The Allies at the Siegfried Line

At dawn on 13 September 1944 the tanks of the US 3rd Armored Division moved against the fortifications of the Siegfried Line south and south-east of Aachen. At Roetgen, a German border village where the Americans had spent the previous night, Lieutenant Colonel William Lovelady’s combat group had to blow up rows of concrete “dragon’s teeth”, because the earth tipped into a crater in the road had turned to mud. When the tanks passed through the obstacles before midday, the crews of eight pillboxes and shelters along the road fled. Near the village of Rott a single Panther tank with a few anti-tank guns held up the American column for more than an hour; the Americans lost four tanks, but the first belt of fortifications had been breached at that point. A few kilometres to the north-west the division’s second combat group spent half a day unable to force the obstacles near Oberforstbach, until someone discovered a crossing over the dragon’s teeth that local farmers had built up earlier.

On 13 September American troops reached the Siegfried Line. The first American patrol crossed the frontier of the Reich on the evening of 11 September, and not near Aachen but several dozen kilometres to the south, from Luxembourg. Aachen did not fall in September: the Americans entered its streets only in October, and the German garrison surrendered on 21 October 1944 after the weeks-long Battle of Aachen. Nor were these the first Allied soldiers on German soil in this war – in September 1939 the French advanced a few kilometres into the Saar, but withdrew after a few weeks.

Sergeant Holzinger’s patrol

According to the US official history by Charles B. MacDonald, at 6.05 p.m. on 11 September 1944 five men of a reconnaissance platoon of the 85th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, 5th Armored Division, led by Staff Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger, waded across the River Our near the village of Stolzembourg, a few kilometres north-east of Vianden. The bridge had been blown, but the water turned out to be shallow. On the far bank the men climbed a hill on which stood the few buildings of the village of Keppeshausen, and saw a dozen or so concrete pillboxes nearby; someone had built a chicken coop beside one of them. After a brief look round they went back, and an hour later the report of the first crossing of the border was making its way up the chain of command. The patrol had set out from Luxembourg, whose capital the same division had liberated the day before.

Holzinger was only a few hours ahead of the others. In the early evening a reinforced company of the 109th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, crossed the bridge over the Our between Weiswampach in Luxembourg and the German village of Sevenig, and south-east of St. Vith in Belgium a patrol of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, crossed the river. Its men talked to local civilians and brought back a German cap, some money and a handful of soil as proof. All three units belonged to General Leonard Gerow’s V Corps of General Courtney Hodges’s US First Army.

The West Wall

The Siegfried Line – the Germans called it the West Wall (Westwall) – was built between 1936 and 1940 along the western border of the Reich, from near Kleve on the Dutch border to Lörrach near Basel. The first fortifications went up in 1936, after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the strongest sector being on the Saar, facing the French Maginot Line. Work on a large scale began in May 1938, during the Czechoslovak crisis. It was directed by Fritz Todt, the builder of the Reich’s motorways; in the autumn of 1938 more than half a million people were working on it, and roughly a third of Germany’s annual cement production went into the fortifications. Unlike the Maginot Line, it was not a chain of great forts but a belt of thousands of small, mutually supporting pillboxes and shelters, supplemented by anti-tank obstacles – rivers, ravines, forests and rows of concrete pyramids. In the Aachen sector the fortifications formed two belts a few kilometres apart, with the city lying between them.

Adolf Hitler’s propaganda presented the West Wall as impregnable. That impression helped him at Munich in 1938, and in the summer of 1939, as tension over Gdańsk (Danzig) mounted, German cinemas showed a film about the fortifications intended to convince the public that the western border was secure. Once France had fallen in 1940, however, the line lost its significance. Construction practically ceased and the effort shifted to the coasts of the Atlantic and the English Channel. By 1944 the bunkers had no mines, barbed wire or fortress armament, and most could take at most a 37 mm anti-tank gun, useless against newer tanks. Four years of neglect had, on the other hand, given the fortifications excellent camouflage: Allied air reconnaissance failed to spot many positions, and intelligence relied mainly on data from before 1940. Charles B. MacDonald wrote that in September 1944 the West Wall was something of a Potemkin village, formidable chiefly thanks to an old and undeserved reputation.

Only on 20 August 1944, as the front in Normandy was collapsing, did Hitler issue a decree on a “people’s” levy for work on the fortifications. Civilians, including members of the Hitler Youth, were sent to dig anti-tank ditches and trenches, but the work was done in haste and without coordination. On 5 September Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was reappointed Commander-in-Chief West, while the previous holder of the post, Field Marshal Walter Model, retained command of Army Group B. As late as 10 September Rundstedt warned that he needed five to six weeks to restore the West Wall to a usable state. The bunker garrisons consisted largely of fortress battalions, emergency units scraped together from stragglers and men on leave, and the remnants of divisions shattered in France.

Reconnaissance in force near Aachen

On the northern wing of the First Army, facing the so-called Aachen Gap – the most convenient route to the Rhine and the Ruhr – stood General Joseph Lawton Collins’s VII Corps. Hodges, short of fuel and ammunition, intended to halt the army for at least two days; his logisticians calculated that enough supplies for five days of heavy fighting would not be built up until around 15 September. Collins nevertheless obtained permission for a “reconnaissance in force” on 12 September. He hoped that a powerful blow would break through the fortifications before the Germans had time to man them. He committed two combat groups of the 3rd Armored Division and two regiments of the 1st Infantry Division. If the West Wall gave way easily, the infantry were to take Aachen and the tanks were to push along a corridor through Stolberg towards Düren on the Rur.

The reconnaissance of 12 September brought no breakthrough: the armoured columns were held up by mines, roadblocks and the dragon’s teeth, and one of them halted for the night at Roetgen. Collins then concluded that the mere appearance of the Americans would not be enough, and on 13 September he launched the attack proper. By evening the 3rd Armored Division had broken through the first, weaker belt of fortifications in front of Aachen (the so-called Scharnhorst Line) in two places, and over the following days it closed up to the second belt and the outskirts of industrial Stolberg. Within a few days the 1st Infantry Division swung round Aachen in a semicircle from the south.

In the city itself chaos reigned. On hearing that the Americans were approaching, Party and state officials, and even the police, fled, abandoning the evacuation of the population that Hitler had ordered for the border zone. Lieutenant General Gerhard von Schwerin, commander of the 116th Panzer Division, who had been entrusted with the defence of the city, halted the evacuation and – as MacDonald relates – handed the only official he found still at his post, a telephone exchange employee, a letter in English addressed to the commander of the American forces that would occupy Aachen, asking for humane treatment of the population. The Americans did not enter the city, however; the letter fell into German hands, and Hitler ordered Schwerin’s arrest. The general was relieved of his command, but he escaped with a reprimand and later commanded a corps in Italy.

Fuel, Antwerp and the dispute over strategy

The Americans arrived at the West Wall exhausted by a pursuit that since the end of August had carried them from the Marne and the Seine to the frontier of the Reich. Their supply lines could not keep up with the front. Supplies were still being landed mainly on the Normandy beaches and at Cherbourg, the railways had been wrecked, and fuel and ammunition were hauled hundreds of kilometres by the truck convoys of the Red Ball Express. The Canadians and British had captured or were besieging the Channel ports, and Antwerp, taken at the beginning of September with its quays almost intact, was useless as long as the Germans held the banks of the Scheldt estuary.

General Dwight Eisenhower, who had assumed direct command of the land forces on 1 September, was conducting a “broad front” advance: all three army groups were to move forward simultaneously. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery demanded that supplies be concentrated on a single powerful thrust in the north towards the Ruhr, while General Omar Bradley and General George Patton wanted the American armies to play that role. On 10 September Eisenhower agreed to Montgomery’s plan to seize the bridges in the Netherlands with an airborne assault and outflank the West Wall from the north. A large share of the stocks went to this operation, launched a week later, which slowed the First Army at Aachen still further. In those same days Roosevelt and Churchill were discussing the war in Europe at the Second Quebec Conference.

On the southern wing Gerow’s V Corps broke through the fortifications in the Eifel and near Wallendorf on 14 September, but the forward combat group of the 5th Armored Division soon had to pull back, and Patton’s Third Army was stuck on the Moselle at Metz. The Germans, who two weeks earlier had seemed beaten, managed by mid-September to plug the gap on their western border. The Germans themselves later called this unexpected revival of their defence the “miracle of the West”.

What came next

The September optimism, in which Allied staff officers predicted the end of the war before Christmas, was dashed at the West Wall. The fighting for the border belt dragged on through the whole of the autumn and winter. On 2 October the US XIX Corps attacked the fortifications north of Aachen, and on 16 October, together with VII Corps, it closed the ring around the city; after heavy street fighting the commandant of Aachen, Colonel Gerhard Wilck, surrendered on 21 October. Aachen, Charlemagne’s old capital, was the first large German city taken by the Allies, but much of it lay in ruins. South of it, in the dense forests between Roetgen and Düren, the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest had been under way since September – one of the bloodiest and least rewarding operations of the US Army in Europe.

In the border hills of the Eifel, where the first American soldiers had crossed in September, the Germans assembled forces in December for the Ardennes offensive, using the fortifications of the West Wall as cover. Only in February and March 1945 did the Allies break through the line along its whole length, reach the Rhine and cross it – first at Remagen, then in the north and the south. The Siegfried Line thus held up the Allies for no more than a few months, but combined with the supply difficulties and the rebuilding of German strength it was enough to ensure that the war in the West, which in September 1944 had seemed close to its end, went on for another eight months.