We lay there courting sleep until the first faint light of day showed above the trees and the word to assemble passed like a dirty thing among us. Down in the woods where we lay, the dark was still almost as impenetrable as ever, but we stirred our rusty joints, picked up our meager belongings, and headed in the direction our instincts told us was the road we had left the night before.
As we moved to assemble, we became aware of the presence of a big tank only some ten feet from where we had spent the night. We had not seen it before. It might have been one of ours, maybe a dead one, or perhaps it was German. We would never know, though we figured if it was German it would have fired at us.
Counting noses as we hit the road, I found that my platoon was ready to obey when the signal came to move forward. Though the darkness would not be fully dissipated for an hour, the marching was considerably easier, for even a little light eliminated the awful problem of keeping physical contact and we could make out most of the obstacles in the road and avoid them.
The trail led down between a pair of giant concrete pillboxes which had been blasted into big heaps of jagged rubble. The incredible thickness of the concrete awed us as we passed. Battalion had taken over one of the blasted structures as a head-quarters and aid station, and additional ammunition for our mortars and machine guns was waiting for us just outside. I picked up a carton of mortar shells, slung it over my shoulder, and then hoisted two boxes of machine gun belts with my free hand. Despite this added load, it was easier now to keep pace with the column, for a gray, cheerless light had begun to filter through the trees to dispell a measure of the gloom in the morbid woods.
As visibility increased, we looked about with sobering revelation. The fighting here, on both sides of the road, obviously had been bitter, fierce, and destructive. Once magnificent trees now were twisted and broken; indeed, it was hard to find a single tree which had not been damaged in one way or another. Mutilated limbs torn from the trees spread a rough, grotesque carpet on the floor of the forest. The country was hilly, almost like a roller-coaster, with steep rises projecting in some places close from the edge of the road.
Everywhere we saw discarded equipment—gas masks, ammunition belts, helmet liners, helmets, rifles. Here and there were articles of clothing with great rents and clotted scarlet stains. One man kicked a bloody shoe from his path, and to our revulsion we could see a foot still in it.
Soon the signs of battle turned into sounds—mean, nasty, personal sounds. The noise of Jerry artillery crashing along the narrow valley through which we marched reverberated incessantly against the wooded hills, making it impossible to detect where the shells landed. Nor could we see where the shells hit because of the rises in the ground and the thick matting of the branches of the evergreens. One of the protections an infantryman needs and soon acquires is an ability to distinguish the various sounds of battle and recognize those that mean danger to him, but in the Huertgen Forest we began to realize that the forest usurped this sixth sense. We would grow slow and uncertain in our reactions. Uncertainty means delay, and sometimes the difference of a split second is all that separates life from death.
Despite the emotional conflicts that raged inside us, we continued forward like the soldiers we were, a long, worried column moving to an inevitable rendezvous with destiny. And death.
When we reached a place where the road crossed a timber bridge over a small, muddy stream, Captain McKenna was waiting to give me further instructions.
“Boesch,” he said, “I’m taking the company up that hill ahead to relieve a company of the 12th Infantry. We still jump off at nine o’clock like our orders said. I don’t think your 60’s will do a damned bit of good in an attack in these woods. I want you to stay here and cover this valley. It’s our responsibility, and I figure you can do more good here than you could up on the hill. You’ll have to use your ammunition bearers as riflemen to protect your position—do the best you can.”
As the rifle platoons and my machine gun section moved ahead, I went about the business of getting ready for Jerry should he choose to advance along the line of the stream. There were no positions really suitable for mortars, but eventually I settled for a location near a fork in the road where the road split to follow both banks of the stream. Here we placed the mortars in battery.
The ground around the bridge was a sea of mud at least a foot and a half deep and of a consistency slightly thicker than plain water. Engineers working to make the road passable for vehicles, particularly for tanks, were bringing up truckloads of gravel to fill in around the bridge. Nearby a tank destroyer watched over the proceedings, affording some measure of reassurance against the concern that the enemy might advance down the valley.
After marking out the places for the men to dig in the mortars, I set about the job of picking possible target areas. Hardly had I begun when Lieutenant Ziemke stumbled down the hill, his face ghostly white and contorted with pain. With his right hand he held a bloody left arm. He had been on the hill less than 15 minutes when a German bullet caught him in the left forearm.
“Is it bad?” I asked solicitously.
“Not too bad,” Ziemke replied with a grin, but every movement made him wince and it was obvious he was slipping into a state of shock. “It didn’t touch the bone.”
“Hey, looka guys,” one of my men shouted to the rest of his squad, “the lieutenant’s went and got hisself a million dollar wound!”
Crowding around to have a look, the men made no effort to conceal the envy in their glances or their remarks. A million dollar wound was one that did no permanent damage to bone or structure yet still was serious enough to put a man in the hospital for a while. Hospital was a magic word which meant rest, attention, beds, hot food, and—what was most important— nobody shooting at you.
(Ziemke’s wound did, in fact, prove to be of the million dollar variety, but a few months later, after he had returned to duty, he took a Jerry bullet in the throat and died within a few minutes).
Hardly had Ziemke departed toward the aid station when Captain McKenna came staggering down the road, his messenger helping him to walk. He had suddenly been taken violently ill and was doubled up with stomach cramps. Our amateur diagnosis pronounced it appendicitis, but whatever it was, it was obvious that the Captain needed medical attention immediately. We commandeered an engineer jeep to rush him back to the aid station. It was the last time I was to see Captain McKenna. After several weeks in the hospital, he returned to duty but was killed on Christmas Day.
Nick Von Keller took over the company, and I moved up again to the post of executive officer, though I still maintained control of the mortar section. The changes occurred so rapidly that men of the 12th Infantry whom we were relieving still had not cleared the area.
We dug in our mortars and kept constant watch up the wooded valley for any signs of enemy infiltration. Up on the hill Easy Company joined Fox Company and jumped off in the scheduled attack. They took two pillboxes; that was all. It quickly became apparent that this hastily-mounted attack was stopped cold and would make no further progress through the day. Artillery fire plastered the two companies unmercifully, and a whole rifle platoon of Company F, along with a part of the weapons platoon became lost from the main body and presumably was captured. I was selfishly thankful that Jack was not with them; he had been ordered to stay behind in Luxembourg to orient the men of the 28th who took over our positions.
Throughout the day Jerry’s big guns sought the bridge over the stream, and even though they failed to find it, their errors in aim were small enough so that the area around my mortars was deluged with huge shells. Meanwhile, the big trucks carrying gravel and stone came and went, dumping their loads into a seemingly bottomless morass around the bridge. An almost constant rain added to their problems, and the task began to appear hopeless. In addition, continuous turn in of the trucks in one spot was compounding the problem. Eventually the engineers decided that the trucks should cross the bridge and turn around on the other side of the stream in order to spare the road the grinding effect of the trucks’ backing, twisting, and turning.
The first truck negotiated the bridge with little real difficulty, found relatively solid ground on which to turn, and started back. Easing off the bridge into the slimy mud, the driver prepared to dump his load.
Karooom!
The violent explosion rent the air! Steel fragments flew. Pieces of truck flew. Someone screamed in agony.
We were only about twenty yards away. Diving into our half-finished holes, we waited until the rain of metal ended, then jumped from the holes to help the engineers.
The twisted bulk of the truck had been blown about 15 feet from the spot where the explosion occurred. The front end was demolished. The driver was still behind the wheel, alive but unconscious. We lowered him to the road, onto a stretcher. Six other men who had been close to the truck suffered visibly from concussion.
By the time the last of the engineers had been cared for, darkness was descending, and we slunk back to our holes for the night. It was already too dark to heat our K-rations, and in the freezing, pelting rain we had little desire to eat the food cold. So thoroughly soaked were our overcoats that they were useless for keeping us warm, so we spread them across the top of our holes to help fend off the unfriendly elements. Hardly anyone ever wore an overcoat in the Huertgen Forest. Those that tried had to walk stooped at the waist as if they carried the burden of the world on their backs, so heavy were the coats after soaking up rain and mud.
Everything was cold, wet, clammy. Mud clung tormentingly to our clothes, and even when the rain stopped for a while, which was rare, the soggy mud made sure we stayed cold and uncomfortable. At first I did not have even the protection of over-shoes, but within a few days I was to find a pair that fitted me on a man in a ditch who was beyond caring whether his feet were wet or not. As I removed the overshoes from the dead man I felt no emotion other than selfish satisfaction that at last my feet would be protected.
Through the night we shivered while taking turns at standing guard. Our artillery shells came overhead and crashed on Jerry-land to our front; Jerry’s shells came and crashed around us with a diabolical roar that made us huddle closer to the muddy bottoms of our holes. We were caught in the middle of what seemed a perpetual two-way stream of messages that spelled violent death.
With the first sight of light in the sky, we crawled from the wet holes, stretched our cramped muscles, and looked at the world through bloodshot eyes. It wasn’t much of a world to look at. The rain continued to fall with an irritating monotony, and as a murky light increased, we could see the torn and twisted body of the truck, mute testimony to the violence of the evening before. It was hard to imagine any explosive powerful enough to do so much damage to the truck. We finally decided it could not have been just one mine but several stacked together.
As we discussed the tragedy, a truckload of engineers arrived to tow away the battered vehicle. One of the officers who had been with the engineers the night before recognized me and spoke.
“You haven’t seen one of our men around here, have you? We’re missing one man ever since the explosion last night. I thought he might have stayed with you fellows.”
“Haven’t seen a stranger around at all,” I said.
The wrecker moved in and towed the big wounded vehicle out of the slimy road. When it moved away, I helped the engineer lieutenant search through the muck for equipment. We had found several shovels when my foot hit something soft and yielding. It was the missing man. He either had been crushed to death by the truck or drowned in the oozing mud. We helped carry him up to higher ground and laid him where the trucks could not disturb his peace.
Now that daylight had come again, more trucks began to line up with loads of gravel, and a new squad of engineers arrived to take over the task of filling the hole. The tank destroyer moved ahead of our mortar positions and took up a post where it could sweep the intersection and cover both roads. A new day had started in the Huertgen Forest with a bustle of work, but it looked very much like the same dismal day before.
After checking the mortars thoroughly and conferring with Sergeant Senuta on targets, I moved ahead to the rear command post of the company. In a situation of such close contact with the enemy, it was important for the company to have two CP’s in order to coordinate communications and movement of supplies. Only about 200 yards separated the spot chosen for the rear CP from the front lines, but those 200 yards afforded a slight measure of protection which enabled the men to go about various supply tasks out of sight of the enemy.
The 200 yards from the rear CP to the front led up the side of a steep hill, made almost impassable by fallen trees and brush and the slippery, ubiquitous mud. With some of the men from my mortar section, I formed a carrying party to move rations, water, and ammunition up the hill. Huffing, puffing, bitching bitterly, we followed the telephone lines to guide us. Shells fell frequently not far away, but so thick was the forest that we never actually saw a burst. The noise of the explosions bounced against the sides of the hills and echoed up and down the valley with a fury that left us concerned and perplexed, never quite knowing when to drop to our bellies for protection. So steep was the hill in some spots that we would progress for five feet, then slip back six. We had to crawl under some broken trees and over others, passing our burdens to willing but weary hands on the other side. By the time we reached the top we all were sweating profusely despite the chill in the air and the steady rain.
In the face of the unpleasant situation, Nick Von Keller still greeted me with apparent warmth when we reached the pillbox he was using as a command post. If he was worried over the way things were going, he was far too clever to convey his feelings to his men. I admired him for it. Briefing me on what had been happening on the hill, he told of the noisy night they had spent under the German shelling. I wanted to stay on the hill with him and leave the rear under the guidance of Sergeant Foy, but Nick would not hear of it.
“I will feel better if you are there to come up and take over if I am hit, old man,” he said. “Keep the supplies coming and be sure to stay in touch with the situation. That will be just what I need.”
A little reluctantly I turned and found my way back down the hill. On the way I resolved to make the path easier for the men to climb. As soon as I got to the rear CP, I telephoned battalion to send the Ammunition and Pioneer Platoon to hack out a clear path. Within an hour the men were at work.
The real terror of the Huertgen Forest lay partly in the number of casualties we absorbed but also partly in the type of in-juries. The Germans had sown the forest lavishly with mines. Mainly they were Schuh and box mines, scattered in no apparent pattern. The mines contained about a half pound of TNT, just enough to blow off a man’s leg or foot. It was impossible to probe for them with bayonets or knives, for the area was too large, and it was equally impossible to use mine detectors to find them. Since these mines were encased in plastic or wood, mine detectors, which are designed to pick up the presence of metal in the ground, would not react to them. Besides, so many shell fragments littered the floor of the forest that mine detectors were constantly buzzing even though no mine was present.
Men became afraid to walk except on well-beaten paths, and even these sometimes disclosed mines that had failed to explode even though hundreds of feet had passed over them. The parade of men wounded by mines was so constant and depressing that the thought of getting a foot or a leg blown off was with us at every turn. This specter haunted us day and night.
Up on the hill Easy Company jumped off in another attack, only to run into a well-defended stretch of concertina barbed wire which the men could not cross. As they stopped at the obstacle, the German machine gunners caught them in a terrible cross-fire while mortars, and artillery rained down on them with deadly accuracy. Soon the wounded were slipping and slithering down the muddy hill in a painful, bloody procession. Lieutenant Gillespie slipped and fell during this attack, taking a bullet in the leg from his own carbine.
We checked them through our command post and added their names to an ever-growing list of casualties which we noted each day on our morning report. At times we laid down our pencils and picked up our carbines to try to even the score against individuals or small groups of Germans who wandered down the valley, sometimes errantly, sometimes on reconnaissance, sometimes with the specific purpose of surrender. It was a feeble, futile effort to balance the casualty lists. To us, we had no way of estimating the damage our artillery and planes were doing to the enemy, it seemed a cruelly one-sided battle.
On the opposite bank of the creek, Company G went into action in an attempt to outflank the opposition which was holding up the other two companies, but the advance platoon soon hit mines and the platoon leader had both legs blown off. Machine guns and mortars then started cutting down the remaining members and it was only with painful difficulty that any of the men made their way back.
As I look back on the action in the forest, a curtain of time tries to minimize the cruel length of the days and nights and run them together in one broad picture. It is difficult to recall the sequence in which events occurred. Each episode appears to claim precedence over the others. But though it is hard to recall exactly when a thing happened, it is impossible to erase the events themselves, for the sheer, stark, exhausting terror burned them inextricably in our memory.
The next day following the thwarted attack of companies F and G, I looked up from something I was doing on the road and saw Jack approaching. For a moment I was crestfallen and may not have greeted him with the enthusiasm the reunion deserved, for in the back of my mind was the knowledge that now he would be exposed to the same terror and dangers as the rest of us. Shaking off this morbid thought, I pumped his hand vigorously. For a few happy minutes we talked like a couple of voluble Frenchmen, but duty beckoned, and he turned, picked up his equipment, and made his way slowly up the blood-stained hill.
I saw another familiar face on the road that day, a pleasant, clean, smooth-shaven face belonging to brand new Second Lieutenant James H. Kee, of Newberg, Tennessee. Only the day before Kee had been a dirty, bearded, but capable sergeant who had left for the rear to be awarded a well-deserved battlefield commission. At division headquarters General Stroh had presented him with shiny gold bars.
“Hey, look, lieutenant,” one of the men said to me. “Kee got a shave and a gold bar. They had to give him a bath so the general could get close enough to pin the bars on him.”
I shook Kee’s hand with sincere enthusiasm.
“I won’t congratulate you,” I said. “I’m not sure congratulations are in order. But I do wish you every bit of luck in the world.”
Kee smiled, his clean face offering a strange contrast to the rest of us. He obviously understood why I would not congratulate him.
Lieutenants, he knew, too often received the honor of being among the first to be killed. (Kee became proof of that axiom when he was caught by the burst of a mortar shell. He was evacuated with more than 400 wounds. After the war we met in Houston, Texas, and he still had more than 200 pieces of shrapnel in him. In 1959 he died and at the funeral home I said a prayer from each of us in the One-Two-One.)
Company G pulled back from the halted effort to force a way through the woods on the opposite side of the creek and reformed its battered platoons to our rear. The next day one intrepid platoon moved down the road on the left side of the creek in order to avoid mines, then, upon reaching a point believed to be about even with Easy Company’s hilltop position, left the dangerous road and turned toward the creek. Fording the stream, the men began to climb the sheer face of the hill. It was a difficult and brilliant maneuver. In some places the incline was so precipitous the men had to pull themselves up by tugging at trees and bushes, but they made it and forced the Jerries to abandon several positions along the road.
The Company G commander, Captain Black, the tall, blond Westerner whom I had come to know in Brittany, then led the rest of his company straight up the road past our little foxhole CP in an effort to reach the platoon and strengthen and exploit the advantage the platoon had gained. But Black and his men had not gone far beyond us up the steeply rising road when machine gun fire cut down the two men who were preceding Black as scouts. Black nevertheless pressed forward, urging his men all the way until at last they came to a roadblock covered by three machine guns. The ground was so steep on either side of the road that the men could not deploy and could find no cover except in a shallow ditch on the right of the road.
The ditch turned out to be false protection, at least for one man, Lieutenant Joe Kowalewski, who had left his job as Battalion S-2 to become Company G’s executive officer. As Joe stepped into the ditch, he set off a mine that severed one leg midway between the ankle and the knee. Medics responded quickly to the call to carry the lieutenant back, and Captain Black helped them bundle the big, genial fellow on the stretcher. As they carried Joe past my mortar positions, I tried to think of a joke, some pleasant remark to make. “It’s a suicide mission,” I started to say, but I could not speak. I had to turn my face away.
Unable to penetrate the roadblock, the remaining members of Company G began to stumble back by our command post. I could see as Captain Black approached that he was under some terrible strain. At the sight of me, a fellow officer whom he knew, he gave way to a volume of pent up emotions.
“Why did it have to happen to them?” he cried. He dropped his head in his hands and began to sob. “Why didn’t it happen to me? McCarthy gets both his legs blown off. Men get killed and wounded all around me. Those two sergeants were with me ever since I got here. I made them sergeants. Now they’re dead. Joe loses his leg. Why doesn’t it happen to me? Why, dammit, why?”
I could appreciate how Black felt. He was a man who took his immense responsibilities seriously, and the ever-lengthening casualty lists inevitably had a strong effect on him. I tried to comfort him, to make him understand that we all felt the same way. But he was inconsolable.
At last I put him in my hole, stretched my blanket over him, and telephoned battalion.
“Colonel, it’s me, Boesch,” I said, keeping my voice low so Black could not hear me. “I’ve got Captain Black here in my foxhole. His nerves are shot. He needs a little rest, else we’re going to lose a mighty good man.”
The Colonel listened, then said to keep Black with me for a few hours to see if he might not snap out of it.
“Okay, sir,” I agreed. “His men are stretched out along the road here now. I don’t want to parade him past them in this condition anyway. I’ll make sure he’s okay before I bring him back.”
When I hung up, I heard Black sobbing again. I went to him.
“I heard you, Boesch,” he cried accusingly, sitting up in the foxhole. “You’re ashamed of me. You think I’m yellow. I’m not yellow. I’m not afraid of these sonsabitchin’ Germans. I’m not afraid of their goddamned artillery. But why do all these good men get killed while I stay here and see them go? Why wasn’t it me instead of them? Why wasn’t it me? Answer me that, dammit. Why?”
How could I explain to Black that I often had pondered the same thing, that I had concluded that somewhere in Heaven they used a strange method of selecting who would go and who would stay. Most of the men at the front explained their narrow escapes with the laconic phrase that their “number had not come up,” but I wondered how many believed in their own bravado. To many a man in other foxholes I had recited a poem on the subject:
It does not matter when I go.
Nor how nor why.
Each day a million roses blow,
A million die.
For every bird that lives to sing,
A song is stilled.
I go ... a brief remembering…
My place is filled.
I’ll live and love and dine and drink
The while I may,
And when my number’s called, I think
I’ll say “O.K.”[2]
I knew now was not the time nor the place to recite this poem to Black nor to try to explain it to him. Nor was it any use to try to comfort him. I left him in my hole, covered him with everything I could find that might provide some warmth, and hoped that he might sleep.