Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  In the dense forest, some of the fir trees had grown as tall as telephone poles, and the terrain was treacherous: steep ridges as well as deep gorges, all wrapped in a cold, shaded dampness. It was some of the most rugged country in western Europe.

  To fight off invasions from the west, the Germans had turned the center of the forest into a labyrinth of well-camouflaged defenses, part of the four-hundred-mile West Wall, better known to the Allies as their Siegfried Line—with concrete bunkers, rows of barbed wire, minefields, machine guns, and steel-walled artillery positions. Then there was the simple fact of the landscape. The boggy forest floor, which sun rays seldom reached due to the dense canopy, was not ideal for tanks or other vehicles, and the wintry low overcast and foggy conditions grounded most Allied airpower, which limited air support for the ground troops.

  The 28th Division, a unit of the Pennsylvania National Guard that had fought in the Civil War and was declared the “First Defenders” by Abraham Lincoln for racing to defend the threatened capital in response to an urgent plea from Congress, launched its attack with three infantry regiments on the cold, foggy morning of November 2, 1944. At 8 A.M., thousands of soldiers left their foxholes and moved into the dark woods. Carrying out an attack plan that relied on extensive tank, aircraft, and artillery support—little of which materialized—each of the division’s regiments was sent off in a different direction, in violation of a basic principle of war to concentrate combat power at a decisive place.

  At first, their worst enemies were the forest and the weather. The GIs, lacking proper winter clothes, were exposed to rain, sleet, and freezing temperatures. Then they encountered the Germans, veterans of winter fighting, bundled in snow-white cold-weather gear, who waited behind trees and inside bunkers to fire point-blank at approaching U.S. soldiers. Even when the Americans spotted them first, the tree growth was so thick in places that they couldn’t always make accurate rifle shots. Instead they had to use grenades, but that meant getting close enough to a target to throw them accurately.

  None of the 28th’s regiments reached their first-day objectives. Some units lost half their men in the opening hours. One regiment was pushed back by German artillery to its original start position, and the others, caught between minefields and barrages, were pinned down. Inexplicably, neither the division commander, Major General Norman Cota, nor his staff had ordered reconnaissance patrols into the forest beforehand. Such probing could have determined the location of the defenses they faced, the minefields, pillboxes, and other obstacles, and, equally important, would have revealed the Germans’ true strength in the forest. In addition to the two German divisions they had been told to expect, the 28th also faced a third division that had unexpectedly moved into their sector. Another tactical blunder was designating a narrow, muddy trail through the Kall Valley to serve as the division’s main supply route. Almost as soon as the battle began, it became a struggle to keep open this lifeline to the men in the forest.

  In the days that followed, Victor’s IPW team stayed close to the action, interrogating newly captured German prisoners, several hundred of whom were captured in the first week alone. The Germans had a renewed resolve to defend their homeland from invasion, and Victor soon came to the conclusion that the morale and determination of the German army had been grossly underestimated.

  Victor was shocked by what he saw at the front lines: U.S. infantrymen attacking steep, well-defended ridges and bunkers, resulting in atrocious losses. Radios were unreliable in the dense woods, and, absent firsthand accounts, Victor realized that the 28th Division headquarters had little grasp of the disaster unfolding. So he and his team took it upon themselves to question GIs about battle conditions and personally relay that information back to the division command post in the hope that the brass would come to their senses. A new strategy or plan was needed to stop the slaughter.

  Victor would always remember the carnage he saw in the forest: the horror of mortar and artillery barrages; unrelenting shell bursts exploding in treetops, against which lying prone on the ground was no protection; torn and bloody clothing and body parts blown into the air and left hanging in tree limbs like Satan’s laundry; armored tanks mired in thick mud and unable to move; soldiers too tired or too scared to leave their foxholes, even to relieve themselves. Men were cracking up, one combat medic told him. Some desperate soldiers were inflicting wounds on themselves, shooting their feet, toes, or fingers so as to get a medical evacuation.

  Victor had experienced the terror of Normandy and Saint-Lô, but they did not compare with the bloodbath in the woods southeast of Aachen. Hürtgen Forest would stretch into the longest single battle the U.S. Army ever fought—nearly five months. Eventually, American soldiers did cross through the forest into Germany’s Ruhr region, but only after months of costly defeats and the reduction of numerous divisions, some of which took as many as five thousand casualties in a matter of days. The total American casualties in the Hürtgen Forest exceeded thirty thousand. Newly arrived soldiers were rushed up from replacement depots and thrown into the fight with such frequency that there was soon a manpower shortage at the depots. Demoralized troops and their commanders, as well as the army’s top generals, now knew what Victor had already decided: the determination and ability of the Germans to defend their homeland had been badly misjudged. No longer was there any talk of wrapping up the war in Europe by the holidays.

  In late November, the 28th Division, after failing to achieve many of its objectives in the Hürtgen Forest and reeling from nearly 40 percent casualties and the loss of much of its equipment, was pulled off the line and sent to a quiet area in Luxembourg along the Our River, which flowed through the Ardennes Forest.* The region’s tree-studded hills, quiet valleys, and quaint villages seemed the ideal rest area, and here the division was to be refitted with new vehicles and equipment, issued winter clothing, and its depleted ranks filled with replacements. While this process was under way, however, the 28th was charged with holding a twenty-five-mile front, too great a distance for a single division to cover, even a fully manned, heavily equipped one in top shape. They would be spread thin, but no one gave it much thought. After Hürtgen Forest this felt like a wintry paradise, a true vacation. Division headquarters was set up in Wiltz, Luxembourg, a brewing and tanning town with a two-hundred-year-old castle, twenty miles southeast of Bastogne, Belgium.

  Victor Brombert in Roetgen, a German border town near Aachen, and the first German town to be taken by Allied forces, October 1944. (Family photograph)

  The men were exhausted, and a comprehensive program for rest and rehabilitation was put into effect, including two-day passes to Paris and longer stays at rest centers in Luxembourg. Given a three-day pass, Victor took the opportunity to surprise Yvette with a visit, and even the daylong 250-mile ride to Paris on bumpy roads in the back of a truck did not diminish his anticipation of their reunion. When they met, she asked no questions, and he did not speak of the war, so there was little for them to discuss. She seemed to know better than he that their story had no future and that even the present was fleeting. She was correct. That one night of bliss was to be their last together.

  Victor returned to Wiltz, where his IPW team had settled in a vacant house in town. They were soon conducting interrogations of captured members of German patrols that had been sent west of the Our River to probe U.S. lines. These interrogations confirmed the presence of the 26th and 352nd Volksgrenadier divisions opposite them. The 352nd had fought at Normandy, with one of its regiments defending Omaha Beach on D-Day. The division had also seen heavy fighting near Saint-Lô and was believed to number at least fifteen thousand men. Little was known about the 26th, which had been formed a couple of months earlier and had not yet fought.

  From December 12 on, division outposts reported sounds of motors and much vehicular movement behind enemy lines, especially at night. These accounts dovetailed with claims by locals who were sure an enemy buildup was taking place to the east. To try to get corroboration of t
hese disturbing reports, Victor’s team split in half, with each taking one of their jeeps to cover greater distances and speak to more people.

  Victor and two other interrogators arrived at a village inn along the Our River, and they set out to find anyone with firsthand information about the enemy buildup across the river. One German peasant woman who had recently crossed the border said she had seen large concentrations of German troops across the Belgian border beyond Sinspelt, thirty miles inside Germany. She said there were masses of men and equipment, including many armored tanks, trucks hauling barrels of fuel, bridge-building materials, and river-crossing boats.

  Victor and his team spoke with other locals and gathered similar eyewitness accounts. They were so detailed, and so alarming, that the interrogators drove that night to VIII Corps headquarters in Bastogne to personally report that large numbers of German troops, tanks, and materiel were massing just over the border, with the capability of attacking U.S. lines through the Ardennes.

  VIII Corps, under the command of Major General Troy Middleton, comprised two battle-weary infantry divisions, the 28th and 4th, both having been refitted after their Hürtgen Forest losses, and the newly arrived 106th Infantry Division, which had no combat experience. These three divisions, filled with soldiers either exhausted or green, were stretched across a front that ran parallel to the German frontier in Belgium and Luxembourg. All that separated them from the Germans was the winding Our River, in many places no more than forty feet wide and easily fordable.

  Victor and his IPW team arrived in Bastogne late on Friday evening, December 15, and they were surprised by how unimpressed the colonel at corps headquarters was with their latest intelligence. He said they had received similar warnings about the Germans massing troops and equipment, and anyway, there was little anyone could do about it now.

  “Our lines are thin,” the officer admitted. “Too thin. We’ll just have to sit and wait. Anyhow, it’s probably a diversionary action. Forget it.”

  Shown the way out, Victor and his team members returned to the village inn, where they each had their own room. Although the night was uncannily silent, Victor’s sleep was troubled. He kept turning the day’s events over in his mind. Tactical intelligence learned from prisoner interrogations was routinely acted upon to save American lives, but here was a possible coup of strategic intelligence, suggesting that a massive surprise attack could be imminent. And to be told to forget it? The hours inched forward, with Victor falling in and out of a restless sleep. Then, at around 5:30 A.M., he awoke with a start, to what he thought was thunder accompanied by flashes of lightning. When the building began to shake, he realized it wasn’t a thunderstorm after all but an artillery barrage.

  Victor had never dressed quicker. Grabbing his few belongings, he raced outside and found the other guys, nervous and half-dressed, already by the jeep in the courtyard waiting for him. In addition to artillery bombardment, mortar shells were now landing nearby. He knew German 88 mm artillery had a range of ten miles, but the maximum firing range of mortars was under two miles. That meant that the Germans had crossed the river and were already well inside American lines.

  They jumped into the jeep, and Victor drove as fast as possible through thick ground fog the ten miles back to headquarters in Wiltz, where they learned that the heavy artillery and mortar barrages, lasting for forty-five minutes, had immediately been followed by tank and infantry attacks along the division’s entire front. Orders and counterorders were flying out to the regiments and battalions that suddenly found themselves under attack; the very attack, Victor knew, that they had been gathering intelligence about for days and had tried to warn the colonel about in Bastogne. Had they been forceful enough? Was there anything else they could have done with the information they had? Should they have acted sooner?

  There were heroic stands by the men of the 28th against two Panzer tank divisions, three German infantry divisions, and a parachute division. The 28th had been brought back with replacements to a battle strength of 14,254 men (although many of the new men were still undergoing training), but the division would suffer nearly as many casualties in the Ardennes as it had at Hürtgen Forest: a total of 4,930, or a 35 percent casualty rate. One of its regiments, the 110th, was virtually destroyed, with most of its officers and men killed, wounded, or captured in a valiant attempt to slow the German advance toward Bastogne.

  At division headquarters, the whereabouts of many units was unknown, as was their viability. Some had dispersed or outright disappeared under enemy pressure. General Cota was barking urgent commands over the radio to his units in the field: “Hold at all costs.” “No retreat.” “Nobody comes back.” When radio and phone contact was lost, messengers were sent out to try to reach units that had been cut off, but heavy snowdrifts and icy roads caused collisions and snarled traffic. Low visibility grounded reconnaissance and air-support flights.

  By the second day, Wiltz was under attack and in danger of falling, forcing Cota to move his command post out of Luxembourg and across the Belgian border several miles southwest of Bastogne. By the time the IPW team heard the “fall back” order, there was extreme confusion in and around Wiltz.

  Fall back to where? was Victor’s first thought when he heard the order. Given reports that numerous roads and bridges had already fallen to the enemy, he had no idea which way they should go or whether they would be heading into enemy positions whichever way they went.

  The last defenders of Wiltz were a ragtag group of army engineers, sawmill operators, and clerks who fought a rearguard action until the town was overrun by whistle-blowing German paratroopers of the elite 5th Parachute Division firing machine pistols and supported by tanks.

  By then, Victor and the IPW team were a few miles west of Wiltz. Victor, driving the lead jeep, stopped at a roadblock where armed MPs demanded the day’s password. The MPs were not from the 28th Division and did not know the IPW team. There had been reports over the past two days of English-speaking German soldiers in U.S. Army uniforms creating havoc behind American lines, ambushing GIs, and seizing bridges and crossroads. Some had already been captured in American jeeps or in German tanks disguised to look like U.S. Shermans. Everyone was on heightened alert, and word had gone out that any Germans caught in U.S. uniforms would be executed as spies. Some had been shot on the spot.

  Victor and his team, in their mad dash to leave Wiltz, had not learned the day’s password. One of the IPW members explained as much, in his German accent. A score of guns were leveled at them. Another interrogator spoke up, but he was a native German as well. Victor, who at least had the advantage of a French accent, asked the MPs if there was some other way for them to prove they were U.S. soldiers.

  “What’s the Windy City?” asked one MP warily.

  Victor had no idea, and neither did anyone else.

  “Look, we’re all newly naturalized U.S. citizens,” Victor said, pleading their case. “Give us another chance.”

  “Who won this year’s World Series?”

  None of the foreign-born GIs followed American baseball.

  Victor had a grim feeling they were facing some itchy trigger fingers. Protesting their innocence, he demanded the MPs take them to their superior officer. With arms raised and hands behind their heads, they were escorted like captured POWs to a command post, where Victor did some fast talking, explaining that they were a special military intelligence team of German-language interrogators. He and his men all showed their dog tags. Finally their story was believed, and they were sent on their way with the day’s password and a warning to “not speak Kraut.” Victor knew it had been a close shave at the roadblock. To have come this far in the war only to be shot by their own men was not something Victor or anyone else on his IPW team wanted to think about.

  Not long after they crossed into Belgium, they were driving through a village when it came under heavy mortar attack. Pulling up in front of a house, they jumped from the jeep and rushed into a cellar. Inside, they found a group of ter
rified villagers, waiting out the attack. The wails of the children and loud prayers of the adults could barely be heard over the screaming incoming mortar shells that shook the earth and the foundation above them. Victor had slashed a knee jumping down the cellar steps, and blood was streaming down his leg. When the shelling stopped, bursts of tommy guns and small-arms fire could be heard outside along with shouted commands in German. The village was being stormed and houses searched—and their U.S. Army jeeps were sitting out front!

  The Ritchie Boys had to make a fast decision. Stay where they were and risk getting caught by the Germans or take a chance and run for the jeeps? For Victor, being cornered and captured was worse than taking a risk. The others agreed, and up the stairs they bounded and dashed to their jeeps, which miraculously were still untouched and parked where they had left them. They sped out of town without any shots fired.

  Victor did not forget the cries and prayers of the frightened villagers and often wondered what became of them. One German potato-masher grenade thrown down the stairs into the cellar was all it would have taken to kill them all. What was certain, and had been since Normandy, was that he no longer harbored any heroic illusions about war, as he once had. He had seen too much violent and senseless death.

  Early the next morning, Victor and his team were approaching a wood shrouded in fog and snow southwest of Bastogne when a German armored column bore down on them. Abandoning their jeeps, they ran into the forest, where they found a couple of hundred stragglers from the 28th Division, mostly cooks, typists, and clerks. Suddenly, General Cota appeared and began to address them. Cota was angry and determined, a pistol in one hand and a crazy plan in the other. This was tough “Dutch” Cota, known for helping to rally the troops off Omaha Beach in the early hours of the invasion and saving that bloodied assault force from being pushed back into the sea. Cota spotted Victor’s chevrons and stripes, and concluded that as a master sergeant he must be a veteran warrior.