Grunts (18 page)

Both Daniel and Corley had fought their way into Aachen’s suburbs in the first week of October. Both had studied the terrain and prepared their battalions as best they could, under the frenetic circumstances of continuous operations, for urban combat. The inner ring of the city dated back to Charlemagne’s time. It had narrow streets and crooked, close-packed buildings. To the north, along wider streets, were Aachen’s hotels and spas, along with a stretch of high ground consisting of three hill masses generally called Observatory Hill or Lousberg that loomed, at the highest point, some 862 feet over the city. Surrounding everything were industrial suburbs of coal mines, factories, and homes. The Americans planned to assault the town from south to north. The 2nd Battalion’s job was to capture the heart of the city. On the 2nd Battalion’s right, the 3rd Battalion was to push northwest through the factories, the spas, and hotels, and then take all the hills of Lousberg.

Some of the troops had fought in towns during the battles for Sicily, Normandy, and in the drive across France. But no one had any experience fighting in a city of this size. The soldiers tended to call urban combat “street fighting,” a moniker that revealed a certain level of ignorance since the open streets were often the last place an infantryman wanted to be during the fighting. The Army had almost no published doctrine on urban warfare, but this hardly mattered. The ability to improvise, under the stress of combat, was (and still is) a great strength of American ground combat troops, from privates to colonels. In this case, neither Daniel nor Corley had the time to deal with fancy field manuals or retrain their soldiers for urban combat. Instead, both men, in spite of their lack of experience with city fighting, intuitively understood how to approach it, as did many of their sergeants, lieutenants, and captains.

The key was to organize platoons and companies into combined arms teams. “Tanks and tank destroyers were assigned to each company,” Lieutenant Colonel Daniel later wrote. “Artillery observers were to move forward as soon as ground was secured by the advancing rifle companies, meanwhile maintaining liaison with the rifle company commanders.” Self-propelled guns and antitank guns also supported the riflemen, as did squads of engineers, mortarmen, and machine gunners.

Each group contributed its own unique strength to the team. The tanks, tank destroyers, and guns could pulverize buildings, ward off enemy armor, destroy German machine gunners, and even provide mobile cover for the infantrymen. Artillery could devastate entire city blocks, killing enemy soldiers or forcing them to move to safer places. The machine gunners and mortar teams lent even more accurate fire support. The engineers could deal with mines and booby traps. They also had the capability to blast German defenders in their cellars and bunkers. The riflemen, of course, were the lead actors in this urban choreography. They could protect the armor from the peril of enemy Panzerfaust antitank teams, whose warheads could puncture the armor of American tanks. The riflemen were also the ones who would carry out the actual assaults, securing buildings, killing the enemy at close range. These riflemen, according to one unit report, had to be “proficient in proper methods of moving along walls, advancing over walls and rooftops, firing from either shoulder, from the hip, and from covered areas, and rapid entry of buildings.”

In the urban maze of rubble and ruined buildings, commanders might easily lose control of their soldiers. At Peleliu, the Americans had been hampered by poor maps. At Aachen, they were blessed with excellent, detailed maps of the city. In Daniel’s case, he and his company commanders used those maps to establish “a series of checkpoints on street intersections and also in the larger buildings so that each unit knew where the adjacent units were on its flanks. Each company was assigned an area and generally each platoon a street. On cross streets, each platoon would go down about halfway, meeting in the middle.”

The Americans did not have to worry about any political constraints. There were only a few thousand civilians in Aachen. The Americans had no wish to kill them, but, if they did, few would notice in the context of a world war that had already snuffed out the lives of more civilians than combatants. What’s more, in Aachen the opposition would consist entirely of uniformed soldiers, making it easy for the Americans to determine who was a threat and who was not. The city was already in a decrepit state because it had been bombed so often. Thus, if the Americans unleashed wanton destruction on historical buildings, churches, and landmarks, they would suffer no political consequences in the court of world opinion. Indeed, the motto of the soldiers was “Knock ’em all down!” This applied equally to objects or people. Anyone, or anything, that even remotely threatened the Americans was fair game for the full range of U.S. firepower. In this pretelevision age, the Americans did not have to worry about the image-driven consequences of needless destruction or the killing of civilians. They could concentrate solely on the task of taking the city. The odd thing is that the Battle of Aachen was fought largely for political reasons, because of the city’s cultural importance to German nationalism, yet politics had almost no impact on how either side actually fought the battle.
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Surrender or We’ll Blow You Away

At 1020 on the morning of October 10, three American soldiers emerged from the cover of a building in Aachen’s suburbs and began walking down Trierer Strasse (street), toward the German-held city. The man in the middle, Private Kenneth Kading, was waving a bedsheet-sized white flag attached to a pole. To his right was First Lieutenant William Boehme, an interpreter. To Kading’s left was First Lieutenant Cedric Lafley, who was carrying orders straight from General Collins, demanding the surrender of the German garrison. The day was gray and overcast, with light rain pattering off the battered concrete. Much of Aachen was ringed by railroad tracks whose embankment rose up as high as forty feet. About fifty yards shy of a railroad underpass, several German soldiers materialized, waved the Americans over to them, and guided them through the underpass, into the German front lines. The Germans blindfolded the three Americans and led them up the street, first into an apartment building and then into a basement. Shorn of his blindfold, Lieutenant Lafley asked to see the German commander, but was told by two German officers that he was not there. Lafley gave them two envelopes containing the surrender ultimatum.

The Germans had exactly twenty-four hours to comply or else, the ultimatum decreed, Aachen would face “complete destruction.” One of the German officers expressed a hope for good surrender terms. Another ventured to say that they would fight on regardless. A few minutes later, after some more desultory conversation and a polite exchange of cigarettes, the blindfolds were put back in place and the German guides led them back to the American lines. “On the way back our guides stopped briefly beside some comrades to take a nip from a bottle,” Lieutenant Lafley wrote. “They would have liked to strike up a conversation with us but due to previous instructions they only spoke when necessary.” The Germans led them past the underpass and nearly followed them back to the American positions. “It was necessary to tell them to stop and tell them to go back while we proceeded to our own lines.” Later, the Americans broadcast the ultimatum by radio and loudspeaker. They also fired artillery shells full of surrender pamphlets into the city.

The Americans waited the requisite twenty-four hours and hoped for a German surrender. Few of the soldiers wanted to fight among Aachen’s ruins. Although white flags did sprout from some windows and several dozen enemy prisoners filtered into American lines, most of the Americans were realistic enough not to get their hopes up. “Them bastards ain’t gonna give up,” a sergeant drawled on one street corner. “We’ll have to root ’em out house to house style.” He was exactly right. The German commander, Colonel Gerhard Wilck, never even replied to the ultimatum. His silence amounted to a contemptuous no.

In response, the Americans pounded Aachen for two days with artillery shells and P38 and P47 fighter-bombers. In the recollection of one witness, the fighters “came in at a 70-degree angle. You could see them strafing and then the two specks which were 500-pound bombs would cut loose and then a minute later there would be the explosion. Fires were started all over Aachen—there must have been a dozen large ones.” Huge clouds of dust and smoke rose from the debris. Infantrymen watched approvingly and muttered encouragement to the aviators: “Go to it, you glamour boys!” The fighters dropped nearly 173 tons of bombs on Aachen. When the planes were gone, the artillerymen lobbed some five thousand shells at the city. At one point, as the shells exploded, scattering masonry, fragments, and dust, the Germans began playing waltz music over a loudspeaker they had set up. A bizarre voice spoke over the surreal music: “Hey, you dumb Americans, why don’t you put your rifles down and come over and we’ll have a party? If you will stop shelling we will play some music for you. We regret that we have none of your American swing records.” When the shelling continued unabated, the voice said reprovingly: “All right, if that is the kind of music you like, that is the kind of music you shall have.” Enemy mortar crews fired several rounds at the American-held buildings.

Engineers from the 1106th Engineer Combat Group added their own special flourish to the pounding. They actually built car bombs out of abandoned trolley street cars, placed them on their tracks, and used a bulldozer to push them down a hill at the Germans in Aachen. Each car bomb “was loaded with approximately a ton of enemy explosives made up of six German rockets, fifty 88mm shells, two boxes [of] 20mm shells, two boxes [of] 37mm shells and hand grenades and rifle grenades,” one after action report said. The car bombs were the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Gara, one of the engineer commanders. They did little appreciable damage. “I’ve always been disappointed that we didn’t get better results from this ingenious scheme,” Colonel Stanhope Mason, the division chief of staff, later wrote. As a whole, the bombs and shells rearranged the rubble, and jostled the Germans around, forcing them to take refuge in their cellars, but most survived the bombardment and were more than ready to fight when the assault on the city began on October 13. The incessant pounding did an effective job, though, of forcing enemy soldiers from the buildings that overlooked the railroad tracks.
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Plunging into the Concrete Jungle

Before launching their assault, the infantrymen hurled grenades over the railroad embankment. The grenade explosions sounded like a series of dull thuds. Men could hear shrapnel plinking off the piles of shattered masonry. As they hoisted themselves over the embankment, the city was eerily silent. The shattered hulks of apartment buildings loomed immediately ahead, brooding like some sort of disfigured ghosts. Jagged piles of rocks, support timbers, and other urban junk were heaped everywhere. Many of the soldiers took cover behind the piles or against the exterior of buildings, waiting for the supporting Shermans from the 745th Tank Battalion to negotiate their way over the tracks.

Lieutenant Colonel Daniel was impressed with the aggressiveness of the tank commanders in safely driving their vehicles over the embankment and positioning them for the assault. Daniel lined up all three of his companies, each with at least two tanks in support, and sent them forward into their assigned sectors. “Then began the slow mopping up of the buildings in the succeeding blocks,” Daniel wrote. “The infantry had been instructed to avoid the open streets and work through the cellars with liberal expenditure of concussion grenades. The process was necessarily slow and methodical; it was found that in many blocks all cellars were connected, thus making it possible to clear the entire block without emerging on the streets.”

Private Lauren Gast and his rifle squad found some of these pre-prepared tunnels and were only too happy to move through them. At times, though, they had to emerge from the tunnels to get into another building. “We would use a rifle grenade to blast the door open, then run across the street and enter through the open door.” Most of the time, the buildings were empty. If there were no tunnels, the Americans created their own. “The area we were in was a lot of very small apartment buildings that one butted up against the next,” Private Charles Dye of L Company said. “So we chopped holes through the walls and crawled through the walls. The engineers brought us up TNT and we would blow holes through the walls of these houses.”

They could not take the whole city this way, though. Most of the time, they cautiously picked their way along the streets, using tanks, piles of debris, or doorways for cover. “In general a tank or a tank destroyer moved down each street with a platoon of infantry firing at the 2nd or 3rd house ahead,” some of the soldiers testified in a post-battle historical interview. “When a house was cleared the infantry would signal that they were ready (and protected from muzzle blast); then and then only would the tank or tank destroyer fire its next mission. As the tracked weapons fired into a building they would force the enemy down to the cellar, where the infantry would toss hand grenades and immediately follow in.” Often, the tankers fired high-explosive shells through windows and doors. Sometimes, they fired armor-piercing shells to punch a hole in a building and then followed that up with several high-explosive shells. The average tank crew fired fifty rounds of high-explosive ammunition per day.

Machine gunners set up their guns behind debris piles or in especially deep doorways about half a block behind the leading vehicles and riflemen. From there the gunners sent out volleys of bullets, down the street, ahead of their comrades as they advanced. Often the machine gunners shot up windows, especially on the upper floors of intact buildings, in hopes of killing snipers. Artillery observers moved with the infantry, calling down fire as close as two or three blocks away. The urban sprawl made radio communication spotty, so signalmen strung communication wire in the wake of the advancing infantry, allowing Corley and Daniel to stay in touch with their company commanders. Flamethrower and demolition men worked closely with the riflemen. “When a steel door was encountered,” the soldiers said, “it was covered by infantry fire while the demolition man worked his way to it. At the same time, the flamethrower would work his way to a window through which he would throw a two- or three-second stream of fire normally 30-40 yards, thus forcing those inside to keep down, or driving them out.” In the meantime, the demolition man would set his charge and blow the door open. Riflemen then ran forward, burst through the opening, and shot everyone inside at such close range that they could see the horrified expressions on the faces of their victims.