germeter-Huertgen road still belonged to me. The infantry was going to try to secure the road bend, and then I would have to finish getting it cleared. But that evening I was told that the infantry efforts had failed; they would try again tomorrow. I was told I could wait till tomorrow to do the clearing. If I waited, I would be out there with my men in the midst of a firefight in broad daylight. My men would be slaughtered and the job would not get done. I decided to take advantage of the present lull and try to sneak a squad of men out under cover of darkness and bitch it out.” As an incentive, the commander of the 12th, Lt. Col. Edmond Fry, promised Cohen a pass to Paris as soon as the road was sanitized. “It was the kindest thing that gruff son of a bitch had ever said to me in the three years I’d known him.

  “With about a dozen men, I moved quickly up the half mile to the place where we’d left off earlier. We came to the tank ditch, climbed across on a dead tank that straddled it. It was raining, bone-chilling cold, and eerily quiet. We groped along not knowing quite how far we were going nor what we would find when and if we got there. We came to a shattered barbed wire fence, the kind the Germans put up on their side of the minefield to keep their own people from wandering in. I assumed that this was as far as I needed to go, that the road ahead was clear.

  “Just to make sure, we continued, oh so cautiously, forward. Then the clouds shifted. I saw the outlines of houses, heard German voices. If they saw us they must have assumed we were also Germans. Nothing happened. I tapped the man in front of me [Pvt. Archie Stewart] on the shoulder, told him to swing his mine detector around, and head back. There were three of us at that point in our little parade, and we walked in silence, folding back on the rest of our guys and reversing our march.

  “When we reached the ditch, I asked the mine detector man if the ditch had been checked. He said he didn’t know but he’d check to make sure. But the edge of the hole was not firm, as we had believed; it was soft and crumbly. He started to slide in and I tried to catch him. But I was too late. He slid onto a mine, which killed him and hit me with a scattering of shrapnel. As I fell, a second mine exploded, which blew over me and killed Pvt. Merle Mallard, the man behind me.

  “Now the enemy was alerted and with machine guns zeroed in earlier, they let us have it. My right leg was broken, but I hopped on the other leg, climbed across the ditch on the tank, and then was hit in the same leg by a spray of bullets, one of which is still in there. My belly was torn open, a couple of fingers were shattered, and I had pieces of metal embedded all over my face. Sergeant Bellestri and his guys got me back to the infantry front line headquarters.

  “I reported to [Captain John R.] “Bill” Terry [B Company commander] there that we would need a couple of bays of Treadway bridge [to cover the crater]. Bill had a new lieutenant beside him, and by protocol he should have inherited my platoon. But this was no place for a rookie, and besides, Captain Terry was just too jawgritting mad to let the opportunity get away from him and he took over himself. Bill was shot in the chest and in the leg for his troubles. Bill was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for that action. Another DSC went to a wild young private named Potter. In addition to the medal, Potter got the pass to Paris promised to me by Colonel Fry. I had a week in a Paris hospital as part of my thirteen months of convalescence.”

  14

  DEEPER INTO THE WOODS

  From Schevenhutte, elements of the 47th Infantry, 9th Division, pushed north to overrun the dairy at Bovenberg and, beyond that difficult assignment, take on the task of aiding the drive of the 104th Division through the Stolberg corridor. Buttressed by units from the 3d Armored Division, the 47th was to secure the hamlets of Hucheln, Wilhelmshohe, and a particularly prickly outpost, Frenzerburg Castle. The strategy envisioned a linkup with the 104th Division, which would cross the Inde River on the way to the Roer.

  The effort that began on Thanksgiving saw a battalion from the 47th ravaged by entrenched German
machine guns and bigger weapons. It was not until 24 November that Hucheln fell, and then the next day Wilhelmshohe, although in both instances, the support of tanks lagged because of soft ground, mines, and antitank guns. Attention shifted to the Frenzerburg objective, a fortified castle redolent of knighthood during the Middle Ages. It overlooked an open area and jeopardized any advance in its vicinity.

  Chester Jordan, 3d Platoon leader with Company K of the 47th, and his closest associates believed that having endured the Bovenberg battle, they were to enter corps reserve “and have a few days out of sight and shot of the Germans.” The expected deliverance from combat vanished almost immediately. Jordan was informed that the 2d Battalion of the regiment would be making an attack and needed his company “to go out and be a spectator on their left flank while they got the job done. It’s a piece of cake, a stroll in the sun, and you’ll be back for a good dinner.”

  Ignorant of the objective for the 2d Battalion, the eighty men of Company K entered an area marked by sugar beet fields with train tracks running through it. Jordan said he glanced over the rail line and spied a column of German soldiers, their greatcoats flapping in the wind, headed in the opposite direction. “It was the Ninth Army’s sector, but I knew nothing of their troop locations. These Germans seemed to think they did. It is not encouraging to see the enemy going toward your rear, even if you have a rail line between you.”

  The promised piece of pastry quickly turned prickly. “Everything in the world hit us, mortar, 40mm ack-ack, MG, and some things I couldn’t identify. We were in a fishbowl and everyone was looking down our throat.” The troops found some refuge in a deep drainage ditch with weeds, bushes, even small saplings.