Aachen: The U.S. Army's Battle for Charlemagne's City in World War II (25 page)

General Corlett found it necessary, but risky, on 3 October to commit a combat command in a confined bridgehead where an infantry regiment was still struggling to gain enough room for its own operations. However, as the official U.S. Army historian explained, “Corlett was less concerned about likely confusion than about losing the little Wurm River bridgehead altogether. He wanted the weight of the armor on hand before the Germans could mount a sizeable counterattack.”
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CCB's debut on the Siegfried Line began just before noon. The 1st Battalion of the 41st Armored Infantry Regiment, Major Jenista commanding, moved from its assembly area, where its tanks and half-track personnel carriers coiled to await the crossing of the Wurm by Lieutenant Colonel Wynne's 2nd Battalion of the 67th Armored Regiment. Wynne began moving his tanks over the bridge at 1300, but artillery fire was falling constantly at the time. Each vehicle, as it crossed, also came under fire from an enemy antitank gun located in a pillbox on higher ground to the northeast of the bridge. As observers recalled, “The gun, evidently unable to depress sufficiently to hit the bridge, still put direct fire on the vehicles.”
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It was about one mile from the bridge to the western fringes of Ubach, and after Lieutenant Colonel Wynne's armor crossed the railroad tracks, he chose to use a more southerly approach route where the artillery and antitank fire were less intense. Buildings lining both sides of this roadway also afforded more protection for his men and vehicles; both were slowed up. Finally, at 1455 hours Wynne's tanks were on the western edges of Ubach. Ten minutes later, however, a clearly frustrated Colonel Johnson was overheard by his staff saying to a division liaison, “What is Powerhouse supposed to be doing? They're messing around a little bit, but mainly sitting there. Somebody has got to move Powerhouse.”
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Johnson learned a short time later that Lieutenant Colonel McDowell had made contact with Wynne and that “they had cooked up a plan; the armored people will be behind him.” A frustrated Colonel Johnson added at this time, “It doesn't look like a breakthrough to me.”

Johnson was correct. Another account shed additional light on the situation and offered this perspective:

Units became entangled amid the heavy column of artillery fire delivered on the town by the enemy. Roads and streets were congested with vehicles, and the tempers of commanders ran high. Only after careful coordination between the 3rd Battalion commander and the Armored Task Force commander was the situation disentangled.
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There could have been even greater confusion that afternoon. The original plan had called for the armored infantry to clean out the northern and western ends of Ubach. However, by late afternoon just two Company A medium tanks, with eight infantrymen riding on each one, had pushed across the Palenberg bridge. Given the congestion in Ubach, further movement was stopped by the 41st Armored Infantry's commanding officer, Col. Sidney R. Hinds, at 1630 hours. Hinds, who had been in command since the 41st came overseas in 1942, was without question not a happy man. His regiment's motto was, “We stand up straight, we shoot straight, we drive straight, and attempt to live straight.” He wanted to get in the fight.

Instead the tanks simply moved off the road and outposted for the night. At 1800, Capt. Henry H. Hastings's Company B was ordered to secure the bridge. His platoons moved across on foot, one at a time, then infiltrated by squads into defensive positions. Company A, commanded by Lt. Russell A. Law, came across next and moved up to make contact with Captain Hoppe's Company E of the 117th Infantry east of the railroad line; Law's men then secured the area westward back to the river. By this time Lieutenant Colonel Wynne's tanks had reached the center of Ubach, where under some presumable truce with the infantry they halted for the night. Even the engineers attached to the assault teams were unable to cross the Wurm until the following morning.
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The lack of maneuverable roadway space also impacted the 3rd Battalion's overall mission on 3 October. “We continued to push forward, attempting to flank the resistance we encountered,” Lieutenant Colonel McDowell explained later. “But due to the congestion of the route being
taken through Ubach because of the presence of tanks from the 2nd Armored Division, [Colonel Johnson] ordered us at 1840 to button up for the night 500 yards short of our objective. The eastern half of Ubach was still in enemy hands.”
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Companies K and L were nevertheless astride the upper of the two main roads that ran through Ubach, well north and west of the once busy business district. “The Jerries had bolted everything up, and because many of the houses were barred it was hard to take cover from their artillery,” noted Spencer, West Virginia, native Lt. Charles O. Hardman, commander of Company L's 1st Platoon.
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Lieutenant Thompson's Company I had by this time tied into the tail of the 3rd Battalion positions, establishing its defenses around a busted-up schoolhouse and what was left of a church. “We had originally planned to use the tall Ubach church on the western end of town as an OP,” remembered Thompson. “But the Germans shelled it heavily and lopped off the steeple and riddled the church.”
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Lieutenant Colonel Frankland's 1st Battalion of the 117th Infantry Regiment spent 3 October improving their defensive positions around the pillbox line on the crossroads south of Palenberg while McDowell's 3rd Battalion passed to their left toward Ubach. Enemy artillery came in throughout the day; the hardest hit was Captain Kent's Company A. “With friendly and enemy fire whistling over their heads, and while they were subjected to constant shelling, the company devised a bucket brigade system on water and rations,” an account of the day's actions noted in explaining how the company coped under the strain.
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“Men had to stay in their foxholes, so empty canteens were tossed from foxhole to foxhole until they reached the ‘rear,’ and then they went forward again with boxes of ‘K’ rations in the same way.”

Major Ammons's 2nd Battalion had also continued its attack, with the mission of securing the high ground just to the north of Palenberg that morning. It proved to be a difficult day for these men. “The ridge securing this high ground was very steep and in some places vertical,” a report noted.
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The only approach to the area was through a large draw to the northwest of the high slag piles by the factory district and the Germans held this draw with a strong force covered by pillboxes. Company F was stopped without advancing. Company G fared a bit better; these men
were able to clean out the rest of the factory area, in the process capturing a number of enemy positions and a large amount of their equipment and guns. Ammons was released from the mission of taking the high ground later in the day. It was also fortunate that the mortars of Company H had displaced into Palenberg to support his positions in the afternoon, for the first German counterattacks hit early the following morning.

Two counterattacks were made by approximately 240 enemy soldiers of the 219th Engineer Battalion; most of these Germans were attached to
Leutnant
Gutsche's 13Co and
Leutnant
Huber's 1Co. Their mission was to blow up the Marienberg-Palenberg bridge, so they first came through the draw toward Ammons's forces starting at 0700 on 4 October; they were not infantry soldiers, but engineers who had been told to fight to the end with no possible retreat. By early afternoon these attacks were repulsed, in large part because of effective friendly artillery fire placed directly in the draw by the 118th FA. Company F bore the brunt of this attack; the 2nd Platoon played a key role in stopping the enemy forces. Hand-to-hand combat prevailed; because the fighting was so close the platoon leader had to call for Company H's mortar fire on his own positions. American casualties were moderate; the number of Germans killed or wounded was unknown.

The larger German efforts hit Lieutenant Colonel McDowell's 3rd Battalion in crowded Ubach and Colonel Sutherland's 119th Infantry Regiment positions among the tangled debris and pillboxes in the woods south of Rimburg. The counterattacks in Ubach came in three distinct phases. The first two were delivered by elements of the 49th Division's 148th Infantry Regiment. The final counterattack was made by companies of the 1st Battalion, 352nd Regiment of the 246th Division, which had arrived from Aachen.

At about 0400 on 4 October, Staff Sgt. Tolliver Curry of Company L's weapons platoon stuck his head outside the doorway of a house on the northernmost road running through Ubach and saw two Mark IV tanks. One tank pulled up close to the house and its aerial was suddenly sticking into a second-story window while its cannon and machine gun fired westward up the road. When five Germans dismounted and started running into the house, Pfc. Ira Reeder killed two and wounded one other before the other two got away. A private tried to fire a bazooka out
of a second-floor window at the tank, but his weapon jammed and all he could do was throw a rifle grenade at the turret as the Mark IV pulled back. The second tank, accompanied by a larger enemy force, had appeared on the other side of the house, and during this time it was raking the structure with machine-gun fire.

“Bullets splattered liberally through the house, particularly on the first floor but most of our personnel were on the second floor,” remembered Pfc. Reeder. “But while the tank was firing, some of the machinegun section men were getting their share of the Germans. Private Antone Montaya took a good toll of enemy running across the open ground north of the house with his BAR; Technical Sergeant George Morris killed two with his carbine. Another machine gunner in the hall was also helpful in stopping the attack.”
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When dawn broke, the house became an even hotter spot. The Mark IV that had retreated came back and started machine gunning the entire structure this time. Company L's 3rd Platoon, commanded by Lt. Joseph Elinski, was pushed back across the street from the house. Enemy troops that had emerged out of the gloomy rain from a barracks area just to the east of Ubach hit right into the boundary between the men and Captain Culp's Company K. Staff Sgt. Roy Bettes remembered being rudely interrupted by machine-gun fire while eating his breakfast ration. While a BAR team supplied support, Bettes got even by retrieving his M1 and picking off two of the enemy gunners.

Culp estimated that this counterattacking force eventually consisted of seventy-five to one hundred men with six to eight Mark IV's. “Our lines were 50 yards or less apart,” he recalled. “There was confusion at times about where the lines were, for enemy and friendly troops were holding alternate houses.”
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The enemy riflemen advanced on one occasion with white flags and then, apparently at a pre-arranged signal and spot, suddenly bent over and picked up rifles on the ground and started yelling and firing only 25 yards away from the Company K outposts.

Captain Culp's 2nd Platoon had a particularly difficult time after Lt. Orrin Cooley's 3rd Platoon was cut off. The 2nd Platoon commander and one of his sergeants worked their way back for reinforcements, and
then in the face of heavy enemy tank and small-arms fire, Staff Sgt. Henry F. Brand, the ranking noncom, successfully withdrew most of the men. But when others were captured, the Germans regrouped and the house sheltering the weapons platoon soldiers became totally isolated. Other Germans also occupied the next house westward by this time; they were adding their own fire as the tanks continued to blast away with their machine guns and tubes. Then between 0830 and 0900, seven more Mark IVs arrived and tried to cut around the north side of the road and encircle all of Company L.

By probing through the enemy positions until he found a suitable OP to direct friendly artillery fire, Lt. Robert C. Burke, forward observer for Battery C of the 118th Field Artillery Battalion, saved Company L from certain massacre. He had learned that the forward observer at another post had become a casualty. Without hesitation and in the face of certain danger, Burke left his first position and moved through a street subjected to extremely heavy enemy fire, including direct machine-gun fire from a German tank. Arriving at the observation post where his fellow observer had been wounded, he discovered that Germans now occupied it. Running the gauntlet through more raining shells, he carefully darted farther up the street and selected an observation post on the third floor of another building; from here he directed the friendly artillery fire that started turning the hostile attack on Company L into a decisive German defeat. One round of 105mm fire hit square on the turret of an attacking Mark IV, causing wider disruption because at the same time tanks of Major Wynne's 2nd Battalion of the 67th Armored Regiment were rolling along the open ground just to the north of Ubach; a few American tanks actually reentered the town to help out. “The work of the 2nd Armored in coming into position, plus the artillery fire, caused the Germans to withdraw,” a later account noted. “The cut-off section of the weapons platoon held out, although isolated.”
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The Americans barely had time to get organized before the third German counterattack came in from the south edge of Ubach at about 1500. This time Company K's final protective line was quickly breached by several Mark IVs, cutting off twenty men in Lieutenant Cooley's 3rd Platoon from the rest of Culp's company. Only two soldiers from the platoon managed to make it back, but when the company attacked to
regain the line seven others who had been held captive in a cellar were freed. The Company L men were not hit as hard during this strike; the cut-off weapons platoon was actually able to break out of the house in which they were trapped and make their way back to the CP. Both companies, however, were down to fewer than a hundred men each.

Lieutenant Thompson suffered a different fate in his Company I's weapons platoon. As German shelling increased through the afternoon, a half dozen rounds dropped in the middle of these men as they were moving up from the schoolhouse on the western fringes of Ubach to support the rest of the 3rd Battalion companies. One squad was wiped out and shell fragments wounded another ten men. The weapons platoon leader, Lt. Shelton S. Turner of Delta County, Texas, was killed.