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

by Gerald Astor

  The American campaign through the Huertgen Forest to the Roer paused during the last week of 1944 and well into January of the new year. Although the German thrust in the Ardennes stalled after its first week of gains, it was not until the end of month that the First Army, aided by the timely intercession of the Third Army under Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., felt secure enough to resume its quest to cross the Roer en route to the Rhine.

  However, before directing Courtney Hodges to go on the offensive, Eisenhower, as supreme commander, insisted upon seizure of the Roer dams rather than risk inundation of the American forces. The GIs overran the towns of Konzen, Bickerath, Am Gericht, and Imgenbroich, along with nests of bunkers that succumbed to British-manned Crocodile tanks equipped with flamethrowers. Stiffening opposition at Huppenbroich and Eicherscheid eroded the U.S. forces, but the troops achieved their objectives.

  Once again, 78th Division soldiers advanced upon Kesternich, which the enemy had held since it killed, captured, or drove out the GIs who occupied the fringes of the town in mid-December. On this occasion, the Lightning Division was an element in the Ninth U.S. Army. The strategists blocked out a script in minute detail, with specific buildings designated for particular rifle squads in the attacking 2d Battalion of the 311th Infantry.

  The soldiers jumped off at 5:30 A.M. on 30 January. Almost immediately, the carefully made plans fell apart. Snow obliterated vital landmarks. The Shermans from the 736th Tank Battalion skidded and slipped on the frozen ground. Mines disabled some, while direct fire knocked out a pair. The armor could not keep pace with the foot soldiers, who became wary of their mechanized companions after the exploding mines injured those around the tanks.

  Despite the glitches and the intense enemy resistance, by 9 A.M. Americans entered several houses for the torturous ordeal of a house-to-house battle against a well-dug-in foe. The fighting continued into the night, and the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Richard W. Keyes, later commented, “The battle had lost its coordination and the fighting become piecemeal. It was very difficult to pick out specific buildings indicated on the sketch. Most of them had either been demolished completely or had lost their form. Many elements in the companies were scattered and difficult to control. The tank-infantry coordination was not favorable. The tanks seemed to expect the infantry to lead them and the infantry was prone to wait for the tanks.”

  Colonel Chester M. Willingham, the regimental CO, admonished Keyes to “keep pushing. [The troops are moving] too slow.” He told the battalion leader not to hesitate to commit his reserve tank platoon. Problems of poor communication between armor and infantry persisted. The telephone mounted in the rear of a tank to enable a ground pounder to talk with those inside was frequently inoperable or torn away by shell fire. Frustrated infantrymen pounded on the turret or even covered the periscope in order to get the attention of the tankers.

  In the Company E spearhead, SSgt. Jonah E. Kelley, a twenty-one-year-old from West Virginia, led a squad. They engaged the Germans hidden in the houses. Wounded by mortar fragments that rendered his left hand virtually useless, Kelley insisted on continuing after the application of a bandage. Because of his injury, he fired his rifle by laying it across one arm instead of from the crook of the shoulder or from the hip.

  Held up by fire from one house, Kelley rushed the building and killed the three defenders, enabling his companions to advance. He managed to shoot down a sniper in an upstairs window with a single shot and drop another soldier running from a cellar. The squad took a defensive position for the night, and in the morning, as they continued deeper into Kesternich, they encountered heavy automatic weapons fire. The sergeant artfully maneuvered around the rubble until he saw a machine pistol firing from the concealment of a haystack. Accurate work with his M1 ended the threat.

  An American mortar squad attempted to squelch another machine gun nest farther down the street, but the German fire wounded as many as a dozen men. Kelley rushed the position, whose gunner trained the weapon on him from behind a wall. Hit by several bullets, the sergeant, with his final breaths, managed to empty three rounds through a hole in the barricade, snuffing out the enemy soldier. A posthumous Medal of Honor went to Kelley’s mother. Kesternich itself fell after the second day of furious fighting, which reduced every single one of its 112 houses to rubble.

  Following the bloody successes culminating with the capture of Kesternich, Clarence Huebner, elevated to commander of the V Corps, emphasized the urgent need for the 78th, now returned to the First Army, to capture the major dams. The pressure on Huebner emanated from Eisenhower through Bradley and Hodges. He assigned CCR of the 7th Armored Division and an extra battalion of combat engineers and bolstered the artillery.

  Hodges, determined to end the campaign swiftly, brought on additional forces. He inserted the 82d Airborne Division into the Huertgen with the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, a regular component of the 82d, and the 517th Parachute Infantry Combat Team, a formerly independent regiment. Both outfits, designated Task Force A, possessed considerable combat experience and had been rushed successfully into the Ardennes to confront the mid-December penetration.

  Major General James M. Gavin, the CG of the 82d Airborne, unlike most of the other division commanders, undertook a personal tour of the territory in which he would operate. “I went to the town of Vossenack on reconnaissance. I found no enemy and, having gone through the town by jeep, reached the trail that crossed the Kall River valley. Accompanied by the division G-3, Col. John Norton, and Sergeant [Walker] Wood, I started down the trail. It was really a reconnaissance, since I did not know what the lay of the land would be, and what, if any, enemy might still be there. Our orders for the following day were to attack across the Kall River valley from Vossenack and seize the town of Schmidt. By now, most of the snow had melted; there was only a small patch here and there under the trees.

  “I proceeded down the trail on foot. It was obviously impassable for a jeep; it was a shambles of wrecked vehicles and abandoned tanks. The first tanks that attempted to go down the trail [the 707th Tank Battalion with the 28th Division] had evidently slid off and thrown their tracks. In some cases, the tanks had been pushed off the trail and toppled down the gorge among the trees. Between where the trail begins outside of Vossenack and the bottom of the canyon, there were four abandoned tank destroyers and five disabled and abandoned tanks. … All along the sides of the trail there were many, many dead bodies, cadavers that had just emerged from the winter snow. Their gangrenous, broken, and torn bodies were rigid and grotesque, some of them with arms skyward, seemingly in supplication. They were wearing the red keystone of the 28th Infantry Division.”

  As he continued down the pathway, he came upon a demolished stone bridge. “Nearby were dozens of litter cases, the bodies long dead. Apparently, an aid station had been established near the creek, and in the midst of the fighting it had been abandoned, many of the men dying on their stretchers.” The scene matches the account of Bill Peña’s November experiences with the 109th Infantry.

  In pursuit of their assignment, the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment troopers wended their way over the same trail. They were en route to the objective of Kommerscheidt, site of the slaughter of the 28th Division GIs retreating from Schmidt three months earlier. Sergeant Bill Dunfee echoed Gavin, “The area became known to us as ‘Death Valley.’ There were trucks, tanks, jeeps, trailers, tank destroyers, bumper to bumper and all shot to hell. I had been exposed to the carnage of war in four airborne operations—Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and Holland—but I never saw anything that could compare. Freshly killed troops in various stages of dismemberment are gruesome enough for the average stomach. But these men had been through a freeze and thaw. They had lain there since November, and their flesh had rotted and was peeling from the skeletons. Some were in litters. I hoped they were killed outright and not abandoned to freeze to death. There was complete silence in our column, each man handling this horror in his own way. For me, it was the most shocking sing
le experience of the war. If anyone needed an incentive to fight, this gave him ample reason.”

  The other parachute outfit, the 517th, had moved from quarters in Stavelot, Belgium, one of the key towns in the Battle of the Bulge, to Honsfeld for duty under the 82d Airborne. It occupied a blocking position, while the 325th Glider Infantry, fighting on foot, attacked its objectives. On 3 February, the 517th shifted to the control of the 78th Infantry Division, headquartered in Simmerath for assignment in the attack aimed at Schmidt and the Schwammenauel Dam.

  Knowing that Schmidt, perched on a ridge that overlooked the Schwammenauel Dam and its reservoir, served as the key to control, and aware of the misfortunes of the 28th Division when it tried to advance through the Kall River gorge, Lightning Division CG Parker aimed his forces to strike from the south. He left the Kall River approach from the northwest for Gavin’s 505th. The 517th would attack from Bergstein, northeast in a “diversion” to prevent a concentration of enemy troops around Schmidt.

  The opening gambit, on 3 February, called for an attack by GIs of the 78th to sanitize the territory south of the reservoir, which involved crossing a narrowed Roer and seizing Dedenborn, a tiny village atop high ground. Ordinarily, at this time of the year, the frigid waters of the Roer ran slowly but thawed snows created an icy torrent. Two platoons of riflemen from the 1st Battalion of the 311th Infantry struggled through the chest-deep stream, losing more than a dozen men to drowning or gunfire. However, the two officers and thirty-one enlisted men who clambered up the eastern bank, although bereft of many of their weapons, entered Dedenborn, where, fortunately, no one resisted. The 311th’s 3d Battalion encountered more numerous enemy troops as it pursued the objective due east of Kesternich, but the opposition yielded readily.

  Two days later, the final push began, with the 309th and 310th Regiments advancing through the rain on Schmidt. The first Germans encountered gave up without a struggle; more than 100 surrendered without a shot. At this point, however, the offensive halted while engineers scoured the roads for mines. An impatient Huebner, hectored by Hodges, widened the front with orders for the 9th Division to ford the Roer near the Urft Dam. The move would forestall any reinforcement from the east to the defenders. The GIs of Gen. Louis Craig streamed across the river and quickly established a block against the Germans.

  At the same time, Huebner ordered Parker not to delay further and instructed him to cross the Roer at Roerberg, seize a lesser dam, the Paulushof, and the forested high ground in the vicinity. Parker designated the 311th Regiment for the assignment. Once again, haste wasted lives without reward. Enemy mortars, registered on Roerberg, fell with deadly accuracy. The first half dozen shells hit someone, killing at least seven men, including a pair of war correspondents, and wounding the battalion commander and other key officers. Enemy observers overlooked the site chosen for fording the river and reconnaissance determined the waters ran far too swiftly for the GIs to wade across or bridge them. Huebner cancelled the ill-timed operation.

  Parker and Huebner renewed the push toward Schmidt, with the 310th passing through the two other 78th Division regiments. A welter of instructions confused the officers and men at the front with no clear direction to any specific unit. The darkness of the 5 February night forced a halt. In another poorly thought out plan, the 1st and 2d Battalions of the 310th passed through the ranks of the 309th on their way to assault a fortified barracks in Schmidt. The infantrymen moved out at 3 A.M. on 6 February in total darkness with predictable consequences. The soldiers, unable to distinguish their locations, blundered about, falling into abandoned foxholes and shell holes. Seven hours after they started out, they had advanced less than 500 yards and narrowly escaped destruction as they repulsed a strong enemy counterattack. Greatly displeased, Huebner visited Parker to vent his displeasure.

  William Sylvan at First Army headquarters reported on 6 February, “Gen. [Hodges] was not too well satisfied with the progress made during the day toward Schmidt. The area was heavily mined and pillboxes strongly defended. Gen. nevertheless felt with all the strength we had in that area, greater gains should have been made. Tonight forward troops advanced in the vertical grid 3,000 yards toward the town. The 517th Parachute Infantry, which attacked south in the vicinity of Bergstein, ran into heavy minefields and small-arms fire; at the end of day made only 800 yards not yet up to the Kall River.”

  The 8th Division occupied the village of Bergstein after the 2d Ranger Battalion drove the enemy from Hill 400. In the strategy devised by the V Corps with the 78th Division’s Parker, the 517th PRCT relieved the foot soldiers in Bergstein for the final assault on Schmidt. Dick Robb, sergeant major of the 517th’s 3d Battalion, described the 13th Infantry Regiment that the troopers replaced as “in the worst condition of morale one could imagine. The Germans had them completely cowed. At dusk, Jerry moved up close to the town into trenches and sniped at even the slightest movement. At dawn, they moved back to a wooded area and covered the GIs with rifle and mortar fire.

  “Several of us entered a house overlooking the enemy positions. Outside lay a body, a GI. I asked how long he had been there. An officer told us, ‘several days.’ We learned there were a number of dead that couldn’t be recovered because of the situation. We were told the troops were fed only twice a day, after dark in the evening and before dawn of the next day.”

  The 517th’s march toward the Roer dams began badly when regimental CO, Col. Rupert Graves, arrived at Bergstein and immediately sought to reconnoiter the area. Observing the activity, German gunners began dropping shells into Bergstein, which led to protests from the 8th Division GIs. Their commander started to scold Graves, who tartly responded that he could hardly be expected to launch an attack without adequate reconnaissance. The 8th’s CG accepted the explanation but insisted Graves should consider himself severely reprimanded.

  The 2d and 3d Battalions were to head out at night, cross the steep ravine down to the twenty-foot-wide Kall, wade through the frigid water, and seize control of the high ground overlooking the road to Schmidt. Aside from the firepower, including artillery and mortars, that could be brought down on them, the troopers knew they would contend with a huge minefield.

  According to Tom R. Cross, son of the commander of the 121st Infantry and a captain in the 517th, who subsequently investigated the sequence of events, the strategists in charge were well aware that a frontal assault toward Schmidt invited disaster. In fact, the plan envisioned that while the 517th would preoccupy the major German forces, other U.S. units would swing around the defenders and envelop Schmidt. Unfortunately, instead of instructing the troopers to feint and thus distract the foe, they were told to confront and engage the enemy.

  At the headquarters of the 82d Airborne, Rupert Graves was informed by the top intelligence and operations officers of the futility of the role assigned to the 517th. Said the 517th’s Tom Cross, “Mel Zais [3d Battalion CO] went to the 121st Infantry Regiment of the 8th Division, which was commanded by my father, Col. Thomas J. Cross. My father, who lost a lot of men trying to dislodge the Germans from Bergstein, gave Mel all the details based on his experience in the area. He told Mel that the 517th was facing an impossible task and urged him to relay that to the headquarters committing the 517th to the task. Mel said it was too late. The timetable for the operation would not permit a change.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Dick Seitz, the 2d Battalion leader, criticized the operation as a classic series of errors. “High echelon strategists can work from a map and aerial photos, but it is an axiom of military operations that battalions or companies should never advance without first-hand knowledge of the terrain. We never had an opportunity to make a foot recon. The plan called for a night attack, which makes the need for good recon, enabling one to recognize terrain features, even more imperative. The plan said we were to advance with the two battalions abreast. We were unable to properly rehearse the operation. The book calls for adequate planning, rehearsals, and to proceed on a narrow front. We violated all of these a
nd jumped off right on schedule.

  “I did take out my battalion in a column of companies, which is a narrow front. I thought things were going well, when I learned the 3d Battalion was held up by heavy machine gun fire. They were now holding their position, waiting for artillery fire. We had started without initial arty [artillery] prep to gain the element of surprise.

  “My battalion, with [Capt.] George Giuchici of F Company in the lead, continued forward. Suddenly, from the direction of the 3d Battalion, the enemy counterattacked in force. At the same time, the Germans lit up the night with flares; it was like daylight. The enemy cut across between my command group and the 2d Platoon of F Company. I was behind them with the 3d Platoon. Good old George, bless his heart, a great soldier, kept going. I realized that the 3d Battalion was not on line with me, leaving my flank exposed. I ordered a halt and to repel the counterattack.”

  Private First Class Myrle Traver, toting a BAR, was part of F Company. “In the early afternoon, someone brought word they had found an abandoned cabin. At last, a warm place where we could cook and eat. Joe Martin, Wayne (Willie) Gibbon, Elio Masianti, and I sat and talked after our meal. Word came we were to go at 10 P.M. Boy! We hated to leave that warm place and go out into the snow.

  “I remember putting the little white strips of plastic on the backs of our helmets. The strips were fluorescent and would shine at night so we could see the man in front. We moved out and started crawling, keeping in line by following the tape strung out by engineers. Machine guns and flares kept me scared to death. Just keep crawling on the belly, flares and guns flashing, but just keep going. We finally got through the minefield and were moving up and down mountain trails. Sometimes we would fall behind, then play catch up, so as not to lose sight of the white spot on the helmet ahead.

  “After some time, I looked back. No one was following. We just kept moving. I ended up in a foxhole with Lieutenant [Warren] Caufield. He told me to keep down. About then, two German officers walked up. Caufield raised up his folding carbine and shot both Germans from about a three-foot range.