Grunts (19 page)

The Americans had to do quite a bit of “back clearing.” This meant back-tracking and clearing buildings they thought they had secured. “A group of enemy would work along the passageways in the sewer and then appear in areas that were thought secured,” an after action report stated. “Each manhole had to be located, grenades thrown and the sewers thoroughly blocked and covered.” The infantry soldiers also had to “search every building from cellar to attic, being certain that nobody, civilian or soldier, is left behind.” Needless to say, this was time-consuming.
⁵

Richard Tregaskis had covered the Pacific War, penning a famous book entitled
Guadalcanal Diary
. At Aachen, he tagged along with F Company, 2nd Battalion, as the men of that company fought block by block through the city. He was struck by how similar city fighting was to jungle fighting. “Windows are bushes, houses are trees. Every one of the thousands of windows, like every tropical bush or plant in the jungle, is a potential source of danger. And every house in a city, like every tree in the jungle, must be checked for enemy soldiers—probed by high explosive or an American foot soldier.” As Tregaskis watched, the troops unleashed every implement of firepower in their arsenal, at anything or anyone they even perceived to be a threat. “The technique is to blast your way through the middle of a block of houses with high explosive when you can; just as you might carve a path through the solid wall of jungle with a machete.”

Even with all the firepower, the process was exceedingly dangerous. The Germans could choose from a dizzying array of hiding places. Cellars with street-level windows were ideal locations for machine gunners, who spewed grazing fire along the concrete streets, or Panzerfaust gunners with perfect vantage points to hit the treads or side armor of tanks. Snipers favored upper-level windows because of the fields of fire and sight lines they offered. Sergeant Mack Morris watched, in disgust, as “a soldier stood easily in a doorway and a sniper two blocks away put a bullet through his head. The boy fell and lay quietly for a while. Then he bled from the mouth and groaned and died. His blood covered the doorway.”

Elsewhere, at the leading edge of the 3rd Battalion’s advance, Private First Class Leroy Stewart, a scout in K Company, was crawling in a ditch alongside a curve in a street. Several machine guns opened up on him, kicking up mud and grass frighteningly close. He was an experienced infantryman who had joined his company in Normandy. Realizing that the road was completely covered by the enemy guns, he crawled back and looked for a concealed route to close with the machine guns. It occurred to Stewart that a tank could destroy the machine guns, so he sent back a request for one. “Word came back up. They didn’t want to send up a tank because it might get knocked out. That made me mad. They didn’t care if I got clobbered but didn’t want to take a chance with a tank.”

Stewart’s attitude was very common among infantrymen. Nothing infuriated them more than this kind of situation. Their job was the most dangerous. They took the highest casualties. To them, it made sense to call on every measure of support, not just to accomplish the mission but to minimize their own danger as much as possible. But officers—especially tankers—often had a more cold-blooded point of view. To them, tanks were more precious than riflemen, especially in city fighting, where the armor was so immobile and vulnerable in tight spaces. As one such officer wrote, “It is not advisable to have [tanks] advance with the assault infantry. It would be very simple for the enemy to attack the tank” with a range of weapons. “A tank has no room to maneuver in a city street, and thus becomes very vulnerable to AT [antitank] fire.”

Reflecting this viewpoint, Stewart’s platoon leader came up and ordered him to get moving. Stewart tried to explain the situation to the lieutenant but he was unswayed. “He told me he was giving me a direct order to move up and not keep holding up things.” Private First Class Stewart angrily refused. Here was a classic example of a crisis in small-unit leadership. Stewart had more combat experience than his lieutenant, affording him more status. In the Army’s hierarchical structure, the officer’s word should have been law. In garrison it probably would have been, but not in this life-or-death combat situation. Stewart knew that Army discipline and potential punishment paled in comparison to the grave danger posed by the machine guns. In real combat, American soldiers followed officers and sergeants because of confidence in their leadership, not necessarily because of their rank. The new lieutenant thus had no leverage. If he threatened court-martial, Stewart would probably have welcomed it as a chance to leave the front lines.

Stewart was a good soldier, though, not a malingerer. He offered to do what the lieutenant wanted but only “if he would go beside me.” Again, here was another test of leadership, and the lieutenant failed. Instead of accepting this challenge, thus demonstrating his courage and a belief in his own orders, the lieutenant threatened to court-martial Stewart. As he did so, another soldier let the young officer off the hook by offering to carry out the lieutenant’s order himself. The soldier made it to the bend in the road when, all at once, the guns opened up. Bullets tore into him. Stewart’s squad leader tried to pull the wounded man back but he got hit, too. Chastened, the lieutenant called up tanks. The infantrymen used the tanks for cover. The tanks blasted the machine-gun-infested buildings, and the advance continued. In Stewart’s opinion, “we had lost both of these men when we didn’t have to.” Such are the grave stakes of small-unit leadership in the infantry.
⁶

Some of the heaviest fighting raged in several city blocks around a cemetery that was located immediately astride the 2nd Battalion’s planned route of advance. Here the Germans had pillboxes, trenches, and antitank ditches, along with 20-millimeter and 75-millimeter guns hidden in several apartments. One platoon got caught in a cross fire of deadly machine-gun and mortar fire that killed two men and badly wounded eight others. A Panzerfaust streaked from a building and slammed into a tank. The ensuing explosion “knocked out” the tank. This was a boxing term favored by the Americans to describe a catastrophic kill. It was easier just to say “knocked out” rather than to describe the actual reality of twisted metal, burned crewmen, and exploding ammunition. For hours the two sides battered each other. Machine guns chattered. Tank guns boomed. Bazooka rockets smashed into walls. Rifles barked. American BAR men disgorged twenty-round magazines with a steady “tac, tac, tac” staccato.

The Americans steadily overwhelmed the German defenders, but doing so was a nightmare. One enemy-held building was really a reinforced steel and concrete pillbox. It contained four machine guns, protected by soldiers with Panzerfausts and MP40 submachine guns that the Americans called “burp guns.” The burp guns were deadly at close range and could fire thirty-two-round clips at a rate of four hundred rounds per minute. At ranges greater than one hundred yards, the burp guns were useless. In tight spaces, they were quite deadly. The Americans brought up an antitank gun and battered the pillbox with several rounds, to no effect. In the end, according to a unit citation, “riflemen infiltrated under intense enemy fire that took its toll, and stormed the building, killing and wounding the entire German group of defenders.” In other words, foot soldiers somehow worked their way close to the building as bullets hit many of them, probably killing a few (hence the phrase “took its toll”), until they were close enough to hurl grenades, burst inside, and shoot their enemies at close range.

Whoever wrote the citation did not mention the staggering toll this daring assault must have taken on the surviving American riflemen—the adrenaline rush, the gut-wrenching fear, the anguish of seeing friends torn apart by bullets and fragments, the guilt and helplessness of being able to do nothing to alleviate their suffering, and, especially, the trauma of killing fellow humans at close range, watching the life drain from their faces, hearing them cry for their mothers, listening to them beg for survival, possibly even finding family photos in their wallets, and knowing all the while who was responsible for killing them. This was the reality of urban combat for the 26th Infantry at Aachen.
⁷

Experiencing the City

As the Americans drove deeper into the city, they encountered substantial numbers of civilians. Their presence only added to the stress of fighting in such an urban maze. To some extent, most of the soldiers held the German people responsible for the war, so they felt little sympathy for them. Nor did the Americans regret inflicting destruction upon such a shrine of German national consciousness. At the same time, though, few if any men wanted to kill or harm a noncombatant. “There were a lot of Germans still living in the town, in the basements,” Private Dye said. “We did have to take some consideration for them. We tried not to hurt them. We weren’t fighting the civilians; we were fighting the soldiers.”

When the infantry soldiers flushed such civilians from homes and cellars, their first priority was to make sure they posed no threat. Very few did. Most of the Germans were frightened, almost desperate-looking. The vast majority were elderly people or children. “You want to get them out of the way so you can go on,” one infantryman said. “Then some old lady . . . will remember that she left her kerchief, and of course she’ll want to go back and get it. Or some little girl about six will have run off without her coat and her mother will want to go back to the house and get it or something. Damn it, that’s a nuisance when you’re fighting a war.” Nuisance or not, the infantry showed remarkable patience with the civilians, if only because they were happy to spend a few minutes dealing with Germans who were not shooting at them.

In the wake of the infantry, civil affairs teams, intelligence specialists, and military policemen moved the civilians to the safety of barracks outside of town, cared for their basic needs, and debriefed them. “Normally people would march to the rear on foot, carrying what personal belongings they could,” one civil affairs soldier later said. “At times they were loaded on empty trucks going to the rear, so that they would not interfere with transportation going to the front [lines].” The Americans issued them identification cards, fed them from food stocks they had captured in France, and gave them medical attention. On the first two days alone, the Americans evacuated 609 civilians. In the ensuing days, the numbers rose into the thousands.

Specially trained German-speaking counterintelligence teams—aided by German informers—circulated among the local men, making sure they were not Nazi spies. In one instance, Sergeant Dick Lang was interrogating a group of people in a church when he noticed a priest who, for some reason, did not look the part. Lang questioned him intensely and took an instant dislike to him, but the man answered all of his questions with no problem. He asked the other people about him and they said they had only known him for two weeks but he was okay. Lang still did not feel right about the man. “I couldn’t really find anything wrong with the priest except I didn’t like him.” Another, less patient member of Lang’s team shoved a pistol in the priest’s face and demanded answers. “At this, our suspect stood up very straight, and at attention gave his true name and military rank. He was an SS spy, one of the first caught in Germany.” He was, of course, a rarity. Most of the civilians were ordinary people who were glad to see the fighting pass them by. They were simply biding their time until they could return to their shattered homes and rebuild them.
⁸

As German soldiers retreated at Aachen, they often left behind webs of booby traps and mines for the advancing Americans. Like Tregaskis’s jungle, the urban wasteland was ideal for such traps. Slag heaps, hills of masonry, doors, window frames, and the assorted detritus of city life all made excellent hiding places. Earlier in the war, the German Army had done the same thing in the towns of Italy and France, so this was merely a continuation of their impersonal defensive warfare. In blocks where the Germans stood and fought, the Americans were reasonably sure to encounter few mines or booby traps because the Germans, of course, had no desire to trigger their own traps. But undefended areas fairly crawled with them. This was why Daniel and Corley attached teams of engineers to their rifle companies. As tanks and infantry soldiers carefully maneuvered along each street, engineers kept a wary eye out for mines and traps. “Certain houses had their doors wired to explosives in the mailbox,” an engineer commander wrote. “A house yard was found to be mined and was carefully avoided throughout the operation. This small area was found to contain at least twenty-five booby traps, most of which were made of grenades with pull wires.” Teller mines blocked some rubble-choked streets. Live grenades were placed in cupboards and drawers.

One thing that worked in the Americans’ favor was that the Germans had to do almost all of their booby-trapping hastily at night. Also, Colonel Wilck needed most of his own engineers to fight as infantry, meaning he had few experts available for extensive booby-trapping. “Frequently trip wires were fairly obvious,” the same engineer officer commented. Sometimes detonators were sloppily hidden or at times “not concealed or carried away.” Quite often, civilians and prisoners revealed the locations of booby traps because they knew the Americans would defuse them, minimizing property damage and loss of life for everyone.

Most of the time, the infantry soldiers found more benign items in Aachen than mines. After all, thousands of people had once lived there. Their property was everywhere—clothing, jewelry, heirlooms, books, personal papers, cabinets, photos and the like. It was a strange mixture of the harshness of war with the comforts of home. The Americans rifled through many a family home. The soldiers were mainly looking for food, alcohol, money, valuables, and weapons. In the bombed-out kitchen of one shattered house, several soldiers from F Company found a tasty menu of food to scrounge. The kitchen, in the recollection of one witness, “was well stocked with rows of home-canned vegetables, a big barrel of hen eggs and another of goose eggs. There were various kinds of bread, cakes and preserves . . . all spread out by shelling.” The soldiers promptly cooked themselves a meal of scrambled eggs, topped off by cakes.