The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (36 page)

They jump off again, and soon there is only a handful of the old men left.” On September 19 the 3rd Armored Division and the 9th Infantry Division began the attack. The lieutenants and captains quickly learned that control of formations larger than platoons was nearly impossible. Troops more than a few feet apart couldn’t see each other. There were no clearings, only narrow firebreaks and trails. Maps were almost useless. When the Germans, secure in their bunkers, saw the GIs coming forward, they called down pre-sited artillery fire, using shells with fuses designed to explode on contact with the treetops. When men dove to the ground for cover, as they had been trained to do and as instinct dictated, they exposed themselves to a rain of hot metal and wood splinters. They learned that to survive a shelling in the Hurtgen, hug a tree. That way they exposed only their steel helmets.

Tanks could barely move on the few roads, which were too muddy, too heavily mined, too narrow. The tanks could not move at all off the roads. Airplanes couldn’t fly. The artillery could shoot, but not very effectively, as forward observers (FOs) couldn’t see ten meters to the front. The Americans could not use their assets-air, artillery, mobility. They were committed to a fight of mud and mines, carried out by infantry skirmish lines plunging ever deeper into the forest, with machine guns and light mortars their only support.  For the Germans, it was equally horrible. One enemy commander, Gen. Hans Schmidt of the 275th Infantry Division, called the forest a “weird and wild” place, where “the dark pine trees and the dense tree-tops give the forest even in the daytime a somber appearance which is apt to cast gloom upon sensitive people.” Gen. Paul Mahlmann, commanding the 353rd Infantry Division, said his troops “were fighting in deplorable conditions, exposed to incessant enemy fire, fighting daily without relief, receiving little support from their own artillery, drenched by frequent rain, and without the possibility of changing clothes.” He went on, “Forsaken as they were they had no choice but to hold out in hopeless resignation.”

For the GIs, it was a calamity. In their September action, the 9th and 2nd Armored lost up to 80 percent of their front-line troops and gained almost nothing. In October the 9th-reinforced-tried again, but by mid-month it was dead in the water and had suffered terribly. Casualties were around 4,500 for an advance of 3,000 meters. German losses were somewhat less, around 3,300.  Staff officers were learning, if slowly. On the last day of October the staff of the 9th Division issued a five-page report, “Notes on Woods Fighting.” Troops already in the line and still alive knew what the lessons were, but the report was valuable to new units and replacements being fed into the forest. It advised training in forest fighting prior to commitment, pressing against a tree when the shelling began, fighting during the day because night operations were physically impossible, never traveling in the woods without a compass, and never sending reinforcements forward in the midst of a battle or shelling.  Call it off! That’s what the GIs wanted to tell the generals, but the generals shook their heads and said, Attack. On November 2 the 28th Infantry Division took it up. Maj. Gen. Norman Cota, one of the heroes of D-Day, was the CO. The 28th was the Pennsylvania National Guard and was called the Keystone Division.  Referring to the red keystone shoulder patch, the Germans took to calling it the Bloody Bucket Division.

It tried to move forward, but it was like walking into hell. From their bunkers the Germans sent forth a hail of machine-gun and rifle fire, and mortars. The GIs were caught in thick minefields. Everything was mud and fir trees. The attack stalled.

“The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,” Pvt. Clarence Blakeslee recalled, “and the nights were so bad I would pray for daylight.” Lt.  John Forsell, K Company, 110th Infantry, 28th Division, had a macabre day-night experience. He was outside the village of Schmidt, which was no-man’s-land.  “Daily we would check the houses,” he explained. “The Germans patrolled the same town at night. One morning our patrol came into town and found a G.I. hung on the Crucifixion Cross. We cut him down. We stayed in town and hid in a few houses waiting for the Germans. A German patrol came in, we had a gunfight, they were caught by surprise. A few of the patrol got away but we took three Germans and hung them on three crosses. That ended that little fanfare for both sides in Schmidt.”

For two weeks the 28th kept attacking, as ordered. On November 5 division sent down orders to move tanks down a road called the Kall trail. But no staff officer had gone forward to assess the situation in person, and in fact the “trail” was all mud and anyway blocked by felled trees and disabled tanks. The attack led only to loss.

There were men who broke under the strain, and there were heroes. On November 5 the Germans counterattacked. An unknown GI dashed out of his foxhole, took a bazooka from a dead soldier, and engaged two German tanks. He fired from a range of twenty-five meters and put one tank out of action. He was never seen again.  On November 6 an entire company passed the breaking point. An all-night shelling had caused numerous casualties. At dawn a German counterattack began. When the small-arms fire erupted from the woods, the men could endure no more. First one, then another, then two and three together, began to run to the rear. Capt. Joe Pruden was sympathetic: “They had just had too much. Their endurance could stand no more.” But he knew he had to stop them, get them to turn and face the enemy.  Along with other officers at the command post, he tried. But the men were “pushing, shoving, throwing away equipment, trying to outrun the artillery and each other in a frantic effort to escape. They were all scared.” He saw badly wounded men lying where they fell, crying out for medics, being ignored.  The 28th’s lieutenants kept leading. By November 13 all the officers in the rifle companies had been killed or wounded. Most of them were within a year of their twentieth birthday. Overall in the Hurtgen, the 28th Division suffered 6,184 combat casualties, plus 738 cases of trench foot and 620 battle fatigue cases. Those figures mean that virtually every front-line soldier was a casualty.

Col. Ralph Ingersoll, the creator of the “Talk of the Town” for theNew Yorker magazine, was an intelligence officer with First Army. He met with lieutenants who had just come out of the Hurtgen: “They did not talk; they just sat across the table or on the edge of your cot and looked at you very straight and unblinking with absolutely no expression in their faces, which were neither tense nor relaxed but completely apathetic. They looked, unblinking.” Bradley and Hodges remained resolute to take the Hurtgen. They put in the 4th Infantry Division. It had led the way onto Utah Beach on June 6, and gone through a score of battles since. Not many D-Day veterans were still with the division-most were dead or badly wounded. In the Hurtgen, the division poured out its lifeblood once again.

First Army put the 8th Infantry Division into the attack. On November 27 it closed to the town of Hurtgen, the original objective of the offensive when it began in mid-September. It fell to Lt. Paul Boesch, G Company, 121st Infantry, to take the town. At dawn on November 28, Boesch put one of his lieutenants to the left side of the road leading to town, while he took the other platoon to the other side. Boesch ran from man to man, explaining what the company was about to do. When he gave the signal, they charged. “It was sheer pandemonium,” he recalled. Once out of that damned forest, the men went mad with battle lust.  Boesch described it as “a wild, terrible, awe-inspiring thing. We dashed, struggled from one building to another shooting, bayoneting, clubbing. Hand grenades roared, fires cracked, buildings to the left and right burned with acrid smoke. Dust, smoke, and powder filled our lungs, making us cough, spit.  Automatic weapons chattered while heavier throats of mortars and artillery disgorged deafening explosions. The wounded and dead-men in the uniforms of both sides-lay in grotesque positions at every turn.” American tanks supported Boesch’s company. He remembered that they would first spray the buildings with their .50-calibers, then use their 75s to blow holes for the infantry. “We hurled ourselves through the holes or through windows or splintered doors. Then it became a battle from floor to floor-from room to room.” The company took nearly three hundred prisoners.  As the battle sputtered to a close, Boesch “started to shake, and it wasn’t the cold. I realized that I had not been afraid during that whole day. Not once did I feel afraid. I was busy as hell, and that occupied my mind. But when I shook, visibly, on that floor with a roof at least two feet thick over my head, I was hoping that I would not forget to be afraid because that was the best way to stay alive, to not make careless moves.” He was wounded later that night by a German shell and was sent to a hospital in the States.  The 8th Division didn’t get far beyond Hurtgen. By December 3, it was used up. A staff officer from the regiment was shocked when he visited the front that day.  He reported, “The men of this battalion are physically exhausted. The spirit and will to fight are there; the ability to continue is gone. These men have been fighting without rest or sleep for four days and last night had to lie unprotected from the weather in an open field. They are shivering with cold, and their hands are so numb that they have to help one another on with their equipment. I firmly believe that every man up there should be evacuated through medical channels.” Many had trench foot; all had bad colds or worse, plus diarrhea.

15 -    The Battle of the Bulge

THROUGH THE FALL, the great offensive continued. The only place the Allies were not on the attack was in the Ardennes itself, which was thinly held by Lt. Gen.  Troy Middleton’s corps. On a drive to Maastricht on December 7, Eisenhower had noted how spread out the troops in the Ardennes were, and he questioned Bradley about the vulnerability of this sector of the front. Bradley said he could not strengthen the Ardennes area without weakening Patton’s and Hodges’s offensives, and that if the Germans counterattacked in the Ardennes they could be hit on either flank and stopped long before they reached the Meuse River. Although he did not expect a German counterattack, he said he had taken the precaution of not placing any major supply installations in the Ardennes. Eisenhower was satisfied by Bradley’s explanation.

December 16 was a day of celebration at SHAEF main headquarters in Versailles, featuring a wedding, a promotion, and a medal. In the morning, Eisenhower aide Sgt. Mickey McKeogh married one of the WAC sergeants. Eisenhower hosted a champagne reception in his house in Saint-Germain. He had something else to celebrate: the U.S. Senate had just announced his promotion to the newly created rank of General of the Army, which made him equal in rank to Marshall, MacArthur-and Montgomery.

Late in the afternoon Bradley arrived to complain about the replacement situation. The United States now had all but one of its divisions committed, the flow of replacements was not keeping pace with the casualty rate, and because of the general offensive that Eisenhower insisted on conducting, SHAEF had few men in reserve.

While they talked in Eisenhower’s office, British Gen. Kenneth Strong interrupted to inform them that a German attack had been launched that morning in the Ardennes. Bradley’s initial reaction was to dismiss it as a mere spoiling attack, designed to draw Patton’s forces out of the Saar offensive. But Eisenhower immediately sensed something bigger. “That’s no spoiling attack,” he said, explaining that since the Ardennes itself offered no worthwhile objective, the Germans must be after some strategic gain. “I think you had better send Middleton some help,” he told Bradley. Studying the operations map with Strong, Eisenhower noticed that the 7th Armored Division was out of the line, in First Army sector, and that the 10th Armored Division, a part of Third Army, was currently uncommitted. He told Bradley to send the two divisions to Middleton, in the Ardennes. Bradley hesitated; he knew that both Hodges and Patton would be upset at losing the divisions, Patton especially, as the 10th Armored was one of his favorites. With a touch of impatience, Eisenhower overruled Bradley.  In the morning, the news Strong brought, based on identification of German divisions in the Ardennes and on captured documents, was about as bad as it could have been. Eisenhower’s rapid and intuitive judgment had been right-the Germans were engaged in a counteroffensive, not just a counterattack. Two German panzer armies of twenty-four divisions had struck Middleton’s corps of three divisions. The Germans had managed to achieve both complete surprise and overwhelming local superiority, an eight-to-one advantage in infantrymen and a four-to-one advantage in tanks.

Eisenhower accepted the blame for the surprise, and he was right to do so, as he had failed to read correctly the mind of the enemy. Eisenhower failed to see that Hitler would take desperate chances, and Eisenhower was the man responsible for the weakness of Middleton’s line in the Ardennes because he was the one who had insisted on maintaining a general offensive.  But despite his mistakes, Eisenhower was the first to grasp the full import of the offensive, the first to be able to readjust his thinking, the first to realize that, although the surprise and the initial Allied losses were painful, in fact Hitler had given the Allies a great opportunity. On the morning of December 17, Eisenhower showed that he saw the opportunity immediately, when he wrote the War Department that “if things go well we should not only stop the thrust but should be able to profit from it.”

After dictating that letter Eisenhower held a conference with Smith, Gen. J. F.  M. Whiteley, and Strong. SHAEF now had only two divisions in reserve, the 82nd and 101st Airborne, which were refitting from the battles around Arnhem. The SHAEF generals anticipated that the Germans would attempt to cross the Meuse River, thus splitting 21st and 12th Army Groups, and take the huge Allied supply dumps at Liege. The dumps were crucial to the Germans, as they contained the fuel Hitler counted on to sustain a drive to Antwerp.  Whiteley put his finger on the small Belgian town of Bastogne and declared that the crossroads there was the key to the battle. Bastogne was surrounded by rolling countryside, unusually gentle in the rough Ardennes country, and had an excellent road network. Without it the Germans would not be able to cross the Ardennes to the Meuse. Eisenhower decided to concentrate his reserves at Bastogne. He ordered a combat command of the 10th Airborne to proceed immediately to the town, and told the 101st to get there as soon as possible. He also sent the 82nd Airborne to the northern edge of the penetration, where it could lead a counterattack against the German right flank. Finally the Supreme Commander ordered the cessation of all offensives by the AEF “and the gathering up of every possible reserve to strike the penetration on both flanks.” The following morning, December 18, Ike called Smith, Bradley, and Patton to a conference. The generals met in a cold, damp squad room in a Verdun barracks, on the site of the greatest battle ever fought. There was only one lone potbellied stove to ease the bitter cold. Eisenhower’s subordinates entered the room glum, depressed, embarrassed. Noting this, he opened by saying, “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.” Patton quickly picked up on the theme. “Hell, let’s have the guts to let the --- --- --- go all the way to Paris,” he said. “Then we’ll really cut ‘em off and chew ‘em up.” Eisenhower said he was notthat optimistic: the line of the Meuse had to be held.  But he was not thinking defensively. He informed his commanders that he was not going to let the Germans get away with emerging from the West Wall without punishing them. He asked Patton how long it would take him to change the direction of his offensive, from east to north, to counterattack the Germans’ left, or southern, flank.