Grunts (21 page)

A few blocks to the west, Daniel’s battalion was also methodically fighting block by block in the medieval heart of the city, employing a similar blend of combined arms. The fighting ebbed through several venerable cathedrals in the city center. German artillery shells were falling in disquieting numbers. Many of them hit the ruined facades of tall buildings “with the result that the precarious walls collapsed” on anyone underneath, in the recollection of one soldier. Like his colleague Corley, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel made extensive use of his 155-millimeter self-propelled gun. At one point, he set it up at a crossroads, with perfect fields of fire, and watched as the crew disgorged shell after shell at German machine-gun crews in the ruined State Theater. The machine guns soon posed no further threat to the infantry.

As the foot soldiers advanced, they hugged close to accompanying tanks and tank destroyers. Both groups shot at anything that looked suspicious. “To discourage antitank crews or any enemy group, the infantry would toss assault grenades into each building whether they were fired on from that structure or not,” an infantryman wrote. “In case the grenades did not secure the desired effect a vehicle would then pump a few rounds into the building. This usually brought a few Germans streaming from the building but, since the cellars of all the buildings were connected, the enemy often withdrew to the next structure; thus making it necessary to repeat this performance on each building.” Sometimes the infantry soldiers spotted Panzerfaust-wielding German soldiers in windows. Riflemen peppered the windows, as did accompanying machine gunners. The tank crewmen, thus alerted to the danger, pumped their own rounds into the windows. Few of the enemy soldiers survived such onslaughts. When the infantry wanted to avoid moving on the open streets, they attacked through the back alleys. In many cases, bazooka men shot holes through walls, allowing infantry squads to outflank the Germans.

The bitterest fighting occurred in a technical school and in several surrounding houses, where young German soldiers were determined to make a final stand against an assault by F Company. “Machine gun, rifle and mortar fire hindered our advance,” the company history recorded. “Several houses were bitterly contested room by room.” This meant close-in fighting—hurling grenades, shooting people at point-blank range, sometimes even fighting to the death with fists or bayonets. It was the worst kind of traumatic, stressful, exhausting combat. “Driving hard against the outpost buildings before the school,” one of the soldiers later wrote, “four squads worked from roof to roof clearing the machine gun nests which were sited to cross fire upon the approaches to the school.”

Five horrendous hours of fighting ensued. It was an infantryman’s fight all the way—personal, physically exhausting, and soul-stealing. For the most part, the soldiers of F Company had to fight room by room, against enemy soldiers who generally preferred to die rather than surrender. The tankers lent what fire support they could, but the closeness of the fighting often forced them to hold their fire. For the infantry, the killing took place at intimate range, in rooms, foyers, and basements. They watched their enemies die at close range. They watched them hurt. They heard them scream. They also watched their own friends get hit and go down, sometimes in silent, lifeless heaps, but usually with painful, surprised cries and bloody wounds. Corridors echoed with beseeching cries for medics. The reports of grenades, submachine guns, and rifles in such confining spaces assaulted the eardrums of everyone involved. No one who participated was unaffected. In short, it was awful in the extreme.
¹¹

Fortunately, the Germans were just about finished. With the fall of the technical school on October 20, along with much of the city center, and 3rd Battalion’s seizure of the high ground in northern Aachen, Colonel Wilck’s survivors could not hold out much longer. With the Americans in control of most of the city, German holdouts were scattered around, hanging on, but out of communication with higher headquarters (senior officers called these holdouts pockets of resistance).

Wilck, his staff, and many of his remaining soldiers were clustered inside a three-story-high, reinforced concrete air raid bunker that was straight in the path of Corley’s relentless advance. Bunkers like this served as shelter, not just for German troops but also civilians. The Americans had already cleared several in Aachen. Mindful of Hitler’s order to fight to the finish, Wilck sent his superiors several defiant messages, including one that reported that “the last defenders of Aachen are embroiled in their final battle!” Privately he was not as resolute. He knew the end was near, but he was concerned that if his garrison did not appear to be fighting to the end, Hitler would exact reprisals on the families of his soldiers.

On the morning of October 21, Corley’s lead troops, augmented with the 155-millimeter gun, prepared to assault Wilck’s bunker. The 155 crew fired several shots, battering the concrete, ripping big holes, but not otherwise penetrating inside. For Wilck, this was the final straw. He knew he had to surrender. He tried to send two of his men outside under a white flag, but in the fog of battle the Americans shot them down. So Wilck enlisted the help of two American prisoners, Staff Sergeant Ewart Padgett and Sergeant James Haswell. Both of these men were combat engineers who had been captured in Aachen a few days earlier.

Sergeant Haswell took the white flag and ran into the street, waving it vigorously. “There was a great deal of small arms fire at first, but I continued to wave the flag until the firing ceased.” An American soldier leaned out the window of a nearby house and motioned Haswell to him. Haswell and Padgett then communicated Wilck’s surrender message up the American chain of command to Lieutenant Colonel Corley’s CP. Corley, Colonel Seitz, and Brigadier General George Taylor were all there. They insisted on an orderly, unconditional surrender. Haswell and Padgett dutifully returned to the bunker and relayed this to the Germans. Wilck and his staff were assembled in the colonel’s room, waiting to surrender. As a sign that he accepted Corley’s terms, Wilck took out his pistol, removed the clip and, in Haswell’s recollection, “threw the clip under the bed, laid the pistol on the table, smiled and left the room.” This was his way of accepting the terms.

A few minutes later, at 1000, Wilck and his men streamed out of the bunker, into captivity. Hundreds of enemy soldiers, a few with their hands on their heads, most with their hands at their sides, shuffled down Aachen’s battered streets, past grubby-looking GIs. One of the American survivors, Private First Class Stewart, watched them walk by. They looked haggard but he and his buddies looked even worse. Stewart noted that he had not had a bath, a shave, a haircut, or a hot meal in thirty-seven days. Later, the Americans led Wilck and his officers to the pockets of resistance, where the colonel persuaded his remaining soldiers to lay down their arms. “The show is over,” a 26th Infantry officer recorded in the unit’s journal that afternoon. The Battle of Aachen was done.

The venerable city was almost completely destroyed. “The city is as dead as a Roman ruin, but unlike a ruin it has none of the grace of gradual decay,” Lieutenant Robert Botsford wrote. “Burst sewers, broken gas mains and dead animals have raised an almost overpowering smell in many parts of the city. The streets are paved with shattered glass; telephone, electric light and trolley cables are dangling and netted together everywhere, and in many places wrecked cars, trucks, armored vehicles and guns litter the streets. Most of the streets of Aachen are impassable, except on foot. Piles of debris have been shored up along the gutters without much method.”

This was the field of ruins that two battalions of infantry, augmented by armor, artillery, and engineers, had had to master. “Though the German garrison had fought courageously and skillfully, it had been beaten by a combined American force of half its size,” one of the American officers recorded in the regimental records. Aachen demonstrated the potency of well-led combined-arms teams, as well as the remarkable versatility of infantry and the ability of ground soldiers to adapt to a confined urban environment. By all rights, two understrength battalions of infantry soldiers should not have been able to take a sizable city against a force more than twice their number. They did it through the manipulation and prodigious use of firepower, the aggressive zeal of riflemen, and the adept planning of commanders.

But they also had other advantages. Aachen was isolated for part of the battle, negating the enemy’s ability to reinforce his garrison. More important, the fighting took place within a political vacuum. The American soldiers who fought there did not have to worry about any political consequences of their actions. Concern for civilians notwithstanding, the GIs were able to concentrate exclusively on the tactical challenge of taking the next building or the next block. They could destroy everything, and everyone, with impunity, as long as it enhanced the mission of seizing Aachen. No one cared if they did this with particular zeal, or even a lust for destruction—hence, “knock ’em all down.” The media they dealt with were entirely friendly and supportive (Tregaskis even lived with the soldiers and told their life stories in his piece). World opinion had no impact on the battle. To the Americans, Aachen was just one more place to carry the fight to Nazi Germany, another piece in the strategic puzzle of victory. The city’s annihilation held no significance to them whatsoever, nor to the overall strategic balance of world opinion. It was the classic example of a politically unrestrained urban battleground, one of the last such politically benign city battlefields in which Americans would ever fight.
¹²

CHAPTER 4

Scenes from the Northern Shoulder of the Bulge: Men Against Tanks and Everything Else

Winter and Discontent

NO ONE COULD DECIDE WHICH hurt more, the cold or the inertia. In December 1944, the western Allies were stalemated along the western frontiers of Nazi Germany. A fearsome winter had set in, blanketing much of the front with snow and ice, compounding the misery of frontline existence for American infantry soldiers. Most lived in crude, slushy holes or dugouts. If they were lucky, their holes had some overhead cover afforded by logs or scrap metal. A few soldiers enjoyed the partial shelter of ruined houses or barns. Foot gear was inadequate. Winter clothing was improvised from a mishmash of long underwear, sweaters, fatigue jackets, and wool gloves. Temperatures ranged from the teens to the twenties. Trench foot, frozen feet, and frostbite were distressingly common. Men went weeks without showers, haircuts, hot food, shelter, or any semblance of warmth beyond what a handful of pine needles set afire in an empty ration can offered.

What’s more, they were sitting in place, defending fixed positions, instead of attacking, gaining ground, and hastening the end of the war. The combination of winter weather, supply problems, and stiffening German resistance had ground the previously inexorable Allied advance to a halt. So now they were defending. The average infantryman might have welcomed a respite from the dangerous routine of attacking, but each of them knew in his heart that only such a relentless advance would conquer Germany and end the war. Because of this, the wintry inertia was disquieting for the American soldiers. Nazi Germany was on the verge of defeat, but the maniacal Adolf Hitler was not prepared to admit any such thing (proving the wise axiom coined by a later generation of American soldiers that “the enemy gets a vote”).

Hitler decided to scrape together his last reserves, including his best armor and his most committed SS troopers, for a major winter offensive against a thinly held section of the American lines in the rough Ardennes Forest. In all, he had three entire armies, including more than eight armored divisions. His ambitious long-shot goal was to attack under a winter canopy that would negate Allied air superiority, gash a huge hole in the American front, drive a wedge between the British and American armies, destroy the fragile Allied coalition, and then negotiate a skin-saving end to the war. His main fist for this surprise sucker punch was the 6th SS Panzer Army under General Joseph “Sepp” Dietrich, an old Nazi party crony. Dietrich’s army included four SS armored divisions. Led by these powerful units, he was to hit the northern shoulder of the American line in the Ardennes, knife into Belgium, and dash all the way to the vital supply port of Antwerp. A major portion of his attack was to hit the sparsely defended front of the U.S. Army’s brand-new 99th Infantry Division.

The 99th had just arrived in November and had been holding defensive positions in the quiet northern Ardennes for about a month. The division was spread thin over a horseshoe-shaped nineteen-mile front of rugged terrain from Lanzerath in the southwest to Hofen in the northeast. This was twice as much ground as most American generals thought a division should defend, but with combat manpower at a premium in late 1944, this was the unhappy reality. Major General Walter Lauer, the division commander, had all three of his infantry regiments on the line. The 395th held his left (eastern) flank, which was anchored at Hofen. In the middle, east of the twin villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath, the 393rd was sprinkled among forest positions, facing east toward Germany. On Lauer’s right (western) flank, the 394th Infantry Regiment defended the vital Losheimergraben crossroads, amid dense rolling woodlands.

In the U.S. Army, most infantry units have a distinctive culture that stems from tradition, the unit’s leadership, and the men who populate the outfit. The soldiers of the 99th called themselves “the Battle Babies.” The division was composed of an interesting mixture of men. The youngest soldiers were academically bright, college-experienced men who had once been part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). The ASTP had offered them the chance to go to college, on the Army’s dime, while they trained for future leadership or technical positions outside the world of combat infantry. However, the voracious combat needs of the fighting fronts had necessitated the program’s cancellation in early 1944. As a result, many of these teenaged ex-ASTPers ended up in the 99th (and several other similar divisions), mixing with less educated men, generally in their early to mid-twenties, who had more experience in the Army. Forging a common identity as Battle Babies, they trained to a fever pitch back in the States.