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

by Gerald Astor

  “When the shells started to fall, I guess A Company became disorganized and B Company received the juicy honors. Like a lot of other times it was, ‘Okay, Second Platoon, take the lead.’ I think I had a Lieutenant [James] Foster at that time. He called for his squad leaders and asked, ‘Where will you be, Nick?’ ‘I will be wherever you want me to be, with you, in the middle of the platoon, or in the rear of the platoon pushing the men on and on.’ Most of the time I was just behind the 2d Squad, directing and leading comrades, patching up wounded, cradling the dying. We no sooner jumped off when the shelling increased and the enemy machine guns started spraying. Lieutenant Foster and the first two rifle squads took out one or perhaps the second one.

  “Captain [Robert C.] Bland [the acting S-3 of the battalion] said we had 35 to 40 percent casualties. For awhile I thought I was the platoon medic. It was quite cold; I thought it to be about 10 degrees above. It got cold enough to start freezing my feet and legs. (After the war I learned I have very small arteries and veins, which causes this.) We dug in and were motionless for at least two days, when a runner from the CP—Lieutenant Foster was acting CO—said, ‘Tschida, form your platoon. Make sure all rifles are working, et cetera, go up and see what’s going on.’ This was about December 5 or 6. So, it was fix bayonets, check your bolts and ammunition, and be ready for action. I chose Stu Persinger as my scout. He and I would run the program. I was the platoon leader, without the promotion to lieutenant.

  “We had only gone about 100 yards when the big shells started to rain down on us, taking some toll on the platoon. We were not near any foxholes, so we had to hug the ground the best we could. Shortly, the CO called to cancel the program and move back to our original starting point. While the shells got bigger and bigger, the men got to some shelter as best they could.

  “During the two days, while sitting still in foxholes most of the time, my feet and legs had become more frozen and navigating with them became impossible. Now, a huge shell landed between Sgt. Champ Montgomery and me, as well as the other 1st Squad members. It took care of Montgomery’s hearing and damn near amputated my left arm at the shoulder. A large shell fragment, red hot, dug a hole two inches from my shoulder then bounded away to land sizzling in the snow.

  “Trying to get about my duties, my legs failed me, and I asked Sgt. Bill Grant to take over while I trudged and crawled to the medic station a short distance behind us. Not realizing that the shell blast took a toll on my equilibrium, I kept falling down a lot. Two medics helped me into the station, sat me down right next to the pot-bellied stove, and gave me the ‘Blue 88’ [morphine injection] that put me out of the war right quick. A few days later, I came round to find myself in a temporary schoolhouse hospital. They would ship me to a hospital in England, and after nearly three months and almost having one leg taken off, I was released.” His war was over, although it took him a year and a half to obliterate the nightmares.

  Clifford Lamb served as a member of a mortar squad with Company B in the 46th AIB. He described the Huertgen as “a dark, brooding, evergreen forest. Now, in late November, the trees dripped with the incessant rains. Blanketed by fog in the short winter days, it was shrouded by blackness in the long winter nights.”

  Like those who had gone before him, Lamb gaped at the shredded trees, the mud-stuck vehicles, “the German and American soldiers [who] still lay where they had fallen.” His column paused in the woods before Kleinhau as the half-tracks edged off the road around the corpse of a German soldier sprawled beside the pathway. “The platoon leader called out, ‘Once you are on the ground, don’t move around. The place is booby trapped.’ Hardly had this been said [when], as one GI moved forward, a Bouncing Betty he had stepped on jumped waist high behind him. Seeing it, I yelled, ‘Hit the ground!’ Had the second charge exploded, yelling would have been too late. We all were yet to live for the next day’s battle.”

  On foot, the armored infantry advanced to the edge of a firebreak that led to a clearing before Kleinhau. Said Lamb, “The firebreak had been churned into raw mud by tank treads. Teller mines removed by engineers were piled by the sides of the firebreak. Weasels, tracked ammunition carriers, now worked their way forward through the firebreak.

  “Heavy barrages of U.S. artillery thundered overhead in an attempt to blast out the enemy wherever he was. The German artillery was more precise. It knew where we were. Round after round shrieked down the firebreak, bursting somewhere behind us. We hugged the ground and waited. Some medics appeared saying they needed help in evacuating wounded in the open field ahead. I, with others, went with them, but upon arriving at the edge of the woods, the medics took a look at the intense small-arms fire and decided there was not any way we could get the wounded out without getting hit ourselves. The wounded would have to wait.

  “Riflemen [forward of Lamb’s mortar squad] began bringing in surrendering Germans from dug-in positions in front of Kleinhau. With hands clasped behind their heads, they stumbled forward with exhaustion embedded in their dark faces, undoubtedly fearing that they might not yet survive the lethal fire erupting around them. At times like this, GIs occasionally remarked, ‘They are lucky. I wish I could go back as an American prisoner too!’”

  The open field in front of the town became a pitiless killing ground. Wounded from both sides, Americans and Germans unable to continue to resist, staggered, stumbled, and crawled toward the firebreak. The German artillery zeroed in on the opening, but the only chance for an injured man to survive was through that passageway to the rear.

  Lamb noted, “Some didn’t make it. I dove for the ground as an incoming shell exploded beside a hobbling GI heading for the firebreak entry. He twisted around and collapsed on the ground. I yelled ‘Medic!’ and hunched low moving quickly forward. The wounded continued to stream past us. One seemed unhurt. I asked him why he was leaving the field. He took off his helmet, showed where a bullet had gone in and out on one side, and then pointed to the long groove on the side of his head.

  “Having once read that one GI survived shelling in North Africa by crawling along the ground in the several-inches-deep tank track groove, I did the same. I worked my way from shell hole to shell hole, never being willing to believe that I wouldn’t make it. I could only think that this had to be a devil’s football game and what could be so wrong that men had to kill each other.”

  A small artillery spotter plane appeared overhead and seemed to promise pinpointed artillery fire that would blast the big guns of the foe. But the Germans continued to torment the American troops with a steady rain of ordnance. The cries for medics did not slacken, and wounded steadily struggled to reach safety.

  Lamb and some associates achieved the first line of houses at the edge of the village, and they huddled behind a building. “A German gunner, who perhaps really knew his field of fire, sent an artillery shell between the two houses, and it exploded beside the group. Miraculously, I was not hit. We yelled for medics. This time we lost our mortar gunner, Lou Napolitano, who had taken a shell fragment in the leg.”

  Jim Carnivale, a native of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who had joined the National Guard while in high school, was a machine gunner with Company B of the 46th Armored Infantry. In the battle for Kleinhau, he recalled, “We were strictly infantry, foot sloggers. My captain told me to get another platoon up to reinforce what we had. Artillery shells were coming in like rain. I looked at him and he knew what I was thinking. I wasn’t about to go out in that barrage. ‘Wait till it cools off,’ he said. When it did, we all moved out and that’s when I got hit. I ran for a trench the Germans had dug. I knew it was there because I saw it as we went by.

  “In the trench was the 2d Platoon. ‘Where’s the 3d?’ I asked. That was the one wanted by my captain. ‘Back on the road,’ I was told. I followed the trench back, and as I went around a jut in it, I spotted a German soldier. I pulled back. Nothing! Gingerly, I peeked around that jut and saw a dead German who had shoveled out the side of the trench for protection. I am sure he was a
victim of time fire, a shell burst above the ground.

  “I started off again and the trench ended. I came up above ground and ran for the ditch alongside the road. There was a medic with no bandages or morphine, or nothing. He was trying to carry a GI wounded in both legs. We sat him on my rifle and started to carry him back across a wide open field. One of our jeep drivers saw us and brought us to the aid station.

  “Mine was not a severe wound. The medics took care of the badly hurt ones first. But after they treated me, I went back to Paris and was out of action for nine weeks before I returned to my outfit in Herleen, Holland, the same place we had left to go to the forest.”

  Kleinhau yielded, and for the night, the GIs from Lamb’s company fell back to the woods to regroup but without further harassment from enemy artillery. In the morning, B Company set out for the area beyond Kleinhau with the mortar squad formed into riflemen. They passed through the village where buildings still burned from the previous day’s battle.

  “On a forested hillside, through the trees, we came upon large bomb craters filled with the wounded, some with waxy faces having turned yellow [because] of the loss of blood. They were waiting for nightfall to come, so they could be safely evacuated by ambulances over the daylight-exposed roads. Alarmed by our apparent lack of caution, they yelled to us to ‘keep low,’ that there were snipers around.

  “Here on this steep wooded hillside, we moved into shallow foxholes, apparently evacuated by some of the wounded whom we had seen shortly before. There was no enemy fire as we dug the holes deeper into the dirt and shale, fearful that the enemy fire could start any moment. None did. Nevertheless, remembering the intense artillery fire the day before, many of us continued to dig deeper through the night.” Lamb did not quit excavating until his head was below ground where he sat.

  The outfit was scheduled to jump off in an attack across a small valley on the following day. But the order to move out never came. “Suddenly, the hillside erupted in a rain of artillery fire with shrapnel screaming in all directions. The slope of the hill and our position on it made us the victims of plunging artillery fire, the worst. I clenched my teeth and hunched as low as I could, thankful that I had dug the hole as deep as I had.

  “Finally, the barrage lifted. It had devastated our positions. The wounded began struggling up the hill to whatever help and safety they could find. Seeing some would not make it without help, some of us left the safety of our foxholes and helped the badly wounded to get to the top of the hill and on into the basement first-aid station in Kleinhau.”

  The battered company staggered backward, hoping to reduce their vulnerability. But the enemy renewed its fusillades, cutting them down in exposed areas. “Nearby,” said Lamb, “a shell exploded in a group of five. They lay there in a heap. None got up. To the unit command, it must have become obvious that we had been cut to pieces and could no longer fight as a unit. The remnants were ordered to the rear and to find our way back to our half-tracks in the woods on the other side of Kleinhau.”

  Alone, or in small groups of two or three, the GIs scrambled toward the vehicles. Lamb passed a pair of soldiers who lay in a ditch where they fell. On his way through the village, he saw “Sherman tanks, standing on the road, side by side, with their 75mm guns roaring and the machine guns raking the woods in preparation for an infantry attack. One by one the exhausted remnants of B Company found their way back to their armored half-tracks in the woods from where we had started. Night came and you could hear the subdued anguishing over lost comrades. This was not the end of the fighting for us, but at this point others would do the fighting.”

  Michael J. DiLeo was a rifleman in the headquarters squad of Company B of the 46th AIB. He echoed the sentiments of tens of thousands of others as he entered the woods on 29 November. “I found the Huertgen Forest to be hell on earth, snow, cold temperatures, mud, dense woods, and an enemy that had all open areas zeroed in by artillery. One day I ended up digging three foxholes. The first one I finished I dug deep enough so a tank could go over. Shortly after completion, we were told to pack up, as we were being relieved by foot infantry. When we got to our next stop, we started digging again. I went down three feet and hit water. Very soon after we were told not to dig, because, come sundown, the enemy would start dropping shells on the area. So, when it got dark, we moved into the woods. There I decided to dig a slit trench instead of a foxhole, making it twelve inches deep, wide enough and long enough to sleep in. But the area was shelled all night. Every time we heard the shells coming, we stopped digging and hit the ground. When I was finished, I got in to sleep, but there wasn’t more than an hour when we were told to get ready, as we were attacking the town.”

  Colonel Burton, as head of the force designated to occupy the high ground, erroneously believed to be in American hands, reached his pinned-down troops and rallied them sufficiently for a successful but bloody assault. The 46th AIB bagged Hill 401 but at excessive cost; nearly half the outfit was rendered unfit for duty because of the wrong information about who occupied the heights.

  Having seized Hill 401, the 46th AIB continued its offensive through the thick woods beyond Kleinhau. Captain Tyler Bland, formerly the CO of B Company in the States and during its first months in combat, received a promotion to the position of S-3. When the leader of C Company went down, Bland was sent to take charge of the unit. As he attempted to organize an assault on German big guns, a shell burst amid the group he was leading. Three men died on the spot and several others were wounded, including Bland, who lost a leg.

  In the same attack, DiLeo, as a member of Company B, recalled the severity of the artillery and mortars that pelted them along with withering machine gun fire after they entered a forested area on their way toward the objective. “First Lieutenant Charles Smith [a pseudonym], the executive officer, had taken over when Captain Bland was promoted. He was a very compassionate man. In training, he never yelled at anybody. I believe he was studying to be a minister. We were shelled all night long, in the dense growth of woods, big tall and short pine trees. Our casualties were very heavy. The battalion lost 40 percent of its strength during this twenty-four-hour period.

  “This day, December 1, we started out behind Company C. They didn’t get too far before we went in. I was in one of the last groups to go out into the open. There were five of us: the commanding officer, Lieutenant Smith; Sergeant Robinson, the radioman, had a forty-pound radio strapped on his back; I carried the spare batteries; I was with Jim Carnivali, my tentmate, and a very young boy we called ‘Georgia’ because that’s where he was from.

  “Ahead of us was a very large open area, about the size of several football fields. We came upon a fire trench about eighteen feet wide and four feet deep. We crossed it, then saw dirt kick up in front of us. We figured a sniper, and about five yards further lay a large German artillery pit. We made a run for the pit, and the front of it seemed like it was out of the sniper’s sight. We were all crouched in a corner and all was quiet. Then the CO called out, ‘DiLeo, go back and tell Colonel Burton [the 46th AIB CO] we need medics.’

  “I was stunned. I said to myself, ‘Why not use the radio? But if I don’t go, I am in trouble. If I do go, the sniper will get me. If I run fast and zigzag, he might miss.’ So I jumped out and zigzagged to the fire trench. I decided to head north in the trench and, right after an artillery barrage, jump out and run toward the woods we started from. But as I was walking in the trench, I ran into three or four medics walking toward me. The medical sergeant told me they were coming to take care of the wounded. I said I was on my way to tell Colonel Burton to send up medics as we had a lot of wounded. The sergeant said all of the medics are covering the area.

  “I turned to go back to my unit. But they were out of the artillery pit and running toward the woods. I joined them just as a barrage started to come in. We all hit the ground. After it let up, we began to get up. The lieutenant saw me and I was about to tell him what I did. But the radio sergeant didn’t get up, and when
Lieutenant Smith saw the radio sergeant down, he said, ‘DiLeo, take the radio off Sergeant Robinson,’ who was out, unconscious, breathing very heavily. But I noticed the lieutenant didn’t stop. He just kept on walking toward the woods. I yelled, ‘Lieutenant, where are you going?’ He didn’t stop and I told Georgia to take the radio while I went after the lieutenant. I caught up with him as he entered the woods and again asked where he was going. The woods there were very dense, visibility was about five feet. Then I heard voices, and I saw a group of at least five German soldiers walking toward us.

  “I said to Lieutenant Smith, ‘You speak German. Tell them to surrender and put their hands up.’ He did, and they were happy to do so. Now we have five prisoners. So what does the lieutenant do? He turns around and heads out of the woods toward where we had started from that morning. Two officers who recognized Lieutenant Smith came out and escorted him in the wooded area from which we had started. Nothing was said to me. I was left to wander.

  “I mixed in with the troops there. A sergeant asked for volunteers to help lay down a phone line. I volunteered. After dark, we went out for a few hours, and during that time we heard one artillery shell coming pretty close. We hugged the ground. When it hit, we felt the earth shake. It turned out to be a dud. We were very lucky. The next day I rejoined my company. A major from battalion came to lead us.”

  On 3 December, when the 83d Division began to move into the forest to relieve the 4th Division, the Ivy Division’s casualties numbered 432 known dead, 255 missing, and more than 3,300 men wounded or injured. The 22d Regiment absorbed the worst drubbing—233 killed, 750 wounded. None of the figures included those disabled by trench foot or diseases.