Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (42 page)

Virtually no Allied Commander anticipated a possibility that Germany’s Wehrmacht had enough strength to initiate an offensive action. On December 16, 1944 however, Hitler launched his Ardennes Offensive and caught the Allied commanding officers by complete surprise. The two U.S. Airborne divisions flown in on DDay and abused during Market Garden were now dropped in St. Vith and Bastogne to hold these strategic crossroads at all costs. So began the “Battle of the Bulge.” Ten days later, the Allieds regained the upper hand and the enemy offensive was halted although German troops remained in the area and were not fully removed until February, 1945. The cost of that battle was the highest paid by the Allieds thus far with more than 80,000 American and British listed as casualties. It cost the Germans about 100,000 men but still the march towards Germany went on from both the Allieds in the west and the Russians in the east. By February, the Red Army was 160 miles from Berlin while the Allieds still had no bridgehead over the Rhine and still had not effectively breached the Siegfried Line.

Since the fight in Belgium did not gain us anything except more casualties and we still hadn’t captured the ports of Antwerp, the remainder of the early fall is being focused on supply lines and how to get them going again. We’re not across the Rhine and we’ve run out of gas. We continue to make progress towards Germany but need the port to deliver critical fuel for our tanks and vehicles. But even without Antwerp, we’re driving with what we have. Monty was ordered again to take Antwerp while the Americans are concentrating further south. Ike’s plan is to push to the Roer River and then to the Rhine at Cologne. General Hodges’ First Army took the center with Aachen on his left and the Hürtgen Forest on his right. General Collins decided to go around Aachen into the Hürtgen Forest to cut off the defenders and reach the Roer River that way. As we fight to capture what will probably be the first German town to fall to the Americans, it was ordered that we clean out the Hürtgen Forest of any and all Krauts who could lend assistance against our fight for Aachen and the Ruhr Valley. If successful, we just might penetrate the front line and maybe we can capture a few thousand Jerries while we’re at it. Our objective is to clear the Hürtgen and seize the city of Monschau. The battle started in mid September and continues still.

The Hürtgen Forest is 50 square miles and borders the Ardennes Forest. The Hürtgen at this time of the year is eerie with huge, tall trees, deep ravines and then imposing, high ridges. The maps we poured over showed small interspersed pathways but nothing sufficient for tank movement. We sent in troops but got reports that only small patrols could go out as there was simply no room for large fortified patrols. From what we were told, the Jerries were entrenched and very well hidden which took an awful toll on our men. If we thought that what Bradley went through in the Cotentin Peninsula was bad, we were appalled at what he is going through here. Just as in the bocage, there is no room to do anything but move ahead while a hidden enemy strikes. After two months of fighting in the Hürtgen, our losses are mounting quickly. Just so far it looks like we’ve lost over 25,000 men either killed, captured or taken prisoner. It makes me want to puke. Surrender of entire companies has been reported as retreat is impossible but on October 21, 1944, Aachen fell and that made this battle a little bit easier to swallow. Then Bitburg fell. We were in Germany but we weren’t there in numbers large enough to finish this goddamn war yet. So the fighting in the Hürtgenwald, as the Krauts call it, continued.

Besides having to go out in small patrols, there was another new and deadly development in this battle and that was that the goddamn Krauts booby trapped everything, including trees and even dead Americans. Those sons of bitches used mines and trip wires to cause as much mayhem as they could and our guys were helpless to find and destroy the bastards. No air cover could get in and no tanks could support the ground troops. This doesn’t look like it’s going to end well anytime soon and our casualties are mounting by the minute. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if victory here is even possible. Just between November 7
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and December 3
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, the 4
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Infantry division has lost 7,000 men. I know Harold is in there somewhere and I can’t stand it. I’ve heard that whole companies have been annihilated. The guys have no shelter, no hot food, freezing cold weather and near constant snow or rain coming down on them while fighting a series of spooky, chilling battles. We tried putting in new commanders but nothing changed. We tried altering tactics and even moved the objectives but nothing helped. Our men are sitting ducks out there and as we ran out of idea after idea, it was finally decided that the 2
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Ranger Battalion should be called in to give this impossible mission a go.

The Rangers who were exceptional at Pointe du Hoc on DDay were called in again. Their objective this time was the hill at the eastern edge of the Hürtgen Forest. They wasted no time, went in and caught the goddamn Krauts with their pants down. After hand to hand combat, those Rangers took that goddamn hill and held it for a whole day until relieved. They sustained almost 100% casualties of some sort, either killed, wounded or taken prisoner. We had that all important hill now in our hands, but we didn’t hold it for long. The goddamn Kraut bastards retook the hill and hold it still. But as they are holding the hill, we are moving towards the Roer and reports are coming in that we expect to be at the west bank of the Roer River any time now. But still the fighting is going on in that goddamn forest and I haven’t heard from Harold.

The only good news we’ve received lately is that Antwerp’s port is now in our hands. It took a while to sweep the river and the port for mines, so it wasn’t until November 26
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that we could finally start using the river to bring in supplies. Now that Monty finally took the port instead of just the city, we’re using it to its full potential and I saw that by the middle of December, something like 20,000 tons of supplies were being unloaded at Antwerp each day. This will relieve our fuel shortages which will give us new mobility to push on and so Ike’s current plan for winning the war is to have the three army groups under General Patton in the south, Brad in the middle and
Field Marshal
Montgomery in the north all head to the German border. Those generals (and one Field Marshal) were to drive their way to the Rhine, get some bridgeheads over it and then move like hell to cross into Germany to get the war won.

Since France and the Low Countries are pretty much cleared of virtually all remaining Krauts, it was time for us to move SHAEF headquarters from Granville, France closer to Paris. After seeing how remote and unavailable our headquarters in Granville near Avranches was during Market Garden, we moved again, this time to Versailles. We experienced too many communication difficulties with that Granville location. I’m not blaming our inaccessibility on the disaster that resulted from Market Garden, but it sure didn’t help that we were so far removed from the deteriorating situation in Holland. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if we had had full and instant communications during that debacle. And another thing, this move brings us closer to the German border which we have to cross in order to bring that goddamn Hitler to his knees.

After probably the most brutal fighting of the war so far, it’s just been reported that we’re pretty much out of the Hürtgen Forest (finally!) and are at the Roer River with its dams. After all that the guys who survived the Hürtgen Forest went through, each one of them should have been given passes to Tahiti or Cuba. The best we could do for them, though, was to send them to the Ardennes Forest for the rest and recuperation they so desperately needed. It’s expected to be hot up north and to the south but the Ardennes should be nice and quiet enough, especially now that winter has arrived. Brad is also putting the new kids coming in as replacements in with General Hodges’ First Army guys who are just plain worn out and exhausted. Who better to teach them survival tactics than these heroes? They got to keep an eye on things and keep moving east, of course, but rumor has it it’s so quiet over there, you can hear a fly piss on a cotton ball.

Well, the minute I’m saying that all is quiet on the western front, we start to get reports that there’s a big Jerry movement afoot. We didn’t get any Ultra decrypts about this beforehand because there was nothing that was picked up. Still, we do have our ear to the ground and the first reports started coming in on the morning of December 16
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when our outposts relayed signs of enemy troop movements. It’s been too overcast and snowy for us to fly reconnaissance runs along the border so we’ve been in the dark for the last week or so but overall it seemed to be pretty quiet. When the first reports of increased Jerry tank movements started coming in, we were pretty much convinced the Krauts were running their own version of Operation Fortitude, just trying to make us believe something was up so we would divert troops leaving a hole where they intended to concentrate some offensive or something. One commander thought they even went so far as to play phonograph records of tank sounds to bolster their subterfuge. Really. How dumb did they think we were? Who would launch any attack in a forest where tanks can’t maneuver in the winter with crappy weather which would preclude any air support on short winter days?

We all thought the Boche bastards were dead on the vine but apparently they’ve been able to scrape up some tanks and troops because we’re getting more and more reports that the Krauts actually are moving west into the Ardennes Forest. Good luck with their tanks in there! What we’ve been able to pick up so far leads us to assume that the movement we’re seeing is defensive because the only one or two radio transmissions we heard referred to an operation: Watch on the Rhine. If what we’re hearing about the reported sightings of Panzer and infantry divisions is correct though, that means they’re moving whole divisions out there. That sure makes us think they’re doing more than just Watching the Rhine. Maybe we’ve missed some other transmits about some kind of offensive action and if we did, we may be in serious trouble because as part of Ike’s “Broad Front” strategy, some sectors are stretched kind of thin including the Ardennes Forest where Brad has just one tank and three infantry divisions covering a line about 100 miles long. We’ve got just over 80,000 exhausted or brand new troops around the Ardennes Forest covering this very long front. And if the Krauts are moving in whole divisions, that means there’s a hell of a lot more of them than there is of us out there. What a goddamn pity we didn’t know that these bastards were moving. We could have wiped them all out before they had time to set up shop.

Ultra decodes were now starting to come in fast and furious so we knew who was involved and what they were supposed to be accomplishing. Why we didn’t get this info earlier, I don’t know unless some Kraut muckety muck ordered radio silence for some reason. Well, once they called that order off, we were reading their plans just as soon as they were made. The Krauts kept moving closer and closer to the Meuse River and we knew that taking Antwerp away from us by crossing the Meuse was apparently the number one item on the Kraut agenda. So one of the first things we did was to have Monty block any access the Krauts had to Antwerp and get those bridges over the Meuse secured. Keeping a steady supply of fuel and supplies coming in was pretty goddamn high on our list of priorities so this was going to be a real battle if they were seriously thinking they could get Antwerp away from us. If we lost that port after all we had been through to gain it, it’d be us who would be dead on the vine.

Knowing the Krauts were up to nothing good, Ike had to coordinate battle plans and troop movements. On December 19
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, he finally came to the conclusion that he’d have to put Monty in charge of the Northern sector where the Krauts were massing. This meant taking Brad off and keeping the First U.S. and Ninth U.S. Armies where they were but putting them under Monty’s command. Brad was put in charge of all troops to the south but that did nothing to console him. I have never seen Brad so distraught but Ike kept telling him it was just because our communications lines had all been destroyed and Monty was up in the area of the attack already. Monty, of course, used this appointment to create the image that he was once again being called in to save a situation which, if he had been listened to, would never have occurred in the first place. It was heartbreaking for all of us to have Monty put in charge of anything anymore and I guarantee you, no matter what happens it will either be because Monty took control or it won’t be Monty’s fault. You don’t need me to tell you which scenario will yield which result.

The Krauts were pushing hard here and we heard that they were less than 35 or 40 miles away from the Meuse River so Monty used the Americans to hold them off. Since Monty’s first goal was to protect Antwerp, the roads leading to it were the key. General McAuliffe was the commander at Bastogne in the southern area of the German attack because General Taylor had gone stateside. General Bruce Clark, under command of General Courtney Hodges, was the commander at St. Vith. Both of these towns were critical because of their locations at major road intersections in the middle of the Ardennes line. The Germans were steadily advancing and days of heavy, brutal fighting continued. Ike ordered Monty to take care of what we found out was General Dietrich’s 6
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SS Panzer Army on the north and Patton to take care of the Jerry flank further south.

As the fighting went on, the Krauts gained more ground, destroyed more trucks, tanks and men and took even more prisoners. General Hodges had been forced to abandon his headquarters at Spa and Montgomery began moving four of Hodges’ divisions southwards where the enemy was approaching Bastogne. By the next morning, Bastogne, with its six crossroads, appeared to be severely threatened. We couldn’t let the goddamn Krauts take this town because if they controlled these roads, they could resupply and bring up reinforcements in their drive towards Antwerp. So we landed the 101
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paratroopers into Bastogne and from what I’ve been hearing, they are doing their usual hell of a job at keeping the situation contained. Plus, it stands to reason that the more we keep these bastards tied down, the less of them there are to get to Antwerp and the quicker we can bring in reinforcements. Then we can knock the shit out of them once and for all.