We only went a few yards across the open field toward Huertgen when the artillery fire suddenly ceased. A few vagrant shells still fell on the far end of the town, but the noise of these explosions seemed merely to heighten the silence around us. It was almost as if the silence itself had exploded. We felt frightened, naked, alone.
Jerry obviously would not ignore the quiet. Coming on the heels of the bombardment, it could mean only one thing to him, that infantry was moving in for an assault. We were 25 yards out of the woods now, 50 yards, 100 yards. Here and there, from a half-dozen different houses along the fringe of the town, German gunners fired bursts from automatic weapons. Two hundred yards we advanced, 300 yards—tracer bullets beat the ground around us, forcing every man into the mud as if the hand of Satan himself had reached up and dragged everybody down at once. One moment I was part of a rapidly moving line of men against an objective that reputedly was deserted; then, in a flash, I was flat on the ground, part of an attack that had bogged down.
Though daylight was fast approaching, night still draped a measure of protective concealment about us. I knew that now the artillery had deserted us, our only hope of getting to the first houses was to continue to move, no matter how much fire we drew. Up and down the line I ran, shouting like a man possessed, urging the men to get up, to keep moving. The men must have realized as I did that it was now or never, for they responded, and once again we were plowing across muddy ground toward the objective. Four hundred yards, 500 yards, just about half way now. The tempo of the German fire increased in intensity the closer we got, but still we moved—slowly. Six hundred yards, 700 yards. Now the cries of the wounded were all around us as the machine guns and burp guns fired with amazing accuracy in that dim light. Again the thin line wavered, slowed, and dropped to the ground.
Again I moved from man to man, calling now for fire and movement. By this method, one group of men would fire, seeking to silence the enemy gunners, while another group rushed for-ward 15 or 20 yards. Then those rushing would drop to the ground to cover the advance of the first group.
But it was difficult to transmit any real enthusiasm to the others when I, to them, was almost a stranger. I did not know the names of all of the squad leaders, so that I could not call on them individually to help overcome the inertia. It was maddening. At last I decided to put action to my own suggestion and jumped into the lead, rushing forward, dodging, firing my carbine as fast as I could. But Jerry’s return fire sought me out and kept the men burrowed in the mud.
After a time I came upon the platoon leader with the moustache. He was lying face down in a shell crater, his helmet clutched close on his head with both hands.
“Come on, boy,” I cajoled, “let’s get the hell into that town before we get chewed to pieces.”
A trembling voice answered.
“Just a minute, just a minute.”
Still the lieutenant did not move. Looking down at him, I longed to run the muzzle of my carbine squarely into his exposed bottom. I might have done it had not my urging at last begun to have some effect with the other men. One by one they began to fire and move again toward the houses.
One automatic rifleman was doing a particularly valiant job. Running toward him, I hoped to help him direct his fire so that we might build his fast-firing weapon into a base of fire to enable all the others to continue forward. I pointed out a number of likely targets to him, but as he crouched against the stock of his weapon and began to shoot, a bullet hit him square in the middle of the forehead. He toppled over without a sound. Dead.
For a moment I stared at the man, half-dazed, hardly able to comprehend what had happened. Another burst of German fire snapped me back to reality, I picked up the automatic rifle, intent either on firing it myself or passing it along to someone else, but the second burst had damaged the gun itself. It would not fire.
As I rose to continue forward, German fire cut loose from at least a dozen new positions. Bullets ripped the ground with unmitigated fury. I tried hard to keep from facing the truth, but we obviously could not continue to advance in the face of this fire. We were, in the language of the infantryman, “pinned down”— a scant 100 yards from Huertgen.
I still was loathe to admit total defeat. Even though this platoon could not move, there was still the possibility that perhaps Lieutenant Carroll’s platoon on the other end of the line was not so hard hit. I started in that direction.
Deciding to move and getting there were two different things, however. Not only did Jerry continue to pick us off with small arms fire, but now he added the deadly burst of mortars. Every short bound I took seemed to draw a fusilade of machine gun fire, and as I paused to hug the ground to escape this fire, mortar shells began to come in with deep, crunching explosions. Yet somehow they missed and at last I came up behind Carroll’s men, only to discover they were in the same dismal predicament as the others.
Carroll’s men nevertheless had some advantage, for they had come upon a narrow communications trench about a hundred yards in front of the first group of houses. The trench was not only narrow but shallow, only some two and a half feet deep. At one end was a small, low, covered dugout. With some difficulty we dragged four wounded men from the trench into the dugout.
Carroll himself was farther forward. I decided to continue until I found him in the hope that together we might work something out. Though the communications trench ran in the direction I wanted to go, it was so packed with men seeking cover from the fire that it would be difficult to pass along it. I tried getting out of the trench and rushing forward by bounds, but Jerry forced me back. With agonizing detail, I had to plan my way past each man in the narrow ditch. Some moved to one side, others doubled up, some flattened themselves on their faces to let me crawl over.
As I came to a bend in the trench, a particularly husky soldier blocked my path.
“Flatten yourself against the trench,” I called out, “to the right.”
Nodding that he understood, the soldier drew in his breath, hoping to leave room for me to pass. I moved quickly, but for some inexplicable reason, the man shifted away from the side of the trench just as I reached him. We collided. My chest was jammed tight against his back when suddenly we both were hurled backward with stunning violence. A Jerry bullet had caught the GI in the shoulder and thrown us both to the ground. The fact that a bone stopped the round was all that had saved me, for otherwise the bullet would have passed through his body into mine.
Pulling the man behind the bend in the trench where others might administer to his wound, I continued to work forward. As I rounded the bend, the Jerry fired again, but this time the shot was high and struck the earth at the top of the trench, doing no more harm than to send down a shower of mud.
When at last I found Carroll, I realized quickly that my trip had been futile. He and the men close around him were just as immobilized as the rest of us. Reluctantly, I turned to make my way again down the trench and seek some other method for reviving the attack. En route I helped the soldier who had been hit in the shoulder to make his way to the little dugout. He became the sixth patient. I knew of at least four men who had been killed, and obviously there had been others.
I hoped to contact Fox Company, but there was a gap between the last of my men and the first of Captain Cliett’s, and I could see none of Company F. A lone house which stood to our right rear may have held some of Lieutenant Korn’s men, but it was impossible at the time to check.
Finally I slumped down in the trench, exhausted and thoroughly bewildered as to what I might do to alter our position. It was painfully evident that the attack had bogged down completely and equally evident that there was nothing we could do about it.
After alerting everybody to be prepared for a possible German counterattack, I made the wounded my first job. We had no medics, for they were among those I had been unable to find when we pulled out of the woods before daylight. After checking each man for bleeding and shock, I collected every piece of uniform that could be spared in an effort to keep them warm. Through that long day I made the rounds of the casualties often. We had nothing to make their lot easier, no morphine, no drugs of any kind except the sulfa powder in their first aid packets. There was no way we could move them to rear, for to expose ourselves at all was to invite death. Half a mile of open field stretched back to the woods, and Jerry shells landed in the field all day.
One man, hit in the thigh, had to lie outside the dugout in the trench because there wasn’t room inside for him to stretch out.
“How’re you coming, fellow?” I asked, crouching near him.
“Oh, boy!” he sighed in a low, satisfied voice, his eyes staring above him at the sky. “White sheets for Christmas!”
“What did you say?” I asked in disbelief.
“White sheets for Christmas,” he repeated, not monotonously, but exultantly, “white sheets for Christmas!”
I marvelled at the man’s philosophy. For him the war was over. He had done his job well, and now he had received his million dollar wound. Christmas, he believed, would find him far from the mud and the cold and the dying. The thought of not making it from that dismal trench to the hospital apparently never entered his head. Yet he was far from safety. As I looked beyond him, back at the field that led to the woods and the battalion aid station, I wondered just what he would get for Christmas—white sheets, or a white muslin mattress cover.
After weeks of rain, this day turned out fine and bright. An unshaded sun shone in unaccustomed brilliance over the desolate landscape. After being in the woods for so long, we felt positively naked out in the open.
Our planes flew overhead constantly, pausing now and then to zoom down on Huertgen and drop their bombs or to strafe beyond the town. For once I envied the fly-boys of the Air Corps. I could not stand because my protection was little more than two feet deep. I could not sit because when I did mud oozed all over my bottom and made me wet and cold. Though I tried sitting on my pistol belt and canteen, they disappeared quickly into the greedy mud. I spread my raincoat over the slime, but it too sank out of sight. I hardly dared sit on my helmet lest my head protrude unprotected over the rim of the trench. At times my feet became so imbedded in the clinging mud that I had to reach down and pull them clear to keep the mud from passing over the tops of my boots. Though the day was clear, it was bitterly cold.
I would have loved being in the Air Corps.
As time wore on, I tried to make some estimate of the situation which would ease the frustration. But it is more than difficult to make decisions that affect other men’s lives when you can’t even raise your head high enough to see what is firing at you. Jerry added to our problems by searching for us with mortar and artillery fire. At times, as heavy explosions cracked almost on top of us, I could not see how we could possibly escape further casualties, but each time we burrowed deep in the mud and came through without loss. Our own shells also passed overhead from time to time. The morning waned, and still we were pinned down. We could not move, and Jerry did not venture from his houses to meet us at close range.
Sometime in the early afternoon, the sharp report of a direct fire weapon sounded behind us, followed quickly by the splintering crash of a projectile into one of the houses ahead. It was a solution to our problem. If tank destroyers would spew direct fire from the woods line against the houses, we could easily follow their barrage with a concerted rush.
Crawling hastily through the mud, I reached my radio and contacted battalion, explaining my plan to Captain Freeman.
“The gun that fired is directly behind us,” I said. “We’re on a line between them and the houses we want hit. I can correct their fire from here.”
“Okay, Boesch,” Freeman replied. “I’ll have them put another round where they put the last one, then you can move it either way you want.”
I waited impatiently while he relayed my message. In the interim I alerted the men around me that we would be up and moving shortly.
When Freeman came back on the radio, what he said almost made me bounce straight into the air.
“Boesch,” he said, “they can’t remember where they fired that last round. Can you give them a landmark?”
“Do you mean,” I said slowly and deliberately, “that those stupid bastards have been firing into their own troops without knowing where they were shooting? Let them come up here and I’ll go back and fire a few rounds at random over their heads and see how they like it!”
I just couldn’t imagine such carelessness. The house they had hit was perilously close to us, very difficult to distinguish from the other battered buildings in the edge of Huertgen.
“Tell them to put another round where they think they fired that one,” I said at last, then told every man to hug the bottom of the trench.
But the round never came close to the previous target nor to us.
“Look, Freeman,” I said, “tell those fellows to be sure not to hit the first house. I think some of F Company’s men are in there. But tell them to fire another round for registration and I’ll see if I can pick it up. Remember, don’t hit the first house.”
Before the tank destroyers had a chance to fire again, artillery began to rip into the first house. But it was not our artillery. It was Jerry’s!
It seemed obvious to me that Jerry had picked up our radio conversation. Before the roar of his artillery died down, he began dropping mortar shells around our communications trench with disturbing accuracy. The shells literally rained down.
On the other end of the radio Freeman exclaimed somewhat stupidly, “My God, is that falling on you?”
I gritted my teeth, then answered with savage sarcasm.
“What the hell do you want me to do now?” I asked. “Direct their goddamned mortar fire for them?”
When the mortar shells finally let up, I was amazed that we had only one casualty to add to our dugout hospital. As soon as the noise abated, I again contacted Freeman on the radio and got the tank destroyers back to work. The crewmen responded with reluctance; they felt they were exposing their vehicles too flagrantly by continuing to fire from the same spot, but when I pointed out that we were slightly exposed also, they went to work. After an agonizing guessing game that saw the tank destroyers bouncing shots all over town, I finally managed to zero them in on the group of houses we wanted hit. But even when they hit the houses, they were reluctant to bring the rounds low enough to do any good for fear they might hit our positions. Most of the shells struck the upper stories of the houses. I was convinced that Jerry was firing at us either from the first floors or from the cellars.
“Bring them lower!” I roared in desperation.
The scant inches with which they complied meant little. Though I appreciated their concern for hitting us, our position was fast becoming alarming, and we had to take chances. Cautiously raising my head I tried to assess the effect of the fire, but Jerry drove me back with a burst of machine gun bullets that missed by only inches.
Despite this reminder that we still were off our targets, I decided that we had to make another attempt to rush the houses. I alerted Carroll’s platoon. Following several rounds which scattered brick and concrete in impressive fashion we leaped to our feet, but had gone only a step or two beyond the trench when the same machine guns opened fire again and forced us back to cover. We pulled two more men back to the dugout for bandaging.
I called back for more fire immediately. This time we got half a dozen fast rounds, but another attempt at rushing forward met the same accurate machine gun fire. There were so many places the fire could be coming from, so many houses that overlooked us, that it was almost impossible to pin down the source. I determined nevertheless to give it one more try and called back for six more rounds.
This last request brought Colonel Kunzig to the radio.
“Boesch,” he said, in the telephone voice that had become so familiar, “don’t knock those houses apart too badly or we won’t have any place to put the CP.”
Choking back a reply designed to tell him where he could shove his CP, I reminded him that unless we took the town there wouldn’t be any CP.
I got my six rounds, but they failed to do the job. For a moment I was stumped, then decided on a new approach. Crawling close to Bill Carroll, I told him I was going to call for a dozen fast rounds.
“Count them off, Bill,” I said, “and the second that last one hits don’t waste any time jumping forward.”
Bill grunted in assent and made such preparations as he could while lying flat on his face in a pond of water and mud. I contacted battalion again and told them what I wanted. To my utter consternation Freeman told me the tank destroyers had pulled back to the rear—and safety—for the night! Even as Freeman explained that he had thought we would not want them anymore, I slumped wearily down in the mud and cursed out loud.
Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Goddamnit!
I wanted to cry.
It was late afternoon, and I looked forward to the coming of night so we could evacuate our casualties. Though most of the wounded were bearing up well, it was obvious that the long hours of pain and anxiety were beginning to have an effect. My optimistic patient had scarcely stirred from his position in the trench, and whenever I was in earshot he muttered his hopeful refrain about “white sheets for Christmas.” But some of the others were not so nonchalant.
“Lieutenant,” they would say, “when are you going to get us out of here?”
I took careful note of the way they worded the question. It was not, “When are we going to get out of here?” What they said was, “When are you going to get us out of here?”
I wondered.
Just as dusk was beginning to settle, Colonel Kunzig called on the radio. In an ill-disguised effort to camouflage his meaning in case the Germans were listening, he said he was sending “some of our thick-skinned friends out to help.”
“Do you understand?” he asked.
“I do,” I said rather curtly, still conscious that Jerry might be listening.
Again I alerted the men to get ready to move, and in a moment I saw them stirring to make weapons and equipment ready. Though I had no success in contacting Lieutenant Moustache to make sure he joined us, I did get word to some of his men and could see them adjusting their equipment.
Looking over my shoulder, I made out four light tanks pulling from the woods behind us. We followed them anxiously every inch of the way as they came racing across the field. Grasping my carbine, I crouched low in the trench, ready to take the lead as soon as the tanks came abreast of our positions. A mixture of emotions churned within me. As much as I dreaded the danger ahead, I felt a certain amount of relief in being able to do something active for a change instead of sitting there like a duck in a Coney Island shooting gallery.
Closer, closer came the tanks, the roar of their motors serving as an urgent signal for us to be ready. Though they were only light tanks, the sight of them racing well dispersed across the field imparted to us a feeling of strength. Eagerly we watched, anxious to join them and break forever this dreadful impasse.
The lead tank was only about 200 yards from us when an explosion rocked it back on its haunches. Part of the left tread flew high in the air. Men spilled from the hatch like upset ants. The tank had struck a mine.
The other tanks paused only long enough to pick up their buddies. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, they turned and streaked back toward the woods. We watched with emotions tinged both with disappointment and concern as Jerry chased them back to the woods line with artillery fire.
Then we took off our packs and slumped silently back down in the damnable mud.