Aachen: The U.S. Army's Battle for Charlemagne's City in World War II (40 page)

The Germans came closer to overrunning Captain Koenig's Company F command post that morning.
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Another artillery strike preceded this effort at 0400; the Germans hit hard between Koenig's right flank and the left flank of Jeffrey's Company G and closed to within 40 yards of Koenig's CP. This was as far as they got. The attack was over by 0830, but both companies had to spend the rest of the day simply getting reorganized. Hostile artillery never let up, making evacuation of the wounded to Eilendorf very risky; the Americans at least had the satisfaction of seeing German medics spending most of the day removing their dead and wounded. Three U.S. soldiers had been killed; twelve others were unaccounted for and presumed captured. The casualties of the 1st Engineer Assault Regiment were uncertain, but the 2nd Battalion took two of their officers and seventy-five enlisted men as prisoners.

Captain Brown's Company C kept busy by strengthening their defenses along the ridge leading down to the big road; Brown even ordered roadblocks on the roadway itself. His men were not attacked.
Peckham's 3rd Battalion also had a productive day. Captain Folk's Company L men were able to mop up the northern outskirts of Haaren with little trouble and they even extended their flank toward Verlautenheide. Captain Russell also sent a reinforced platoon of his Company K with tank destroyers down to the rail line on the southern edge of Haaren, where they captured six officers and eighty-three enlisted men. These gains proved disheartening to
Oberst
Engel; his 12th Infantry Division reported that Lieutenant Colonel Peckham's real estate grab “was particularly unpleasant—the fact that the enemy gained more ground in Haaren and crossed the railroad bend to the south.”
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This was justified; if Brown's roadblocks didn't stop resupply efforts for Aachen, Peckham's companies now could.

Colonel Seitz's 26th Infantry Regiment used the rest of 10 October to prepare for the anticipated strike on Aachen itself. The general plan called for a two-pronged attack with Lieutenant Colonel Corley's 3rd Battalion first working through the dense factory district between Aachen and Haaren. Farwick Park was then Corley's first objective; St. Elizabeth's Church dominated one edge of the park; a strip of older homes bordered the southwest side of the hill along Monheims Allee and odd-shaped houses squared off the northwest blocks.

Farwick Park had been gouged out over the years; it had once been filled with Aacheners who during more pleasant times enjoyed its tennis courts, gardens, walks, spas, and even an artificial lake. Two prominent buildings stood above the scrubby underbrush on the forward slope of the hill: the luxurious five-story Palast Hotel Quellenhof, which would become the command post for
Oberst
Wilck when he entered Aachen, and the Kurhaus, designed by famous Aachen architect Jakob Couven and built in the late 1800s for spa guests; in better days patrons reveled in its medicinal 70-degree waters. The park and its gardens overlooked the magnificent Aachen Cathedral, Charlemagne's final resting place. The Americans would come to call the park Observatory Hill because of a four-story tower on the very top of the hill mass; it housed hostile artillery observers.

Corley's second objective was to reduce prominent Salvatorberg, where Charlemagne's son Ludwig had first built a chapel for the dead
before a Benedictine monastery was founded in CE 996; now there was an air raid shelter built into the slope of the hill for Aachen's overflowing twentieth-century citizenry to survive the upcoming American offensive.

Corley's last objective was to wrestle control of the 264-meter-high Lousberg, which overlooked the city center to the south and Soers to the north. A quarry on the hill was first cut in Neolithic times, thousands of years before the Romans came to Aachen. Local superstition had it that the Lousberg was created by the devil himself from huge amounts of sand he brought from the North Sea after he was tricked into believing he would receive the soul of the first living creature when the great Aachen Cathedral was finished. According to lore, the first soul belonged to a wolf, so the devil erected Lousberg in disgust. But it was now Lieutenant Colonel Corley's turn to establish his battalion's own curse on the Germans populating the Lousberg.

Lieutenant Colonel Daniel would have the honor of commanding his 2nd Battalion's attack into the center of the ancient imperial city; his flank would be approximately 200 yards south of Corley's, roughly equivalent to a large Aachen street block. His men would move in an east-to-west direction along bomb-pocked, debris-filled roads and blasted-out buildings, through the core of the ancient city, all the way to its western edge; his soldiers would experience urban warfare for the first time, tactics for which were not even in Army field manuals. Two battalions of the 1106th Engineer Combat Group would hold the perimeter on the southern side of the city while Daniel's companies crossed its front and planted their own legacy into Aachen's already deep historical roots.

The planned air and artillery strikes would first pound the perimeter and targeted centers of Aachen over a two-day period, commencing when the ultimatum expired. The city had already been reduced to rubble in many locations by earlier Allied strikes so no wide area bombardment was planned before the new attack; a steady use of dive bombers on preselected targets, irregularly spaced, would be made instead. Artillery fires would follow and be used to inflict as many casualties as possible, soften up enemy defenses, and cover the opening performance of American forces during the upcoming Aachen drama. Targets had been carefully selected.
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Corley's forces would benefit from these strikes—intended to kill German soldiers and diminish their overall fighting ability as a unit—when
a gas works, a soap factory, a machine factory, a wagon factory, an electrical machinery shop, an iron factory, a car factory, a boiler factory, and even a winery in the factory area were bombed and blasted. The quarry atop Lousberg was in the air drop zone, as was the observation tower in Farwick Park; brickyards, bus stations, railroad stations, post offices, and even streets into the city on its southern and western perimeters would also be hit to block reinforcements from entering Aachen. Hospitals and other known medical facilities were not to be targeted.

The 2nd Battalion's Lieutenant Colonel Daniel explained how his men would then choreograph their opening act:

The general plan was to use artillery and mortar fire across our immediate front to isolate the area, thus preventing the Germans from entering (or for that matter from leaving), and then to use direct fire from tanks, tank destroyers, anti-tank and machineguns to pin down the defenders and chase them into cellars, and then move in with bayonets and hand grenades to destroy or capture them.

We continually pressed the necessity for keeping up a continuous stream of fire with all available weapons. We coined a slogan, “Knock ’em all down,” which became the battle cry because the soldiers came to realize that the defenders could hardly deliver accurate fire with buildings falling about their ears. We had practiced this knocking down technique with marked success by making platoon raids on houses known to be occupied by the enemy.
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During his planning, Daniel anticipated several problems and found creative solutions for them. First, he required large amounts of ammunition. Coordination and control between units fighting in the streets would be problematic. This would be exacerbated by the stubborn fact that his front would be some 2,000 yards in dense, populated urban terrain, nearly twice the frontage prescribed by Army doctrine at the time. He had to decide what to do with civilians, as well as figure out how to effectively use the tanks and TDs in claustrophobic city streets without risk of loss to enemy antitank weapons. The Army Field Manual provided little assistance; Daniel had to use creativity.

We established a battalion ammunition dump, stocked with all types of ammunition for all of our weapons in the battalion and attached units. It was planned to keep this dump moving so that all units would always have an ample supply immediately at hand. Second, we worked out a “measles system” whereby all street intersections and important buildings were numbered and the number circled on a map so that it would be easy to report exact locations accurately and quickly. In addition, constant positive liaison and contact between units was stressed.
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Pragmatism governed how to handle the Aachen citizenry:

If they were not evacuated as we overran the abodes, the chances for German soldiers to masquerade as civilians behind our lines would be great. We decided, therefore, that the way to clean out an enemy city was to clear everyone, civilians and soldiers, from each building before passing to the next. We planned to search every room, every closet, every cellar, even manholes in the streets, to be absolutely certain that no German was left behind our front lines. We knew this would be a slow process, but the only alternative was to be subjected to sniping from our rear.

To tackle the problems for his tanks and TDs during the upcoming street fighting, Daniel and his staff planned to initially place them on side streets so their turrets and machine guns could poke around corners, firing all their weaponry to escort the infantry forward. Then, as soon as another street was cleared, his foot soldiers would protect the tanks by first destroying any German antitank emplacements or guns on a perpendicular street. Up would come the tanks and TDs and they would repeat the process, block by block; these combined tactics would essentially have the infantry protecting the armor from
Panzerfausts
while their fellow soldiers in their thick-plated vehicles rudely engaged any strongpoints that tried to hold them up.

All of Daniel's rifle companies would be used in the assault. Lt. Beasoe B. Walker's Company G would be on the left and Company E, commanded by Oklahoman Capt. Ozell L. Smoot, owned the center; Capt. Rowland A. Weeks's Company F would attack to the right. Each
company was organized as a small task force; two tanks and a pair of TDs would accompany each of the rifle companies. Capt. Gilbert H. Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, would split his heavy weapons Company D; the two 50mm machine-gun platoons would join the flank companies, and an 81mm mortar section would be attached to each company with embedded observers maintaining the necessary coordination with the company commanders for targeting Germans. Three squads of engineers equipped with flamethrowers and dynamite charges were also assigned to the companies.

On 11 October the skies cleared; the slanting rain and dreary clouds of the day before gave way to midmorning sunshine, but another front was forecasted to bring more showers later in the afternoon. No word about the ultimatum filtered into the company CPs. Heavy mortar and intermittent artillery fire hit Corley's 3rd Battalion before daybreak. Allied planes dropped more leaflets over the city an hour after first light, giving
Oberst
Wilck's forces another chance to give up. A few did. At about 1000 hours, twenty Germans came through Lieutenant Colonel Corley's outpost perimeter along the Aachen-Haaren rail line and surrendered to the first Americans they saw. Others attempted to do the same; a spokesman for the deserters said many more had followed them, but were driven back by officers who threatened to shoot anyone else who tried to cross the tracks. In some cases, they did. Americans witnessed German officers actually firing on their own soldiers who surrendered to Weeks's Company F, but most of the enemy soldiers made it to the POW cage.

The promised assault on the city started with a working over by fighter bombers at noon, within an hour after the expiration of the ultimatum. DIVARTY first marked targets with red smoke, then P-47 Thunderbolts made one run each on Aachen. The P-47s, with their supercharged 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines roared in, bled off their 325 knots of airspeed, and then dove like stones and dropped either two 1,000-pound bombs, or fired ten rockets, depending on their targets. One flight dove in and laid a pattern of explosives on Farwick Park. To the men on the ground, it looked like the fighters started at one end of a street and bombed it one building at a time; then after a short interval another would come in and start on the next street. “It was so quiet in those strange lulls,” wrote correspondent Don Whitehead. “You could hear the birds singing and the wind singing through
the trees. There was not even the sound of a rifle shot. At our feet a black cat with white stockings lay in the straw and purred.”
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Twin-boom P-38s, powered by twin Allison in-line 1,150-horsepower engines came in next and strafed the city; in front of their pilots’ sight lines in the canopies at the leading edge of the plane between their contoured fuselages, four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon delivered fires during long slanting runs on their objectives. Some of the fighters also dropped 2,000-pound payloads of deadly bombs from barely visible bays beneath their wings. “When their bombs were dropped they climbed back steeply, circled and then came back down again and strafed the enemy,” remembered Whitehead. “They were not even challenged, and I did not see a single burst of ack-ack thrown against them from inside or outside Aachen.”
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Before their missions were over, some 300 fighter bombers unloaded 62 tons of bombs. Observers indicated that all had hit their targets as marked. Twelve battalions of VII Corps and 1st Division artillery then poured 4,800 rounds, nearly 170 short tons of explosive, into the city starting at 1555 hours. Most of the barrages were directed into the center of Aachen, as well as its southeastern and eastern edges to wreak havoc and more destruction ahead of the infantry strike.

But there were unintended consequences, as the men on the ground were to soon discover. The fire and damage from the bombing and artillery created dust, haze, smoke, and frightening psychological damage to ordinary Aacheners, yet it also heaped rubble into piles that would be used by the U.S. soldiers’ opposite numbers to defend their positions. Lieutenant Colonel Corley even sent patrols out after the artillery shelling stopped to assess its effect in the factory district; his men determined that the German defenses “had not been too greatly impaired.”
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