Fighting in the Hürtgen Forest, Schmidt acknowledged, made ‘the greatest demands on [the soldiers’] physical and psychological endurance’. They survived only because the Americans could not profit from their overwhelming superiority in tanks and airpower, and artillery observation was very difficult. But German supplies and rear-echelon personnel suffered badly from fighter-bomber attacks. The difficulties of bringing hot food forward meant that German troops received nothing but ‘cold rations at irregular intervals.’ Men in soaking uniforms had to remain in their foxholes for days in temperatures close to freezing.
On 8 October, the division was joined by Arbeitsbataillon 1412, consisting of old men. ‘It was like a drop of water on a hot stove,’ Schmidt commented. Virtually the whole battalion was annihilated in the course of a single day. An officer cadet battalion from the Luftwaffe was also torn to pieces. And on 9 October, when the division had already suffered 550 casualties ‘without counting the great number of sick’, a police battalion from Düren was thrown into the battle east of Wittscheide. The men, aged between forty-five and sixty, were still in their green police uniforms and had received no training since the First World War. ‘The commitment of the old paterfamilias was painful,’ Schmidt admitted. Casualties were so heavy that staff officers and training NCOs from the Feldersatzbataillon, their reserve and replacement unit, had to be sent forward to take command. Even badly needed signallers were sent in as infantrymen.
Only the very heavy rain on 10 October gave the 275th Division the chance to re-establish its line. Schmidt was impressed by the American 9th Infantry Division and even wondered whether it had received special training in forest warfare. That afternoon when his corps and army commanders paid a visit, they were so shaken by the condition of the division that they promised reinforcements.
Reinforcements did arrive, but to launch a counter-attack rather than strengthen the line. They consisted of a well-armed training regiment 2,000 strong, half of whom were officer candidates, commanded by Oberst Helmuth Wegelein. Hopes were high. The attack was launched at 07.00 hours on 12 October with heavy artillery support. But, to the despair of German officers, the advance became bogged down under very effective American fire. It appears that the battalion commanders of this elite training regiment became confused and the whole attack collapsed in chaos. A second attempt in the afternoon also failed. Training Regiment Wegelein lost 500 men in twelve hours, and Wegelein himself was killed the next day. On 14 October, the Germans were forced to pull back to reorganize, but as General Schmidt guessed with relief, the American 9th Division was also totally exhausted.
The 9th Division’s painful and costly advance came to a halt on 16 October after it had suffered some 4,500 battle and non-battle casualties: one for every yard it had advanced. American army doctors, operating on both badly wounded GIs and German soldiers, had begun to notice a striking contrast. Surgeons observed that ‘the German soldier shows an aptitude for recovery from the most drastic wounds far above that of the American soldier’. This difference was apparently due to ‘the simple surgical fact that American soldiers, being so much better fed than the Germans, generally have a thick layer of fat on them which makes surgery not only more difficult and extensive, but also delays healing. The German soldier on the other hand, being sparsely fed and leaner, is therefore more operable.’
To the dismay of divisional commanders, First Army headquarters was unmoved by the casualties of the 9th Division’s offensive and still took no account of the terrain. Once again Hodges insisted on attacking through the most difficult parts and the thickest forest, where American advantages in tank, air and artillery support could never play a part. He never considered advancing on the key town of Schmidt from the Monschau corridor to the south, a shorter and generally easier approach. The trouble was that neither his corps commanders nor his headquarters staff dared to argue with him. Hodges had a reputation for sacking senior officers.
The First Army plan for the Hürtgen Forest had never mentioned the Schwammenauel and Urft dams south of Schmidt. The idea had simply been to secure the right flank and advance to the Rhine. Hodges did not listen to any explanation of the problems the troops faced. In his view, such accounts were simply excuses for a lack of guts. Radios worked badly in the deep valleys, heavy moisture and dense pinewoods. A back-up signaller was always needed since the Germans targeted anyone with a radio pack on his back. The Germans were also swift to punish any lapses in wireless security. The slip of a battalion commander who said in clear over the radio ‘I am returning in half an hour’ led to two of his party being killed in a sudden mortar bombardment on their customary route back to the regimental command post.
The trails and firebreaks in the forest were misleading and did not correspond to the maps, which inexperienced officers found hard to read anyway. ‘In dense woods,’ a report observed, ‘it is not too infrequent for a group to be completely lost as to directions and front line.’ They needed the sound of their own artillery to find their way back. Sometimes they had to radio the artillery to fire a single shell on a particular point to reorientate themselves. And at night men leaving their foxhole could get completely lost just a hundred metres from their position, and would have to wait until dawn to discover where they were.
Most unnerving of all were the screams of those who had stepped on an anti-personnel mine and lost a foot. ‘One man kicked a bloody shoe from his path,’ a company commander later wrote, ‘then shuddered to see that the shoe still had a foot in it.’ American soldiers soon found that the Germans prided themselves on their skills in this field. Roadblocks were booby-trapped, so the trunks dropped across trails as a barrier had to be towed away from a distance with long ropes. New arrivals had to learn about ‘Schu, Riegel, Teller and anti-tank mines’. The Riegel mine was very hard to remove as it was ‘wired up to explode upon handling’. Germans laid mines in shellholes where green troops instinctively threw themselves when they came under fire. And well aware that American tactical doctrine urged troops to approach a hill whenever possible via ‘draws’, or gullies, the Germans made sure that they were mined and covered by machine-gun fire.
Both sides mined and counter-mined in a deadly game. ‘When mines are discovered,’ a report stated, ‘this same unit places its own mines around the enemy mines to trap inspecting parties. The Germans, in turn, are liable to booby-trap ours, and so on.’ A member of the 297th Engineer Combat Battalion noticed a mine poking through the surface of the ground. Fortunately for him, he was suspicious and did not go straight to it. A mine detector showed that the Germans had buried a circle of other mines all around it and he would have had a leg blown off. ‘The Germans are burying mines as many as three deep in the soft muddy roads in this sector,’ Colonel Buck Lanham’s regiment reported soon after reaching the Hürtgen Forest. The engineers would locate and remove the top one, not realizing that there were more. Once spotted, they resorted to blowing them with dynamite and then repairing the hole in the road with a bulldozer.
Another danger was from trip-wires among the pine trees. Officers complained that soldiers spent so much time staring at the ground just in front of them in an attempt to spot wires and mines that they never looked up and around when on patrol. The Americans also improvised trip flares in front of their forward positions, with wires stretched out in several directions between the trees. These consisted of a half-pound block of TNT taped to a 60mm mortar illuminating shell, with a firing device. They soon discovered that they had to be sited at least fifty yards in front of the machine-gun pits covering the approach, otherwise the gunner would be blinded by the light. But in the Hürtgen Forest nothing was simple. As another officer observed: ‘The effective range of rifle fire in woods and forests seldom exceeds fifty yards.’
Both sides suffered badly from the chilling autumn rains. Even when it was not pouring down, the trees dripped ceaselessly. Rusty ammunition caused stoppages. Uniforms and boots rotted. Trench foot could lead rapidly to debilitation, and eve
n the need to amputate. American officers were slow at first to recognize the gravity of the problem. Regiments, weakened by the loss of so many men, made efforts to issue a fresh pair of socks to each man with his rations. Men were told to keep their spare socks dry by putting them inside their helmet, and to use the buddy system, rubbing each other’s feet briskly, and sleeping with their feet up to help the circulation.
The constant chill felt by men soaked to the skin for days on end in water-filled foxholes made battalion officers aware of the need to allow men to get warm at least once a day. Bell tents with heaters inside were set up behind the lines, with hot coffee and hot food on offer. Another heated tent was used for drying uniforms. But all too often the constant attacks and the Germans’ aggressive patrolling prevented those in the forward foxholes from getting away. Trench-foot rates soared as the men were simply doomed to shiver under pelting rain and chew on cold rations. As a heater and cooker, some resorted to using a C-Ration can filled with earth and soaked in gasoline, which they dug into a hole a foot deep. They would then warm up their food or liquid in a larger No. 10 can which had been perforated round the top.
Resilient constitutions, both mental and physical, were needed in such conditions, especially when the snow began to fall in November at higher altitudes. ‘Men over thirty are too old to stand up under combat conditions,’ a VII Corps officer observed, ‘while men under twenty are not sufficiently matured, mentally and physically.’ Unfortunately, the vast majority of replacements were either under twenty or over thirty.
Even providing overhead cover for the two-men foxholes was a dangerous matter. The German artillery fired tree bursts, deliberately exploding their shells in the tops of the tall pines to rain splinters and metal shrapnel down on anyone sheltering below. So part of the foxhole had to be covered with logs under a thick layer of earth, camouflaged in turn with moss or branches. But cutting logs to size with an axe was dangerous. The sound carried a long way and the Germans, knowing that men were above ground, would fire a rapid mortar barrage. Handsaws had to be used instead.
The Germans, as had been their practice in Normandy and on the eastern front, manned their foremost line very lightly, relying on automatic weapons. They then used better-quality troops to launch their counter-attacks, backing them with tanks. And when the Americans attacked, they did not shrink from calling down artillery fire on their own positions. The Americans soon discovered that they could do the same, because with the shells coming in from behind, the spray of deadly splinters and shell fragments went forward against the attackers rather than down on their own men, sheltering in their foxholes. ‘It took guts, but it worked,’ a colonel commented.
On 1 November, Hodges accompanied by Gerow, the V Corps commander, visited the headquarters of the 28th Division at Rott. He told ‘Dutch’ Cota, who had so proudly watched his men march through Paris, that they would be attacking the next morning as the first stage before VII Corps began to advance on their left. The plan, Hodges assured him, was ‘excellent’. In fact the plan was just about as inept as it could be. Not only was the 28th to advance across the steepest ridges and valleys, but Hodges ordered Cota to split his division in different directions, effectively making his attacking force far weaker than the defenders. Not even a whole regiment was to advance on the town of Schmidt. Cota tried tactfully to point out the flaws but his objections were ignored.
Obstinacy and a failure to listen were even greater at the top of the Third Reich. The very next morning, General der Flieger Kreipe, having been forced to resign as chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, made his farewell to Reichsmarschall Göring on his special train at the Wolfsschanze. The conversation came round to the outcome of the war. ‘Certainly there will be a Nibelungen battle,’ Göring said, ‘but we will stand at the Vistula, at the Oder or at the Weser River.’ Kreipe doubted that a civilian population could be expected to engage in such suicidal warfare. He begged the Reichsmarschall ‘to prevail upon the Führer to see to it that politics will take a hand in the matter. Göring was silent for a while,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and finally told me that he was unable to do this since this would rob the Führer of his self-confidence.’
At 09.00 on 2 November, just as Kreipe met Göring, the 28th Infantry Division advanced eastwards out of a small salient into the mistcovered forest. The 110th Infantry Regiment on the right suffered badly from machine guns in pillboxes of the Siegfried Line which had not been dealt with earlier. The 109th Infantry on the left were equally unfortunate, running straight into an unmarked minefield covered by heavy fire. The German 275th Infanterie-Division defending the sector was by then experienced in forest fighting, but had been ground down so badly that its commander, Generalleutnant Schmidt, clamoured for its relief. Some of his soldiers, on surrendering to the Americans, claimed that mines had been laid behind as well as in front to prevent desertion. Several of their comrades had been executed for making the attempt.
In the centre, the American 112th Infantry Regiment attacked down towards the village of Vossenack, running along to the end of a saddleback ridge above the 200-metre-deep ravine of the Kall river. Artillery concentrations of white phosphorus shells set most of the houses on fire. Sherman tanks fired at the church steeple, on the assumption that it contained at least a German artillery observer or snipers. Expecting a counter-attack after they had occupied the smoking village, the company commander told his men to dig in and have their rifles ready. To his surprise ‘one big, old country boy remarked, “The last time I fired this thing, it cost me 18 bucks in a summary court. I was liquored up on Calvados.”’
On 3 November at dawn, the 112th Infantry began to advance down the very steep slope to the River Kall below and then climb up the equally steep escarpment on the south-east side which led to the village of Kommerscheidt. One battalion, displaying considerable endurance, leap-frogged on ahead towards the town of Schmidt, which it seized to the astonishment of the utterly unprepared German troops there. Sergeant John M. Kozlosky stopped a horse-drawn ammunition wagon. ‘When the driver found that Kozlosky could speak Polish, he jumped from the wagon and kissed Kozlosky on both cheeks.’ He was one of the many Poles forced into the Wehrmacht. Below Schmidt lay the great, meandering Schwammenauel reservoir and its dam, just two and a half kilometres from where the soldiers of the 112th stood. Cota could not resist basking in the congratulations he received on this triumph, even if it seemed too good to be true.
Only a few days before, officers at First Army headquarters had suddenly realized that if the Germans opened the dams when American forces downstream were trying to cross the River Roer, a wall of water could sweep away pontoon bridges and cut off any troops in bridgeheads on the east bank. Hodges started to take this in only when news of the capture of Schmidt arrived, but it was too late to do anything. And to make a bad situation worse, Hodges had just encouraged Collins to delay the VII Corps attack until a fourth division arrived to reinforce his advance. As a result the 28th Division was left totally exposed.
Cota’s division could hardly have been a worse choice for such a hopeless task. Earlier losses meant that most of its troops were replacements and it had a very high rate of self-inflicted wounds and desertion. As a warning, Private Eddie Slovik, a repeat deserter from the division, was selected as the only soldier in the United States Army in Europe to be executed for the offence.
The Germans had been taken by surprise because they could not understand the reason for the strong American attacks in the Hürtgen Forest, ‘after the effectiveness of the German resistance’ against the 9th Division the previous month. But, in one of those coincidences of war, Generalfeldmarschall Model, the commander-in-chief of Army Group B, was holding a map conference at that very moment in Schloss Schlenderhan, near Quadrath, west of Cologne. He and his staff were looking at the possibility of an American attack along the boundary between the Fifth Panzer Army and the Seventh Army. So as soon as Model received word of the American occupation of Schmidt, he wasted no time. He
sent Generalleutnant Straube, the commander of the LXXIV Corps in charge of the sector, straight back to his headquarters. Then, with General Erich Brandenberger of the Seventh Army and General der Panzertruppe Hasso von Manteuffel of the Fifth Panzer Army, he worked out their best response with the other officers present.
The 116th Panzer-Division was ordered to move with all speed to attack the northern flank of the American advance along with the 89th Infanterie-Division. The 116th Panzer was now commanded by Generalmajor Siegfried von Waldenburg, following the storm created by his predecessor, Generalleutnant Graf von Schwerin, who had cancelled the evacuation of Aachen. Waldenburg also left the map exercise rapidly with his operations officer, Major Prinz zu Holstein, to rejoin their division. Model, who had been ordered by Führer headquarters not to commit the 116th Panzer, felt obliged to ignore this instruction purely ‘to prevent American troops from spilling out of the woods on to the open ground’.
That night, men of the 3rd Battalion of the 112th Infantry Regiment holding Schmidt were exhausted after their efforts. Rather than dig foxholes, they went to sleep in houses. Their officers never imagined that the Germans would react immediately, so they did not send out patrols or position outposts. As a result the battalion was totally surprised when German infantry and tanks appeared at dawn, following a sudden artillery bombardment. Short of bazooka rounds and shocked by the unexpected attack from three directions, most of the battalion panicked. In the confusion, some 200 men ran straight into more Germans coming from the south-east, and only sixty-seven of them were left alive afterwards. Officers lost control of their men. The rest of the battalion, abandoning their wounded, rushed back towards Kommerscheidt to join up with the 1st Battalion.