Citizen Soldiers_ The U.S. Army from the - Stephen E. Ambrose [35]
On September 27 Third Army made its first attempt to take Driant. Although they had only a vague idea of the fort's works, they figured that a pre-World War I fortress system couldn't possibly stand up to the pounding of modern artillery, much less air-dropped bombs of 500 to 1,000 pounds, not to mention napalm. From dawn to 1415 hours the Americans hit the fort with all the high explosives in their arsenal.
At 1415 the llth Infantry Regiment began to move in on the fort. To their astonishment, when they reached the barbed wire surrounding the moat, Germans rose up from pillboxes all around and opened fire. Shermans came forward to blast the pillboxes, but their 75-mm shells hardly chipped the thick concrete. The infantry ignominiously withdrew under cover of darkness.
Third Army now faced the oldest tactical-engineering problem in warfare-how to overcome a fortified position. It helped considerably that the Americans eventually got their hands on the blueprints of the fort, which showed a warren of tunnels. No amount of high explosive was going to knock the fort down. Infantry would have to get inside and take possession.
On October 3 the second assault on Driant began. Captain Harry Anderson of Company B led the way, tossing grenades into German bunkers as he ran across the causeway into Driant, where he established a position alongside one of the casements. An intense firefight ensued. Germans popped out of their holes like prairie dogs, fired, and dropped back. They called in their own artillery from other forts in the area. American engineers got forward with TNT to blast a hole in the casement, but the heavy walls were as impervious to TNT as to shells and bombs.
On top of the casement Private Robert Holmlund found a ventilator shaft. Despite enemy fire, he managed to open the shaft's cover and drop several bangalore torpedoes down the opening. Germans who survived evacuated the area, and Captain Anderson led the first Americans inside the fort. The room they had taken turned out to be a barracks. They quickly took an adjacent one.
The Germans counterattacked. The ensuing firelight was a new dimension of combat. It shattered nerves, ears, and lives with machinegun fire and hand grenade explosions reverberating in the tunnels enclosed by thick, dripping masonry walls. The air was virtually unbreathable; men in the barracks room had to take turns at gulping fresh air from firing slits.
B Company was stuck there. It had neither the equipment nor the manpower to fight its way through the maze of tunnels. It couldn't go back; being on top of the fort was more dangerous than being in it. At dark, reinforcements accompanied by a half-dozen Shermans crossed the causeway and assaulted another casement, but they were badly shot up and forced to withdraw.
Captain Jack Gerrie, CO of G Company, llth Infantry, led the reinforcements. On October 4 Gerrie tried to knock down the steel doors at the rear of the fort. Direct cannon fire couldn't do it, and protruding grillwork made it impossible to put TNT charges against the doors. The Germans again called down fire on Driant, which forced G Company to scatter to abandoned pillboxes, ditches, anywhere for shelter. That evening Gerrie tried to reorganize his company, but the Germans came out of the underground tunnels-here, there, everywhere-fired, and retreated.
At dawn on October 5 German artillery commenced firing. After hours of this, Gerrie wrote a report for his battalion commander: "The situation is critical.