Artillery and mortar barrages pounded Kommerscheidt through the night, and catcalling enemy infiltrators crept so close in the encroaching draws that Jewish GIs hammered out the telltale H—for Hebrew—on their dogtags. “I’ve only had one day of it. No, came the reply, then yes, then no. The attack began no better for the 109th Regiment on the left flank. A magnesium flare drifted across the pearl-gray dawn, and wide-eyed GIs spied a long column of Panthers and Mk IVs snaking toward them from the northeast, easily swerving around the pointless mines. Hodges was an old-school soldier: He had flunked out of West Point—undone by plebe geometry—and risen through the ranks after enlisting as a private in 1905. The 28th had regained full strength but only with many replacements untrained as infantrymen, under officers and sergeants plucked from anti­aircraft units and even the Army Air Forces. Plus a visit to the excellent Vossenack Museum. Exhausted after Friday’s trudge through the Kall gorge in heavy overcoats with full field packs, the 3rd Battalion sent out no patrols and scattered 60 antitank mines—delivered during the night by tracked M29 Weasel cargo carriers—on three approach roads without attempting to implant or camouflage them. and it was good to visit such a place, knowing that the volunteer staff fully appreciated our interest. Any hope of maintaining formation was dispelled quickly by the blackness of the night and by German shelling. On Wednesday, November 1, after lunch in Spa with the V Corps commander, Major General Leonard T. Gerow, Hodges made a rare visit to a division command post. A commander who offered his men $5 for every tree found unscarred by shellfire got no takers. Reconstructed inscription: "To Marcus Caelius, son of Titus, of the Lemonian district, from Bologna, first centurion of … Through the long winter, feral dogs in the forest would feed on corpses seared by white phosphorus. As the gray skies spat sleet, 15 panzers and 2 infantry battalions renewed the attack on Tuesday morning, shooting up farmsteads and garden shacks. The 9th Division in late September had learned how lethal the Hürtgen could be when its troops tried to cross the forest as part of the initial VII Corps effort to outflank Aachen. Copyright © 2013. MS wooden cross. But tree cover would prevent them from providing the support they could in other terrain, and entering the forest immediately lost the Americans one of their advantages. German Battlefield Relics from late 1944 including the Hurtgen forest and the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest Reduced Price Items World War 1 British,French,Colonial Relics recovered from The Somme battlefield After nightfall, in relentless rain and stygian darkness, engineers hacked at the trail with picks and shovels—a bulldozer broke down half an hour after arriving—but even the nimble Weasels seemed clay footed, and the ammunition trailers they towed had to be unhitched and manhandled around each sharp turn into and out of the gorge. The Shermans fired four rounds apiece to dismember the church steeple in the town of Vossenack and any snipers hidden in the belfry, and 200 white-phosphorus mortar shells set the village ablaze. My main areas of expertise are Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Scheldt, the liberation of Brabant, Hurtgen Forest, Battle of the Bulge, Operation Veritable, and the 1945 Allied Rhine crossings. On Sunday night, reconnaissance troops from the 116th Panzer clattered down the Kall creek bed past an old sawmill, through ferns half as high as a man. Seven dams built for flood control, drinking water, and hydroelectric power stood near the headwaters of the Roer, which arose in Belgium and spilled east through the German highlands before flowing north across the Cologne plain and eventually emptying into the Maas southeast of Eindhoven. By September 1944, the Allied offensive in Western Europe had swept from the Normandy beaches all the way to the West Wall, or Siegfried Line, the formidable defensive position along the German border consisting of concrete bunkers fronted by antitank obstacles. Max Raid Battles: Fields of Honor, Soothing Wetlands, Forest of Focus, Insular Sea Anime Appearences Azumarill has made several appearances, most of which were cameos. Soldiers at dusk fashioned litters from tree limbs and overcoats. Still in their raincoats and hip boots, the engineers battled infiltrators all night around the church; Germans at one point occupied the tower and the basement while GIs held the nave. ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, the 28th Division began planting a defensive barrier of 5,000 mines around the cramped salient held in the Hürtgen. “I never saw a wood so thick with trees as the Hürtgen,” a GI later wrote. Published in After the Battle, Number 71, 1991. The soldier was obviously sewing buttons onto his uniform and eating and drinking his rations, in this freezing foxhole, before German mortars have hit their positions. As for the thirsty, each general in First Army received a monthly consignment of a case of gin and half cases of scotch and bourbon; lesser officers combined their allotments in a nightly ritual to make 12 quarts of martinis for the Hôtel Britannique mess, a grand ballroom with mirrors on three walls and exquisite windows filling the fourth. See more ideas about forest, wwii, world war ii. Roads in the forest are few, winding, and narrow. More and more of the perfect groves were gashed yellow with machine-gun bullets or reduced to charred stumps—“no birds, no sighing winds, no carpeted paths,” Forrest Pogue reported. Senior officers in First Army would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain the tactical logic behind their Hürtgen battle plan. “It was a horrible business, the forest….We had the bear by the tail, and we just couldn’t turn loose.” Even Joe Collins, who enjoyed favorite-son status with Hodges, conceded that he “would not question Courtney.”, “We had to go into the forest in order to secure our right flank,” Collins said after the war. World War 2 Relic & Treasure Hunting in Hurtgenwald in Germany Single American divisions continued to gnaw and be gnawed: Attacks in coming days by the 4th and 8th Infantry Divisions, like those by the 9th and the 28th, gained little at enormous cost, with battalions reduced to the size of companies and companies shaved to platoons. Definitely worth a visit. By day’s end the 110th had gained not a yard, and by week’s end the regiment would be rated “no longer an effective fighting force.”. The weeklong battle had been among the costliest division attacks of the war for the U.S. Army, with casualties exceeding 6,000. My unique and exciting, customised tours, cater for individuals, couples and for small groups of up to a maximum of 8 people. Telephoned congratulations from division and corps commanders across the front poured into Cota’s headquarters in Rott, 10 miles to the west. The Hurtgen Forest, located 50 square miles from the Belgian-German border, is recognised as the scene of a series of bloody battles in 1944-45. Fighter-bombers incinerated recalcitrant towns with napalm, and one potato village after another was blasted to dust by artillery. Examining a badly wounded man for injuries in the dark woods, a 28th Division medic reported, was “like putting your hand in a bucket of wet liver.” A surge in head wounds stirred debate in the ranks about whether German snipers were aiming at the bloody buck­et insignia painted on their helmets. These bees can be bred to … Despite the setback, Hodges and his command group soldiered on: At a November dinner party in the Spa generals’ mansion, the table was decorated with the distinctive black A of First Army’s shoulder flash, originally adopted in 1918. Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, Gerow called back with permission. We found some nice stuff! A German prisoner disclosed that arrangements had been made to ring Düren’s church bells if the dams upstream were blown. It also adds bees which can be placed in Bee Houses, Apiaries or the larger multi-block Alveary. He likened the menace on his right flank to that posed by German forces in the Argonne Forest to the American left flank during General John J. Pershing’s storied offensive on the Meuse in the autumn of 1918. Not until November 7 did Hodges order V Corps to even begin drafting plans to seize the dam sites, and not until December 4 would Bradley’s war diary note: “Decided must control Roer dam.”, By that time another frontal assault through horrid terrain had come to grief, and officers at Spa were reduced to feeble maledictions. “This was my personal Valley of the Shadow,” a medic wrote. “We squat in an air-less cellar,” a German medic wrote his parents. With that, the final battle for Europe would unfold, he said, in “three general phases”: an unsparing struggle west of the Rhine, the seizure of bridgeheads over the river, and finally a mortal dagger thrust into the heart of Germany. This is the worst. Also a look at German MG positions and foxholes on the Brandenberg-Bergstein ridge, Location of the field grave & memorial cross, to PFC Paul Peternell (121st Infantry 8th Division), who died on the 9th of December 1944. One regiment took four days to move a mile; another needed five. All told, 120,000 soldiers sustained 33,000 casualties in what the historian Carlo D’Este would call “the most ineptly fought series of battles of the war in the West.” A captured German document reported that “in combat in wooded areas the American showed himself completely unfit,” a harsh judgment that had a whiff of legitimacy with respect to American generalship. The 109th had advanced barely 300 yards when a sharp pop was followed by a shriek: a GI clutched his bloody foot. A top secret memo to Hodges from Ninth Army’s General Simpson on November 5 cited a Corps of Engineers study titled “Summaries of the Military Use of the Roer River Reservoir System,” which concluded that the enemy could “maintain the Roer River at flood stage for approximately ten days…or can produce a two-day flood of catastrophic proportions.” An American attack over the Roer might be crippled, with tactical bridges swept away and any troops east of the river isolated and annihilated. A killer. His body was found in July 1981, RAFFELSBRAND – The battles for the heavily defended Raffelsbrand Road Junction Bunkers & extensive trench systems, Remnants of ” The Westwall” (Dragon’s Teeth) at Simmerath, Paustenbach & Lammersdorf, Rott (Norman “Dutch” Cota’s Command post -28th Infantry Division), James E Rudder’s Command Post – Germeter (2nd Ranger Battalion), Roetgen/Rott (Dragon’s Teeth) – 1st penetration of the Siegfried Line – September 13th 1944-Task Force Lovelady – 3rd Armored division. The fast flowing Rur River flows through it’s centre and there are some wonderful restaurants to sample local beers, wine and excellent food (optional visit), Lukas – Muhle (old mill & huge former German aid-station location), near Schmidt & Vossenack, Tiefelbach River & the assaults on Brandenberg & Bergstein. The morning wore on, and the existential crisis sharpened. Hodges, with assistance from Lieutenant General William Hood Simpson’s Ninth Army, was to sweep forward another 10 miles to the Roer River, overrun the town of Düren on the far bank, then press on toward Cologne and the Rhine. On Tuesday morning, November 7, the engineers helped beat back a panzergrenadier assault, keeping Vossenack in American hands except for the eastern fringe, dubbed the Rubble Pile, which the Germans would hold for another month. Here was the Grimm forest primeval, a place of shades. Although this is a small map, it is so highly detailed and carefully crafted that I believe it comparable to Relic’s own professionally-made maps. Sometimes on request he ghost-wrote love letters for young GIs, reading his favorite passages to fellow journalists. The Urft finally fell in early February, but only because German defenders had rallied round the Schwammenauel and the 20 billion gallons it impounded. A German engineer interrogated in Spa intimated that a wall of water could barrel down the Roer. Five of the seven dams lacked the capacity to substantially affect the river’s regime, but the other two—the Schwammenauel and the Urft—impounded sizable lakes that together held up to 40 billion gallons. Not until 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, November 5, just before moonrise, were the stalled Shermans finally shoved over the brink into the gorge. Apr 7, 2015 - This Pin was discovered by Philip Lizee. MERODE – a fine example of extensive German trenches can be clearly seen here, in the now peaceful forest. A believing man with imagination could almost see the end of the war. Here lay the most promising frontage on the entire Allied line. Bradley would later claim that by mid-October “we were very much aware of the threat they posed” and that the “whole point” of the renewed attack through the Hürtgen was “to gain control of the dams and spillways.” That was untrue. Telephone: (mobile) +44 77208 55690 “Aggressive, touchy, and high-strung,” Bradley later wrote of the staff he had created before ascending to 12th Army Group, “critical, unforgiving, and resentful of all authority but its own.” Three rivalrous figures played central roles in this unhappy family: Major General William B. Kean, the able, ruthless chief of staff who was privately dubbed Captain Bligh and to whom Hodges ceded great authority; Brigadier General Truman C. Thorson, the grim, chain-smoking operations officer nicknamed Tubby but also called Iago after the Shakespearean character who schemes to bring down his commander; and Colonel Benjamin A. Dickson, the brilliant, turbulent intelligence chief long known as Monk, a histrionic man of smoldering grievances. Subscribed. “I’ve condemned a whole regiment of the finest men that ever breathed,” a distraught officer told reporter Iris Carpenter. 1944, Hürtgen Forest Battle. Read Books Hell in Hurtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph … No panzer counterattack was considered likely given Allied air superiority and the destruction of German armor in the past two months. Dead men from the 9th Division still littered the forest, bullet holes in their field jackets like blood-ringed grommets. Colonel Dickson, First Army’s intelligence chief, disagreed. This Week in History - WWII - 1944 - The Battle of Hurtgen Forest. No terrain analysis was undertaken, nor were the dams mentioned in tactical plans. For nearly a week the green 78th Division, reinforced by a regiment from the 82nd Airborne and eventually the veteran 9th Division, had retaken ground won and then lost in the Hürtgen battles of late fall: the Kall gorge—where dozens of decaying, booby-trapped corpses of 28th Division troops still lined the trail—and then Kommerscheidt, and finally ruined Schmidt, captured in a cellar-to-cellar gunfight on February 8 after 40 battalions of U.S. artillery made the rubble bounce. Browse more videos. The reconnaissance battalion was already galloping toward Schmidt, followed by the bulk of the division and by troops from the 89th Infantry Division. (Jump off-positions began here). Army/National Archives), (Map:?Baker Vail; Source: Gene Thorp map from "The Guns at Last Light," by Rick Atkinson). Was the Kall Trail open? Against such odds, and to the surprise of American and German alike, the division’s main attack won through in the center. Newsflare. In Rott, Cota’s perplexity only deepened. Feb 13, 2014 - Explore Maxine B's board "Hurtgen Forest" on Pinterest. I crafted this map off and on for a period of three years, inspired by the Operation Market Garden map “Best”. Fifteen American divisions otherwise poised to drive on Berlin were stranded on the west side of the river for another two weeks. An abrupt, piercing scream unmanned Company G, which fled for the rear through Vossenack, and the contagion instantly infected the ranks. 129 Pins • 31 Followers. In truth, “the most likely way to make the Hürtgen a menace to the American Army,” the historian Russell F. Weigley later wrote, “was to send American troops attacking into its depths.”, No consideration was given to bypassing or screening the forest or to outflanking Schmidt from the south by sending V Corps up the vulnerable attack corridor through Monschau, 15 miles below Aachen. He had been seen weeping by the road as trucks passed carrying wounded soldiers from the front. “We’ll take the ‘hit’ out of Hitler,” they sang. A special theme I cover is the experience of Easy Company, 506 PIR, 101st Airborne from The Netherlands to Zell am See. University of Pennsylvania Press. Édouard Manet, French impressionist painter best known for Luncheon in the Grass. (121st Infantry, 8th Division), Scenic hike – A  beautiful, historic, flat walk along the Kall River from Simonskall (optional). HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. Model ordered the corps commander back to his post, but other officers—including two army commanders—were instructed to continue the war game, using dispatches from the front to help orchestrate the battle. Having already committed his only division reserve to help the hard-pressed 110th Infantry in the south, the little Napoleon had lost control of the battle before it really began. Cota ordered two road-repairing companies from the 146th Engineers into the line as riflemen. The army historian Forrest Pogue described one cashiered officer waiting by the road for a ride to the rear, belongings piled about him “like a mendicant.”. Mortar pits were overrun, bazooka rounds bounced off panzer hulls like marbles, and yowling enemy infantrymen raced toward Schmidt from the south, west, and east, some banging on their mess kits in a lunatic tintinnabulation. BATTLE OF HURTGEN FOREST 50th: SGM Robert S. Rush; Battle for Huppenbroich, Germany; Oral history interview with Arthur C. Neriani, a member of the 8th Infantry Division describes his experiences from the battle of Hürtgen Forest from the Veterans History Project at Central Connecticut State University This page was last edited on 7 December 2020, at 12:05 (UTC). If they had been, even under heavy German artillery fire, casualties “would not be high nor would ground be lost.” During the battle, Hodges complained, the division staff appeared to have “no precise knowledge of the location of their units and were doing nothing to obtain it.” The First Army commander wanted Cota to know that he was “extremely disappointed.” Before driving back to Spa, Hodges told Gerow that “there may be some personnel changes made.”, The gray weather grew colder. Spreading across the forest like the fingers of a hand are ridges that run southwest to northeast, the largest of them being the Monschau corridor, which extends from Monschau to Duren on the other side of the forest. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company LLC. Headquarters generals also requisitioned the hilltop mansion of a Liège steel magnate as their bivouac; Belgian guests were occasionally invited to movie screenings in a nearby school, where soldiers tried to explain in broken French the nuances of Gaslight and A Guy Named Joe. For two weeks across the 170-mile front of the First and Ninth Armies, the 28th Division would be the only U.S. unit launching an attack, attracting the undivided attention of German defenders who already knew precisely where the Blutiger Eimer (Bloody Bucket) division was assembling. “Damn the dams.”, ATTACKING THE WORST PLACE OF ANY now fell to Major General Norman “Dutch” Cota and his 28th Division, still recovering from the September skirmishes that had revived the division’s World War I nickname, the Bloody Bucket, so called for their red keystone insignia. Among those sent to the rear for psychiatric examination were two GI collectors, one with a cache of ears sliced from dead Germans and another with a souvenir bag of teeth. A flourishing resort since the 1500s—the German travel-guide publisher Karl Baedeker had called it “the oldest European watering-place of any importance”—Spa reached its zenith in the 18th century with visits by Peter the Great and other potentates keen to promenade beneath the elms or to marinate in the 16 mineral springs infused with iron and carbonic acid. “All we could do was sit back and pray to God that nothing would happen,” Major General Truman Thorson, the operations officer, later lamented. Tests by army engineers confirmed that every one of the city’s 11 drinking water sources was polluted, but a decent black market meal could be had at the Hôtel de Portugal—horsemeat with mushroom caps seemed to be a regional specialty in these straitened times. Small bespoke tours are much more personal and interesting and a good way to make friends, or to share our mutual interest in WW2. Medics distributed liquor rations donated by rear-echelon officers. Cota could only agree. But the brisk brrrr of machine-gun fire from pillboxes on the division’s right flank mowed down men in the 110th Infantry Regiment—“singly, in groups, and by platoons,” the division history recorded. From Vosse­nack the ridge plunged into the crepuscular Kall gorge, a deep ravine carved through the landscape by a stream rushing toward the Roer. “The 28th Division situation is going from bad to worse,” First Army’s war diary noted on Tuesday. Had the regiments been properly deployed and dug in? GIs unable to leave their flooded rifle pits, described as “artesian wells,” were once again reduced to defecating in empty C-ration cans. Two American battalions in column spilled down a twisting cart track, then forded the icy Kall near an ancient sawmill and emerged from the beeches limning the far ridge to pounce on the drab hamlet of Kommerscheidt. Items include 2 civilian silver spoons, a coffee ration packet, various kit buttons, shrapnel, M1 Garand rifle bullets, Garand ammo clip, an Artillery uniform button, wire and the best discovery of all – a sewing thimble. Four compact woodland tracts formed the Hürtgen, 11 miles long and 5 miles wide in all. A lieutenant who considered the pell-mell flight “the saddest sight I have ever seen,” added, “Many of the badly wounded men, probably hit by artillery, were lying in the road where they fell, screaming for help.”. 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