on the West Wall. It was commanded by a first lieutenant, because its commander had been wounded the previous day. Technical-Sergeant Tom Beers was told to take a twelve-strong platoon with a tank to seize a pillbox. While it was still dark, Beers walked back into Harspelt to show his accompanying tank the way forward. The soldiers crossed their start line at 1030, following the Sherman, and quickly came under mortar and artillery fire. The tank stopped. Its commander called down to Beers, demanding to know when he should stop firing and—by implication—advancing. “Use your head,” said the sergeant irritably. One squad set out towards a pillbox 350 yards away. They were stopped by wire. Beers went forward himself and started cutting it. Then a machine-gun opened fire on the Americans, causing some men to scurry back down the road. One sergeant, Moulding, picked up a BAR light machine-gun and continued forward with three riflemen. Beers said: “It was getting to be quite a run, and the machine-gun fire wasn’t anything to sneeze at.” He shouted back at the men who lay prone fifty yards behind him: “Keep coming—these heinie bastards can’t hit us!” He moved forward himself, and others followed. Nine Americans finally reached the pillbox. Beers fired his rifle into its embrasure, “I guess just for my morale’s sake.” He ran round the back, throwing two grenades to keep the Germans’ heads down. Then they laid a 10-pound satchel charge by the door, which failed to explode. The rest of the company was now 200 yards behind. There was a brief pause before an NCO of another platoon arrived, carrying a new satchel charge. This exploded without doing much visible damage to the pillbox, but evidently shocked its inhabitants. Beers left two men to watch the entrance, and scouted warily around its surrounding fire trenches and sleeping quarters, throwing grenades in front of him, though the positions proved to be empty. Then one of the watchers by the entrance hollered: “They’re coming out!” Twenty-one Germans led by a captain emerged from the pillbox with their hands up. One attempted to make a run for it and was shot. The rest were taken prisoner.
This little skirmish was typical of a hundred others up and down the West Wall, save that attackers elsewhere often met more determined resistance. To the men of the 109th who advanced up the road from Harspelt, the overwhelming superiority of the Allied armies and the strategic weakness of the Germans possessed no significance. They knew only that their depleted company was being asked to assault the vaunted Siegfried Line, with precious little help from anybody else. “I think that the propaganda on the strength of the Siegfried Line has created a feeling of timidity in attacking the defences,” Lieutenant-Colonel H. G. McFealey wrote to Bradley on 22 September. “Once they have had some success, the feeling is gone.”
As with many units in many battles, most of the men involved in the 109th’s little action behaved cautiously and hesitantly. The outcome was decided by the persistence and courage of a handful of NCOs and riflemen. So much depended upon a small minority of such men. As the bold and experienced soldiers were wounded or killed through the weeks that followed, they proved ever harder to replace. The pace of the Allied advance became progressively more sluggish. Lieutenant Witt of the 109th was especially scornful about the behaviour of supporting tanks: “If one gets hit, they all turn tail and run, and it surely is hard to get your men up when that happens.”
South of VII Corps, V Corps also made initial penetrations. But these were halted by German reinforcements. The Americans reported, correctly, that they faced 9th Panzer Division. Its armoured strength was reduced to just three tanks. But as usual the Germans’ professionalism and energy made the most of tiny resources. They counter-attacked again and again, pushing at exposed flanks, about which they considered the Americans morbidly sensitive.
In the chaos of a battlefield on which his forces were widely scattered and short of