Armageddon - Max Hastings [142]
The dams might be reached through the so-called Monschau Corridor, a narrow strip of open ground just south of the Hürtgen, difficult country for an attacker because of its gorges, streams and pillboxes. Its seizure must inevitably be an infantry task. Back in October and November, the Americans had persuaded themselves that they could not advance up the Monschau Corridor while German forces remained on their flank in the forest. Yet the enemy in the trees were not elite mobile formations but infantry dependent upon their own feet and horse-drawn carts to go anywhere.
When the Americans finally addressed the Monschau Corridor in December, Gerow’s V Corps at first made uncommonly good progress. His fresh divisions, especially the 78th, advanced without artillery preparation, exploiting friendly fog on 13 December. The 2nd Division made much slower work of the Monschau Forest. It may have been “battle-hardened,” to use one of the most abused clichés of war, but it was also very tired. Its 9th Infantry Regiment suffered 400 losses from trench foot and exposure, and a rather smaller number of battle casualties. “The German Army almost until its final extremity rotated units out of the line more frequently and regularly than the American Army,” a U.S. historian notes. “The effect was to undermine an effective American division’s asset of experience by sheer weariness.” By the morning of 16 December, the Monschau Corridor attack was stuck. There was also a lurking sense of menace. While the 78th Division confronted the German 272nd Division, there was growing evidence of larger enemy forces beyond, with more ambitious purposes than those of merely checking the U.S. V Corps.
SOUTHWARDS IN LORRAINE, Third Army launched a new attack on 8 November, across a front of almost sixty miles. An assault on such a broad front represented a dispersal of hitting power which puzzled those who admired Patton’s rare grasp of the importance of concentration. The conditions were dreadful. It was at this period that Patton enlisted the aid of Colonel James O’Neill, Third Army’s senior chaplain: “Do you have a good prayer for weather? We must do something about this rain if we are to win the war . . . We must ask God to stop.” If this request strengthened the widespread belief that Patton was not wholly sane, it inspired O’Neill to write a prayer which was afterwards circulated to every man in Third Army alongside its commander’s Christmas greeting: “Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle.” When it began to snow soon afterwards, opinion was divided about interpretations of the divine response.
Sergeant Bill Mauldin became a legend in the U.S. Army long before he achieved the same status in the United States as a cartoonist, by creating his two dogface GIs Willie and Joe for Stars & Stripes. Patton loathed these characters, whose shaggy mien and unheroic behaviour he deemed “subversive.” He summoned their creator for a personal reprimand. Mauldin afterwards provided one of the most vivid portraits of Third Army’s commander:
There he sat, big as life . . . His hair was silver, his face was pink, his collar and shoulders glittered with more stars than I could count, his fingers sparkled with rings, and an incredible mass of ribbons started around desktop level and spread upward in a flood over his chest to the very top of his shoulder, as if preparing to march down his back too. His face was rugged, with an odd, strangely shapeless outline; his eyes were pale, almost colorless, with a choleric bulge. His small, compressed mouth was sharply downturned at the corner, with a lower lip which suggested a pouting child as much as a no-nonsense martinet.