The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (34 page)

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 assault 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 shells per day from 105s. Then the Germans came on in division strength, but again Dawson’s company beat them back, with help from the artillery and air. “We had constant shelling 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 hardships 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 balls or small pieces of scrap 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.-Lô. 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 Malmédy, Belgium, suddenly they were everywhere.  “By now I had gone through aerial bombing, artillery and mortar shelling, 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 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 spaced 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, Düsseldorf 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 butts 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 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 reassigned. The battalion held its position.

On October 17 a German attack overran Dawson’s antitank 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 shells, 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 God-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. Nobody 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 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 classical 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 shirt, 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.”