The attack on Aachen

At 9 a.m. on 2 October 1944 American aircraft appeared over the valley of the little River Wurm, on the Dutch–German border some 14 kilometres north of Aachen. After the air strike and an artillery bombardment, the men of Major General Leland Hobbs’s 30th Infantry Division came down from the hills on the Dutch side, crossed the river on plank footbridges and attacked the first line of German pillboxes between Palenberg and Rimburg Castle. This was the long-prepared attack by Major General Charles H. Corlett’s XIX Corps on the Siegfried Line – the first of two blows intended to close a ring around Aachen.

Popular chronologies state that on this day the American forces launched a “full-scale attack” on the German West Wall. This is a simplification: the fortifications around Aachen had already been attacked in September by VII Corps, which broke through them south-east of the city. What began on 2 October was the first carefully planned, methodical assault on the West Wall, with the participation of aircraft, the corps artillery and freshly reinforced divisions.

The encirclement plan

After the September pursuit through France and Belgium, the US First Army of General Courtney Hodges, part of General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, stood on the German border. During the first battles for the Siegfried Line, in mid-September, the VII Corps of General Joseph Lawton Collins drove into the belt of fortifications south and east of Aachen, around Stolberg, but shortages of fuel and ammunition, diverted north for Operation Market Garden, stopped it halfway. The city found itself inside a semicircle of American positions, open only to the north-east.

Hodges’s plan was simple. XIX Corps was to break through the West Wall north of Aachen and then swing south towards Würselen. Once that attack began to take effect, VII Corps was to strike north from the Eilendorf area, take Verlautenheide – a strongpoint in the second belt of fortifications – and join hands with XIX Corps. The main task in the south fell to the 1st Infantry Division of Major General Clarence Huebner. The Americans did not initially intend to storm the city itself; they expected the cut-off garrison to surrender.

Hobbs chose for his attack a sector little more than a kilometre and a half wide, by the villages of Marienberg and Rimburg, some 5 kilometres south-west of Geilenkirchen. In this way he hoped to avoid the stronger fortifications closer to Geilenkirchen and the dense built-up area of Aachen’s suburbs. On the left, Colonel Walter Johnson’s 117th Infantry was to cross the Wurm south of Marienberg; on the right, Colonel Edwin Sutherland’s 119th Infantry was to cross near Rimburg. Once a bridgehead had been won, Major General Ernest Harmon’s 2nd Armored Division was to cross the river, cover the northern flank and push on eastwards. As a diversion, the 29th Infantry Division feinted an attack north-west of Geilenkirchen, and the 30th Division’s 120th Infantry did the same near the Dutch town of Kerkrade.

The air strike that missed

The attack had been postponed many times – the men of the 30th Division had been waiting in their foxholes above the Wurm since 18 September. From 26 September the artillery methodically shelled pillboxes located from the air and on the ground, and the final postponement was forced by rain, which cut visibility and ruled out air support. The division, which had twice been bombed by mistake by its own air forces in Normandy, had no regrets that this time the heavy bombers would play no part in the attack. According to the US official history (Charles B. MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign), 360 A-20 Havoc and B-26 Marauder medium bombers and 72 P-38 and P-47 fighter-bombers were to take part in the strike.

The effect was negligible. Five bomber groups failed to hit their assigned areas at all, and the rest dropped only part of their loads on target. An hour after the strike began, the commander of the 117th Infantry reported that not a single bomb had fallen in front of his lines. Napalm incendiaries hit the wooded hills behind Rimburg, but the wet forest refused to burn. As the interrogation of prisoners later showed, the strike made little impression on the Germans; some slept through it. General Corlett, judging that without strong support the infantry would not take the fortifications, told his artillery to draw on the ammunition reserved for repelling counter-attacks. More than 400 guns and mortars smothered the battery positions, assembly areas and the first line of pillboxes, and in twelve hours 26 artillery battalions fired 18,696 rounds.

Across the Wurm and through the Palenberg pillboxes

On the left, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Frankland’s 1st Battalion of the 117th Infantry ran down across sodden beet fields towards the river. The heavy machine guns firing on the pillbox embrasures had to use tracer and were quickly spotted – the battalion lost five of its eight. Company C, which reached the river under heavy fire, was pinned down. Beyond the Wurm, the open ground from the railway embankment to the line of pillboxes along the Palenberg–Rimburg road offered no cover at all. Company B nevertheless crossed it in a few minutes, while a rolling barrage kept the Germans in their shelters.

The attack was led by special assault teams with flamethrowers and pole charges, while the rest of the platoons fired at the embrasures. Private Henry E. Hansen, emptying the last of his flamethrower’s tank into the embrasure of a pillbox that everyone thought had already been taken, set off a fire and exploding ammunition inside; a moment later ten Germans came out with their hands up. Company B broke through the first belt of pillboxes, losing only two men in the assault itself. Company A followed, and in the afternoon the 2nd Battalion cleared the German outposts from Marienberg on the Dutch side and moved into Palenberg, a mining town on the far side of the river. Two pillboxes in Palenberg were taken with bazookas and demolition charges, and the rest of the town was fought for house by house. In one of these fights Private Harold G. Kiner threw himself on a German grenade that had landed between him and two comrades and was killed saving their lives; he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. At about 4 p.m. small-arms fire ceased over the spot where the bridge between Marienberg and Palenberg was to be built. The tanks, however, were unable to help the infantry in time: the banks of the Wurm had turned into a bog in which a bulldozer and the tanks towing it got stuck, and the first engineer bridge was not completed until 6.30 p.m.

Below Rimburg Castle

Things went much worse for the 119th Infantry. Its plan depended on prompt tank support, but the culvert the engineers had prepared for the crossing fell apart while being dragged to the river, and when a bridge was finally in place in the afternoon the tanks bogged down in black mud. The first battalion was pinned behind the railway embankment, under fire from pillboxes and trenches in the woods east of Rimburg; whenever the artillery lifted its fire, the Germans ran out of their shelters and reoccupied their field positions. The second battalion, which had lost its footbridges on the way – the men crossed on improvised bridges made of fences and doors – came under fire from Rimburg Castle. By evening it had surrounded the castle on three sides, but the garrison, protected by medieval walls and a moat, would not yield. The third battalion, thrown into the fight in the late afternoon, also failed to get beyond the railway. The regiment ended the day holding a shallow bridgehead a kilometre and a half long and less than 300 metres deep.

On the German side the sector was defended by General Friedrich Köchling’s LXXXI Corps of General Erich Brandenberger’s Seventh Army, and directly by General Wolfgang Lange’s fresh 183rd Volksgrenadier (PL) Division and General Siegfried Macholz’s 49th Infantry Division. The attack took them completely by surprise. Köchling had expected the main blow south-east of Aachen, and the feints by the 29th Division and the 120th Infantry meant that for several hours the commanders of both divisions did not believe that the blow on the narrow sector at Marienberg was the real one. A counter-attack ordered by Lange after dark was delayed by three hours by what the Germans recorded as “murderous” American artillery fire. When it finally went in at midnight, it consisted of a handful of infantry with two assault guns and was beaten off. Köchling, disheartened by this performance, told Lange to confine himself to “sealing off” the breach until stronger reserves arrived. The leading battalion of the 117th Infantry lost 146 men that day, 12 of them killed, and the other battalion committed to the fight lost 70, also including 12 killed.

Aachen – a symbolic city

Aachen had little military importance. It lay in a basin surrounded by hills, it was neither a fortress nor an important road junction, and its railway lines had already been wrecked by Allied air raids. Before the war it had some 165,000 inhabitants; after the British raids of spring 1944 and the successive Nazi evacuation orders issued in haste in September, as American patrols drew near, fewer than 20,000 remained, according to the US official history. Aachen nevertheless carried immense symbolic weight. It was here that Charlemagne resided in the 8th century, and here that he was buried, in the Palatine Chapel he had founded, now part of the cathedral. Between 813 and 1531 more than thirty kings and emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned here – the empire that nationalist tradition, and Nazi propaganda after it, called the “First Reich”. Adolf Hitler, who liked to proclaim that his state would last a thousand years like Charlemagne’s empire, demanded that the city be defended to the last man, house by house.

Inside Aachen at that time was Colonel Gerhard Wilck’s 246th Volksgrenadier Division, which at the end of September had relieved the bled-white 116th Panzer Division there. The latter’s former commander, General Gerhard von Schwerin, had been dismissed after leaving a letter for the American commander in September, when the party authorities had fled the city, asking him to spare the population. According to the US official history, based on German documents, on 7 October the four divisions of LXXXI Corps had a combined strength of some 18,000 infantry and artillery troops.

What came next

On 3 October the 119th Infantry drove the Germans out of the woods near Rimburg, and the 3rd Battalion of the 117th Infantry and Combat Command B of the 2nd Armored Division forced their way into Übach. For the following days the small town was the target of incessant German counter-attacks, broken up by artillery fire, while the bridgehead expanded slowly, pillbox by pillbox. On 7 October the Americans entered Alsdorf and broke through the West Wall to its full depth. According to the US official history, the week of fighting cost the 30th Division and the 2nd Armored Division more than 1,800 men killed, wounded and missing, including about 200 killed, and Combat Command B alone lost 52 medium tanks.

On 8 October, in the south, the 1st Infantry Division went over to the attack, taking Verlautenheide and Crucifix Hill, and on 10 October the Americans called on the Aachen garrison to surrender. When the Germans rejected the ultimatum, the city came under artillery fire and air attack. The ring closed on 16 October near Würselen, and after street fighting Colonel Wilck surrendered on 21 October. Aachen was the first large German city taken by the Western Allies.

The battle that began on the Wurm on 2 October did not, however, fulfil the hopes of a rapid advance to the Rhine. It cost three weeks and thousands of casualties, and south of Aachen the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest had already been under way since September. The Siegfried Line, obsolete and manned by hastily assembled units, combined with the autumn rains, supply problems and the rapid rebuilding of German strength, allowed the Wehrmacht to hold the Allies on the Reich’s western border for the whole of the winter. The Americans did not cross the Roer, the next objective of their armies, until February 1945.