Armageddon - Max Hastings [134]
A few miles inside Germany, south-east of Aachen, lay a cluster of large expanses of wooded hills collectively known to the Americans as the Hürtgen Forest. The ridge lines, occupied by the German 275th Division, had been cleared of timber, which increased their dominance of the forests below. The 275th were poor-grade troops, who—like the garrison of Aachen—posed no plausible threat to the flanks of an American advance to the Roer. Yet the strange decision was taken that the Hürtgen should be cleared of Germans before another major attack eastwards was made. The American historian Russell Weigley has wisely observed: “The most likely way to make the Hürtgen a menace to the American army was to send American troops attacking into its depths. An army that depends for superiority on its mobility, firepower, and technology should never voluntarily give battle where these assets are at a discount; the Huertgen Forest was surely such a place.”
The U.S. 9th Division had suffered much unpleasantness during its early attempts to push through the Hürtgen in October, while Aachen was still in German hands. By 16 October, the formation had suffered 4,500 casualties in advancing two miles. At the beginning of November, the 28th Division of V Corps took over the task. Some early successes alarmed the Germans, and caused them to reinforce the area heavily. When the fresh U.S. 18th Infantry was pushed into an assault on 8 November, its battalions suffered 500 casualties in five days. The executive officer of one regiment of 28th Division wrote: “We’re still a first-class outfit, but not nearly as good as when we came across the beach. We have a great deal more prodding to do now.” In the thickly wooded country where the tracks had become quagmires, it could take six or eight hours to move rations and ammunition forward a mile or two. The 121st Infantry charged eleven men with refusal to return to the line—the first such case V Corps had recorded. An American officer said bleakly: “We are taking three trees a day, yet they cost us about 100 men apiece.”
Yet, instead of recognizing the folly of attacking on terrain that suited the Germans so well, Courtney Hodges reinforced failure. The Americans poured men into the long succession of battles which became known to all those who participated as “the hell of the Hürtgen Forest.” This network of woodlands some eight miles deep by twenty wide, almost impassable by tanks, eventually cost its attackers some 25,000 casualties. The terrain made it impossible to deploy American firepower effectively. The defenders’ weapons could cover every narrow access with devastating consequences for advancing infantry. “The trees were so dense that even when the sun shone, the day seemed gray,” wrote Lieutenant William Devitt of the 330th Infantry. “My first impression of the Hürtgen was the unremitting noise of the artillery. It sounded like a thunderstorm that went on and on without stopping.”
Devitt was a thoughtful twenty-year-old Minnesotan, posted to the 83rd Division in December as a replacement. “Until that time, the war hadn’t seemed very real or very deadly to me . . . I was anxious to learn what combat was like. I wanted to have the experience, probably to be able to talk about it after I got home.” As he took his platoon into the line, he was horrified by the sight of the 4th Division men his unit was relieving, their faces and field jackets caked in yellow mud: “They looked like a collection of ghosts . . . a grim lot, hollow-eyed from the constant pounding of shellfire, and fear of impending death.”
Many of the trees around their positions had been hacked short by shellfire. There were craters and fallen branches everywhere, together with German corpses, which fear of booby traps made the Americans unwilling to remove. Because it was hard to bring hot food forward, they lived chiefly off K-rations: processed meat, cheese, cooked eggs, crackers,