Word reached us in mid-afternoon that the attack of Combat Command R on Huertgen had failed. The tanks had crashed out of the woods only to come upon antitank mines as they headed across open ground toward Huertgen. A mine knocked a tread off one of the tanks, blocking the narrow exit of the road from the forest. German antitank guns in Huertgen then made quick work of the leading tanks, and no others could get past the disabled tank on the road. The attack ground to an abject halt.
Along with this discouraging news came a fresh rumor that the One-Two-One was to take Huertgen, whereupon the armor would again take up the fight on open ground beyond the town. The rumor became fact late in the afternoon when a party of jeeps stopped on the road near my CP and the assistant division commander, General Canham, came in to use my telephone.
I asked the General about Huertgen.
“We’re getting ready to move in right now,” he said. “The fact is, F Company has already pushed off. I’m sure the town is empty. Air saw a long column marching away from it.”
The word became official a short time after the General left. I received a call from battalion directing me to move into Huertgen as soon as Fox Company made it.
But Fox Company did not make it. The General’s feeling that the enemy had abandoned Huertgen was sprinkled liberally with wishful thinking. A pilot may well have seen a column moving away from the town, but what he failed to note was that many more Germans apparently had stayed behind. On the theory that Huertgen was ours for the asking, Company F had gone about the job under strong pressure from higher headquarters without time to make any concrete preparations. Somehow the staffs in the deeper dugouts felt that all Captain Cliett had to do was form his depleted company into a column of two’s and march down the main street. The chatter of machine guns and the pounding of artillery which reached our ears soon made it abundantly clear that somebody was wrong.
As night came, plans underwent hasty change. Fox Company was to send out night patrols to get information for a concerted attack by the entire battalion at seven o’clock the next morning. I headed for Nick’s CP where Colonel Kunzig had arrived to formulate the attack plans.
I found that on paper the plan for the next morning’s attack was simple and sensible. Companies F and G were to attack side by side with a road which F Company already had reached as a clearly defined line of departure. We were to cross the road at seven o’clock, advance on the town, and take it. It was that simple—on paper.
Cliett and I discussed our plans carefully. Huertgen was an elongated, omnifarious collection of drab gray houses grouped primarily along one main street, which was in effect a winding road stretching more than half a mile before emerging again in open fields. My company, we decided, would clear the left side of the street, Company F the right side. Where the street made sharp bends, we designated points of contact beyond which one company was not to advance without coordinating with the other, lest we end up shooting each-other. Then with blissful optimism we traced the attack to a successful conclusion.
What disturbed us most was the necessity to cross a thousand yards of flat, open field, virtually devoid of any cover or concealment, before we could gain the first buildings in the town. We obviously would be ripe for annihilation once we left the concealment of the forest unless we could devise some means of keeping Jerry occupied while we crossed the open ground. At our insistence, Colonel Kunzig promised ample support from mortars and artillery before we started and for several minutes thereafter while we moved across the fields. This was vitally important.
As Cliett and I mulled over our plans, two men from Company F arrived with two prisoners they had taken while on patrol. Corporal Haerich, Easy Company’s German-speaking medic, came in to question the prisoners in the hope of gleaning some information which might be of use in the attack.
After beginning the interrogation, it soon became apparent that for every question we received two completely disparate answers, so that in the end we were left more confused than if we had asked nothing. One of the prisoners insisted, for example, that about a hundred Germans were in Huertgen but that all were ready to capitulate.
“Only because their Nazi officers have threatened to shoot them do they stay and fight,” he concluded.
His bedraggled companion did not agree.
“There are more than four hundred men in Huertgen,” he averred. “They will fight to the last as they have been ordered by Hitler.”
The only point the pair could agree on was that everybody in the town was hungry, but even on this subject their opinions showed some divergence. One insisted this would lessen the Germans” will to fight, the other said it would sharpen it.
“You pay your money and take your choice,” grunted Cliett, “and we won’t know which of the bastards to shoot until it’s too late to do us any good.”
Colonel Kunzig, for his part, believed the man who thought the Germans were ready to surrender.
“What he says goes right along with the report from General Canham,” he insisted. “Those one hundred are just a rear guard.”
“Pretty big rear guard, wouldn’t you say, Colonel?” Cliett asked dryly.
“Which man do you believe, Haerich?” I asked. It seemed to me that Haerich with his knowledge of the Germans must have formed a personal opinion which would be based on something more than ours.
Haerich was quiet for a moment, looking from one to the other of the prisoners in the flickering candlelight in the musty dugout. At last he cleared his throat and spoke.
“Well, Lieutenant Boesch,” he said, “I think this man sounds more honest than the other.”
He pointed a gloved hand toward the man who promised a small force with only token resistance.
“I hope to God you’re right, Haerich,” I said.
With that, the meeting broke up.
It was well after midnight by the time I got back to my own CP to be greeted by my officers and sergeants, whom I had previously instructed to assemble there. In the CP dugout we all gathered around a map. Lighting an extra candle, we talked long and searchingly about every phase of the attack. I gave them every scrap of information I had obtained, and several offered suggestions which we incorporated into the original plan. At long last I was satisfied that everyone knew his job and I had done all I could to insure success of the attack. The others scattered to take advantage of the few hours remaining to let their men know what we were to do.
When they left, I sat quietly for a while, then stretched out on a small strip of bunk which the others in the headquarters group had politely reserved for me. Around me I could hear the rhythmic breathing of those who were lucky enough not to bear responsibilities that kept them awake. Now and then a troubled snort broke the cadence.
Relaxing with a deep sigh, I went over in my mind the various details of the attack, searching for flaws, but I could detect no error in the preparations as we had made them. Our chief difficulty lay in the fact that our rifle squads were drastically depleted. I bore a personal difficulty in knowing too few of my men, so that I would have trouble calling and directing them by name. Yet for all this, I had no real fear for the job ahead. Combat was not new. This was a particularly hard task, but we had faced other hard ones and won.
Though it seemed days since I last had closed my eyes, sleep would not come. Finally I got up and telephoned Captain Cliett’s CP. The Captain could not sleep either. Bit by bit we went over the plans again, but the only improvement we could hit upon was to draw the artillery fire closer during the time we were crossing the field.
“If the artillery doesn’t hit those first houses,” I said, “we’re going to catch hell, John. Why don’t you call battalion and check it with them?”
Cliett did call battalion, but Colonel Kunzig would not agree. In order to pull the artillery fire closer, Cliett’s men would have to draw back from the road they had reached the preceding after-noon, and Kunzig was unwilling to take responsibility for approving a withdrawal, no matter how strategically important and no matter how short or how temporary the withdrawal.
Because my CP was in a central location, all the telephone lines in the battalion ran through it. Thus, I was able, if I wanted, to listen in on almost any conversation. Unable to sleep and distressed by Kunzig’s refusal, I lay on my bunk the rest of the night with the phone at my ear. What I heard gave me an insight into how the big wheels turned. It left me wondering how they managed to turn at all.
At one point Kunzig called the regimental commander, Colonel Cross, to discuss our suggestion that F Company pull back to the edge of the woods to insure that the artillery could hit the first houses. Cross was adamant in his refusal.
“Not one inch!” he said in a tone which convinced me he said it with his jaw thrust forward. “We will not move that company nor any other company back one single inch. Kunzig, I’ll hit them with every weapon we’ve got that’ll fire. We’ll keep it up all night and then give them a concentrated dose in the morning, just before the attack. But that company stays put!”
From where I lay I could see by the flickering light of the candle that the artillery fireline as we had drawn it on the map was much too far beyond the first houses. I could see it plainly; Colonel Kunzig could see it; Colonel Cross must have been able to see it. It took no genius to recognize that the solution Cliett and I offered was logical and sound. But in order to keep a map in some higher headquarters from registering the fact that men had taken a backward step, even though by going backward five hundred yards they might subsequently be able to advance a thousand, the men would have to stay where they were and let the edge of the objective be a privileged sanctuary for the enemy.
I fretted and fumed at the telephone. At one point I was tempted to open my switch and tell everybody what was on my mind. It was only with difficulty that I forced myself to remain silent.
When the conversation was over, I telephoned Cliett and told him. He was as disappointed and frustrated as I.
Still unable to sleep, I continued my vigil at the telephone.
When Kunzig had talked to Cross, the regimental commander had directed extreme thoroughness in preparations for the attack, particularly in communications. Colonel Cross demanded specifically that double telephone lines be installed to insure against a break in contact between regiment and battalion. Kunzig had promised this would be done and subsequently telephoned his own headquarters to speak to his executive officer.
“Major,” he ordered, “I want to keep in constant touch with regiment by phone tomorrow during the attack. I want you to be sure to have double phone lines in operation by daylight.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the major spoke up quickly. “I’m ‘way ahead of you, sir. I have the men out right now putting them in.”
“Damned fine work,” applauded the Colonel, “that’s the sort of cooperation I like from my staff.”
The major swelled up on the phone until I could almost hear his buttons pop.
The telephone line was silent for a while. Then the next voice I heard was that of the Major.
“Hello, operator? Give me the communications officer.”
After a pause the communications officer came on the line.
“Look,” the Major said, “the Colonel’ll be up at Easy Company’s CP tomorrow. I want you to get busy right away. Root out the men and start putting in double telephone wires from regiment up to Easy Company. We’ve got to have them in by six o’clock. That doesn’t give you much time, you better shake a leg.”
Slowly the luminous hands crept past the dancing numerals on my watch, and still my weary body refused to accept sleep. Three-thirty. Four o’clock. Four-thirty. Five. At last it was time to move. Awakening my headquarters group, I headed through the woods to the spot where I had arranged to meet the rest of the company. It was as black as ever even though dawn could not be long off.
At the road I found to my disgust that my company was not there. Despite the explicit and detailed instructions I had given the platoon leaders only a few hours before, they were all still in their holes. For the next half hour I was a one-man team booting men out of holes and onto the road. The squad leaders, I discovered, had failed to give their men any instructions for the attack. My temper boiled.
As quickly as possible I saw that the non-coms got on with the job of telling the men details of the attack plans. While they were doing it I made a firm resolve to check thoroughly on squad and platoon leaders at the first possible opportunity. Having had the company less than two full days, I had had no chance to impose my own will on them. That obviously needed to be done.
“Something is wrong, radically wrong,” I thought bitterly, “when men with stripes and bars fail to get their men ready for an attack.”
Speed was vital. Everything depended on getting to the line of departure on time, and we still had a long way to go. Though a hurried check revealed that some men still were missing, I decided to go without them rather than try to find them in isolated foxholes in the blackness of the forest. We set out down the road. Taking the lead, I set a rapid pace.
We had not gone far before we ran into men of the 1st Battalion of the 13th Infantry. They were bunched along the road in a scattered, noisy column which eventually was to move to the edge of the woods, turn north, and then assist our attack by enveloping Huertgen from the northwest. The narrow woods road was clogged with troops. Men coagulated together, talking and milling about noisily like nervous cattle.
Chills ran up and down my back. The spot where the battalion of the 13th and my own men became intermingled was the very place where I had undergone a terrific pounding from Jerry artillery the morning before. If Jerry had hit the spot once, he obviously had a concentration right at hand to hit it again. Had he chosen that particular moment to blast the road, it would have been wholesale slaughter. The prospect prompted me to redouble my efforts to get past. How fortunate it was that Jerry did not suspect how we violated every basic principle of safety as if he were impotent to make us regret it.
This encounter consumed more of the precious time we needed to reach the line of departure on schedule and before daylight revealed our movement to the enemy. Though I managed to keep my men together through the bottleneck, I realized as we passed that if we were to move cross-country through the woods as scheduled, we would never get to the line of departure on time. I decided to gamble. Instead of turning through the woods, I elected to stay on the road. This was a longer way around and no one yet had used it—so that running into mines and perhaps a roadblock and a few Jerries was a real possibility —but if all went well, we obviously could make better time on the road.
Again I lead the column as rapidly as I dared. Fallen trees and branches frequently blocked the way. With an imagination made fertile by the impending attack, I conjured fantastic ideas of guiding my company into a mine-laden trap; of steering them head-on into a strong Jerry position. But the delays we had encountered had left no real choice.
Instead of mines and live Germans, we came upon a ghastly column of dead Jerries which apparently had been caught by one of our artillery barrages. Dead men lay sprawled over the road in various frantic postures of violent death. The stench was overwhelming. Bloated men and bloated horses, one of which had burst, lay all across our path, and we had to step high to shake the entrails from our boots.
It was a terrible thing to lead men through such a depressing setting while en route to an attack. Several vomited at the sight, and some needed stiff prodding to force them through. None of us could help but be affected by the experience, even though the dead were enemy dead. Only the fact that we were nearing the edge of the forest and thus deriving some benefit from the approaching dawn made it possible for us to find a path through the vegetable and animal debris.
As we reached the area assigned to us with ten minutes to spare, I gratefully threw off some of my concern. Already big shells were bursting in Huertgen, some of them white phosphorous shells exploding in weirdly beautiful patterns. I spread out my small platoons, had a last word with Carroll and Lieutenant Moustache, pointing out landmarks in the town for them to guide on, and then left to coordinate with the left flank platoon of Company F.
A tall, red-haired lieutenant from Newton, N.J., Edward Korn, commanded the Company F platoon. Together, as the artillery continued to pound our objective ahead, we quickly checked the more important points of the attack.
As we talked, I noted with satisfaction a marked increase in the tempo of the artillery preparation, but I also noted that the buildings closest to us definitely were unaffected by the pounding. Then the pattern of bursts moved even farther from us.
I felt frustrated, almost condemned. Without artillery fire on those first houses, our only chance of getting across the open before the Jerries awoke to our presence lay in beating the dawn. This was a pitifully slim chance, for already the first vestiges of daylight were beginning to reflect on our helmets and barrels of our weapons. I wanted to swear out loud, to damn all who had stood in the way of our getting the support we deserved.
But it was too late, even for swearing. The hands on my watch said seven o’clock. Signalling my messenger and radio operator to follow, I turned back toward my own company.
A thin olive drab line of burdened men rose from the ground and moved forward. I fell in behind the platoon led by the lieutenant with the moustache. Then out across a treeless, coverless field we marched.
This was the way to Huertgen, elusive objective, key to the Huertgen Forest.