Aachen: The U.S. Army's Battle for Charlemagne's City in World War II (5 page)

Several of our tanks were burning just short of this barrier. Little could be seen beyond, as the gentle ridge running northeast and southwest masked further observation. A hasty map reconnaissance indicated gentle fields in the open terrain offering little cover from small arms fire. The plan of attack most likely to succeed appeared to be a frontal attack through the barrier for 500 yards, then a change in direction to the southeast. This provided a flanking approach to Nutheim from the rear of the enemy's main defenses. The ridge running northeast and southwest would offer concealment from enemy observation to the north. Little was known of the enemy other than his determined resistance as evidenced earlier in the day.

The attack jumped off on time. Adams first ordered his men to advance in a column of companies across the open field separating the obstacles from the woods. Company A, commanded by North Carolina
native Capt. Thomas W. Anderson, led the column approximately 200 yards farther to the north of Lieutenant Henderson's tank destroyer location; they were still held up at the dragon's teeth. The dismounted forward observers of Task Force Doan, as well as each of Adams's company captains, called for armored artillery and mortar support using their SCR 300 radio sets. The 81mm mortars of the battalion's heavy weapons Company D, under the command of Capt. Walter D. Stevens, placed harassing fires on the Germans and were also prepared to fire missions on call.

Immediate trouble waited.
²⁷
As Anderson's men approached the obstacles, heavy machine-gun and sniper fire came in from houses on the left flank of the column while 120mm mortar and artillery shells rained down from the direction of Oberforstbach. The leading platoon broke into a run through the dragon's teeth, temporarily separating Anderson's other two platoons. One remained behind; the other caught up with the lead platoon as they passed the houses from which the Germans were shooting.

Lieutenant Henderson's TDs, fortuitously still held up at the dragon's teeth, now rendered assistance. He remembered:

There must have been at least 25 to 30 enemy in those buildings. All four TD's laid on the enemy with .50 caliber machineguns, firing about 300 rounds. [I] got permission from the battalion CO to put HE on the houses where the enemy was, and did so. There was no more trouble from the snipers. These snipers, in addition to temporarily holding up the infantry, had been firing on the medics who were trying to evacuate the considerable number of wounded remaining along the dragon's teeth.
²⁸

As darkness fell, Company B, commanded by Capt. Edgar Simons, plus the platoon that was separated from Company A, moved along the ridge toward Nutheim. Company C, under the command of Capt. Allen B. Ferry, a New Hampshire native commissioned from ROTC in 1941, trailed Simon's men. Both companies had received relatively light casualties when the momentum of the attack carried them through the tank barriers and their covering pillboxes. A barn in the direction of Nutheim burned brightly and served as a guide for them. The sounds of war—tracers and explosions—could be heard as Doan's tanks rolled toward the
village to their south. Adams's forces made contact with his armor about 500 yards west of the village an hour later. They suffered surprisingly few casualties during this move, considering the number killed or wounded in Task Force Doan by this time. But they had completely lost contact with Captain Anderson's two Company A platoons.

It turned out that these men had lost their direction during the intense barrage near the dragon's teeth and had proceeded directly northward on a roadway beyond the burning barn until they came to a hard-surfaced road near Kroitzheide. Using this road, Captain Anderson turned his men southeastward, thinking this would bring them to the edge of Nutheim.

Advancing they found telephone wires alongside the road, which were cut. Soon a German soldier on a bicycle came down the road, searching for the break in the wire; he was taken prisoner. Anderson deduced that the wires must have run to an artillery or mortar position in the town ahead [Schleckheim], so he deployed one squad on either side of the road to work behind the buildings, and one to proceed down the main street itself. The Americans surprised German soldiers eating supper with no posted security. On the left side of the road, they captured an artillery piece and two mortars; and on the right, they captured two 88mm guns.

The prisoners said that they had expected an attack on Nutheim, but had anticipated ample warning of the danger in their location. That statement, and a map check, convinced Captain Anderson that he had overshot his objective, so he decided to go back to the burning barn.

Attempts to destroy the captured ordinance may have alerted surrounding Germans to the American presence in their midst, but in any event Company A came under heavy small arms fire from all sides and withdrew in a running fight, reaching the burning barn at 2100.
²⁹

Major Adams's command group, which had been with Simon's Company B as they made their way to the barn, picked up Company A radio calls. Captain Levasseur led a small patrol out to guide Anderson's
men back to the assembly area. While they safely joined up at around 2300 hours, casualties had mounted for the battalion. The night move had cost Major Adams two officers and eleven enlisted men.

It had also been a long day for Lieutenant Colonel Doan. His task force had renewed its attack at dusk with Lieutenant Colonel Orr's infantry first starting up the draw toward Nutheim to execute the ordered attack frontally. The reinforcement tanks and TDs had delayed their start from the dragon's teeth for an hour while the artillery crews laid fire along their path of advance. But small-arms and antitank fire had been taking a toll on the tanks still trying to work their way toward the village. Lieutenant Hoffman was wounded a second time by an enemy rifleman, this time more seriously as he dismounted his now knocked-out tank. Another had also been hit, and flames from this tank lit up the adjoining countryside as it burned in the dark. By this time Doan was down to only eight of the original twenty tanks he had at the start of the day. After spotting forty enemy infantrymen along the road behind a group of hedgerows, Doan temporarily halted the advance rather than run the risk of further losses from
Panzerfaust
fire in the dark.

The few remaining tanks were dangerously low on ammunition by this time, so the first platoon of reinforcements that Hickey had promised to Doan moved around to protect the right flank of his decimated forces. Armored infantry followed. Then between 2200 and 2300 this combined force reached the western edge of Nutheim, at first mistaking an apple orchard for the predesignated assembly area that was actually in a nearby, more heavily wooded area just to the east. Fortunately no enemy forces occupied the orchard so Doan, still giving instruction and attempting to bolster morale, chose to have the few remaining tanks of his original task force leaguer here.

The night had grown very dark and rainy by this time, but an exhausted Doan still managed to find Major Adams. According to reports he “was relieved to learn that [Adams] had already set up defenses to the west, thus protecting the left flank of his armored force.” Others were undoubtedly relieved as well. Another report revealed, “It was Lieutenant Colonel Orr's first day in action. He never expected to see another dawn.”
³⁰

The not-so-relieved LXXXI Corps commander,
Generalleutnant
Schack, took immediate action to reinforce the area. He had erred in his estimation of the Americans’ intentions, expecting they would attack directly into Aachen, rather than into the Stolberg Corridor. Task Force Doan's penetration of the
Westwall
9 kilometers south of the city forced Schack's hand. The 353rd Division moved to Vicht to reinforce the Oberforstbach-Roetgen sector. “It was Corps’ intention to improve and reinforce, with all means available, the second line of the Westwall in the southern sector where the main enemy attack was now expected,” Schack remembered. “For this reason a regional defense training battalion which was to come from Frankfurt and another regional defense unit were assigned and subordinated to the 353rd Division.”
³¹

The 353rd Division commander,
Generalleutnant
Mahlman, commented on these changes, later recalling the pathetic state of his division at the time:

Here ersatz battalions of the 526 Ers Aub Division were employed under the command of an ersatz infantry regimental staff (453), under Oberst Feind. The landesschuetzen ausbildungs (local defense training) battalion was brought up from Frankfurt. When [I] inspected this battalion, [it] was found that a great number of the approximately 800 men were completely unfit for combat, and only partially fit for labor assignments. Twelve men were over 60. [I] ordered thorough medical inspections and sent the least suitable personnel—over 100—back to Frankfurt.

Division in the meantime made plans for the reorganization. After the staffs of Grenadier Regiment 941 and Grenadier Regiment 984 had been taken over by the 275th Division, no combat troops remained to the 353rd Division. Only trains were still available from the infantry, fusiliers and engineers. From Artillery Regiment 353 only a regimental staff [officer] and two battalion staff [members], trains, and a few artillerymen and one howitzer were available.
³²

To add additional forces, the 9th Panzer Division received permission to fall back to the Stolberg-Zweifall sector. During the afternoon,
due to the gap that had developed between
Oberst
Mueller's decimated forces and those south of Aachen, half of Assault Brigade 394 reinforced the 9th Panzer Division. Mueller had spent most of his day in Brenig at the command post of Replacement and Instruction Regiment 253 where he mainly worried about this open gap. “The enemy could infiltrate into the wooded area to the northeast of Roetgen, which could not be controlled,” Mueller remembered. “The width of the gap and the measure to be taken by the enemy could only be guessed at by the German command.”
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Mueller also received an engineer replacement unit of about a hundred men from the Cologne area that night. They had already prepared road and bridge demolitions outside of the second line in the
Westwall
, and these men were now moving to Brenig to construct obstacles in the woods nearby. Mueller recalled:

In the second Westwall line two sectors had been formed. To the right, one under the commander of Panzer Brigade 105, manned by marching elements of the Luftwaffe which had been newly brought up, the fighting qualities of which, however, were very limited…another on the left under the commander of Replacement and Instruction Battalion 253.
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What Mueller did not know that night was that a Corps order would be handed to him the next morning directing him to give up his division, as “[his] assignment as commander of the 9th Panzer Division was not acceptable to the Higher Command.” The successful attacks of American armor and infantry over the past two days undoubtedly influenced this.

Generalleutnant
Schwerin's 116th Panzer Division forces had spent the night of 12–13 September conducting security operations ahead of the
Westwall
before pulling out at dawn to assemble in the Würselen area, outside of Aachen. Displacing via Vaals and Vaalsequartier, this first left the division an amazing 10 kilometers behind the positions south of Aachen that it had been entrusted to defend, leaving the thin city forces to contend with the 16th Infantry Regiment's penetration in the area of the Bradenberg Hill at the time.

Lieutenant Colonel Driscoll remembered the fight with elements of Battalion XIX, then under the command of von Osterroht, to keep this real estate that his men got into during the morning:

[We] first had the hell kicked out of us and casualties were streaming into the command post. Company C was attacked by a company of about 80 men through the thickly-wooded terrain and they first got right into our positions. One BAR man was later found dead beside his gun; his magazine all empty and 12 enemy dead around his position. Two light tanks were moved up and they blasted the Germans with their 37mm gun and machineguns. By noon the attack was repulsed and 12 prisoners were taken.
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Meanwhile, General Huebner's 18th Infantry Regiment, under the command of Col. George A. Smith Jr., had attacked the high ground west of the Aachen-Leige road on its way to the Reich border. Two battalions moved abreast that morning: the 1st Battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. Henry G. Learnard, and the 3rd Battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. Elisha O. Peckham. Learnard's men moved through the
Westwall
and took up positions near a forestry fire tower in the Aachen State Forest. From here, a field artillery's forward observer remembered he could see the brushy fields leading right up to the first buildings on the outskirts of Aachen. Peckham's rifle companies took an area directly on the Holland-Belgium-Germany border and set up outposts. Company K, under the command of Capt. William A. Russell, was the first unit to cross into the Reich.
³⁶
By 1115 hours that morning the situation had deteriorated to the point where LXXXI Corps had finally ordered the 116th Panzer Division to clear out the penetration made by General Huebner's infantry in the forest south of the city.

But
Generalleutnant
Schwerin's forces were unable to stop the 16th Infantry's companies when they got there. According to the 116th Panzer Division's historian, “At 2010 hours, Major i.G. Wolf reported to corps, ‘Enemy attacked our counterattack. One battalion reinforced by assault guns will be positioned behind the bunkers that are no longer firing. With this the enemy attack through the Aachen city forest widened eastward, up to the Eupen road.”
³⁷

The U.S. forces that the 116th Panzer Division historian described as attacking eastward up the Eupen Road were led by Vermont native Capt. Kimball R. Richmond, the Company I commanding officer in Lt. Col. Charles T. Horner's 16th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Battalion. These men advanced against the 2nd Battalion of Panzer Grenadier Regiment 60. Richmond's riflemen first left Eynatten, riding northward on the decks of several light and medium tanks before deploying in platoon columns to reconnoiter and find suitable routes for their armor to move northeastward. They made first enemy contact with a light machine-gun crew, and when it became apparent there were others in nearby pillboxes, DIVARTY laid down a five-minute artillery barrage.