As German soldiers retreated at Aachen, they often left behind webs of booby traps and mines for the advancing Americans. Like Tregaskis’s jungle, the urban wasteland was ideal for such traps. Slag heaps, hills of masonry, doors, window frames, and the assorted detritus of city life all made excellent hiding places. Earlier in the war, the German Army had done the same thing in the towns of Italy and France, so this was merely a continuation of their impersonal defensive warfare. In blocks where the Germans stood and fought, the Americans were reasonably sure to encounter few mines or booby traps because the Germans, of course, had no desire to trigger their own traps. But undefended areas fairly crawled with them. This was why Daniel and Corley attached teams of engineers to their rifle companies. As tanks and infantry soldiers carefully maneuvered along each street, engineers kept a wary eye out for mines and traps. “Certain houses had their doors wired to explosives in the mailbox,” an engineer commander wrote. “A house yard was found to be mined and was carefully avoided throughout the operation. This small area was found to contain at least twenty-five booby traps, most of which were made of grenades with pull wires.” Teller mines blocked some rubble-choked streets. Live grenades were placed in cupboards and drawers.
One thing that worked in the Americans’ favor was that the Germans had to do almost all of their booby-trapping hastily at night. Also, Colonel Wilck needed most of his own engineers to fight as infantry, meaning he had few experts available for extensive booby-trapping. “Frequently trip wires were fairly obvious,” the same engineer officer commented. Sometimes detonators were sloppily hidden or at times “not concealed or carried away.” Quite often, civilians and prisoners revealed the locations of booby traps because they knew the Americans would defuse them, minimizing property damage and loss of life for everyone.
Most of the time, the infantry soldiers found more benign items in Aachen than mines. After all, thousands of people had once lived there. Their property was everywhere—clothing, jewelry, heirlooms, books, personal papers, cabinets, photos and the like. It was a strange mixture of the harshness of war with the comforts of home. The Americans rifled through many a family home. The soldiers were mainly looking for food, alcohol, money, valuables, and weapons. In the bombed-out kitchen of one shattered house, several soldiers from F Company found a tasty menu of food to scrounge. The kitchen, in the recollection of one witness, “was well stocked with rows of home-canned vegetables, a big barrel of hen eggs and another of goose eggs. There were various kinds of bread, cakes and preserves . . . all spread out by shelling.” The soldiers promptly cooked themselves a meal of scrambled eggs, topped off by cakes.
At one point during the battle, Private First Class Stewart’s K Company took a jam factory. “There were big wooden barrels full of fruit juice. We would shoot a hole in the barrel and drink all we could. There was fresh jam of all kinds waiting to be eaten. Close by was a ginger bread factory so we got a lot of the bread and made jam sandwiches.” This rich food was rough on the constitutions of infantrymen who were used to eating canned C or K rations, causing some serious diarrhea. Toilet paper was already in short supply and, for obvious reasons, this made the diarrhea problem much worse. “We were using anything we could find for paper,” Stewart said. “Curtains, bedding and anything we could find was used.” In yet another abandoned house, Private Jim Curran’s squad found a two-foot-high jug of wine. “It was the greatest wine I’ve ever tasted. We filled up our canteens and then went battling down the street.” Most of Aachen was without electricity and water. Some of the American soldiers grew so thirsty that they took to dipping their canteens into the holding tanks of toilets.
There was simply too much rubble and broken glass for wheeled vehicles to move around in the city. Commanders and staff officers employed tracked M29 “Weasels” to haul supplies to the frontline rifle companies. They also used them to evacuate the growing number of wounded soldiers. In the opinion of one major, medics would “go anywhere, anytime” to get the wounded, many of whom would have died without quick, expert medical attention. At one street corner in Aachen, Tregaskis, the correspondent, saw a wounded lieutenant who had been stitched in the chest and abdomen by three burp gun bullets. The lieutenant was in shock, and his life was literally ebbing away with each passing moment. “His face was gray, and he had the stunned look of a badly wounded man. The human color had drained from his skin and his eyes were glazed.” Blood from the bullet holes was seeping onto the sidewalk. Several tense minutes passed before finally a litter team retrieved the wounded soldier. “The wounded man’s head sagged on his neck as he was lifted. His face was clay color and he groaned as if a wave of pain or fear had come over him.” The litter team expertly lifted him up, comforted him, and hauled him away.
They were part of a clearly defined medical process. When a soldier got hit, his company aidman tried to get to him and administer first aid. Then litter teams came up, put the wounded soldier on a stretcher, and carried him back to the Weasels. The Weasels then carried them to aid stations that medics had set up in houses outside of town. Battalion surgeons, who were sometimes overwhelmed with wounded, nonetheless followed a checklist of their own. “The patient has all bloody and wet clothing removed,” one surgeon wrote. “He is transferred to a dry dressed litter. He is given morphine. He is adequately bandaged and splinted and he is given plasma . . . and then evacuated” to a more permanent hospital.
The medics saved many more men than they lost, but casualties were still eroding the fighting power of the rifle companies. Within a few days, most were operating at half or two-thirds strength, proving the combat axiom that the closer to the sharp end of real fighting, the smaller the number of participants there will be. Each night, personnel officers fed brand-new replacements into the companies. This kept the rifle companies in operation, but they were always understrength, in constant need of reinforcements and fire support.
For the replacements, this was a rough way to enter the world of combat—friendless, in the middle of an urban brawl, engulfed in mindless destruction, engaged in the kind of fighting that took great savvy and wits for survival. The new men either adapted to their brutal circumstances or they died. “It would take a few days for a new man to get over the shock of being in combat and a lot of times they didn’t last that long,” one rifleman wrote. Private Dye welcomed many such newcomers to his L Company, and tried to teach them how to survive. “Follow me and do what I do,” he told them. One time, he was leading four new soldiers to the collection of ruined husks that constituted the company positions, when he heard mortar rounds coming in. He hit the ground, huddled against a wall, and crouched for the impact. The four replacements stood staring at him in confusion. When the mortar shells exploded, though, their confusion evaporated quickly and they learned to hit the ground.
In the 3rd Battalion, a few of the rookies refused to go into battle. One shot himself in the hand, another in the foot. The veteran soldiers did not approve of this self-mutilation, but they understood why it would happen. Many of the old salts were suffering from combat fatigue and had to be medically evacuated. They were significantly more likely than new men to be affected by this combat-related psychoneurotic condition, mainly because they had seen too much, done too much, and were just plain exhausted (hence the word “fatigue”).9
Killing for the Ruins
One of the most problematic aspects of the American situation in Aachen was that they went into the city without first isolating it. This afforded the Germans an opening (quite literally) to reinforce their hard-pressed defenders in Aachen. Isolating a city in urban combat is axiomatic: if the defending commanders can reinforce their garrison within the city, they can wage a protracted, attritional battle, grinding down the attackers, perhaps eventually destroying them in this way. Stalingrad is probably the best example of this nightmarish scenario. At Aachen the Americans did not face a situation of that gravity, but they did absorb major German counterattacks. Most of these attacks hit the 16th and
18th Infantry Regiments, outside of town, around Verlautenheide, where the Americans had not yet completed the encirclement of Aachen.
On October 15, amid ugly rain showers, some of the German attackers made it into Aachen itself, where they smashed into the right flank of Corley’s 3rd Battalion. By now, Corley’s men had taken Observatory Hill and much of the area, generally known as the Farwick Park, around the hill. “The Farwick Park area consisted of a dominating hill feature with a four-story observation building on top of the hill, a large building called the Kurhaus, and another called the Palace Hotel,” Corley wrote. Jagged blocks of houses bordered the area on the southwest and northwest sides of the park, from a roundabout called Roland Circle to a street called Manheims Allee. “The Park was originally a hill. It had been gouged out to build gardens, an artificial lake, walks, tennis courts, and the two main buildings, the Kurhaus and the Palace Hotel. The forward slope of Observatory Hill was an abrupt slope covered with heavy underbrush. The ground next to the Palace Hotel was a rapid rising slope covered with scattered trees and slight underbrush.”
The most powerful enemy attacks occurred late in the afternoon on the fifteenth, when a battalion of German soldiers—some of them teenaged SS troopers—with six tanks and self-propelled guns assaulted Observatory Hill. The noise, destruction, and chaos of the fighting were nearly overwhelming. Mortar shells belched from the hidden tubes of both sides, pelting the whole area, turning green grass into brown craters. A pair of German tanks with infantry riding aboard drove to within a couple hundred yards of the battalion CP. American M10 Wolverine tank destroyers from the 634th Tank Destroyer Battalion danced from street to street, trying to score kill shots on the enemy tanks. Corporal Wenzlo Simmons fired thirteen shots at one German tank. He thought he destroyed it but he probably just forced it to retreat because the tanks simply disappeared.
Some of the most desperate, close-in fighting occurred on the hill itself. A forward observer was in the tower, calling down 60- and 81-millimeter mortar fire on his own position, in hopes of stopping the German soldiers who were trying to negotiate the steep slopes. The Germans scored no less than thirty-six direct hits on the tower, but the observer continued his work. Some nine hundred U.S. mortar shells exploded all over the hill and the Farwick Park.
Combat raged at close quarters around the Kurhaus. The Germans were so close, and so determined to prevail, that most of the Americans ran for their lives, hoping that the mortar shells and some covering fire from a few stalwart individuals would save them. The infantry soldiers who were manning forward observation posts in select houses near Roland Circle were especially vulnerable. One of them, Private Curran, could hear “the krauts running up and down the streets there in front of us. There was about six of us at the outpost. I remember I was hit in the leg . . . by some shrapnel.” Somehow they escaped, but Curran was never sure how. No doubt his conscious mind deliberately blotted out the horrible details, a common defense mechanism to minimize the damage of traumatic events.
As always in combat, the actions of a few individuals made a huge difference. In his battalion journal, Corley specifically mentioned two of his sergeants, Wise and Tomasco, for “brilliant qualities of leadership” and a “PFC [Jesse] Short of Co. K for single-handedly” holding off an enemy attack on his unit. Bazooka men risked imminent death by leaning out of windows to shoot at enemy tanks that they could only vaguely see advancing down the avenues toward them. No one knew if they hit any of the tanks, but they certainly warded them off. One BAR man alone fired fifty-nine magazines of ammunition at the Germans (further evidence, among volumes, disproving S. L. A. Marshall’s dubious ratio-of-fire contentions).10
The fighting seesawed around Observatory Hill for most of October 15 and 16. In the opinion of Colonel John Seitz, the commander of the 26th Infantry Regiment, Corley’s 3rd Battalion, in that two-day period, had “its toughest time” during the campaign so far in northern Europe. The German counterattacks were ultimately unsuccessful, but they did temporarily halt the American advance in Aachen. General Huebner waited until his division staved off the German counterattacks, then joined hands with the 30th Division, and isolated Aachen, before giving Seitz the go-ahead to resume his assault on the city.
The attacks resumed in earnest on October 18. Corley’s battalion focused on clearing Observatory Hill, Farwick Park, and the area around the Kurhaus, particularly the Palace Hotel (also called the Quellenhoff), a beautiful, stately building that was perched atop the high ground. The aggressive battalion commander inadvertently strayed into the German lines during a pre-attack reconnaissance of the area and this, in his estimation, gave him “a hasty picture of the ground to the immediate front.”
The Americans pummeled the area with mortar and artillery rounds on October 17, but went forward silently the next morning under cover of predawn darkness. The battered German defenders could not hope to defend every building and avenue. Corley’s men quickly infiltrated the enemy lines, surprising small groups of enemy soldiers, rupturing the center of the enemy defenses. Corley was convinced that the Palace Hotel was the key objective, so he focused most of his efforts on it. A few days earlier, in response to his request for more mobile fire support, a nearby artillery unit had sent him, and also Daniel, one 155-millimeter, tracked, self-propelled gun apiece. Corley made liberal use of the gun, battering enemy-held buildings. In one instance, the gun pumped fifteen rounds into several houses around Roland Circle, setting up a perfect assault by I Company. Later, he placed the gun on the tennis courts, assigned a platoon of infantrymen as security, and ordered the gun crew to open fire on the Kurhaus and the Palace Hotel. Each time the gun fired, concussion waves engulfed bystanders like an unseen wind. The sound echoed off nearby buildings, and even knocked down walls. Private Stewart was in a house adjacent to the gun. When the 155 fired, some of the house began to crumble around him. “I thought . . . a German tank had got to us.”
Anyone standing too close to the gun risked getting knocked down, or even knocked out. The men could feel the concussion in their chests. But the shells were doing major damage, ripping through the walls, sailing through windows, exploding, showering anyone inside with a welter of deadly shrapnel. Tanks and tank destroyers added their lesser guns to the cacophony. Collectively, this firepower “forced the abandonment of a 20mm gun installed in an upper story of the Palace Hotel,” Corley wrote. “It weakened all resistance to our front.” The abandonment of the 20-millimeter gun was especially important because that rapid-firing weapon was so deadly to infantrymen, particularly those who were on the move, in the open. Under cover of the friendly supporting fire, groups of riflemen leapfrogged through ruined buildings. They crawled uphill toward the Kurhaus and the Palace Hotel, where Hitler had once stayed.
One platoon from L Company took the Kurhaus. Another, under the command of Lieutenant William Ratchford of K Company, burst into the lobby of the hotel. As was typical, Ratchford had mostly new men in his platoon. Many were tempted to think they had done their job simply by getting into the hotel, but Ratchford knew better. He divided them into small groups and told each group to secure every entrance to the basement, where he knew enemy soldiers would be hiding. “They threw captured potato masher grenades in on the enemy who was throwing his own out,” a post-combat interview revealed. “Machine gun fire was also turned on the enemy, who by this time had had enough and was trying to get out of the building, pausing only long enough to set his ammunition on fire.” Wherever they could, the GIs slaughtered retreating Germans, peppering them with machine-gun bullets, destroying them with grenades.
The luxurious interior of the hotel quickly became a wasteland of torn walls, shattered glass, shredded carpet, bodies, and bloodstains. The coppery stench of blood, along with the sulphuric odor of spent gunpowder and the dusty pall of fallen timbers and plaster, all permeated the hallways and rooms. “In peacetime it had probably been a nice [place],” Private Stewart later commented. “When we got done with it, it needed a
lot of work done on it before it could reopen.” Inside the hotel, the Americans killed twenty-five enemy soldiers and captured another twelve. They also found large amounts of food and ammunition. The hotel had, at one time, served as Colonel Wilck’s headquarters, but he had since relocated to a large concrete air raid bunker several blocks away. By day’s end, the 3rd Battalion had secured all of the key buildings on Observatory Hill, the whole Farwick Park area, and was now in the process of clearing some of the smaller hills and neighboring blocks of homes. In Corley’s estimation, their success stemmed from the maximum use of firepower combined with quick, well-led, and coordinated assaults by the infantry soldiers.
A few blocks to the west, Daniel’s battalion was also methodically fighting block by block in the medieval heart of the city, employing a similar blend of combined arms. The fighting ebbed through several venerable cathedrals in the city center. German artillery shells were falling in disquieting numbers. Many of them hit the ruined facades of tall buildings “with the result that the precarious walls collapsed” on anyone underneath, in the recollection of one soldier. Like his colleague Corley, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel made extensive use of his 155-millimeter self-propelled gun. At one point, he set it up at a crossroads, with perfect fields of fire, and watched as the crew disgorged shell after shell at German machine-gun crews in the ruined State Theater. The machine guns soon posed no further threat to the infantry.
As the foot soldiers advanced, they hugged close to accompanying tanks and tank destroyers. Both groups shot at anything that looked suspicious. “To discourage antitank crews or any enemy group, the infantry would toss assault grenades into each building whether they were fired on from that structure or not,” an infantryman wrote. “In case the grenades did not secure the desired effect a vehicle would then pump a few rounds into the building. This usually brought a few Germans streaming from the building but, since the cellars of all the buildings were connected, the enemy often withdrew to the next structure; thus making it necessary to repeat this performance on each building.” Sometimes the infantry soldiers spotted Panzerfaust-wielding German soldiers in windows. Riflemen peppered the windows, as did accompanying machine gunners. The tank crewmen, thus alerted to the danger, pumped their own rounds into the windows. Few of the enemy soldiers survived such onslaughts. When the infantry wanted to avoid moving on the open streets, they attacked through the back alleys. In many cases, bazooka men shot holes through walls, allowing infantry squads to outflank the Germans.
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 15