Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (10 page)

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 even 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.

In his command post at Rott, some thirteen kilometres to the west of Schmidt, Cota at first had little idea of the disaster overtaking his division. On 8 November, he was inundated by a chain of commanders. General Hodges arrived to find
‘General Eisenhower, General Bradley
and General Gerow talking the situation over with General Cota. Pleasantries were passed until the official party left,’ Hodges’s aide recorded, ‘then General Hodges drew General Cota aside for a short sharp conference on the lack of progress made by 28th Division … General Hodges, needless to say, is extremely disappointed over the 28th Division’s showing.’ Hodges also blamed Gerow, the corps commander, even though the supposedly ‘excellent’ plan, sending a single division alone into the Hürtgen and then splitting it up, had been the work of his own First Army headquarters. He forced Cota to send an order to the 112th
Infantry to retake Schmidt, which revealed his total ignorance of what was happening on the ground.

Sherman tanks sent forward to take on the Panther and Mark IV panzers could not negotiate the steep winding tracks, the mines and the mud. Low cloud and rain meant that the fighter-bombers could not take off. And all the time, the two American battalions cut off in Kommerscheidt were subjected to concentrated shelling from tanks and all the artillery battalions which Model had ordered in from neighbouring corps. On 7 November, the 2nd Battalion in Vossenack broke and ran. Cota sent in the 146th Engineers, fighting as infantry, and they managed to hold on to the western part of Vossenack against panzergrenadiers and tanks. The situation was so grave that part of the 4th Infantry Division had to reinforce the 28th Division.

On the night of 8 November, American artillery laid a heavy bombardment around Kommerscheidt to allow the survivors of the two battalions to sneak out through the Kall ravine. The 28th Infantry Division had been forced back almost to where it had started, having suffered 5,684 battle and
non-battle casualties
. For Cota, who had watched his division so proudly in Paris, it must have been the most bitter day of his life. The 112th Infantry alone had lost more than 2,000 men and was now no more than 300 strong. As one of Bradley’s staff officers observed:
‘When the strength of an outfit
in the line drops below a certain point, something very bad happens to it and its effectiveness falls away sharply. What happens to it is that there are not enough experienced men left in it to make the replacements – “the reinforcements” – savvy.’

German propaganda wasted no time in boasting of the successful counter-attack, as well as the recapture of Goldap in East Prussia and the failure of the Red Army to take Budapest.
‘The surrounded American task force
was destroyed. The villages of Vossenack and Kommerscheidt have been cleared of the small groups, which defended themselves desperately, but then gave up their senseless resistance.’