As the fighting in the Hürtgen Forest ground on, both sides relied more and more on artillery. Schmidt’s division alone had a total of 131 guns in direct support, although its artillery regiments were equipped with a mixture of German, Russian, Italian and French guns, which made ammunition resupply difficult. The American concentration of firepower was even greater.
The result was a chaotic nightmare of trees smashed, shredded, gashed and sliced by shellfire and mortars, bodies mangled by mines, abandoned helmets and rusty weapons, the burned-out carcasses of vehicles, ammunition containers, ration packs, gasmasks and sodden mud-encrusted overcoats abandoned because of their weight. ‘Especially distressing was the personal clothing of the soldiers,’ General Straube, the German corps commander, admitted. In the wet and intense cold his men suffered from hypothermia, trench foot, frostbite and illness. Yet mortar rounds caused the largest proportion of battle casualties on both sides.
Many German officers believed that the fighting in the Hürtgen Forest was worse than fighting in the First World War, or even on the eastern front. One described it as ‘an open wound’. Generalmajor Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff called it a ‘death-mill’. Hemingway, having attached himself again to Lanham’s 22nd Infantry, witnessed the scenes of snow, mud and smashed pines. He said that the Hürtgen was ‘Passchendaele with tree bursts’.
Hemingway, again armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun despite the recent inquiry into his martial activities, was also carrying two canteens, one filled with schnapps and the other with cognac. He certainly demonstrated his own fearlessness under fire on several occasions, and even took part in one battle. Journalism was not high on his priorities. He referred to himself mockingly as ‘Old Ernie Hemorrhoid, the poor Poor Man’s Pyle’, in a mild jibe against Ernie Pyle, the most famous American war correspondent. But he studied the men around him and their conduct under fire because he had plans for writing the great American novel about the war. As his biographer observed, ‘Ernest gloried in the role of senior counsellor and friend to both officers and men.’ He was fascinated by the nature of courage and derided psychiatrists’ views about a man’s breaking point.
J. D. Salinger, little more than a mile away with the 12th Infantry Regiment, continued to write short stories furiously throughout this hellish battle, whenever, as he told his readers, he could find ‘an unoccupied foxhole’. This activity seems at least to have postponed Salinger’s own psychological collapse until the end of the war.
Combat exhaustion, that military euphemism for neuro-psychiatric breakdown, spread rapidly. ‘After five days up there you talk to the trees,’ ran one of the few jokes. ‘On the sixth you start getting answers back.’ With perhaps cynical exaggeration one of Bradley’s staff officers, who visited the sector, wrote: ‘The young battalion commanders who came out of the Hürtgen Forest were as near gibbering idiots as men can get without being locked up for it.’ One of them apparently said to him: ‘Well, it’s not too bad until the doughs get so tired that when they are coming out of the line and there is a dead dough from their own outfit lying on his back, in their way, they are just too goddam tired to move their feet and they step on the stiff’s face, because what the hell …’
Stress made the men yearn for nicotine and alcohol. Most officers were generous in sharing their own privileged supplies of whisky and gin, but rumours of cigarette rations being stolen by quartermasters in the rear to sell on the black market could almost provoke a riot. ‘The men accept poor or short rations without grumbling,’ remarked an officer with the 4th Division; ‘in fact, [they] would rather go short on rations to get more cigarettes.’
Physical casualties also soared. ‘You drive by the surgical tents in the morning, going up, and there are two or three stiffs there on the ground; you come back in the afternoon and there are thirty or forty … They are short-handed in the Graves Registration squad.’ In the first three days of the offensive, the 22nd Infantry in the 4th Division suffered 391 battle casualties, including 28 officers and 110 NCOs. Sometimes new company and platoon leaders survived for such a short time that their men never even knew their names.
German losses were also severe. Model, determined to ‘keep control of the dominant terrain’, threw one hastily organized battalion or regiment after another into the battle. More elderly policemen and under-trained Luftwaffe ground crew were marched forward to die. Many were killed by American artillery before they even reached the front line. Whenever the sky cleared, American fighter-bombers attacked German artillery batteries using white phosphorus bombs. Although freezing in his threadbare uniform and badly under-nourished due to meagre and infrequent rations, the German Landser fought on because there appeared to be no alternative.
Constant German counter-attacks against the 1st, 4th and 8th Infantry Divisions delayed the American advance through the smashed woodland, but painfully and slowly it continued: whatever the cost, and despite the freezing rain, and the mud and the mines which prevented tanks from coming up to support them. American troops became embittered. ‘Our men appear to have developed fully a requisite psychological attitude towards battle,’ a sergeant wrote in his diary. ‘They are killers. They hate Germans and think nothing of killing them.’
For 23 November, Thanksgiving Day, Eisenhower had ordered that every soldier under his command should receive a full turkey dinner. Battalion cooks tried to comply in the Hürtgen Forest, if only with turkey sandwiches, but as men climbed out of their foxholes to line up, they were hit by German artillery fire. A major who witnessed that day of heavy casualties confessed that he had never been able to eat another Thanksgiving dinner again. He ‘would get up and go to the backyard and cry like a baby’.
Nobody felt there was much to celebrate. It needed another six days of very heavy casualties to take Kleinhau and Grosshau. The 8th Division finally captured the village of Hürtgen in a mad charge followed by close-quarter fighting in the houses, with grenades, rifles and Tommy guns.
The 83rd Division began to replace the 4th Infantry Division. These troops too were shaken by the damage caused by ‘tree bursts that sent shell fragments screaming from the treetops in every direction’. To prepare for their assault on the village of Gey, the massed artillery organized a ‘time on target’, with every gun synchronized to fire at the same moment at the same target. They nevertheless faced ‘gruelling house-to-house combat’ when they entered the village. It was not until the end of the first week in December that the Americans were out of the forest, and looking down on the open countryside of the Roer valley. But they had still failed to capture the town of Schmidt and the dams. RAF Bomber Command, after repeated requests, finally made three attempts to destroy the dams, with five cancellations due to bad weather. Little damage was done and Bomber Command refused to try again. Finally, Hodges decided to try attacking towards them from the south-west with the 2nd Infantry Division, but the great German offensive soon halted that attempt. The dams would not be secured until February 1945.
The cost to both sides in battle casualties, nervous breakdown, frostbite, trench foot and pneumonia had been horrendous. In October, some 37 per cent of US troops had to be treated for common respiratory diseases, the worst level in the whole war. Fighting in the Hürtgen Forest produced 8,000 cases of psychological collapse on the American side. The Wehrmacht did not acknowledge this to be a legitimate reason to be spared front-line duty, so it had no figures. ‘There were few cases of combat exhaustion,’ the chief German medical officer said later. ‘However since these men were not relieved, I could not say what percent this would be of total casualties.’ ‘In some cases,’ wrote Brandenberger’s chief of staff at Seventh Army, ‘soldiers were found dead in their foxholes from sheer exhaustion.’
In the Hürtgen Forest campaign, the United States Army suffered 33,000 casualties out of the 120,000 men deployed. The 4th Infantry Division alone sustained ‘more than 5,000 battle casualties and over 2,500 non-battle losses’. To help the division to recover, General Hodges
ordered it to move to the ‘quiet’ VIII Corps sector across the Ardennes. Over the next twelve days, the 4th Division’s three regiments took over the positions of the 83rd Infantry Division and came under the command of Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, with its headquarters in Bastogne. The 4th Division had to man a fifty-six-kilometre front, yet it was only at half strength when the German Ardennes offensive struck a few days later.
The Germans Prepare
On 20 November, Hitler boarded his special train in the camouflaged siding in the Wolfsschanze. The Führer’s Sonderzug included a flak wagon at both ends with four quadruple guns, two armoured coaches and six passenger coaches in between. All were painted dark grey.
Hitler must have known in his heart that he would never return to East Prussia, but in a characteristic act of denial he ordered the building work on defences to continue. His staff and his secretary Traudl Junge also climbed aboard the train ‘with the rather melancholy feeling of saying a final farewell’. Hitler, who spoke only in a loud whisper, was nervous because next day in Berlin a specialist was going to remove a polyp from his vocal chords. Hitler admitted to Traudl Junge that he might lose his voice. ‘He knew very well’, she wrote, ‘that his voice was an important instrument of his power; his words intoxicated the people and carried them away. How was he to hold crowds spellbound if he couldn’t address them any more?’ His entourage had been begging him for weeks to speak to the nation. ‘My Führer, you must address the German people again. They’ve lost heart. They have doubts about you. There are rumours that you’re not alive any more.’
Hitler wanted to reach Berlin after dark. He said that this was to keep his presence there a secret, but his entourage knew that he did not want to see the effects of Allied bombing. When they disembarked at the Grunewald station and drove off to the Reichschancellery, ‘the column of cars tried to drive down streets that were still intact’, wrote Junge. ‘Once again, Hitler had no chance to see Berlin’s wounds as they really were. The dipped headlights of the cars merely touched on mounds of rubble to right and left of the road.’
Hitler’s most important reason for coming to Berlin was to supervise the planning for the Ardennes offensive, the vision which had come to him when bedridden in the second week of September at the Wolfsschanze. Hitler had been sick with an attack of jaundice, and was therefore unable to attend the situation conferences. ‘Hitler had all day in which to think,’ Generaloberst Jodl later recalled. ‘I saw him alone as he lay in bed – he usually disliked anyone seeing him in bed except his aides – and he spoke of the idea. I made a rough sketch on a map, showing the direction of attack, its dimensions, and the forces required for it.’
Hitler was determined never to negotiate, a fact of which Göring was well aware when he rejected General der Flieger Kreipe’s entreaty to persuade the Führer to seek a political solution. Hitler continued to convince himself that the ‘unnatural’ alliance between the capitalist countries of the west and the Soviet Union was bound to collapse. And he calculated that, instead of being ground down in defensive battles on both eastern and western fronts, a final great offensive stood a far better chance of success. ‘By remaining on the defensive, we could not hope to escape the evil fate hanging over us,’ Jodl explained later. ‘It was an act of desperation, but we had to risk everything.’
On the eastern front, a concentrated attack with thirty-two divisions would be absorbed and smothered by the immense forces of the Red Army. A sudden victory on the Italian front would change nothing. But Hitler believed that in the west, by driving north to Antwerp, two panzer armies could split the western Allies, forcing the Canadians out of the war and perhaps even the British in ‘another Dunkirk’. It would also put paid to their threat to the war industries of the Ruhr.
Hitler had selected the Ardennes as the sector for the breakthrough because it was so thinly held by American troops. He was certainly conscious of the success of the 1940 attack on that sector, and wanted to repeat it. The great advantage was the thickly forested Eifel region on the German side of the frontier, which offered concealment for troops and tanks from Allied airpower. Everything would depend on surprise and on the Allied leadership failing to react quickly enough. Eisenhower, he assumed, would have to consult with his political masters and other Allied commanders, and that could take several days.
Until Hitler’s unexpected announcement at the Wolfsschanze on 16 September, only Jodl knew of the Führer’s plan. From then on, everyone informed had to sign a piece of paper accepting that they would be executed if they mentioned it to anyone not specifically authorized. Jodl used his small staff for working out details of the plan according to Hitler’s wishes. Keitel, although theoretically in charge of the OKW, was not involved in the planning, only in the allocation of fuel and ammunition for the operation. And Rundstedt, despite his position as commander-in-chief west, received no information at all. This was why he was so irritated later when the Americans kept referring to the ‘Rundstedt offensive’ as if it had been his plan.
On 22 October, Rundstedt’s chief of staff General der Kavallerie Siegfried Westphal and Model’s chief of staff General der Infanterie Hans Krebs answered a summons to the Wolfsschanze. Fearing a tirade from Hitler over the fall of Aachen and suspecting that their request for more divisions would be angrily rejected, they were surprised when made to sign a pledge of secrecy on pain of death before entering the conference room. Jodl’s deputy presented a secret study entitled ‘Wacht am Rhein’ – ‘Watch on the Rhine’, a codeword designed to give an entirely defensive impression. There was at that stage no hint of the Ardennes offensive, just the transfer of troops to the western front in the general area of Aachen, supposedly to counter-attack an imminent American onslaught.
After lunch, the two chiefs of staff were included in Hitler’s daily situation conference. A number of officers were asked to leave after the general briefing, and about fifteen men remained in the room. Hitler began to speak. The western front, he said, had been asking for reinforcements, and considering the fact that during the First World War there had been 130 German divisions, this was understandable. He had not been able to reinforce it because he could not afford more troops just for defence. But now things were different because he had evolved a plan for a surprise attack towards Antwerp. It would take place south of Liège, and would be supported by 2,000 aircraft, an exaggerated figure which no officer present believed for a moment.
He wanted to launch the attack in November, the period of fogs, although he realized that it would take most of the month to prepare. The main breakthrough would be made by the Sixth Panzer Army just south of the Hürtgen Forest. Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army would support its left flank, while the Seventh Army would in turn guard against counter-attacks from Patton’s Third Army to the south. Westphal had many questions to put to Jodl afterwards, but found himself ‘whisked away’. He had been tempted to say that the forces allocated were clearly insufficient even to reach the River Meuse, but he knew that if he had raised these objections, the ‘Wehrmachtführungsstab [operations staff] probably would have accused me of defeatism’.
Westphal briefed Rundstedt on returning to Schloss Ziegenberg, the headquarters of the commander-in-chief west near Frankfurt-am-Main. It was next to the carefully camouflaged Adlerhorst, Hitler’s western field headquarters, which Albert Speer had built for him before the campaign of 1940. Westphal also reported his impression that even Jodl probably did not believe that they would ever get to Antwerp.
Although Rundstedt cannot have been pleased at the lack of prior consultation, he was determined not to allow such an over-ambitious operation to proceed without modification. Model, the commander-in-chief of Army Group B, had similar feelings when briefed by his own chief of staff. One can only speculate as to his reaction on hearing that he was strictly forbidden from using any of the divisions earmarked for the great offensive. They had to be withdrawn from the front to be re-equipped, reinforced and retrained. The American attack into the
Hürtgen Forest forced him to break that order less than two weeks later when he had to send forward the 116th Panzer-Division to help retake Schmidt. A number of other divisions nominated for the offensive also had to be brought in to prevent a collapse in the Hürtgen Forest. And further south the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division Götz von Berlichingen, which was needed to hold the advance of Patton’s Third Army, never could be extracted to join the Ardennes offensive as planned. These ‘German divisions were gradually worn down and could no longer be reconditioned prior to the Ardennes offensive’, acknowledged the chief of staff of the Seventh Army.
‘The old Prussian’ and the short, aggressive Model could hardly have been more different in appearance, tastes and political outlook, but they at least agreed that Hitler’s ‘grand slam’, or ‘large solution’, was one of his map fantasies. Rundstedt maintained that the only realistic option on the Ardennes–Aachen front was a double envelopment, with the two panzer armies wheeling inside the great bend of the Meuse to cut off Hodges’s First Army and part of Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s Ninth Army, while the Fifteenth Army further north near Roermond swung out to meet them near Liège. This alternative became known as the ‘small solution’ or ‘little slam’. Model was sceptical about the Fifteenth Army’s role. He wanted to use any spare forces as a follow-up to the main attack, broadening the breakthrough as they advanced, creating ‘a snowplow effect’.