Victory Has Many Fathers, But Defeat is an Orphan

By William C. JandrewAmerican Military University

February 19, 2011MILH 551 – World War II in Europe

Dr. Thomas GoetzFall 2010

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Victory Has Many Fathers, but Defeat is an Orphan…

Late summer, 1944…Rome had fallen, and the massive

Allied invasion of Western Europe had bludgeoned Adolf

Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’, secured the beaches in Normandy,

fought through the French hedgerows, and gained momentum in

its drive toward Germany. Allied armies, fighting hard,

swept northward from southern France and the Wehrmacht,

though offering stubborn resistance, was being driven back

toward Germany. Confidence was high as German resistance

often resembled headlong flight, and Allied leaders planned

the invasion and eventual capitulation of the Third Reich;

the question was no longer “if”, but “how” and “when” the

war was going to end – buoyed by recent success in France

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and the apparent crumbling of the Wehrmacht, some planners,

in their overconfidence, envisioned the occupation of Berlin

by the beginning of 1945. Unfortunately, the realities of

warfare intruded on the idyllic daydreams of Allied

commanders, and in actuality, they were experiencing supply

difficulties as their lines grew longer; the advance slowed

as lead elements ran short of materiel, mostly fuel and

ammunition. Conversely, German resistance stiffened and

supply lines shortened as the Wehrmacht withdrew toward the

Rhine River; no longer fighting for foreign territory, they

were now fighting for their own survival and that of their

homes and families. Adding to Allied difficulties, internal

squabbles amongst coalition leaders stymied attempts to form

effective invasion plans, and political considerations often

overrode military sensibility; who did what was often more

important than accomplishing the task at hand. Ground

Forces Commander Eisenhower, faced with several

possibilities, opted for wide frontal assault on the German

Siegfried Line; without a great concentration of force in

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any one spot, the advance stalled in several areas. The

German Army, greatly underestimated, was no longer fleeing,

had regrouped, and turned to fight – and what began as

reconnaissance in the forests south of Aachen became a

lengthy battle of attrition often resembling World War One

trench warfare; American commanders sacrificed advantages in

manpower and armament by staging repeated frontal assaults

in unfavorable terrain against determined and prepared

defenders, often without a consistent strategic plan. Only

after weeks of heavy losses incurred while trying to

dominate the forest did American commanders realize the

importance of the Roer River dams beyond the forest and plan

accordingly – without control of the dams, ownership of the

forest was useless, as the Germans could flood the Roer

valley and halt the American drive to the Rhine. By the

time they came to realize the importance of the dams,

American commanders had committed to a strategy that ignored

doctrine and common sense, condemning thousands of men to

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die in the unnecessary meat grinder that was the Hurtgen

Forest.

As the Allies drove toward Germany, two major courses

were being laid for the events which would occur in the next

few months: The Allied High Command was evaluating several

different strategies for the invasion of Germany, and the

Germans were regrouping, preparing defenses, and doing their

utmost to prevent such an invasion. These two issues forced

the Allies to choose between keeping them on the run,

preventing extensive German preparation while facing

dwindling supplies due to ever-lengthening supply lines, or

stopping to regroup, shortening supply lines, and facing a

rested and fortified German army in the near future,

extending the war indefinitely1. Within that particular

issue lay another burning question, one that would have to

be addressed no matter what time frame was chosen – how

would they enter Germany? A drive to the north of the

Siegfried Line through Holland was rejected for reasons of

1 Robin Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944 (New York: Overlook Press, 2005), 30-31.

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poor terrain (canals, rivers), as was retracing the route

through the Ardennes the German blitzkrieg had used a few

years earlier (forests, hills); two options remained,

pushing through the Siegfried Line at the Aachen Gap or

toward the Saar Valley, south of the Ardennes2. On

September 1, 1944, Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower also

assumed command of all ground forces, replacing Bernard

Montgomery3, and was able to push his so-called “broad

front” strategy for the advance on Germany, which would

theoretically stretch the German resistance thinly enough to

a point where a breakthrough could be exploited while

simultaneously providing a safe rear area for supplying the

advance4; this broad front consisted of Montgomery’s 21st

Army Group on the northern flank, First Army and Ninth Army

driving west toward Aachen, and Patton’s Third Army moving

2 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 31.3 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 50.4 Ted Ballard, Rhineland: The U.S. Army Campaigns of World War II (U.S. Army Centerof Military History, 1995), 4-5, 13.

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toward the Saar; one advance that could actually be

considered three separate drives5.

While the Allies were organizing their advance and

trying to solve logistical issues to keep it well-supplied,

their supposedly “beaten” German foe was far from defeated,

and organizing a massive defense at what they called the

Westwall – or, as the Allies knew it, the Siegfried Line.

First begun in 1936, it was the German counterpart to

France’s Maginot line, a line of defensive fortifications

that initially ran from the area near Holland to just north

of Switzerland6; expanded later in the 1930’s to stretch

along the Belgian border, it had become less a line and more

a deep belt of overlapping pillboxes, shelters, command

posts, vehicle barriers, and bunkers7 that was designed to

stop, or at least delay, an invading force. It also used

natural terrain features (lakes, rivers, forests) in its

5 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 62.6 Edward G. Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1995), 8.7 Charles B. MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 15.

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defensive construction, and though fallen into disuse and

disrepair after the fall of France in 1940, was still a

formidable obstacle on its own, even without troops to

occupy it8. The troops bound to both occupy the Westwall

and reform elsewhere in the defense of the Fatherland were

far from the beaten and “bedraggled enemy troops”9 in

headlong flight toward home; even though they were often

young teens or old men10, they were fighting for their homes

and families - and waiting for the amis to come.

And come they did, with General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth

Army Group (First, Third, and Ninth Armies) in the center;

General Courtney Hodges’ First Army (V Corps, VII Corps, and

XIX Corps) was tasked with punching through the Aachen Gap,

south of Aachen and north of the Hurtgen Forest; assuming

that Aachen would be heavily defended, it would bypass the

city and encircle it, taking the heart of the Holy Roman

8 Bruce K. Ferrell, “The Battle of Aachen”, Armor, (November/December 2000): 31.9 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 9.10Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 24.

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Empire, Charlemagne’s First Reich, and ancestral home to

Adolf Hitler’s fading Third Reich11. Major road nets

radiated from the city’s location in one of the more heavily

fortified sectors of the Siegfried Line, and its possession

(or destruction) would be a psychological blow to German

resistance as well as a boon to transportation and logistics

for the future of the advance12; to the south of Aachen,

straddling the German-Belgian border south lay several

mountainous and heavily forested areas (the Meroder, Wenau,

Hurtgen, and Rotgen forests) that came to be known

collectively as the Hurtgen Forest13, a place that American

soldiers would come to curse in the coming months.

11 Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 146.12 Charles B. MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign (Washington DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1963), 28.13 Robert Sterling Rush, Hell in Hurtgen Forest :The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 2.

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The Hurtgen Forest

SOURCE: Stephen E. Ambrose, The U.S. Army From the Normandy Beaches To The

Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997)

Despite the capture of Antwerp and the (mostly

theoretical, as German resistance continued in the area) use

of its ports, logistical issues still haunted the advance

and it slowed in early September; a majority of the supplies

needed to storm into Germany were still in Normandy, or

somewhere in France while en route – either way, they were

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not where they were needed most14. As a result, after

successfully crossing the Meuse River and taking back

several towns while protecting Montgomery’s flank, General

Hodges ordered a halt in order to stockpile fuel and

artillery ammunition, allowing only small eastward probes to

test enemy strength. Infantry patrols breached the line

near Luxemburg on September 11, and found empty pillboxes.

Lacking much reliable intelligence on enemy activity around

the Westwall15, and impatient to breach the Siegfried Line,

General Joseph “Lightning Joe” Collins suggested a so-called

“reconnaissance in force” (per the army’s field manual)

between Aachen and the Hurtgen to determine, if possible,

enemy resistance; Hodges allowed it so long as resistance

was light, and if not, Collins would return and await

supplies. General Gerow’s V Corps was given a similar

order16, as it was believed that the Germans were responding

to the action up north in the Netherlands and down south in

14 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 24.15 MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, 31.16 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 12.

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Lorraine, as no enemy units of any real significance had

been seen in the area for over a week and resistance, if

any, was expected to be light17. If it were stronger than

expected, they could withdraw with some new intelligence,

and rest, regroup, and resupply as planned.

While the Allies regrouped and prepared to probe the

line in force, Hitler installed Field Marshals von Rundstedt

and Walter Model to organize the Westwall defense18;

emptying out hospitals and rear-echelon and non-combat

units, he scraped up roughly 150,000 men to defend against

the Allied attacks, from every branch and service – and was

graciously and uncharacteristically assisted by Hermann

Goring, who combed out Luftwaffe units to provide

approximately 30,000 men – about 20,000 paratroopers and

roughly 10,000 support crew no longer needed for the

faltering Luftwaffe19. These men were added to severely

understrength units to create the fortress battalions that 17MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, 38.18James Gavin, “Bloody Huertgen: The Battle That Never Should Have Been Fought”, American Heritage, (December 1979): 36.19 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 56-57.

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would defend the Westwall and were supplemented by Heinrich

Himmler’s Volksgrenadier divisions, often raised from teen

“Hitler Youth” groups and supposedly infused with Nazi

fanaticism; to make up for the smaller division size (10,000

men versus the normal army division size of 12,500), most of

these men were armed with submachine guns instead of

rifles20, and possessed more antitank and artillery

weapons21. The men that were regrouping to man the Westwall

were not elite soldiers, many could not even be considered

“whole” or “young”, but they didn’t have to be, as they were

moving into and occupying heavily fortified positions

designed for just such the defense they were about to

mount22. The tired men of the resurgent German army began

to reoccupy the Westwall in force just as the Americans

arrived.

September 13 marked General Collins’ and the VII Corps’

penetration of the Scharnhorst Line (the westernmost of the20 Robert Sterling Rush, “A Different Perspective: Cohesion, Morale, andOperational Effectiveness in the German Army, Fall 1944”, Armed Forces and Society, (Spring 1999): 480-482.21MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 14.22 MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, 35-36.

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two divergent branches of the Siegfried Line, which parted

north of Aachen and rejoined it in the Eifel Forest) south

of Aachen; he had hoped to break into the Stolberg Corridor,

a gap south of Aachen but just north of the Hurtgen, and hit

the Schill Line (eastern part of the line) in force. The

advance consisted of the 1st Infantry Division in the north,

the 3rd Armored in the center, and the 9th Infantry

Division’s 47th Infantry regiment protecting the southern

flank by entering the Hurtgen forest23; the German 353rd

Infantry division melted away and allowed elements of the

3rd Armored to walk into an ambush by concealed anti-tank

guns – it lost six of its eight tanks24, just a prelude of

things to come in the Hurtgen.

Meanwhile, the 47th Infantry Regiment, finding empty

pillboxes and persistent rumors of German surrender up and

down the line25 had easily taken Zweifall on September 14th

and captured the village of Schevenhutte on the 16th, 23 Karel Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, After the Battle, (May 1991): 1-5.24 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 34-35.25 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 21.

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encountering up to this point very little resistance. What

they didn’t know was that while they were moving west, the

German 12th Infantry division, fresh and fully staffed and

supplied, was brought in by rail to stop the American

advance in the Stolberg Corridor and retake Schevenhutte26;

for almost a week German elements of the 12th threw

themselves at the Americans in Schevenhutte. Simultaneous

action to the south by the American 39th Infantry attempting

to push north near Monschau and meet with the 47th Infantry

near Duren met stiff resistance from the German 89th

Division. On September 18, General Hodges, seeing the

forest as a place for Germans to hide and from which to

counterattack27ordered to 60th Infantry forward to close the

gap between the 39th and 47th and consolidate the line; and

so, the 60th was the first American unit to fully submerge

itself in the dark green gloom of the Hurtgen…

26 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 6.27 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 2.

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High ridges and deep valleys dominated the terrain and

tall, ancient trees blocked out the sun, parted only by

small trails and narrow firebreaks; there were no clearings

worthy of note, except near the villages; but damp wet

ground and mud that sucked at shoes and mired vehicles.

Only small groups could move about together in the thick

wooded darkness, and larger groups lost one another as they

constantly crouched under the trees and tried to navigate

using inaccurate maps and occasionally, German tourist

guides to the forest. The few roads that existed were

narrow and muddy, barely traversable by tanks28, and the

thick woods rendered radios almost useless29. Constant rain

and snow perpetuated the dreary muddiness of the forest –

even the Germans, whose land it was, thought it strange;

General Schmidt of the 275th Infantry called it “weird and

wild…even in the daytime a somber appearance is to cast

28 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany. June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945, 168.29 Paul Duke, “A Catastrophic Battlefield”, The Virginia Quarterly Review, (Autumn 2002): 745.

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gloom…”30and American soldiers didn’t feel much differently.

“The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,

and the nights were so bad I would pray for daylight”31,

said Pvt. Blakeslee. These were just the effects of nature

on the men in the forest – the Germans had augmented its

natural defenses with deep bunkers, thickly laid minefields,

hidden and well-camouflaged machine-gun nests with

overlapping fields of fire, pre-sighted artillery to make

the most use out of ‘tree-bursts’ (artillery shells were

timed to explode at treetop level, showering the men below

not only with shards of metal shrapnel, but also the

splinters of the exploding trees), deep belts of overlapping

barbed and concertina wire, and roadblocks loaded with mined

booby-traps32. In entering the forest, Hodges had committed

his men to an infantry battle, surrendering their advantages

in airpower and artillery to the thick forest, and

30 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany. June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945, 168.31 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany. June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945, 169.32 Steve Snow, et al. CSI Battlebook II-A: Heurtgen Forest (Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, 1984), III-3 – III-8.

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advantages in manpower to the prepared German defenders,

whose man-to-man firepower advantage and fortified defenses

acted as force multipliers against the besieging Americans.

The objectives of the 9th Division on September 19 were

the towns of Kleinhau and Hurtgen; the 60th Infantry would

take the ominously named “Dead Man’s Moor” on its way to the

town of Germeter, and the 39th would take some trails in the

nearby Weisser Weh valley and move on to Kleinhau and

Hurtgen. Already below full strength, the attacks would be

made only by partial units of these elements33. Despite

these shortages, the 39th proceeded through the gloom and

dug in at the Weisser Weh, only to be met by the German

353rd Infantry the next day and then recalled from the

valley to help the 47th at Schevenhutte, which was under

attack by the fresh German 12th Infantry. The 60th ran into

machine-gun nests and disguised bunkers, taking heavy losses

in what became a raging, close-combat struggle over a few

pillboxes. The 39th got to Schevenhutte to find that it

33 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 27.

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wasn’t needed, and slogged back through the Weisser Weh only

to find that the Germans had set up residence in their old

position – their first taste of the confused, disorganized

fighting that was to come. The advance, despite

reorganizations and changed plans, had stalled in the thick

forest. Absent the traditional American accent on airpower

and artillery, the heavy losses incurred in these pure

infantry struggles forced the 9th to stop at the end of

September, and General Gerow’s V Corps took over some of the

VII Corps’ line positions34. Despite what was essentially a

failure in the first real incursion into the Hurtgen,

intelligence officers still felt that “should a major

breakthrough occur, or several penetrations occur, the enemy

will begin a withdrawal to the Rhine River, abandoning his

Siegfried Line”35, so General Craig consolidated his troops

for a second thrust into the forest, this time toward the

village of Schmidt, which sat at the nexus of most of the

major roads in the forest. Again, however, he was to attack34 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 8.35 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 240.

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at nowhere near his full strength, as the 47th Infantry was

stuck defending Schevenhutte – so the 39th would take

another stab at Germeter on the left, and the 60th would

move on the right36. They would be opposed by the German

275th Infantry Division, a hodgepodge of men squeezed

together in the peculiar German habit of forming new units

from remnants, rather than reinforcing older, depleted

units37; the German defenders, with decent defenses and a

larger-than-average number of heavy guns per unit, seemed to

appear whenever and wherever they were needed – and

approximately 6,500 of them were beefing up their positions

when the 9th came once again at the forest. On October 6, a

short artillery barrage and P-47 dive-bomb attacks precluded

the 9th’s next attack into the forest.

The 39th advanced without a secure northern flank, and

with inadequate (mostly absent) air cover and regular and

repeated attacks so predictable that they were chewed up by

36 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 8.37 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 33.

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accurate German artillery fire called down from observation

posts38, bogging down under that and fire from well-

concealed pillboxes, and stopping a mile from Germeter; the

60th was decimated by machine-gun fire and artillery tree-

bursts, made it one half-mile before stopping in the wet

forest just short of Reichelskaul; commanders were reluctant

to proceed without the tank support that couldn’t get to

them because of German mines, roadblocks, and narrow, muddy

trails39- by the time the tanks arrived, the 60th was

hunkered down and barely enduring further German barrages.

The 39th reached Germeter only on October 10th, to find it

empty – neither German 7th Army commander General Erich

Brandenberger or his subordinates could figure out American

motives in the forest, but they also could not ignore them,

and were forced to shuffle their own troops around to offer

continual resistance40. The 39th crept toward Vossenack but

was outflanked by the German Weigelein regiment (named after

38 Gerald Astor, “The Deadly Forest”, World War II (November 2004), 27.39 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 38.40 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 63.

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its commander and just arrived as reinforcements); after 3

days of fighting, the 39th had regained its original

positions, and little else. By October 16, the 9th Division

had slugged it out with its German opposition in the wet,

miserable forest, fighting characterized by confused thrusts

from one line to another against prepared positions – it had

failed to take the town of Schmidt and its vital road net

but gained approximately 3,000 yards of dense forest that

now needed to be held, at the very high cost of about 4,500

casualties. It was so depleted that it was no longer

combat-effective, but First Army still didn’t have its

secure flank – so General Hodges, still believing that the

forest itself should be taken and held, had to come up with

another plan41.

The new plan was strikingly familiar to the old one,

with a few changes – the first in personnel, with Gerow’s V

Corps now tasked with taking the town of Schmidt - his 28th

Infantry Division (Pennsylvania National Guard) relieved the

41 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 86.22

9th Infantry Division on October 26. The second, in

armament – added tank destroyers, chemical munitions, forty-

seven “Weasels” (basically track-driven cargo carriers),

extra engineers and artillery, all to support the infantry

divisions. Other than a different division with added

mechanization, the plan was essentially the same, and

attacks would be made with understrength units with exposed

flanks, much to the dismay of General “Dutch” Cota, the

28th’s commander. When his men assumed the 9th’s positions,

they were greeted with a tableau of dead bodies (human and

deer), discarded materiel, shredded trees, and craters left

by artillery shells42; a landscape resembling a

slaughterhouse on a (tree-filled) moon. Adding to his

frustration was the fact that his men were now committed to

the same plan of attack that gave birth to such a place, and

with the same meager military resources and limited

operational freedom – between the limiting terrain and the

plan he was ordered to follow, he had little leeway. Cota’s

men would first have to fight uphill through the woods to get42 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 90.

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to the few roads that existed, as they were on the exposed

ridges overlooking the Kall River, and no one was sure if

any of the mechanized pieces (tanks, tanks destroyers,

artillery pieces) could even get through the woods to face

German armor, which had the luxury of roads leading into

their side of the valley. Thus reinforced, the 28th was to

push toward Schmidt as part of another “broad front” drive

east toward the Rhine River, with the 109th infantry

regiment on its northern wing, the 112th in the center, and

the 110th on the southern flank. In addition to Schmidt, it

was also to take the Vossenack ridge and the woods adjacent

to the town of Hurtgen. The larger offensive, which also

included VII Corps’ parallel thrust to the north, was

scheduled to begin November 5th, so V Corps and the 28th

Division were to attack no later than November 2. Because

of bad weather (already a constant), the larger attack was

moved back to November 10th, but for some reason the 28th was

still to go forward on November 2nd as originally planned;

as a result, on that day, it moved out alone after an

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artillery barrage (also a calling card, a “here we come”

warning to the defenders) but without air support – again,

due to bad weather. The attack of the 28th unfolded as its

own mini-“broad front”, with each regiment moving in a

different direction and unable to provide mutual support to

the others if needed43; the 110th on the southern edge was

forced back by a World War I style no-man’s-land of

pillboxes, barbed wire, and mines, with nothing to show for

it but casualties, and the 109th in the north was stalled by

a similar setup of minefields and overlapping fields of

machine-gun fire. Attacks by the 109th and resultant

counterattacks by the defending 116th Panzer Division

resulted in an American “spike” of captured turf near the

Weisser Weh river, but flanked by the enemy44, but American

casualties were so high that the 109th was quickly relieved

by the 12th Infantry of the 4th Division, and relegated to a

support role in Vossenack. The 112th, however, in the

center of the thrust, took Vossenack on November 2nd and, 43 Edward G. Miller and David T. Zabecki, “Tank Battle in Kommerscheidt”, World War II (November 2000), 44.44 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 12.

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despite taking heavy casualties due to artillery tree-bursts

(again), began its ill-fated advance toward Schmidt down the

Kall trail. The trail itself had been mapped45 but no one

had actually looked at it, so without any real

reconnaissance, armor was committed to move through what

amounted to little more than a goat trail down a steep grade

into a valley that may or may not have a usable bridge to the

other side46; the infantry passed through Kommerscheidt

unopposed and took Schmidt, leaving one battalion in each

village to prepare a defense until the armor could catch up.

The 707th Tank Battalion tried the Kall Trail first, and

declared it unusable after the first tank’s weight crumbled

the narrow trail, barely wider than the tank itself, and

almost sent the tank tumbling into the gorge; engineers were

sent in to make the trail usable, initially with only hand

tools, and no explosives; heavy equipment took most of the

night to get there47. In the end, three Weasels with anti-

45 Miller and Zabecki, “Tank Battle in Kommerscheidt”, 44.46 David T. Zabecki, “Hallowed Ground: Kall Trail, Germany”, Military History(September/October 2008), 76.47 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 15.

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tank mines arrived in Schmidt, and a basic defense was set

up.

Early on the 4th, the Germans’ 16th Panzer Regiment (10

tanks in all) and elements of the 1055 Infantry regiment

rolled over the American 112th in Schmidt after a massive

artillery barrage; with small arms and bazookas, totally

ineffective against the marauding Panthers, the American

infantry was driven out of Schmidt easily; over 100 were

taken prisoner, while the rest fled into the woods and back

toward Kommerscheidt48, where they were later attacked again

by infantry with Panther support49. Three Shermans (leaving

five behind them mired on the Kall Trail) led by Lt. Fleig

finally arrived in Kommerscheidt to assist the battered

112th , destroying five German tanks and driving off the

infantry before being reinforced by more Shermans and the

893rd Tank Battalion and its M10 tank destroyers later in

the day. Meanwhile, elements of the 112th in Vossenack

48 Astor, “The Deadly Forest”, World War II (November 2004), 27.49 Mike Sullivan, “Armor Against the Huertgen Forest: The Kall Trail andthe Battle of Kommerscheidt”, Armor (May/June 2002), 25.

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continued to endure endless pounding from German artillery

on the nearby Brandenberg-Bergstein Ridge.

The next morning, the Germans counterattacked in

Kommerscheidt with nine Panthers and two Jagdpanther tank

destroyers, retaking the town with a well-coordinated attack

against a disorganized static armor defense; American forces

lost eight Sherman tanks and eight M10 tank destroyers, plus

Kommerschiedt – and most of the 112th, which had been almost

entirely destroyed50. The fighting in this area was so

intense and casualties so high (for both sides) that a few

cease-fires took place between November 7-9 near the

Mestrenger Muhle, a mill and bridge over the Kall River.

Truces arranged by American litter-bearers challenged by

German sentries on the line escalated to direct

communication between leadership from both sides in order to

evacuate dead and wounded; at some points German and

American medical officers worked side-by side until the mill

was evacuated before shelling resumed and both sides

50 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 72.

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targeted the mill, ending the truce51; the vicious fighting

and misery of the forest affected both sides so severely

that the war was set aside, at least temporarily, for more

immediate humanitarian concerns.

The fighting raged on in the other parts of the forest,

and by November 6th, under merciless shelling, the men of

the 112th in Vossenack had had enough; they broke and ran,

leaving the armor behind in the town. The 146th Combat

Engineers were rushed in as infantry to hold what they could

of the town, and an additional task force (Davis, named after

its commander) was assembled to retake Schmidt; it never

made it - four of its tank destroyers were destroyed on an

exposed ridge before the woods, and a battalion of the 109th

got lost and ended up near Reichelskaul. Heavy forest,

malfunctioning radios, broken telephone lines, and sheer

terror all contributed to communications difficulties, and

Colonel Peterson was erroneously ordered to the division

51 Sloan Auchinloss, “Three Cease-Fires Temporarily Halted the Bloodshedin the Hurtgen Forest and Saved the Lives of Many Wounded”, World War II (November 1999), 20.

29

command post; when he arrived after being wounded twice and

exhausted to the point of near-unconsciousness, General Cota

reportedly fainted upon seeing his condition52.

The recent failures in the forest – Vossenack,

Kommerscheidt, especially the second attempt to take Schmidt

– and the associated loss of men and armor forced another

evaluation of the battle by upper echelons, and 1st Army’s

General Hodges’ answer was to remove General Cota from his

command of the 28th53, blaming the man and not the mission;

after a meeting with the various involved commanders (all

the way up to Eisenhower), Hodges backed down, and on

November 8th American units were to pull back to the near

side of the Kall Gorge. The unfortunate men in the

impromptu “neutral zone” aid station near Kommerscheidt

didn’t make it out immediately, but most managed to straggle

back in the next few days. The actions by the 28th in the

Hurtgen cost it over 6,000 men, two-thirds of its armor, and

52 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 17-18.53 Wiliam Terdoslavich, “Battle of Huertgen Forest”, in How to Lose WWII: Bad Mistakes of the Good War, ed. Bill Fawcett (New York: Harper, 2010), 209.

30

the second attempt at taking the town of Schmidt was the

most costly American divisional action of the Second World

War; the Germans sacrificed roughly half that many men, but

still held their forest54.

While American commanders prepared for yet another

offensive deeper into Germany, Adolf Hitler and his generals

were shuffling and augmenting existing units along their

defensive lines while pouring in additional men and materiel

with the dual purposes of holding the lines while protecting

and hiding the buildup for Hitler’s planned Ardennes

offensive – his last-ditch attempt to break out and

recapture Antwerp, eliminate the Allied western front, and

return his attention to the Russians in the east. Whatever

the Germans’ motive, it meant a general buildup and

increased resistance for the next step in the Allied

advance; all done in secrecy – and as history shows, the

Allies didn’t really know what was coming, and weren’t

prepared for it.

54 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 120.31

On November 16th, General Barton’s 4th Infantry Division

was sent to take the town of Hurtgen and clear the forest

between Hurtgen and Schevenhutte, after that moving east

toward the Roer River. The 4th’s efforts were to be part of

a larger offensive including also the 1st , 8th, 9th, and 104th

Infantry Divisions as well as the 3rd and 5th Armored

Divisions, supported by over 300 tanks, almost three-dozen

battalions of field artillery, and huge numbers of aircraft

in an attempt to reach the plain adjacent to the Roer

River55; air support (Operation Queen, the largest

assemblage of aircraft in support of infantry to date) was

to preclude this operation. The 4th would advance with the

8th Infantry Division on its right to the south, and the 1st

Infantry Division to its left in the north, and within the

4th its own 8th Regiment to the north, 12th Regiment in the

south, and the 22nd advancing in the middle. It would face

the remainder of the German 275th Infantry (reinforced with

men from other units), which had been in the woods for a few

55 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 247.

32

weeks and had already fought well against the 9th and 28th

Infantries; it was dug in, and well-prepared56 with the

‘normal’ Hurtgen defenses – pillboxes, mines, and elaborate

fortifications.

Operation Queen kicked off with over 2,000 U.S. and

R.A.F. bombers leveling most of Duren, and flattening the

towns of Julich and Durwiss57; General Barton’s 4th Infantry

Division marched into the Hurtgen already at a disadvantage,

as his 12th Infantry Regiment had been sent to assist the

28th Division earlier in November, and had of course

suffered heavy casualties there - it was to start the next

phase of the battle at about one-third of its original

strength58. The 4th was also to follow the ‘tried, tested,

and found wanting’ method of marching into the forest en

masse, and choosing one of two fates – being chewed up on

the roads by mines, traps, and waiting Germans, or being

split up by the terrain and losing cohesion. Following one 56 Steve Snow, et al. CSI Battlebook II-A: Heurtgen Forest, IV-2.57 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 98.58 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 249.

33

resulted in heavy casualties, and the other resulted in the

loss of a traditional “front” and opening one’s lines to

infiltration, and of course, casualties. As the 4th

Infantry Division forged through the woods, it experienced

the same misery its predecessors the 9th and 28th did; the 8th

Regiment lost 200 men the first day, after meeting heavy

resistance (including 8-foot-high concertina wire, a la

World War I) on the Wehe River, and even with tank and tank

destroyer support made it only 1,000 yards before being

stopped; on its way to the villages of Grosshau and

Kleinhau, the 22nd Regiment spent 3 days losing 3 battalion

commanders and 300 men59, but eventually took Grosshau at

the end of November. The 22nd was the most successful of

the 4th’s regiments, forming an eastward bulge in the German

lines, but in doing so it had ground itself down to almost

nothing. The 12th regiment incurred the (by now normal)

heavy casualties in its attempt to take the highway between

Germeter and Hurtgen village, so that armor could move

between them; the mission failed, and its commander relieved59 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 25.

34

of duty. By November 19th, no significant territorial gains

had been achieved to offset the heavy losses incurred by the

4th Division, and the areas of responsibility between it and

adjacent units were redrawn in order to lessen its frontage

burden and create some sort of front from the no-man’s land

the forest had become; conversely, it had achieved a Pyrrhic

victory of sorts in that its German counterpart in the area,

the 275th, had suffered such high casualties as well that it

was no longer combat-effective, removed from the line, and

replaced by the 344th Division60. The only significant

change in these recent incursions into the “Green Hell” was

General Barton’s omission of a preparatory artillery barrage

to maintain the element of surprise, as it had become a

calling-card of sorts, announcing to its targets that an

attack was imminent; in addition, the weather cleared

occasionally and air support was intermittently available in

this sector. The 4th would continue to fight in the Hurtgen

for a few more weeks, while other units moved in and other

received much-needed relief.60 Steve Snow, et al. CSI Battlebook II-A: Heurtgen Forest, IV-27,28.

35

The 8th Infantry Division had relieved the 28th by

November 19, and were to begin their attack on November 21,

with the goals of taking the towns of Hurtgen and Kleinhau,

and the Brandenberg-Bergstein Ridge, nearing the Roer River

and getting closer to Duren. The 8th had mostly assembled,

its 13th and 28th Regiments, along with the attached 2nd

Ranger Battalion, ready to go; its 121st Regiment was still

trying to move north and rendezvous from Luxembourg. Its

confused overnight truck-ride and foot-march through sleet

and snow brought the exhausted men to their new position at

sunrise, so they could see that they had marched into their

new home of ice, blasted trees, and shell craters nestled

between a ditch and a cliff; they also saw the usual German

gifts of barbed wire, booby traps, and mines61, augmented by

the Germans since the men of the 28th had left the immediate

area.

The 121st Regiment’s plan was to duck through a part of

4th Infantry’s sector and take the woods west of Hurtgen,

61 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 143.

36

and de-mine the road with the help of the 12th Engineer

Combat Battalion and most of the division’s artillery.

Parts of the 5th Armored Division, with infantry support,

were to storm out of the woods at daybreak and take Hurtgen

and Kleinhau so that the 121st could occupy them. The

attack unfolded in what was by now normal “Hurtgen” fashion,

with heavier-than-usual casualties and little success;

subsequent attacks met with similar German resistance, and

battalion medics worked non-stop on mounting casualties62;

renewed attacks were also repulsed, including another thrust

reinforced with additional armor on November 25. Disabled

and destroyed American tanks now blocked the only tank-

worthy road in the area and on November 26 a change was

made – the woods were cleared of German infantry, and some

elements of the 121st got close enough to see that the town

of Hurtgen was still heavily fortified. It was a rare step

forward, and another was taken the next day when infantry

and armor took the Kleinhau-Brandenberg road; tanks and tank

62 Marc F. Greisbach, Combat History of the 8th Infantry Division in World War II, (Nashville, Battery Press, 1988), 37.

37

destroyers proceeded to Hurtgen and “blasted the town

building by building”63 while the infantry slugged it out

hand-to-hand with the defenders in fighting described as

“sheer pandemonium”64; clean up the following day involved

the collection of corpses and round-up of nearly 350 German

prisoners, while arrangements were made for the drive on

Kleinhau, which was taken the next day with similar house-

to-house fighting; it was also secured and an exploratory

thrust toward Brandenberg met instant resistance. Defensive

positions were established and solidified while the next

step was planned – a 5th Armored Division offensive against

Brandenberg with the 8th in support, beginning December 1.

That same day, the decision was made to relieve the 4th

Infantry Division with the relatively fresh 83rd Division.

Some units of the 4th Infantry Division suffered a casualty

rate of over 150% and the division as a whole suffered over

4,500 total casualties65 and was reduced to another

63 Greisbach, Combat History of the 8th Infantry Division in World War II, 40.64 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 150.65 Richard K. Kolb, “4th Fights Through Four Wars”, VFW, Veterans of Foreign Wars Magazine, (February 2007), 19.

38

collection of wounded, sick, and near-frozen men who had

acquitted themselves well in executing a plan that had been

repeatedly proven ineffective. Once again, another American

infantry division had fallen victim not only to the forest,

bad weather and the prepared and waiting Germans within, but

also its own predictable, repetitive wide-front dispersion

of troops that prevented mutual assistance and also the

depth necessary to make penetrations and capitalize on them;

and yet another division was to take its place.

Meanwhile, the push toward the Brandenberg–Bergstein

Ridge by 5th Armored began in early December, and took

heavy losses slugging it out with German armor – losing over

20 tanks and keeping only one tank destroyer serviceable.

It stalled right outside Bergstein, and 5th Armored sent 60

“fresh” men (just released from the hospital) to man the

line outside Bergstein – they were exhausted, without proper

winter equipment, and unarmed – they were forced to pick up

various weapons from the dead on their way66. They were

66 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 167.

39

unable to do much of anything in such a state, and the 2nd

Ranger Battalion was called in to assist in taking Hill 400

on December 7, (hills were numbered by the Army according to

elevation, in feet), which overlooked Bergstein and allowed

German spotters to call down accurate artillery fire all

around it; it was so heavily fortified that American troops

referred to it as “Castle Hill”. After a brief

reconnaissance, the Rangers attacked up the icy slope, past

the bodies of those who had tried before, firing and

reloading as they ran; they took the hill, and many prepared

a defense while 2nd platoon pursued the Germans down the far

side of the hill67; through they had the hill, they were now

surrounded and could only wait for the inevitable

counterattack. Shortly after their assault, they were

shelled mercilessly by German artillery before the first

infantry assault, which they repelled – but were by now left

with 17 combat-effective men, of the original 65-man assault

team. By noon, the Rangers had endured another artillery

67 William R. Phillips, “D-Day Was Not His Longest Day”, World War II, (May2002), 58

40

barrage and repelled another assault while outnumbered 10-

to-1, this time managing to seize some German weapons. This

routine continued throughout the day, and after their radios

were knocked out they began sending the walking wounded back

down the hill in an attempt to break through German lines

and get the 8th Division to send help.

It came the next day, when a massive barrage from the

American 56th Field Artillery Battalion laid down around the

hill gave the Rangers a respite and drove the Germans back,

allowing the Rangers to be relieved by 8th Division

infantry. Lt. Leonard Lomell, a Ranger D-Day hero for his

role in the assault on Pointe du Hoc, claimed that the

hellish fighting on D-Day didn’t compare to the ferocity of

the hand-to-hand combat he endured on Hill 400, instead

calling December 7, 1944 his “longest and most miserable day

on earth”68. The Rangers suffered a 90% casualty rate in

taking Hill 400, and unfortunately the hill was lost two

weeks later during the Battle of the Bulge.

68 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany: June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945, 177.

41

The 8th Infantry Division (including its attached

units and ad hoc task forces) had endured over 4,000

casualties in this phase of the fighting, and with the 1st

and 4th Divisions too depleted to attack further; its drive

had stalled short of the town of Hof Hardt69, and the 83rd

Division was tasked with driving through the remainder of

the forest; the 83rd’s General Macon was concerned with

quickly taking the towns of Gey (331st Regiment) and Strass

(330th) on the edge of the Hurtgen before more German

reinforcements arrived, and clearing the way for the 5th

Armored to push to the Roer River70. The fighting in this

last phase was just as savage as it had been for all the

other divisions, and the 83rd suffered heavy infantry and

armor losses, approximately 1,600 men, until Hitler’s

Ardennes Offensive, or “Battle of the Bulge” began on

December 16 and the fighting then raged to the south of the

Hurtgen; after that, the lines there held until after the

Bulge was reduced in January 1945, and fighting in the area 69 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 29.70 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 172.

42

resumed in February over the still-contested parts of the

Aachen-Hurtgen area71, which had essentially been absorbed

into the post-Bulge campaigns.

The World War I-style stalemate in the Hurtgen Forest

involved around 200,000 men and chewed up several American

and German divisions, producing almost 60,000 total

casualties – but for what? The U.S. Army had traded

personnel, a lot of them, for roughly fifty square miles of

wild forest that proved to be of little value in future

operations – and it still could not go any further because

it did not control the Roer River dams. It did, however,

tie down and eventually destroy German troops and equipment

that could have been used in the Ardennes Offensive –

conversely, those same German troops tied down and delayed a

much larger American force and allowed the secret buildup

that became the Ardennes Offensive – and after all was said

and done, they still retained the Roer dams and the power to

flood the valley and either delay the Americans before they

71 David Colley, “Horror in the Huertgen Forest”, VFW, Veterans of Foreign WarsMagazine, (November 1994), 15.

43

crossed the Roer, or destroy them in the valley72. So, how

did this happen? How did the architects of the successful

Normandy invasion engineer such a similarly unsuccessful

campaign that even mystified their enemies, and what caused

it to bog down and become labeled by some historians as “a

misconceived and basically fruitless battle”73 and “grossly,

even criminally stupid”74.

Several factors contributed to grinding battle of

attrition that became the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, but

the genesis of this campaign’s misdirected plan arose with

the success of the Normandy invasion; as Allied armies

pursued the exhausted and disorganized Germans across

France, their leaders saw what they wanted to see, and

optimism often overrode practicality. Instead of focusing

on annihilating the German Army while it was stunned in

France, the first post-Normandy plans centered on capturing

72 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 34.73 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 205.74 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany: June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945, 167.

44

territory, allowing the Germans to slip eastward75, all the

while underestimating their ability to counterattack76 and

affecting future Allied attack plans. The Germans began to

regroup, re-arm, and prepare for the defense of their homes

and families, while the overconfident Allies experienced

logistical difficulties as they marched across France – they

were outrunning their supplies, and faced with an

overarching planning dilemma - do they pursue now with less-

than-ideal numbers and equipment, or hold up, re-arm, and

face a rejuvenated enemy who had done the same77?

Montgomery favored a strong push from the north, Patton

the same from the south, but ultimately the final decision

rested with Eisenhower – and he favored a wide advance, his

“broad front” plan, which he felt allowed for a safe rear

area for supply and logistics operation for the push into

Germany78, as well as exploiting perceived German weakness,

75 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 6.76 Duke, “A Catastrophic Battlefield”, 745.77 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 31.78 Ballard, Rhineland: The U.S. Army Campaigns of World War II, 6.

45

preventing them from massing in response to any strong

Allied approach79. It was the opposite of the military

principle of concentration of force, and in this case Eisenhower

believed that stretching his forces would cause the Germans

to stretch theirs80 – unfortunately, the Allies lacked the

required overwhelming superiority of numbers to make it work,

especially when assaulting force multipliers such as the

Siegfried Line or the Hurtgen Forest. As historian Robin

Neillands asserts in his criticism of the “broad front”,

“just telling every commander to push ahead hardly amounts

to a strategy”81, and that same vague idea would exhibit

itself later in the campaign, in smaller ways – especially

in the Hurtgen Forest, when the elements of Bradley’s 12th

Army (1st, 3rd, and 9th Armies) themselves split into several

broad fronts along divisional and regimental lines,

resembling at any one time a up to a half-dozen parallel

79 G.E. Patrick Murray, “Eisenhower as Ground-Forces Commander: The British Viewpoint”, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (2007), 158.80 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 62.81 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 47.

46

advances too weak to assist one another in any significant

way, and lacking the depth to force and then exploit any

breaches achieved82. A dozen years after the war,

Montgomery, in his memoirs, called the broad front plan

“uncoordinated” and lacking in that it allowed army groups

to act with too much independence83. This was borne out

over and over later in the campaign when exhausted units

made gains only to withdraw (or be destroyed) because they

themselves were too weak to hold, and reinforcements were

also too weak or nonexistent. Additionally, within the

“broad front” lay the issue of materiel to funnel into the

hoped-for logistics system – Antwerp was still in German

hands, and supplies had to go through France, whose

infrastructure was destroyed by Allied bombing in order to

allow the Normandy invasion in the first place. The Allies

had deprived the Germans in France of roads and railways,

but they themselves inherited the fruits of their labors

82 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 177.83 Murray, “Eisenhower as Ground-Forces Commander: The British Viewpoint”, 158.

47

when they recaptured France, and were limited in their

ability to move while remaining well-supplied; the “safe

area” existed, but gasoline shortages meant that much of the

needed materiel was trapped in Normandy, awaiting transport

to the American units assembling near the Siegfried Line.

The American buildup at the Siegfried Line was nearly

simultaneous with the German buildup within it; some American

units found the line unoccupied on initial probes, only to

meet fierce resistance upon their return a few days later.

Despite the commonly held American belief that the German

army was finished and no longer posed a serious threat, it

was in fact still a potent force, and far from finished.

Field Marshal Walter Model was given command of Army Group B

and ordered by Hitler to reinforce the Westwall; described

as a ruthless, coarse bully who resorted to threats and

ultimatums to inspire his subordinates, Model was also a

highly-regarded defensive specialist who, in his new role,

was encouraged to make the most of his talents. In fact,

48

his quick rebuilding of the German army was referred to as

the “Miracle of the West”84.

In matters of technology, the resurgent German army was

bolstered by the production surges of 1944 – hundreds of

medium and heavy tanks were produced and ready to fight in

the west, airplane production resumed at a high rate, and

research continued on Hitler’s “wonder weapons”. It was

widely accepted that German tanks, with their heavier armor

and better guns, were superior to their American

counterparts, but their superiority was offset by their

numbers – fewer German tanks were available to combat the

larger numbers of Shermans and tank destroyers. Ironically,

the American tank destroyers possessed greater speed and the

larger guns needed to penetrate German armor, but their

thinner armor made their crews reluctant to engage German

tanks without tank support85. The Shermans, however, had been

adapted to a number of specialty roles, such as flamethrower

84 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 7-9.85 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 207.

49

and bulldozer tanks86. On the squad level, the

standard .30-caliber machine gun had a much slower rate of

fire than the German MG-42, but the semi-automatic American

M-1 Garand was superior to the bolt-action Kar 98, and

though the newer Volksturm units were armed with machine

pistols, the Kar 98 was still widely used. Artillery was

fairly evenly matched, though doctrine for its use differed

and American fire control and communication were considered

superior87.

The new German divisions created by the comb-out of

hospitals, rear-echelon, and Luftwaffe units (no longer

needed because the Luftwaffe was a shadow of its former

operational self), approximately 180,000 men, were combined

with surviving units and reformed by the command elements of

the German army that remained operational through the flight

through France, and reconnaissance took place in the Hurtgen

while other units performed delaying actions. Heinrich

Himmler, now commander of the Replacement Army, rushed his

86 Ferrell, “The Battle of Aachen”, 32.87 Snow, et al. CSI Battlebook II-A: Heurtgen Forest, III-12.

50

(better-armed but smaller) Volksgrenadier divisons to the

Western Front, augmented by regular army training

divisions88. The abandonment of the Westwall after the fall

of France turned out to be a blessing, and years of neglect

allowed the forest to take over, naturally camouflaging it;

the German units mashed together in the reorganization

fixed, rearmed, and manned existing bunkers and fortified

the line with mines, wire barriers, trenches, and traps89,

and prepared for an active defense. The forest was more

important to the Germans than the Americans, for several

reasons; for one, it was an excellent place to delay and

wear down the invading Americans by committing minimal

forces, while protecting the rear for both a general troop

build-up and Hitler’s planned counterattack through the

Ardennes90. German leaders also knew the importance of the

Roer River and its dams, and had to protect them – the Roer

plain could, as a last resort, be flooded with the dams’

88 Rush, “A Different Perspective: Cohesion, Morale, and Operational Effectiveness in the German Army, Fall 1944”, 480.89 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 34.90 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 5.

51

opening or destruction and delay the American advance to the

Rhine River, so they had to be retained - and the most

direct route to the major dams (Schwammanuel and Urft) lay

through the Hurtgen Forest. The German plan to protect the

dams, and the river, differed greatly from that of the

Americans.

Both 1st Army’s General Hodges and VII Corps’ General

Collins were veterans of World War I’s Meuse-Argonne

fighting, and were wary of being outflanked by the enemy

from any direction; the Hurtgen Forest represented a

possible staging area from which the Germans could launch a

flanking attack from the south against 1st Army’s advance on

Aachen, and they felt that the forest could be taken with

minimal effort, as intelligence indicated that the forest

was populated by understrength German units loosely

controlled and with very low morale91. The plans that

followed were heavily based on the assumption that they

were, in fact, ready to vacate the forest and the Westwall

91 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 60-61.52

in the same manner they left France92. With a show of

superior American forces, the Germans were expected to just

leave, leaving open the way to the Roer River, the Rhine, and

Germany itself. The warning provided by the 60th Regiment’s

first hard-fought incursion in the forest went unheeded, and

so possession of the forest and its towns and roads became

the initial target of this campaign – and the United States

Army committed itself to the forest.

When it entered the forest, 1st Army’s VII Corps

retained only its advantage in manpower, and surrendered all

of the other advantages it possessed – armor, artillery, and

air power. The roughly 20 to 1 advantage in sheer numbers

of tanks and destroyers enjoyed by the Americans93 was

nullified in large part due to the trees, lack of roads, and

unfriendly topography. The few roads that existed were

mined, blocked, or booby-trapped by the waiting Germans, and

armor that entered the forest lost both its ability to

maneuver and its advantages of speed over the defending 92 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 239-240.93 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 14.

53

German infantry; the resultant separation from its own

infantry meant that it was no longer part of a combined arms

offensive, and left it vulnerable – even the valuable

experience gained in the Normandy hedgerows were no help

here94, and American armor suffered heavy casualties in the

forest. The Kall Trail / Kommerscheidt debacle suffered by

the Lt. Flieg and the 707th Tank Battalion is a shining

example of how the forest topography, plus the Germans

waiting in clearings near targeted villages, decimated

American armor95.

Artillery was also of limited use in the forest, as it

was restricted, like armor, by the terrain. Mechanized like

the armor, it didn’t always enjoy the mobility necessary for

its proper deployment and the thick trees interfered with

targeting and fire control – American observers couldn’t see

targets, and the thick forest became advantageous shrapnel

for German artillery96 (the famous “tree bursts”) and it

94 Sullivan, “Armor Against the Huertgen Forest: The Kall Trail and the Battle of Kommerscheidt”, 25-26.95 Astor, “The Deadly Forest”, World War II (November 2004), 29-30.96 Rush, Hell in Hurtgen Forest :The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment, 22.

54

wasn’t as effective as it had been in the earlier drives

across Europe – the Hurtgen action was mostly an infantry

engagement97. The same tree cover and thick forest, coupled

with bad winter weather, grounded aircraft from both armies,

and the overwhelming advantage enjoyed by the American air

corps (approximately 14,000 Allied planes in the West alone,

versus about 4,500 total Luftwaffe aircraft in both theaters)

was mostly nullified98; on a few occasions air cover was

able to assist, such as the P-47 dive-bombing prelude to the

9th’s October 6 attack and Operation Queen, but the air

corps also did not enjoy the successes it had earlier in the

year. In committing to this forest campaign, American

commanders had surrendered their advantages in men,

material, and offensive mechanized superiority – tanks,

artillery, and air power – and had begun an infantry

offensive against an enemy ensconced in his prepared

97 Jay Marquart, “Going the Distance with the Old Reliables”, World War II (February 2004), 45.98 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 14

55

fortifications, just the type of fighting in which the enemy

had proven to be very, very good99.

The attack on the Hurtgen forest became a small war in

itself, an infantry-based, World War I style battle for

terrain. The battle plan was fairly simple, a microcosm of

Eisenhower’s “broad front” in which units were to push

forward with few, and in some cases, no reserves. Starting

with the 9th Infantry Division’s first action in the forest

in September, American units moved abreast of one another

leaving their flanks exposed, sometimes for miles100, unable

to offer mutual assistance or supporting attacks. They were

also grossly unprepared to attack prepared fortifications

like those of the Siegfried Line, lacking the special

equipment (explosives, bangalore torpedoes, flamethrowers)

essential for the reduction of pillboxes101 and the

experience to maximize such equipment’s effectiveness. Only

through painful experience did the 9th Division come up with

99 Peter R. Mansoor, The G.I. Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945 (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1999), 188.100 MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, 328-330.101 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 44.

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detailed procedures for pillbox destruction – and they still

took up valuable time. The 9th Division finished its time

in the forest with a frontal assault that nearly finished

it102, and it was removed from the line in October with a net

gain of 3,000 yards, in exchange for roughly 4,500

casualties. Such massive casualties forced removal from the

line for much-needed rest, and the acquisition of

replacements. Early in the battle, Major Houston of 9th

Division had warned that the Roer Rover dams posed a threat

to American forces and were extremely important to German

resistance; the dams could be opened or destroyed by the

Germans, flooding the plain and stopping the American

thrust, or be used to flood the plain after the Americans

crossed it, cutting them off from any assistance and most

likely ensuring their destruction103. However, the forest

remained the objective and the 28th Division was to proceed

in a similar fashion – General Cota was given little input

on his division’s deployment, tactics, or plan of attack. 102 Mansoor, The G.I. Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945, 187-188.103 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 65.

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The differences this time were added mechanized elements and

engineer and chemical munitions support for the infantry;

the 28th advanced alone, with its 109th, 110th, and 112th

regiments moving in different directions and unable to

support one another. The end result was to be expected,

with heavy casualties (over 6,000) and the loss of huge

amounts of valuable (and limited) equipment; the 28th, like

the 9th, was sent into the forest, driven out with crippling

losses, and sent to a quiet sector to rest and refit. For

a second time, the same basic plan had failed.

By November, the Roer River dams had begun to enter the

minds of Allied planners, but not their strategy – the forest

was still the target and the newest plan was an amplified

version of earlier “broad front” plans, involving a massive

buildup of five infantry divisions and two armored

divisions, preceded by the aforementioned “Operation Queen”

– the largest-ever air operation in support of a ground

operation. The 4th Infantry Division took its place in the

line, opposing the same German troops in the same fortified

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positions that had already proven almost invincible. Adding

to existing problems was the fact that the 4th was starting

its offensive in a weakened state, as one of its regiments

had already suffered huge casualties in the Hurtgen – its

12th Regiment had assisted the 28th Division earlier in

November. So, already weakened, the 4th Division went forth

just like its predecessors in the forest – regiments

abreast, no reserves, and with gaping holes in its lines,

inviting infiltration104; the result was, not surprisingly,

the same as enjoyed before – heavy casualties, little gain,

and lost time. The 4th Division, given the same mission in

the same terrain in the same weakened state, had become a

victim of not only the forest and the German enemy inside

it, but also the unimaginative and repetitive planning of

the United States Army105; the same tactics that had failed

the 9th and 28th Divisions had also failed the 4th, and it

traded 4,000 men for three miles of forest106. For whatever

104 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 24.105 Mansoor, The G.I. Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945, 190.106 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 250-251.

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reasons, U.S. Army commanders still failed to realize that

their pinprick attacks, one spread-out division at a time,

allowed the Germans to rearrange their forces at will to

repulse the (by this time) predictable American assaults107,

and the same fate, via the same method, awaited the next

division to visit the area. In its own chapter in the

Hurtgen forest saga, in late November the 8th Infantry

Division was tasked with taking the town of Hurtgen itself –

which it did, after slogging through the frozen mud and ice

of the worst German winter in recent memory, and sustaining

over 4,000 casualties by December 8. The last major action

of 1944 in the Hurtgen occurred in the town of Merode, where

only 13 men, out of two companies, survived a German

counterattack108. The Germans still held Schmidt and its

road nexus, part of the forest, and the Roer dams.

Curiously, American interest in actually planning for the

capture of the Roer Dams had escalated toward the end of

107 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 202.108 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 253.

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November and early December109, but the fighting for the

Hurtgen was swallowed up by the Ardennes Offensive and lines

remained relatively stable during the so-called “Battle of

the Bulge” to the south110. By that time the battle had

taken months of valuable time, involved over 120,000 men,

and cost the United States Army over 33,000 total

casualties; the Germans suffered around 28,000111, and the

major Roer River dams, the Schammanuel and the Urft, were

still in German hands. The 78th Division finally wrested

them from German hands on February 9, 1945, after the

Germans had used them to cause some flooding in the Roer

valley112. The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest had become its

own war, insulated from the fighting around it, and even

from the true objectives it shielded, the Roer River dams;

the fighting itself sucked in more and more men, and the

objective became the territory itself, which ironically held

109 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 180.110 Colley, “Horror in the Huertgen Forest”, 16.111 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 34.112 Charles B. MacDonald, Victory in Europe, 1945: The Last Offensive of World War II (Mineola: Dover Publications,2007 ), 81-83.

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no intrinsic value113. It became a self-feeding meat

grinder, in which a cycle of attack and counterattack was

perpetuated by replenishment and repeat, with no end in

sight save the annihilation of one of the combatants.

A few major factors contributed to this cycle of

destruction – the massing of troops at the Siegfried Line

caused it become the sole focus of the early stages of the

advance, to the exclusion of anything else114, and the

aforementioned lack of creativity on the part of the United

States Army was bred in part by what soldier and historian

Charles MacDonald (who also fought there and won a Silver

Star) calls “breakthrough thinking”115, in which commanders

were stuck in a sort of rut – the idea that a major push

somewhere could lead to a breakthrough, and be exploited for

gain. Unfortunately, tied in with the “broad front” idea,

this caused thrusts and advances, often without reserves or

reinforcements, that were too weak to make gains or

113 MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, 493.114 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 204.115 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 69.

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breakthroughs in any one place. When met with failure, they

subscribed to the belief that one more push, one more unit,

one more day or week, would succeed – and so, based on that

thinking, repeatedly committed troops to the forest the same

way each time, without any substantial alteration. The

forest became an end in itself, and the repeated attacks

caused by this repetitive strategy suffered because the

senior Allied commanders were, as a whole, unfamiliar with

the battlefield, and often had no idea what was happening in

it. In their initial planning, they failed to acknowledge

the value of the forest to the defending Germans and

advantages it gave to their outnumbered forces116; by

ignoring the forest topography and making no subsequent

attempts to familiarize themselves with it, upper-echelon

leaders tasked men and their machines with the impossible117

– such as the lack of reconnaissance of the Kall Trail,

little more than a goat trail - but labeled a “road” on

maps given to the tank crews that would eventually plunge 116 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 202117 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 207.

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off of its cliffs, or the small clearings on maps that were

actually miles wide118, causing men to advance long distances

on foot exposed to heavy artillery and machine-gun fire.

Rather than reevaluate the planning, leaders at the Army and

Corps levels pushed for unrealistic goals and assigned blame

to the men asked to do the impossible with virtually

nothing119. When lower-level commanders failed in achieving

the unlikely or improbable, despite often suicidal bravery,

they were very often replaced, without regard to their

circumstances120, adding to the ever-present and climbing

rate of attrition.

Such straight-ahead frontal-assault infantry tactics

and the constant grinding combat lead to spiraling

casualties, and the need for replacement soldiers to

replenish the ranks. The German and American replacement

systems differed greatly, as the German system was unit-

based – units were normally removed from battle and trained

118 MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, 493119 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany: June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945, 169.120 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 252.

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as a whole, giving the individual soldier the benefit of

older unit members’ experience, and also giving him a sort

of home – but the American system was patterned after an

assembly line, with each soldier being a replaceable part of

a unit, a cog in a machine. The machine was running full-

time and required replacements, men and officers, and many

units struggled to stay at even minimum strength.

As the number of American divisions was fixed at

eighty-nine, there weren’t always enough idle divisions

available to relieve divisions that were actively engaged,

and the ones in combat relied on replacements (officers

also) to maintain their effectiveness121. The existing

system provided men with basic training, and further

training, if required, provided in the field. In the

Hurtgen, that often meant that men with minimal training

were rushed to the front, sometimes not even knowing what

unit they were assigned to before being injured or killed122.

121 Rush, Hell in Hurtgen Forest :The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment, 302.122 Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine, The Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes Campaign, 1944, 242, 251.

65

They were replacing men with valuable combat experience

while making mistakes attributable to their inexperience –

bunching up, talking loudly, giving away their position –

and lacking the additional knowledge and skills necessary to

survive in the unique battlefields in which they’d just

arrived. These mistakes not only reduced their

effectiveness by keeping their performance at a lower level

that weakened the unit as a whole, but also created division

within units as the few remaining veterans often avoided the

newer men whose mistakes were liable to get them wounded or

killed. “Veteran” was also a subjective term, as men who’d

simply survived a few days were labeled as such. Between

constant combat that reduced available training time and

frequent veteran reluctance to fraternize with newer men,

valuable lessons that should have been passed from

experienced to inexperienced soldiers were not shared, and

units that enjoyed paper strength did not always possess

full combat effectiveness123. High casualties amongst

123 Rush, Hell in Hurtgen Forest :The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment, 320-321.

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officers also caused similar problems, as new leaders with

no experience with either combat or the men under them were

to lead them into battle; total strangers who’d never met

one another and had little in common aside from a common

uniform rushed into battle together, with insufficient

training and little cohesion – inexperience at all levels

eventually caused more inexperience, which in turn

contributed to higher casualties, necessitating the need for

more inexperienced replacements. The American replacement

system was designed to maintain the administrative

effectiveness of the organization, at the expense of the

individual – it kept units at paper strength, but not always

at practical fighting strength124, and this greatly affected

the men fighting in the interminable gloom and misery of the

Hurtgen.

The fighting in the Hurtgen forest also had the

unintended result of turning back the clock of warfare to

some extent, and became a negative struggle for territory

124 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 207

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reminiscent of the Meuse-Argonne campaign near the end of

World War I125, dominated by close-quarters infantry combat,

frontal assaults, and artillery duels. The drive to batter

through the Siegfried Line and cross the Roer River toward

the Rhine carried the American army into the Hurtgen Forest,

where resistance, if any, was expected to be minimal – when

the U.S. Army was surprised by heavy German resistance

there, it responded in kind – and the battle grew into its

own war, seemingly insulated from the greater war, diverting

the American invaders from their initial purpose. It became

a sort of black hole, eating up lives and military assets at

a pace barely sustainable by its combatants, but no one

could afford to leave as long as the enemy remained; the

Americans had to eliminate the threat to its flanks, and the

Germans had to hide and protect their planned breakout. And

so, the carnage in the Hurtgen escalated and may have

continued unabated for the unforeseeable future were it not

125 Allen R. Millett & Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 474.

68

swallowed up the Battle of the Bulge, in which the Germans

expended the last of their offensive capability.

Until the Bulge occurred, First Army’s General Hodges

stubbornly protected his southern flanks by feeding a chain

of infantry divisions into the forest, hoping for that

breakthrough that the next division might provide. Though

the fighting in the Hurtgen had the unintended and

accidental result of destroying four German divisions that

may have faced the Americans and changing the face of the

German breakout later in December126, it also expended

valuable American resources and the forest itself was a

diversion from his stated purpose of breaking through the

Siegfried Line and advancing east to the Rhine. Though he

cannot be faulted for attempting to secure the southern

flank of the forest, Generals Bradley and Hodges could also

have attempted a containment of the forest after meeting the

first German resistance and forsaken the eventual siege of

the forest, towns, and road nets within it; the delay in the

forest allowed Germany to retain control of the dams until 126 Margry, “The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest”, 34.

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February 1945127. With containment of the forest and a more

southerly move between the Hurtgen and Ardennes Forests

through the so-called Monschau Corridor, the U.S. Army would

have been able to move through clear terrain128 and assault

the dams much earlier in the fall of 1944, completely

cutting off the Germans in the Hurtgen; without

reinforcements and supplies, German resistance would have

lessened or stopped and the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, as

it were, may not have occurred at all129, and become the

“loser that our top brass ever after never seemed to want to

talk about”130.

Though well-intentioned and grounded in military

doctrine, General Hodges’ desire to protect his southern

flank spun out of control and without coherent strategic

direction, became an invasion of the Hurtgen Forest and a

war in itself. By committing fully to the forest, the

127 Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams, 1944-1945, 209-211.128 Terdoslavich, “Battle of Huertgen Forest”, 212.129 MacDonald, The Battle of the Huertgen Forest, 199.130 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany: June 7, 1944 – May 7, 1945, 169.

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United States Army’s advantages in manpower and materiel

were negated by the terrain, with the impassable forest

hampering the movement of men and supplies and severely

limiting the effectiveness of armor, artillery and air power

– three linchpins of American doctrine. The battle became

an infantry struggle reminiscent of World War I, with

commanders who were unfamiliar with the terrain repeatedly

committing troops to frontal assaults against a fortified

and prepared enemy. The replacement system of the time,

impersonal and often inefficient, ensured that army

divisions remained at paper strength when in reality,

undertrained and unprepared men were rushed into combat and

quickly became casualties themselves, necessitating the

insertion of more men of similar caliber. The true goals of

the campaign in this sector, the Roer River and its dams,

were acknowledged by commanders but did not play a role in

strategic planning until the fighting in the Hurtgen had

reached a crescendo, just before being overshadowed by a new

threat - Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch Ardennes Offensive.

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Other strategic options, such as containment of the forest

or thrusts directed through more suitable terrain in weakly-

defended sectors, were not explored until after the

opportunity had passed, and valuable time and costly

resources had been expended in the acquisition of

intrinsically useless territory. The grinding combat in the

Hurtgen Forest had no effect on the eventual outcome of the

war and was swallowed up by the larger campaigns in the

region – by all accounts, the United States Army won the

forest but lost the battle, and it was allowed to fade into

relative obscurity, remembered mostly by those who were

there. In the years that followed, the forest debacle

became a historical footnote and the same men who engineered

the successful Normandy invasion eventually distanced

themselves from the disaster in the Hurtgen Forest – victory

has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

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