The Victors Part 10

From there, the GIs could see Germans on foot and bicycles coming across the bridge. The men wanted to set up their machine guns in the windows and fire at the enemy, but Coyle ordered them to stay back, because he didn't want the Germans to know he was there, at least not until those ant.i.tank guns had been found and knocked out. He was pa.s.sing this order on to Sergeant Sampson when Sampson saw a German running through the street not twenty yards away. Instinctively, Sampson raised his tommy gun and stepped toward the window. Coyle pushed the weapon aside.

"Not yet," Coyle whispered.

Looking out, he saw the Germans manhandling an ant.i.tank gun from behind some bushes in the park and bringing it forward to a spot ten meters in front, pointing it up the street. The Germans were unaware of his presence. Just at that moment Vandervoort came into the room. Coyle explained the situation, showed him the German gun, and said he wanted to coordinate an attack with the British tanks.

Vandervoort agreed. He told Coyle to open up in five minutes; then he dashed downstairs to find the British tanks and put them into the attack. But before Vandervoort could get the tankers organized, someone opened fire from a building adjacent to Coyle. The Germans started firing back. Coyle motioned Pvt. John Keller forward. He fired a rifle grenade at the ant.i.tank gun in the street and knocked it out.

"Kla-boom!" as Coyle remembered it. There was a terrific explosion in the room. Another 57mm had fired; the sh.e.l.l went through one wall and exploded against the other. Then another, and another. Coyle pulled his platoon out of the house and occupied the cellar of another. By now dark had come on. Coyle got orders to b.u.t.ton down and wait for morning.

Dawn, September 20. One mile downstream from the bridges, Major Cook's battalion waited. The men were ready to go but the a.s.sault boats had not arrived. Through the morning, they waited. Vandervoort's battalion, meanwhile, was unable to drive the Germans out of the park, despite great effort (Sergeant Sampson was badly wounded that morning by sh.e.l.l fire).

Vandervoort described the fighting: "The troopers fought over roof tops, in the attics, up alleys, out of bedroom windows, through a maze of backyards and buildings. . . . Where feasible, tanks served as bulldozers, smas.h.i.+ng through garden walls, etc. A tank cannon thrust through a kitchen door really stimulates exodus. In the labyrinth of houses and brick-walled gardens, the fighting deteriorated into confusing face-to-face, kill or be killed show downs." Meanwhile, Cook's battalion waited for the boats.

Cook went to the top of a tower at a nearby power station to survey the opposite bank of the Waal. A young captain with Cook, Henry Keep, wrote a letter home, "We had a glimpse of a scene which is indelibly imprinted on my mind. What greeted our eyes was a broad flat plain void of all cover or concealment . . . some 300 meters, where there was a built-up highway [where] we would get our first opportunity to get some protection and be able to reorganize. . . . We could see all along the Kraut side of the river strong defensive positions, a formidable line both in length as well as in depth-pillboxes, machine gun emplacements. . . ." Cook had support; ten British tanks and an artillery battery were lined 120 up along the river to give covering fire when he crossed. But not until 1500 did the trucks arrive. What they brought wasn't much. There were only twenty-six a.s.sault boats, instead of the thirty-three that had been promised. And they were the frailest of tiny craft, six meters long, of canvas with a reinforced plywood bottom. And there were only three paddles per boat. The Waal was almost four hundred meters wide, with a swift current of about ten kilometers an hour. The paratroopers dragged the boats to the sh.o.r.e, pushed off into deep water, climbed in (thirteen men to a boat, plus three British engineers with the paddles) and tried to use their rifle b.u.t.ts as paddles. But as they got out into the current, some of the boats started whirling in circles. The tanks and artillery fired away. A smoke screen was laid down-but the wind blew it away. As the boats got straightened out and headed for the bank, the Germans opened fire. Cook and Keep were in the first boat. That was not where the battalion commander ought to have been, but Cook had been brought up by Gavin. "It was a horrible picture, this river crossing," Captain Keep wrote his mother, "set to the deafening roar of omnipresent firing. It was fiendish and dreadful. . . .

Defenseless, frail canvas boats jammed to overflowing with humanity, all striving desperately to cross the Waal as quickly as possible, and get to a place where at least they could fight."

Some boats took direct hits, leaving nothing but flotsam. Small-arms fire ripped through the boats. The flotilla seemed to scatter. Yet it came on. Only eleven of the twenty-six boats made it to the far sh.o.r.e, but when they did the paratroopers who had survived the ordeal had their blood up. They were not going to be denied.

"n.o.body paused," a British tank officer wrote. "Men got out and began running toward the embankment. My G.o.d what a courageous sight it was!" Cook led the way. Captain Keep commented, "Many times I have seen troops who are driven to fever pitch-troops who, for a brief interval of combat, are lifted out of themselves-fanatics rendered crazy by rage and the l.u.s.t for killing-men who forget temporarily the meaning of fear. However, I have never witnessed this human metamorphosis so acutely displayed as on this day. The men were beside themselves. They continued to cross that field in spite of all the Kraut could do, cursing savagely, their guns spitting fire." In less than a half hour Cook and his men had reached the top of the highway embankment and driven the Germans out. The engineers, meanwhile, had paddled back to the west bank and returned with a second wave. Altogether it took six crossings to get Cook's battalion over.

As those crossings were being made, Cook led the first wave in an a.s.sault on the bridges. His men came on fast. Meanwhile Vandervoort's people on the west side had finally overrun the park and were starting onto the bridges. The Germans scrambled frantically for the plungers to set off the explosives in place on the bridges, but Cook's men did what they had been trained to do-wherever they saw wires on the ground they cut them. The German engineers. .h.i.t the plungers, and nothing happened.

Cook's men set up defensive positions at the bridges, facing east. As the British tanks with Vandervoort started across the highway bridge, their crews saw the Stars and Stripes go up on the other end. Cook had lost forty men killed, a hundred wounded, but he had the bridges. There were 267 German dead on the railroad bridge alone, plus many hundreds wounded and captured, plus no one could guess how many had fallen into the river. It was one of the great feats of arms of World War II. Lt. Gen. Miles Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army, came up to shake Gavin's hand. "I am proud to meet the commander of the greatest division in the world today," he said. It was 1910 hours. Darkness was descending. Arnhem was but eleven kilometers away. Lt. Col. John Frost's battalion was still holding the eastern end of the bridge, but barely. General Horrocks decided to get up defensive positions for the night. When that was done, the guards began to brew up their tea. Cook's men were enraged. They yelled and swore at the Brits, told them those were their countrymen in Arnhem and they needed help now. Horrocks commented, "This operation of Cook's was the best and most gallant attack I have ever seen carried out in my life. No wonder the leading paratroopers were furious that we did not push straight on for Arnhem. They felt they had risked their lives for nothing, but it was impossible, owing to 121 the confusion which existed in Nijmegen, with houses burning and the British and U.S. forces all mixed up." In the morning (September 21) the tanks moved out, only to be stopped halfway to Arnhem by two enemy battalions, including one of SS troopers, with tanks and 88s. There were Jabos overhead, but the radio sets in the RAF ground liaison car would not work (neither would the radios with the British 6th Airborne in Arnhem). That afternoon the 9th Panzer Division in Arnhem overwhelmed the last survivors of Frost's battalion. Some days later the survivors of 1st Airborne crossed the Rhine to safety. The division had gone into Arnhem 10,005 men strong. It came out with 2,163 live soldiers.

Lieutenant Colonel Frost put the blame on the Guards Armored Division. Standing on the bridge on the fortieth anniversary of the event, he looked west, as he had so often, so fruitlessly, four decades earlier, and got to talking about the guards brewing up their tea, and then on to the relatively light casualties the guards suffered as compared to the 1st Airborne, and on to the magnificent performance of the 82nd.

His face blackened. As I watched, mesmerized, he shook his fist and roared a question into the air, a question for the guards: "Do you call that fighting?" Market-Garden was a high-risk operation that failed.

It was undertaken at the expense of two other possible offensives that had to be postponed because Eisenhower diverted supplies to Market- Garden. The first was the Canadian attack on the approaches to Antwerp, Europe's greatest port and essential to the support of any Allied offensive across the Rhine.

In the event, Antwerp was not opened and operating until the end of 1944, which meant that through the fall the AEF fought with inadequate supplies. The second postponed offensive was that of Patton's Third Army, south of the Ardennes. Patton believed that ifhe had gotten the supplies that Monty got for Market-Garden, he could have crossed the Rhine that fall and then had an unopposed path open to Berlin. That seems doubtful, but we will never know because it was never tried. To the end of his life Eisenhower insisted that Market-Garden was a risk that had to be run. In my interviews with him, between 1964 and 1969, we discussed the operation innumerable times. He always came back to this: The first rule in the pursuit of a defeated enemy is to keep after him, stay in contact, press him, exploit every opportunity. The northern approach to Germany was the shortest, over the terrain most suitable to offensive operations (once the Rhine had been crossed). Eisenhower felt that, given how close Market-Garden came to succeeding, it would have been criminal for him not to have tried. The trouble with Market-Garden was that it was an offensive on much too narrow a front. The pencil-like thrust over the Rhine was vulnerable to attacks on the flanks. The Germans saw and took advantage of that vulnerability with furious counterattacks all along the length of the line, hitting it from all sides. In retrospect, the idea that a force of several divisions, consisting of British, American, and Polish troops, could be supplied by one highway could only have been accepted by leaders guilty of overconfidence.

14 - Metz, Aachen, and the Hurtgen

PATTON'S THIRD ARMY had been stopped in its thrust through France not by the Germans but by a shortage of gasoline. But when the supply line caught up with Patton's lead tanks, he discovered another problem, the mighty fortress system around Metz. The initial key to the system was Fort Driant, built in 1902 and strengthened almost every year since, either by the French or the Germans after 1940. In size, thickness, and firepower it was a monster, with clear fields of fire up and down the Moselle River. Patton could not cross that river until he held Driant.

122 Driant was surrounded by a deep moat, which in turn was surrounded by a twenty-meter band of barbed wire. It had living quarters for a garrison of two thousand, with sufficient supplies for a month or more of battle. Its big guns rose from the earth on hydraulic mounts, sniffed around, fired, and disappeared back into the earth. There were four outlying cas.e.m.e.nt batteries, and concealed machine-gun pillboxes were scattered through the area. The only way in was over a causeway.

On September 27, Third Army had made its first attempt to take Driant. The Americans had a.s.sumed that the fort would be lightly garrisoned by inferior troops. Although they had only a vague idea of the fort's works and surrounding terrain, they figured that a pre-World War I fortress system couldn't possibly stand up to the pounding of modern artillery, much less air-dropped bombs of 500 to 1,000 pounds, not to mention napalm. From dawn to 1415 hours, the Americans. .h.i.t the fort with all the high explosives in their a.r.s.enal. The men of the 11th Infantry Regiment, who led the a.s.sault, were confident that nothing could have survived inside the fort.

At 1415 the infantry began to move in on the fort. To their astonishment, when they reached the barbed wire surrounding the moat, Germans rose up from pillboxes to their front, sides, and rear and opened fire. Shermans came forward to blast the pillboxes, but their 75mm sh.e.l.ls hardly chipped or scarred the thick concrete. The infantry went to the ground, and ignominiously withdrew under cover of darkness.

With that withdrawal Third Army's advance came to a halt. It now faced a new problem in its experience, but the oldest tactical/engineering problem in warfare, how to overcome a fortified position.

Like First Army to the north, Third Army began thinking and got started on the challenge of Driant by adopting some new techniques and weapons. It helped considerably that the Americans finally got their hands on the blueprints of the fort, which showed a warren's den of tunnels.

No amount of high explosive was going to knock it down. Infantry would have to get inside the fort, kill the German defenders who resisted, and take possession. To do that, the 11th Regiment would have to get over the causeway. To do that, there were a few new weapons. One was the tankdozer, another was a "snake," a longer version of the bangalore torpedo. The dozer would clear away rubble, the snake would blast a path through the barbed wire. A third new weapon was the flamethrower. A Company got four of them. On October 3 the second a.s.sault on Driant began. The snakes got shoved under the wire, but they broke and were useless. The tankdozers had mechanical failures. Only one of the four flame- throwers worked. B Company, nevertheless, was able to get into the fort. Capt. Harry Anderson led the way, tossing grenades into German bunkers as he ran across the causeway, inspiring his men to follow him into Driant, where he established a position alongside one of the cas.e.m.e.nts. An intense firefight ensued. Germans popped out of their holes like prairie dogs, fired, and dropped back. They called in their own artillery from other forts in the area. Some American engineers got forward with TNT, to blast a hole in the cas.e.m.e.nt so that the GIs could enter the fortress system. But the heavy walls were as impervious to TNT as to sh.e.l.ls and bombs. On top of the cas.e.m.e.nt, Pvt. Robert Holmlund found a ventilator shaft. Despite enemy fire he managed to open the shaft's cover and dropped several bangalore torpedoes down the opening. Germans who survived evacuated the area, and Captain Anderson led the first Americans inside the fort. The room they had taken turned out to be a barracks. They quickly took an adjacent one. The Germans counterattacked. The ensuing firefight was a new dimension of combat. It shattered nerves, ears, and lives. One small firecracker set off in the bowels of one of the old forts is guaranteed to startle a tour group, and cause ringing ears; no one who had not been there can imagine the a.s.sault on the ears by machine-gun fire and hand-grenade explosions reverberating in the tunnels enclosed by the thick, dripping masonry walls. The air was virtually unbreathable; men in the barracks room had to take turns at gulping some fresh air from firing slits. The stench was a mixture of gunpowder, gas fumes, and excrement. Wounded could not be treated properly. Fresh water was nonexistent.

123 B Company was stuck there. It had neither the equipment nor the manpower to fight its way through the maze of tunnels. It couldn't go back; being on top of the fort was more dangerous than being in it. At dark American reinforcements, accompanied by a half-dozen Shermans, crossed the causeway and a.s.saulted another cas.e.m.e.nt, but they were badly shot up and forced to withdraw when the Germans came up from the tunnels and filtered into their rear. These small, local counterattacks could be devastating. Four of the Shermans were knocked out by panzerfaust sh.e.l.ls.

Capt. Jack Gerrie, CO of G Company, 11th Infantry, led the reinforcements. He had no illusions about the enemy. He had been in on the September 27 attack. "Watch out for these birds," he had told another company commander. "They are plenty tough. I've never run across guys like these before, they are new, something you read about."

On October 4 Gerrie tried to knock down the steel doors at the rear of the fort. Direct cannon fire couldn't do it, and protruding grillwork made it impossible to put TNT charges against the doors themselves. The Germans again called down fire on Driant, which forced G Company to scatter to abandoned pillboxes, ditches, sh.e.l.l holes, and open bunkers, anywhere they could find shelter. That evening Gerrie tried to reorganize his company, but his efforts were hampered by the Germans, who came out of the underground tunnels, here, there, everywhere, fired and retreated, causing confusion and further disorganization in G Company. Gerrie could count about half the men he had led to the fort the previous evening.

At dawn on October 5, German artillery commenced firing at Driant. After hours of this, Gerrie wrote a report for his battalion commander: "The situation is critical[;] a couple more barrages and another counterattack and we are sunk. We have no men, our equipment is shot and we just can't go on. . . . We cannot advance. We may be able to hold till dark but if anything happens this afternoon I can make no predictions. The enemy artillery is butchering these troops. . . . We cannot get out to get our wounded and there is a h.e.l.l of a lot of dead and missing. . . . There is only one answer the way things stand. First either to withdraw and saturate it with heavy bombers or reinforce with a h.e.l.l of a strong force, but eventually they'll get it by artillery too. They have all of these places zeroed in by artillery. . . .This is just a suggestion but if we want this d.a.m.ned fort let's get the stuff required to take it and then go. Right now you haven't got it."

Written from a sh.e.l.l hole, under fire, by a man who hadn't slept in two days, nor had a hot meal, it is a remarkable report, accurate, precise, and rightly critical of the fools who had got him into this predicament. It was so compelling it moved right up to the corps commander, who showed it to Patton and said the battalion commander wanted to withdraw. Never, Patton replied. He ordered that Driant be seized "if it took every man in the XX Corps, but he could not allow an attack by this Army to fail." Over the next three days Third Army ignored Gerrie's advice. It threw one more regiment into the attack, with similar ghastly results. The men on top of the fort were the ones under siege. The lowliest private among them could see perfectly clearly what Patton could not, that this fort had to be bypa.s.sed and neutralized because it was never going to be taken. Patton finally relented. Still, not until October 13 were the GIs withdrawn. About half as many returned as went up. This was Third Army's first defeat in battle.

The only good thing about a defeat is that it teaches lessons. The Driant debacle caused a badly needed deflation of Patton's-and Third Army's-hubris. That led to a recognition of the need to plan more thoroughly, to get proper equipment, to take units out of the line to integrate their replacements, and to conduct courses and exercises on the use of explosives in an a.s.sault on a fortress. The next time, Third Army was going to get it right. North of Luxembourg, at Eilendorf, just outside Aachen, Captain Dawson's G Company was holding its position on the ridge astride the Siegfried Line. The Germans needed to restore the integrity of their line, so they kept counterattacking. By October 4, G Company had repulsed three German counterattacks, and endured five hundred sh.e.l.ls per day from 105s. Then the 124 Germans came on in division strength, but again Dawson's company beat them back, with help from the artillery and air. "We had constant sh.e.l.ling for eight hours," Dawson remembered. "We had twelve direct hits on what was our command post." Then the German infantry came on. "When they stopped coming we could count 350 that we ourselves had killed-not those killed by our artillery or planes, but just by the one lousy little old company all by itself." An officer in headquarters company in Dawson's battalion, Lt.

Fred Hall, wrote his mother on October 6, "This action is as rough as I have seen. Still the hards.h.i.+ps are borne with little complaint." Back at 12th Army Group HQ, Bradley might be circling Berlin on the map, but outside Aachen there was more realism. Hall told his mother, "In the lower echelons of command, faced with the realities of the situation, the feeling is that the war will not be over before the spring of 1945 at the earliest."

Eisenhower continued to urge his subordinates to offensive action. All responded to the best of their ability. It was a war of attrition. Like Grant in 1864-65, Eisenhower could afford to continue to attack because his overall resources were superior to those of the Germans. In his memoirs, he writes that attrition "was profitable to us only where the daily calculations showed that enemy losses were double our own." But calculations were seldom as favorable as two to one-they were more like one to one.

Eisenhower kept attacking. At no other time in the war did he so resemble Haig or Joffre in World War I, or Grant in the Wilderness.

Like Grant, Eisenhower justified what many critics considered a sterile, cold-blooded strategy on the grounds that in the long run "this policy would result in shortening the war and therefore in the saving of thousands of Allied lives." And he was quite cold-blooded about the need to kill Germans. "People of the strength and war-like tendencies of the Germans do not give in," he told a critic. "They must be beaten to the ground."

The campaign that resulted was the least glamorous, yet one of the toughest, of the war. There wasn't much strategy involved: The idea was just to attack to the east. The terrain in the center of the American line-the Eifel Mountains and the rugged Ardennes and Hurtgen Forests-dictated that the main efforts would take place to the north and south of these obstacles. To the north, First and Ninth Armies would head toward the Rhine River along the axis Maastricht-Aachen-Cologne. The major obstacles were the Siegfried Line, the city of Aachen, and the northern part of the Hurtgen. To the south, Third Army would continue to attack around Metz.

To carry out those missions, the American army needed to learn new forms of warfare, 1944-style.

These would be set-piece attacks, like D-Day but in different terrain-cities, villages, forts, and forests. As in the Norman hedgerows, the army would have to develop new tactics to overcome the enemy.

Problems there were aplenty. For the first time since early August, when they had fled the hedgerow country, the Germans had prepared positions to defend. One of the first tasks they accomplished as they manned the Siegfried Line was to put S-mines, Bouncing Betties, that sprang when triggered by a trip wire or foot pressure a meter or so into the air before exploding, in front of their positions. Thousands of them. The canister contained 360 steel b.a.l.l.s or small pieces of sc.r.a.p steel. They were capable of tearing off a leg above the knee, or inflicting the wound that above all others terrified the soldiers. Lt. George Wilson had joined the 4th Division as a replacement at the time of St.-Lo. By early October he had been in combat for nine weeks, but he had not yet seen an S-mine. On October 10, when he led a reconnaissance platoon into the Siegfried Line straight east of Malmedy, Belgium, suddenly they were everywhere. "By now I had gone through aerial bombing, artillery and mortar sh.e.l.ling, open combat, direct rifle and machine-gun firing, night patrolling and ambush. Against all of this we had some kind of chance; against mines we had none. The only defense was to not move at all."

Engineers came forward to clear the mines and use white tape to mark paths through the fields. They took every precaution, but one of the engineers lost his leg at the knee to an S-mine, so they set to 125 probing every inch of ground with trench knives, gently working the knives in at an angle, hoping to hit only the sides of the mines. They began uncovering-and sometimes exploding-devilish little handmade mines, in pottery crocks, set just below the ground. The only metal was the detonator, too small to be picked up by mine detectors. They blew off hands.

A squad to Wilson's right got caught in a minefield. The lieutenant leading it had a leg blown off. Four men who came to help him set off mines; each lost a leg. Wilson started over to help, but the lieutenant yelled at him to stay back. Then the lieutenant began talking, calmly, to the wounded men around him.

One by one, he directed them back over the path they had taken into the minefield. One by one, on hands and knee, dragging a stump, they got out. Then the lieutenant dragged himself out.

Wilson had seen a lot, but this was "horribly gruesome. Five young men lying there each missing a leg."

Wilson stayed in the war to the end. He saw every weapon the Wehrmacht had, in action. After the war, he flatly declared that the S-mine was "the most frightening weapon of the war, the one that made us sick with fear."

Behind the minefields were the dragon's teeth. They rested on a concrete mat between ten and thirty meters wide, sunk a meter or two into the ground (to prevent any attempt to tunnel underneath them and place explosive charges). On top of the mat were the teeth themselves, truncated pyramids of reinforced concrete about a meter in height in the front row, to two meters high in the back. They were staggered and s.p.a.ced in such a manner that a tank could not drive through. Interspersed among the teeth were minefields, barbed wire, and pillboxes that were virtually impenetrable by artillery and set in such a way as to give the Germans crossing fire across the entire front. The only way to take those pillboxes was for infantry to get behind them and attack the rear entry. But behind the first row of pillboxes and dragon's teeth, there was a second, and often a third, sometimes a fourth.

"The Siegfried Line was undoubtedly the most formidable man-made defense ever contrived," according to Capt. Belton Cooper. "Its intricate series of dragon's teeth, pillboxes, interconnected communication trenches, gun pits and foxholes in depth supported by an excellent road net and backed up by a major autobahn system that ran back to Cologne, Dusseldorf and other manufacturing sites less than 50 kilometers to the east, provided the Germans with not only an excellent defense system but also a base from which to launch a major offensive." Cooper was describing the Siegfried Line as it faced Belgium.

Farther south, on the Franco-German border, it was more formidable, with major fortifications holding heavy artillery. The pillboxes were more numerous and better constructed. They were half underground, with cannon and machine guns and ammunition storage rooms and living quarters for the defenders, typically about fifteen soldiers. Throughout the length of the Siegfried Line, villages along the border were incorporated into the system. The houses, churches, and public buildings in these villages were built of stone and rock. The second floors of the buildings and the belfries on the churches provided excellent observation. For Captain Dawson and G Company outside Aachen, the task wasn't to attack but defend. This too was new. State-side training had emphasized offensive tactics, while in France the GIs had done far more attacking than defending. But Dawson and his men were holding high ground east of Aachen, which gave them observation posts to call in targets to the gunners and pilots. The Germans were desperate to get him off that ridge, which reporter W. C. Heinz of theNew York Sun had taken to calling in his dateline "Dawson Ridge, Germany." The Germans needed the ridge to restore their line and relieve the pressure on Aachen. So Dawson was going to have to defend.

At 2300 hours, October 15, an SS panzer division hit G Company. The first shots came as a surprise because the leading tank in the column was a captured Sherman, with American markings on it. The battle that was thus joined went on for forty-eight hours. There was hand-to-hand fighting, with rifle b.u.t.ts and bayonets. It was surreal, almost slow-motion, because the mud was ankle deep. Dawson called in artillery to within ten meters of his position. At one foxhole a German toppled dead over the barrel of an 126 American machine gun, while in another a wounded American waited until the German who had shot him came up and looked down on him, then emptied his tommy gun in the German's face. The two men died, at the bottom of the hole, in a macabre embrace. The American battalion commander cracked. He all but disappeared, or as Lieutenant Hall put it, "he became less and less interested in the conduct of the war."

The officers conferred among themselves, then persuaded the battalion executive officer to talk to the regimental commander. He did, and the CO was rea.s.signed. The battalion held its position.

On October 17 a German attack overran Dawson's ant.i.tank gun position. He set out to retake it.

Lieutenant Hall, battalion S-3, sent a report to regimental S-3 that evening: "I just talked to Dawson and he says that he has position restored where gun was. The gun was knocked out. He was not able to take the house. Said he would get it tomorrow. . . . Dawson's men killed 17 Jerries including five from the crew of a tank which was in back of the house. . . . His men have had no food for 24 hours. Their last hot meal was the night before last. Possibly we can get them a hot meal tomorrow."

Inside Aachen the battle raged. The Germans fell back to the center of the city, charging a price for every building abandoned. The rubble in the streets grew to monstrous proportions. In the center, the old buildings, made of masonry and stone, were almost impervious to tank cannon fire, so Col. Derrill Daniel brought a self-propelled 155mm artillery piece into the city, using a bulldozer to clear a path. Daniel reported that its effects were "quite spectacular and satisfying."

On October 16 the battalion ran into a strong German position in the city's main theater building. Daniel brought the 155 forward and wheeled it into the line side by side with the infantry. It fired more than a dozen sh.e.l.ls, point-blank, into the theater. The theater survived but its defenders, dazed, surrendered.

Still the fighting continued. For another four days and nights the Germans and Americans pounded each other while they destroyed Aachen. Finally, on October 21, Daniel's men secured the downtown area.

Col. Gerhard Wilck dared to disobey Hitler and surrendered his 3,473 survivors. At his interrogation he protested bitterly against the use of the 155 in Aachen, calling it "barbarous" and claiming it should be outlawed.

American losses were heavy, over 5,000. The 30th and 1st Divisions were badly depleted, exhausted, used up. They were in no condition to make a dash to the Rhine. German losses were heavier, 5,000 casualties and 5,600 prisoners of war.

Aachen was destroyed, with the exception of the cathedral, which housed Charlemagne's coronation chair. It escaped major damage.*

The standing cathedral surrounded by ruin and rubble was common after World War II. Five and more decades later, you can see the phenomenon in London, where St. Paul's stands surrounded by post-1945 buildings, or in Cologne, Aachen, Reims, and elsewhere. Thank G.o.d-and thank those medieval craftsmen and architects.

Outside Aachen, Dawson's company continued to hold. After Aachen fell there were fewer, less vigorous German attacks. On October 22 reporter W. C. Heinz got to Dawson's headquarters to do an interview. Dawson summarized the action simply, directly: "This is the worst I've ever seen. n.o.body will ever know what this has been like up here."

Heintz wanted to know, as best he could, and arranged to stay with Dawson for a few days to find out.

The dispatches he filed beginning October 24 give a vivid portrait of a rifle company commander in action in World War II. Of course Dawson was special, but not so special that what he was going through was that much different from what his fellow COs were experiencing. Of them it can be truly said 127 that they held the most dangerous and difficult job in the world. Dawson's HQ was in a cellar in the village. There were a candle and a kerosene lamp, a table and some chairs, a radio playing cla.s.sical music. There were a couple of lieutenants in the room, and a radioman, and Dawson's dachshund, Freda. Heinz got Dawson talking about what it had been like. "And the kid says to me," Dawson related, " 'I'll take that water to that platoon.' And he starts out. He is about fifty yards from this doorway and I'm watching him. He is running fast; then I can see this 88 hit right where he is, and, in front of my eyes, he is blown apart."

Dawson spoke of other strains. "I had a kid come up and say, 'I can't take it anymore.' What could I do? If I lose that man, I lose a squad. So I grab him by the s.h.i.+rt, and I say: 'You will, you will. There ain't any going back from this hill except dead.' And he goes back and he is dead." Dawson sighed. "He doesn't know why, and I don't know why, and you don't know why. But I have got to answer those guys."

He looked Heinz in the eye. "But I have got to answer those guys," he repeated, "because I wear bars.

I've got the responsibility and I don't know whether I'm big enough for the job." He continued to fix his eyes on Heinz. "But I can't break now. I've taken this for the thirty-nine days we've held this ridge and I'm in the middle of the Siegfried Line and you want to know what I think? I think it stinks."

Dawson began to shed tears. Then he jerked his head up. "Turn it up," he said to a lieutenant by the radio. "That's Puccini. I want to hear it." Two GIs came into the room. They were apprehensive because Captain Dawson had sent for them. But it was good news. "I'm sending you to Paris," Dawson announced. "For six days. How do you like that?" "Thanks," one replied, reluctantly.

"Well, you had better like it," Dawson said, "and you had better stay out of trouble, but have a good time and bless your hearts." The men mumbled thanks and left.

"Two of the best boys I've got," Dawson told Heinz. "Wire boys. They've had to run new lines every day because the old ones get chopped up. One day they laid heavy wire for 200 yards and by the time they got to the end and worked back, the wire had been cut in three places by sh.e.l.lfire." Dawson told Heinz that he had men who had been wounded in mid-September, when he first occupied the ridge, who returned four weeks later. They had gone AWOL from the field hospital and made their way back "and the first thing I know they show up again here and they're grinning from ear to ear. I know it must sound absolutely crazy that anyone would want to come back to this, but it is true." The following morning one of the lieutenants told Dawson, "Captain, those wire men, they say they don't want to go to Paris."

"All right," Dawson sighed. "Get two other guys-if you can."

The Battle of Aachen benefited no one. The Americans never should have attacked. The Germans never should have defended. Neither side had a choice. This was war at its worst, wanton destruction for no purpose. Still the Americans continued to attack. A steady flow of replacements coming from England allowed the generals to build companies up to full strength after a few days on the line, even when casualties had run as high as 90 percent. This replacement flow added to the sense of strength-surely the Germans couldn't keep up. At higher headquarters the feeling was, just one more push here, or another there, and we'll be through the Siegfried Line and up to and across the Rhine.

In addition to individual replacements, new divisions were coming onto the line in a steady stream. These high-number divisions were made up of the high school cla.s.ses of 1942, 1943, and 1944. The training these young men had gone through at Fort Benning and the other State-side posts was rigorous physically but severely short on the tactical and leaders.h.i.+p challenges the junior officers would have to meet.

128 Paul Fussell was a twenty-year-old lieutenant in command of a rifle platoon in the 103rd Division. He found the six months' training period in the States to be repet.i.tious and unrealistic. He was struck by "the futility and waste of training and re-training and finding some work to do for the expendables awaiting their moment to be expended." In the field, "Our stock-in-trade was the elementary fire-and-flank maneuver hammered into us over and over at Benning. It was very simple. With half your platoon, you establish a firing line to keep your enemy's heads down while you lead the other half around to the enemy's flank for a sudden surprise a.s.sault, preferably with bayonets and shouting." Fire-and-movement had been the doctrine developed by General Marshall when he was at Benning in the 1920s. Marshall had reasoned that in the next war, the army would expand rapidly and therefore needed to "develop a technique and methods so simple and so brief that the citizen officer of good common sense can readily grasp the idea."

"We all did grasp the idea," Fussell remembered, "but in combat it had one signal defect, namely the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy's flankis . If you get up and go looking for it, you'll be killed." Nevertheless, Fussell saw the positive benefit to doing fire-and-movement over and over: "Perhaps its function was rather to raise our morale and confidence than to work as defined. It did have the effect of persuading us that such an attack could be led successfully and that we were the people who could do it. That was good for our self-respect and our courage, and perhaps that was the point." This was distressingly close to the Duke of Wellington's sole requirement for his lieutenants, that they be brave. Fussell was a rich kid from southern California who had a couple of years of college and some professional journalism behind him. He had blown the lid off the IQ test. Had he been born two years earlier and brought into the army in 1941 or 1942, he would have gone into the Army Air Force, or intelligence, or onto somebody's staff, or been sent back to college for more education. But he was one of those American males born in 1924 or 1925 to whom fell the duty, as rifle platoon leaders, to bear the brunt of the Battle of Northwest Europe, after their older brothers and friends, born in 1922 or 1923, had driven the enemy back to his border.

There were hundreds of young officers like Fussell, lieutenants who came into Europe in the fall of 1944 to take up the fighting. Rich kids. Bright kids. The quarterback on the champions.h.i.+p highschool football team. The president of his cla.s.s. The chess champion. The lead in the cla.s.s play. The solo in the spring concert. The wizard in the chemistry cla.s.s. America was throwing its finest young men at the Germans.

It was bad enough being an untrained infantry replacement; it could be worse going into armor untrained.

Yet many did. One tank commander remembered that in the Bulge "I spent long hours in the turret when I was literally showing men how to feed bullets to the gun. Could they shoot straight? They couldn't even hold the gun right! In the midst of the toughest fighting of the Third Army's campaign I was teaching men what I had learned in basic training." Sgt. Raymond Ja.n.u.s of the 1st Armored Division got a new three-man crew for his light tank. They were all eighteen years of age. Only one had driven a car, and that only to church on Sundays. He became driver. Neither of the other two had any experience firing a machine gun or a 37mm tank gun. Ja.n.u.s gave them a two-hour demonstration. Then they moved out on a mission. The tank had hardly proceeded a half kilometer when the driver panicked and rolled the tank down a hill. The crash threw Ja.n.u.s out of the turret and on his head, causing a severe concussion that cost him his hearing. The replacements paid the price for a criminally wasteful Replacement System that chose to put quant.i.ty ahead of quality. Its criterion was the flow of bodies. Whose fault was this?

Eisenhower's first. He was the boss. And Bradley's. And Patton's. They demanded an ever greater flow of replacements while doing precious little to insist on improving the training, and got what they demanded. In no other way did the American high command in ETO show such disengagement as Eisenhower, Bradley, et al. did in failing to look at the source of their replacements and then to force some obvious and relatively easy improvements in the Repple Depples* and in the a.s.signment methods.

129 It can only be that Eisenhower, Bradley, et al. had no clear conception of life on the front line. They didn't listen to foxhole GIs often enough. So they threw the eighteen-year-olds and the former ASTPers*

into the battle, untrained, alone.

Replacement Depots Army Specialist Training Program, for the brightest enlisted men. Broken up in 1943.

The American army approaching Germany in the fall of 1944 was in part a children's crusade. It had hundreds of thousands of eighteen- to twenty-year-old soldiers, most of them at the cutting edge of the general offensive and almost none of them properly trained for combat. Capt. Charles Roland remembered receiving replacements in January, "a number of whom had eaten Christmas dinner at home with their families, who were killed in action before they had an opportunity to learn the names of the soldiers in the foxholes with them." Eisenhower said that in war everything is expendable-even generals'

lives-in pursuit of victory. If victory required replacements, some of them would have to be expended.

One had to be tough. The problem here is that the Replacement System was guilty of the worst sin of all in war, inefficiency. It was paying lives but getting no return. It was just pure waste and the commanders should have done something about it.

Example: In January 1945, Captain Cooper of the 3rd Armored Division got thirty-five replacements to help crew the seventeen new tanks the division had received. "These men had just unloaded from the boat in Antwerp a few hours earlier," Cooper said. "They had received no previous indoctrination on what they were to do." Not one had any previous experience with tanks. "Most of them had never even been in a tank or even close to one." Cooper gave them a brief verbal orientation. Then his mechanics took small groups into tanks, where each recruit got to fire the main gun three times. "This was all the training time permitted," Cooper remembered, because the guides came to take the tanks to their a.s.signments to the various units. The previous night, the thirty-five replacements had been in Antwerp. At 1500 they lumbered off in a convoy of seventeen tanks headed for the front. Two hours later fifteen of the seventeen were knocked out by German panzers firing 88s. It often happened that more than half the replacements sent directly into combat became casualties in the first few days.

At Metz, Patton continued to attack the forts-although not Driant, which he was by now content to bypa.s.s. Finally, on November 22, Metz was secured-except that six forts around the city were still defiant. The Americans made no attempt to overrun them, and soon enough they began to surrender. The last to give up was Fort Driant, which finally capitulated on December 8. In August, Third Army had advanced almost six hundred kilometers, from Normandy to the Moselle River. From September 1 to mid-December it advanced thirty-five kilometers east of the Moselle. The Siegfried Line, which Patton had said he would reach on November 10, was still a dozen or so kilometers to the east. In crossing the Moselle and taking Metz, Third Army had suffered 47,039 battle casualties.

Up north of Aachen, the Americans continued to attack, side by side with the British. Gen. Brian Horrocks surprised the GIs by showing up on the front lines to see conditions. He was a sympathetic yet critical observer. The 84th Division struck him as "an impressive product of American training methods which turned out division after division complete, fully equipped." The division "was composed of splendid, very brave, tough young men." But he thought it a bit much to ask of a green division that it penetrate the Siegfried Line, then stand up to counterattacks from two first-cla.s.s divisions, the 15th Panzer and the 10th SS. And he was disturbed by the failure of American division and corps commanders and their staffs toever visit the front lines. He was greatly concerned to find that the men were not getting hot meals brought up from the rear, in contrast to the forward units in the British line. He 130 gave the GIs "my most experienced armoured regiment, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry," told the American battalion and division commanders to get up front, and returned to his headquarters.

The problem Horrocks saw was becoming endemic in the U.S. Army in ETO. Not even battalion commanders were going to the front. From the Swiss border north to Geilenkirchen, the Americans were attacking. SHAEF put the pressure on Twelfth Army Group; Bradley pa.s.sed it on to First, Third, and Ninth Armies; Hodges, Patton, and Lt. Gen. William Simpson told their corps commanders to get results; by the time the pressure reached the battalion COs, it was intense. They raised it even higher as they set objectives for the rifle company COs. The trouble with all this pressure was that the senior officers and their staffs didn't know what they were ordering the rifle companies to do. They had seen neither the terrain nor the enemy. They did their work from maps and over radios and telephones. And unlike the company and platoon leaders, who had to be replaced every few weeks at best, and every few days at worst, the staff officers took few casualties, so the same men stayed at the same job, doing it badly. In the First World War, a British staff officer from Gen. Douglas Haig's headquarters visited the Somme battlefield a week or so after the battle. The orders had been to attack, with objectives drawn up back at headquarters. The attacks had gone forward, through barbed wire, mud, mines, mortar, and machine-gun fire, fallen back with appalling loss, only to be ordered forward again. This had gone on for weeks. And the officer looked at the sea of mud and was shocked by his own ignorance. He cried out, "My G.o.d!

Did we really send men to fight in this?"

In the Second World War, the U.S. Army in ETO was getting disturbingly close to the British model of the earlier war. When the chase across France was on, senior commanders (although seldom their staffs) were often at the front, urging the men forward. But when the line became stationary, headquarters personnel from battalion on up to corps and army found themselves good billets and seldom strayed. Of course there were notable exceptions, but in general the American officers handing down the orders to attack and a.s.signing the objective had no idea what it was like at the front. Any answer to why this happened would have to be a guess, and I have no statistics on front-line visits, but from what combat veterans from the fall campaigns have told me, it was only on the rarest of occasions that any officer above the rank of captain or officer from the staff was seen by them.

This was inexcusable. It was humiliating that a British general would have to order American staff officers and their COs to go see for themselves. It was costly to a heartbreaking degree. Tens of thousands of young Americans and Germans died in battles that November, battles that did little to hasten the end of the war and should have been avoided. If there was anything positive to these battles, it was that they gave the American commanders, from Eisenhower on down, the feeling that with all this pressure coming down on them, the Germans surely didn't have the resources to build a reserve for an offensive thrust. Just south of Aachen lies the Hurtgen Forest. Roughly fifty square miles, it sits along the German-Belgian border, within a triangle outlined by Aachen, Monschau, and Duren. It is densely wooded, with fir trees twenty to thirty meters tall. They block the sun, so the forest floor is dark, damp, devoid of underbrush. The firs interlock their lower limbs at less than two meters, so everyone has to stoop all the time. It is like a green cave, always dripping water, low-roofed and forbidding. The terrain is rugged, a series of ridges and deep gorges formed by the numerous streams and rivers. The Roer River runs along the eastern edge of the Hurtgen. Beyond it is the Rhine. First Army wanted to close to the Rhine, which General Hodges decided required driving the Germans out of the forest. Neither he nor his staff noted the obvious point that the Germans controlled the dams upstream on the Roer. If the Americans ever got down into the river valley, the Germans could release the dammed-up water and flood the valley. The forest could have been bypa.s.sed to the south, with the dams as the objective. The forest without the dams was worthless; the dams without the forest were priceless. But the generals got it backward, and went for the forest. Thus did the Battle of Hurtgen get started on the basis of a plan that was grossly, even criminally stupid. It was fought under conditions as bad as American soldiers ever had to face, even including the Wilderness and the Meuse-Argonne. Sgt. George Morgan of the 4th Division 131 described it: "The forest was a h.e.l.luva eerie place to fight. You can't get protection. You can't see. You can't get fields of fire. Artillery slashes the trees like a scythe. Everything is tangled. You can scarcely walk. Everybody is cold and wet, and the mixture of cold rain and sleet keeps falling.

They jump off again, and soon there is only a handful of the old men left." On September 19 the 3rd Armored Division and the 9th Infantry Division began the attack. The lieutenants and captains quickly learned that control of formations larger than platoons was nearly impossible. Troops more than a few feet apart couldn't see each other. There were no clearings, only narrow firebreaks and trails. Maps were almost useless. When the Germans, secure in their bunkers, saw the GIs coming forward, they called down pre-sited artillery fire, using sh.e.l.ls with fuses designed to explode on contact with the treetops. When men dove to the ground for cover, as they had been trained to do and as instinct dictated, they exposed themselves to a rain of hot metal and wood splinters. They learned that to survive a sh.e.l.ling in the Hurtgen, hug a tree. That way they exposed only their steel helmets.

Tanks could barely move on the few roads, which were too muddy, too heavily mined, too narrow. The tanks could not move at all off the roads. Airplanes couldn't fly. The artillery could shoot, but not very effectively, as forward observers (FOs) couldn't see ten meters to the front. The Americans could not use their a.s.sets-air, artillery, mobility. They were committed to a fight of mud and mines, carried out by infantry skirmish lines plunging ever deeper into the forest, with machine guns and light mortars their only support. For the Germans, it was equally horrible. One enemy commander, Gen. Hans Schmidt of the 275th Infantry Division, called the forest a "weird and wild" place, where "the dark pine trees and the dense tree-tops give the forest even in the daytime a somber appearance which is apt to cast gloom upon sensitive people." Gen. Paul Mahlmann, commanding the 353rd Infantry Division, said his troops "were fighting in deplorable conditions, exposed to incessant enemy fire, fighting daily without relief, receiving little support from their own artillery, drenched by frequent rain, and without the possibility of changing clothes." He went on, "Forsaken as they were they had no choice but to hold out in hopeless resignation."

For the GIs, it was a calamity. In their September action, the 9th and 2nd Armored lost up to 80 percent of their front-line troops and gained almost nothing. In October the 9th-reinforced-tried again, but by mid-month it was dead in the water and had suffered terribly. Casualties were around 4,500 for an advance of 3,000 meters. German losses were somewhat less, around 3,300. Staff officers were learning, if slowly. On the last day of October the staff of the 9th Division issued a five-page report, "Notes on Woods Fighting." Troops already in the line and still alive knew what the lessons were, but the report was valuable to new units and replacements being fed into the forest. It advised training in forest fighting prior to commitment, pressing against a tree when the sh.e.l.ling began, fighting during the day because night operations were physically impossible, never traveling in the woods without a compa.s.s, and never sending reinforcements forward in the midst of a battle or sh.e.l.ling. Call it off! That's what the GIs wanted to tell the generals, but the generals shook their heads and said, Attack. On November 2 the 28th Infantry Division took it up. Maj. Gen. Norman Cota, one of the heroes of D-Day, was the CO.

The 28th was the Pennsylvania National Guard and was called the Keystone Division. Referring to the red keystone shoulder patch, the Germans took to calling it the b.l.o.o.d.y Bucket Division.

It tried to move forward, but it was like walking into h.e.l.l. From their bunkers the Germans sent forth a hail of machine-gun and rifle fire, and mortars. The GIs were caught in thick minefields. Everything was mud and fir trees. The attack stalled.

"The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness," Pvt. Clarence Blakeslee recalled, "and the nights were so bad I would pray for daylight." Lt. John Forsell, K Company, 110th Infantry, 28th Division, had a macabre day-night experience. He was outside the village of Schmidt, which was no-man's-land. "Daily we would check the houses," he explained. "The Germans patrolled the same 132 town at night. One morning our patrol came into town and found a G.I. hung on the Crucifixion Cross.

We cut him down. We stayed in town and hid in a few houses waiting for the Germans. A German patrol came in, we had a gunfight, they were caught by surprise. A few of the patrol got away but we took three Germans and hung them on three crosses. That ended that little fanfare for both sides in Schmidt."

For two weeks the 28th kept attacking, as ordered. On November 5 division sent down orders to move tanks down a road called the Kall trail. But no staff officer had gone forward to a.s.sess the situation in person, and in fact the "trail" was all mud and anyway blocked by felled trees and disabled tanks. The attack led only to loss.