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

by Gerald Astor

  “Daylight was breaking and we began to move out again. A few hundred yards further, shells from our own artillery landed right among us. Captain Guichici told Caufield to stay with the wounded and for George Flynn and me to follow him. We ran and ran; if you knew Guichici, you knew he could run. He had his drum-type submachine gun in one hand like a pistol and I dragged the BAR. Flynn carried an .03 Springfield sniper rifle. We stumbled onto a young German soldier. He looked to be about thirteen years old. He begged us not to kill him, and Guichici said to bring him along.

  “We reached the area where we were supposed to meet E Company, but there was no one there. We hid in a large shell hole and waited, hoping the infantry would attack on schedule and pick us up. There was no attack during the day. We didn’t know it had been called off. We talked about trying to get back through to our lines that night, but what would our chances be, trying to pass through the minefield. We decided to wait, hoping for the attack the next morning. Again no attack. We heard troops fighting, the sounds getting closer, even heard American troopers cussing and yelling but they fell back. That night two German officers stood talking and smoking right above us. Captain Guichici reached up and touched one of the German’s boots, just to see if he could do it.

  “Later that night, while Guichici was guarding the German kid—we took turns with guard duty at night—Guichici woke me and said the kid was gone. We thought maybe he had crawled out to relieve himself, as we all had done. But he never came back.”

  Clifford Land, also from F Company, recalled, “As soon as the flares died out, many GIs jumped up and ran. The enemy was aware this would occur, so they sprayed the field the second the flares went out. Many were killed or wounded as a result.

  “Concussion from a mortar shell knocked me into a shell hole. I was lying there when I heard my squad leader say, ‘All right, men. Let’s withdraw.’ I rose from that hole and walked off in the direction I faced. It happened I was going the wrong way, into the enemy lines.

  “Because of the concussion, I did not know I was alone and headed in the wrong direction. Nor was I aware I was in a minefield and surrounded by the enemy. I stopped once to rest. After hearing a noise behind me, I looked and saw the unmistakable silhouette of an enemy helmet. I began to run down the hill, came to a river, and took a left turn, which was again the wrong direction. I wandered for three days and nights behind the German lines, laying low during the day, traveling at night, digging frozen turnips from the ground with my bayonet for food.”

  The troopers with Dick Robb had become infuriated by the stiletto-like thrusts of the foe from its well-protected hideouts. “One of their snipers hit one of our guys carrying a plastic water bottle,” recalled Robb. “That did it, those bastards were in no way going to move us. On even a suspicion of movement in their area, every rifle of ours fired into their positions. That night, we tried to attack across the open area toward them. Even with the 596th Engineers, we could not get through their mines. We lost men to mines, even those who went out to get them.”

  Well back in the battalion column marched engineers from the 596th Engineer Company, a component of the 517th, carrying heavy timbers and planks to construct a crude bridge across the Kall. Sergeant Allan Goodman saw the flares illuminate the sky and the incoming fire crash down on anything that moved. Even before dawn, the engineers realized that there was not going to be a river crossing. They discarded their timbers and planks.

  “At midmorning,” said Goodman, “we were asked to clear a path through the minefield. From the town plateau, the ravine, with sides at a forty-five degree or even steeper pitch, sloped down toward the river. The path was to run halfway up on the pitched sides and mines were plentiful, Bouncing Betty and schu mines. They were both trip wire and contact type that lay buried.

  “We were under constant mortar fire, but the steep slopes protected us to a degree. We laid a white tape and cleared a foot-and-a-half path on each side as we went. The distance was several hundred yards or more. To do this, we worked all day and night, about thirty-six hours straight, and I got far enough forward to receive direct fire from a machine gun emplacement. I could see German ambulances evacuating their wounded.

  “On about the third day, one of the 517th men was brought back up the path after he had slipped off and lost a foot. He actually seemed happy, and we actually envied his leaving, foot or no. That evening I was called to battalion headquarters to be briefed for a night attack. A lieutenant asked if the engineers would lead the way on the path. I interrupted to say we weren’t going to be sheep. We had laid the path line and would be close, but we were not point men and we needed both hands to clear mines when needed. The lieutenant didn’t like it, but the senior officer backed me up.

  “That night my squad was split and my corporal, Dave Pierce, took four men and I took four to each side of the ravine. The night was chaos and the infantry never did reach the objective.”

  In the three days that the 517th vainly struggled to pass through the minefields toward Schmidt, the regiment lost more than 200 troopers, about a quarter of its already depleted riflemen complement. Said medic John Chism, “When I finally stood in front of the side selected for our aid station and looked at the endless vista both north and south, I felt like I was looking on Dante’s inferno. I did not see how anyone could survive this punishment. At night, Bergstein-Schmidt had a yellowish cast caused by the continuous use of various types of flares. Big ones from artillery discouraged troop movement. Little flares conveyed messages about attaining an objective or to fire or lift artillery. The terrain constantly absorbed projectiles of every description. It was laced with beautiful but deadly tracer ammunition from small arms. The combination of all this arcing fire provided depth to the hell washing over the pockmarked mud. The ground was chopped and chewed by round after round into a mass of growing craters. The shell holes served as temporary cover when troops were caught in the open. It was temporary because one had to go forward or backward to survive. To stay meant certain injury.

  “From Bergstein down to the river in the approach to Schmidt, there were just so many paths. It was not enough to take a road with shoulders full of mines from friend and foe removed by our engineers. Security had to be provided, because the Germans were adept at letting attackers pass and then sliding their own mines over a previously cleared road.

  “Outside the hovel that served as the CP and aid station was a large bomb crater, which had to be negotiated on entering or leaving the building. The mortar platoon had placed one of its section behind the building and the natural berm of the crater. One of the mortar men, seeing a buddy, climbed up on the berm to talk to his friend. A sniper fired one round, hitting him in the head, tearing a huge gash and exposing the brain.

  “Captain [Daniel] Dickinson [battalion surgeon] and I happened to be at the aid station, a dozen yards away. We had to treat the man where he lay, which meant we were partially exposed. I assisted Dickinson but felt the need to take cover in case the sniper had any more ideas. Dickinson’s attention was undivided. He carried on the examination with the same coolness and devotion to detail as if he were in a stateside hospital. When he finally pronounced the trooper dead, he instructed me how he would like to have him evacuated. He then secured an M1 rifle and went after the sniper. [Dickinson had previously served as an infantryman.] To his dying day he believed he got that sniper. Dickinson never said anything, but I believe he wanted to show any spectators that the care given the dying soldier was available to everyone.” And Dickinson was laboring under added stress, because his normal associate, Doc Plassman (another battalion surgeon), at the insistence of Chism, had been evacuated with a case of lobar pneumonia.

  Clifford Land, after wandering through no-man’s-land, sifted back to the 2d Battalion. “Daylight caught us as we were coming into a clearing at the base of a mountain. A German machine gun opened up and sprayed the entire area. Men ran in every direction, and I made a dive for a foxhole and landed squarely on top of the ba
ttalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Seitz. There were maybe three other men in that hole. I will never forget how mad the lieutenant colonel was, not from me falling on him but because of the situation we were in. He arose from the foxhole and started giving orders. Standing upright, he shouted for every man to gather up all the equipment he could carry and start a withdrawal up the hillside toward our lines. And he walked as straight as any man could up that hill with a string of men following, while bullets flew and mortars fell all around.”

  Russel Brami, with E Company of the 2d Battalion, had been directed to trail the unit’s advance. “Major Dave Armstrong came to me and said, ‘Brami, we’re going back. You lead us.’ There were thirty to fifty guys now behind me. We were all scared shitless. All I could do was walk over the thin path marked by engineer’s tape. It was the scariest moment of the war for me.”

  The trio of Capt. George Guichici, George Flynn, and Myrle Traver of Company F, lost and out of contact with their fellows, their prisoner having vanished, spent the night hoping the attacking troopers would reach them by morning. “About an hour after first light,” said Traver, “we saw troops coming our way and the helmets looked like ours. We didn’t realize that these were German paratrooper helmets, which did not have the drop side like the regular German ones. The brush was so thick in that direction it was hard to be sure, but we thought they were ours. Six heads and guns came over the rim of the crater and then we knew.

  “I asked Guichici, ‘What now?’ He said, ‘To hell with it.’ They wanted to shoot Guichici because they were afraid of his size. But the kid we had taken prisoner was with them and I told him we hadn’t killed him. He was able to talk the others out of killing Guichici.”

  Traver spent sixty-four days as a prisoner of war and his two companions a similar amount of time. Traver and Flynn, separated from the captain, tried to escape with a group of other captives but were caught. Guichici slipped away twice only to be recaptured on both occasions.

  The 1st Battalion initially had been designated as reserve for the assault on Schmidt. After the first day of the abortive attack, the troopers under Major McMahon started out from Hill 400 toward Zerkall on the left flank of the line. For medic Charlie Keen, the days and nights after the sojourn at Stavelot had been devastating. “We would fight all day and just before total dark, the Krauts, with clockwork precision, would counterattack, employing five tanks and a battalion of infantry. You knew exactly what they were going to do without fail. Someone heard our officers talking about General Gavin speaking on the phone to higher headquarters. He was asked about conditions, and he responded he had all five regiments committed [the 505th and 508th PR were part of the operation] and both flanks exposed for several miles, but not to worry since he still had a company of military police in reserve.

  “Around dark one evening, with the snow about a foot deep and still falling lightly, we were subjected to intense, heavy artillery fire, especially to our front. Slim Ford, an old Toccoa [Georgia base] boy, came running back yelling for me to hurry as Doyle Gray had just been hit. I took off full speed as shells were still coming spasmodically, and in the thick woods, a tree burst would get you whether you were in a foxhole or not. The smell of cordite, or whatever the hell they put in besides powder, hung over the place and the air itself was crystallite.

  “No one was in sight since Slim and Gray was on outpost. There were no GIs and, thank God, no Krauts. In what you might call my free flight, I saw all the shattered trees and over to one side a paratrooper in a jumpsuit with his head stuck in the snow. It was Gray. I heard some more shells coming in, and, spotting a small hole near him, I grabbed for his webbing to drag him into the hole with me in one leap. Just as my hand touched his webbing, I spotted an ear on a snow-covered bush and knew instantly that the body I held did not have its head in the snow. There wasn’t any head. Apparently, a large piece of shell had cut or blown it off.

  “The scene will go to my grave with me, but I’ve often thought at least it was quick. An only child, Gray was always looking for some kind of spot in this life where he could find his place. He did and it was the role of a loner, utterly without fear, who had rather kill the Germans than do anything else. The success he achieved was not the vocation you could take home to civilian life and to a worshipping mother. She wrote the captain and any name she could recognize as having been with Doyle. I should have been the one to answer but I didn’t.”

  On the night of 6 February, H and I Companies were caught in the enemy guns amid the minefield. Platoon leader Ludlow Gibbons from I Company, with a mere fifteen troops left from his normal complement of forty, advanced until they reached a clearing. Gibbons remembered, “We [a scout and the lieutenant] walked twenty or thirty yards into the open field in bright moonlight. The scout and I were facing each other, squatting on our haunches, discussing whether to go right or left to skirt the clearing. I glanced up and directly behind the scout a man’s figure appeared. He let out a yell while hitting the scout, who went down. The German ran off to the right as I fired several rounds. I moved back to the head of the column. Moments later the scout showed up.”

  But with their location disclosed, the men from I Company began taking heavy fire. When dawn broke, the enemy opened up with machine guns from two separate emplacements. The CO, Capt. James Birder, sized up the situation as untenable. He directed a retreat, to be aided by troopers from H Company. As Birder and his people gingerly made their way back, a GI stepped off the tape and onto a mine. Birder carefully followed the wounded man’s footsteps and tried to lift him from under his arms. Birder slipped in the snow and sat down on another mine, triggering a second explosion. Both of the badly injured men were carried some two miles to the nearest aid station, where they died.

  John Saxion served as a platoon leader for H Company. “All morning I had sat with artillery Capt. Robert Woodhull and two of his observers. We watched the Germans through binoculars as they set up mortars in the valley below us. The captain’s 75s could not get enough angle to fire on them.

  “About noon, H Company moved around the hill to get a Jerry machine gun. We eliminated the gun and were digging in, eating our rations. The point BAR man brought me two Germans, one of average size was leading a huge soldier whose head was bandaged along with his chest and hands. When we interrogated the smaller prisoner, he told us that after our third attack had been repulsed, the Germans started to celebrate. The big guy, who was arrogant and very much a Nazi, pulled the pin of a potato masher and held it near his head. It had gone off for a self-inflicted wound.

  “I turned the big one over to Sergeant Robb to take to the rear. On the way back, Robb ordered him to help carry a stretcher. He refused, citing the Geneva rules. Robb threatened him with a .45, telling him to walk off the tape. The prisoner then helped carry the litter up the hill. Later, I asked what became of him and was told he died.”

  Robb saw first-hand the somewhat bizarre antics of the enemy. “A group of us topped a rise at the edge of some woods looking across a clearing to another patch of trees. A number of Germans ran out of those woods toward us, shouting and screaming. A turkey shoot; they had to be crazy. These were targets less than fifty yards away. We captured one who walked right into us and surrendered. He told us something about his comrades using drugs. That fit their behavior.

  “Our lieutenant requested we be allowed to withdraw unless we could have reinforcements. We were only ten or twelve and way out front with mostly wounded behind us. Permission was granted, and we started back with our prisoner. I was jabbing him in the back with my left fist to move faster, my .45 pistol in my right hand, safety off, my finger very tight on the trigger. We were going by several of my friends lying off the trail. He and I were alone, no one else about. Seeing feet blown off by schu mines and now the dead by the trail, I thought perhaps I would kill the prisoner. Why not? No one would know, just a bullet in the back. There would be no retribution for me, even if someone found out.

  “I had not comp
letely justified the act in my mind. He was a paratrooper, not an SS man. Suddenly I came on Sgt. Fred Harmon and a lieutenant. They had a stretcher and on it was one of ours, his right leg blown off at the hip, an awful sight. For an instant, I cursed myself for not killing the German while I had the chance. Then I pointed to the lieutenant’s end of the litter and shoved him at it. I am sure the German was pleased to take the stretcher because there lay safety for him.”

  Saxion watched what he described as an endless stream of men carried back on litters. “When mortars started to pound us, our position became exposed, so we withdrew to our starting point. On the way back we passed the bodies of Captain Woodhull and his observers, killed by the mortars that we observed being set up that morning.”

  One of the wounded from I Company was Lt. Charles Casey, who had been a friend of Saxion through Saxion’s difficult days in Italy, then the invasion of southern France, the Bulge, and now the bloody encounter between Bergstein and Schmidt. “Casey came up from the Kall ravine,” said Saxion, “blood pouring from an ear, and he had another wound in his hip. He asked me for a cigarette but did not even recognize me.” Nothing demonstrated more clearly to John Chism the need to swiftly remove the wounded and begin sophisticated treatment unavailable in an aid station than his three days on the Bergstein-Schmidt front. “Walter Frieble, who came to us fresh out of high school, and Captain Birder both should have survived, although seriously wounded. But the weather and the extra hour required to get them to the hospital was the difference that cost their lives. On the other hand, Hank Wanggrzynowicz was the most seriously wounded person I handled. He was hit by a large caliber bullet or fragment, which all but decapitated him. The missile passed completely through his chin, knocking out teeth and inflicting extreme damage. The little we could do for him was limited to removing loose debris and inserting a tube in order to prevent him from choking on blood. He could not be transported by litter and insisted on sitting up. Roy Dunne, the pint-size ambulance driver, propped him up with an extra blanket and broke all records getting him to Stavelot. Dunne surprised us when he passed the word that he had deposited a living Hank.”