J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [59]
On September 13, the 12th Infantry Regiment crossed into Germany, entering a heavily wooded country in the shadow of the Schnee Eifel, an imposing ridgeline that hugged the Hürtgen Forest. A landscape of steep valleys and rolling hills, the area had been a favorite skiing destination for Germans before the war. Despite the difficult landscape, the 12th had so far encountered no resistance, as its division commanders had hoped. Unknown to the soldiers, their ammunition supplies were far behind them and they would have been hard pressed to fight for any length of time had they been attacked. Relieved and encouraged by the ease of the advance, division commanders ordered the 12th and 22nd regiments to break through the Siegfried Line.
It was drizzling at 1 P.M. on September 14 when the 4th crossed the Siegfried Line.22 Taking advantage of a chilly fog that blanketed the woods, Salinger and his comrades scaled the Schnee Eifel and breached the line without encountering a single enemy soldier. Division commanders were encouraged and ordered the 12th to secure the area’s major highway so that it could be used by the U.S. First Army in its triumphal march into Germany. The regiment secured a hill overlooking the highway and dug in for the night.
The next morning, the soldiers awoke to a very different scene. The woods that had been empty only a day before were now full of enemy troops. Abandoned pillbox fortifications were manned and firing on their positions, and they found themselves confronted by the 2nd SS Panzer Division. The Germans had not expected the Americans to penetrate the Siegfried Line in the rugged area of the Schnee Eifel and had concentrated their forces in more logical locations. When they had learned of the advances of the 12th and 22nd regiments, they had taken immediate action and slipped their forces into place overnight.
The regiment was now entrenched in a quagmire. During the day, it carried out patrols and tried to clear its area of land mines, all the while under artillery and sniper fire. At night, the Germans would slip out of their pillboxes and replace the mines that had been removed. In the Schnee Eifel, the soldiers of the 12th Regiment fought one engagement after another to hold their sector of the line—a sector made worthless because they had lost control of the highway.
Deep within the Hürtgen Forest and surrounded by a thin ribbon of fields and villages lies the Kall River Valley. The valley is actually a gorge, with steep mountainsides rising up from the river. Along the top of the gorge runs the Kall Trail, a haphazard dirt track clinging perilously close to the cliff edge. The valley and the fields around it were, in essence, a shooting range for the Germans, who sat propped upon the surrounding hills. On November 2, the Allied command sent the 28th Infantry Division into the valley to seize the towns whose positions controlled the forest.
At first, the 28th appeared to be surprisingly successful. The division had divided itself between its regiments, with each regiment operating as an independent fighting unit, and managed to take one of the towns, a portion of the gorge, and a thickly forested plain bordering the valley. What the 28th did not realize was that the Germans had allowed them to split up in this way and had surrounded each regiment. Nothing obstructed the Germans from bombarding them at will, both from their mountain strongholds and from the darkness of the forest itself.
Unable to move safely in any direction, the 28th Division was forced to defend impossibly vulnerable positions for two weeks.* In a desperate effort to relieve them, the Allied command ordered tanks to be sent down the Kall Trail, ignorant of the fact that it was a morass of mud and fallen trees.