The fighting in the Hürtgen Forest

At the end of October 1944, while General Courtney Hodges’s US First Army was regrouping after the capture of Aachen, another attack was being prepared south-east of the city, in a place the soldiers had already come to hate. In the last days of the month Major General Norman Cota’s 28th Infantry Division relieved the bled-white 9th Division on the edge of the Hürtgen Forest and prepared an attack on the small town of Schmidt, planned for 31 October and postponed to 2 November because of the weather.

War chronologies record under 27 October that the battle in the Hürtgen Forest was “developing” and would go on through October and November, with the last attacks coming in December. The date should be read as a nominal one: the fighting in the forest had been going on since 19 September, the heaviest came in November, and the last American attacks in December were cut short by the German Ardennes offensive. The Americans did not fully clear the forest itself until February 1945. The battle, which the American historian Charles B. MacDonald, himself a veteran of the fighting on the Western Front, called “misconceived and basically fruitless”, cost the US Army, by the most commonly cited estimates, some 33,000 killed, wounded, missing and non-battle casualties.

The forest

The Hürtgen Forest (Hürtgenwald) is a belt of dense spruce woods, largely planted, on the northern edge of the Eifel, between Aachen, Monschau and Düren. American accounts put the battle area at about 130 square kilometres. The ground consisted of high ridges cut by deep, steep stream valleys, the deepest of which was the valley of the Kall. There were few roads, and those that existed ran along the ridges or along the bottoms of ravines and were easy to block. The treetops closed in so densely that even at midday the forest lay in half-darkness, and aircraft and artillery could not see their targets.

The fortifications of the Siegfried Line ran through the forest, but the conditions created by nature proved more important than the bunkers. The Germans covered the firebreaks with weapon pits, mined the roads and tracks, and ranged their artillery so that the shells burst in the treetops. Shell splinters and wood splinters then rained down on the soldiers, and the infantryman’s usual instinct – to throw himself flat – only increased the danger. The Americans were taught to stand pressed against a tree trunk during shelling and to roof their foxholes with logs. Tanks bogged down in the mud and on the forest tracks, and radio communications in the ravines often failed.

September and October: the 9th Division

The fighting in the forest was originally an adjunct to the September attack on the Siegfried Line. General J. Lawton Collins’s VII Corps was breaking through the fortifications south of Aachen, and its headquarters feared that the Germans might strike the corps’ right flank from behind the trees. On 19 September elements of Major General Louis A. Craig’s 9th Infantry Division – the same Craig who in early 1944 had been organising XXIII Corps – entered the forest to clear it of the enemy and break out into open country towards Düren. They quickly learned that in this terrain a single German battalion could stop a regiment.

After a fortnight or so of stalled attacks, the First Army concluded that taking the ridge with the villages of Germeter, Vossenack and Schmidt would open the way into the depths of Germany and secure the flank of the coming offensive towards the Rhine. On 6 October two regiments of the 9th Division set off towards Schmidt. In ten days of fighting they advanced less than 3 kilometres and by 16 October had lost, according to the Army’s official history, about 4,500 men – more than one soldier for every metre of ground gained. The division came out of the forest exhausted and in the last days of October handed its sector over to the 28th Division.

Yet the aim of the fighting in the forest was not only ground. On the upper Roer and its tributary the Urft lay great dams, the largest of which, the Schwammenauel, stood near Schmidt. As long as they remained in German hands, the Germans could at any moment open the sluices or blow the dams and flood the Roer valley, cutting off any troops that had crossed the river lower down. The dams clearly appeared as an objective in American documents only at the turn of October and November; historians still argue over why so late, and whether it would not have been better to attack them from the south rather than through the forest.

The German defence

On the German side the forest was initially defended by General of Infantry Erich Straube’s depleted LXXIV Corps, part of the Seventh Army and of Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B. The main burden of the fighting in October was borne by Lieutenant General Hans Schmidt’s 275th Infantry Division, made up of the remnants of units shattered in France, topped up with training regiments, fortress battalions and even units formed from Luftwaffe personnel. The German divisions were weak, but the forest cancelled out the Americans’ superiority in tanks, aircraft and artillery, and short supply lines allowed reserves to be brought up quickly.

Model understood the importance of the dams and had no intention of giving up Schmidt without a fight. When the 28th Division went over to the attack on 2 November, he and his army and corps commanders were conducting a map exercise at Schloss Schlenderhan near Cologne, whose scenario envisaged precisely an American attack in this area. On hearing of the attack Model broke off the exercise and immediately sent the 116th Panzer Division into the forest.

November: Schmidt and Kommerscheidt

The attack of the 28th Division, carried out as part of V Corps, looked simple on paper; in reality the division had to strike in three diverging directions at once. On 2 November its 112th Infantry Regiment took Vossenack, and the next day it went down into the Kall valley, crossed to the far side and took Kommerscheidt and Schmidt. The only supply route was a narrow, muddy trail through the Kall gorge, along which tanks could pass only with the greatest difficulty – several of them slid off the embankment and blocked the way. On 4 November units of the 89th Infantry Division and the 116th Panzer Division counter-attacked and retook Schmidt. The Americans held out for a few more days in Kommerscheidt, but during the night of 7–8 November the remnants of the regiment withdrew through the Kall valley. According to the official history, the 28th Division lost more than 6,000 men in this attack; it was one of the costliest single attacks by an American division in the whole war.

On 16 November the First and Ninth Armies launched a great offensive towards the Roer, preceded by one of the heaviest air bombardments ever flown in support of ground forces. In the Hürtgen Forest the attack was carried by the 4th Infantry Division, then the 8th and 83rd Divisions, and at the end of the month also the 5th Armored Division. The village of Hürtgen was taken on 28 November, and on 5 December units of the 5th Armored Division took Bergstein. On 7 December the 2nd Ranger Battalion stormed Hill 400 (Castle Hill), which dominated the surrounding area, and beat off German counter-attacks under heavy fire. According to MacDonald, the 4th Division lost about 4,000 men in combat in this fighting and more than 2,000 to sickness and exhaustion. Among its soldiers was Sergeant J. D. Salinger, and among the correspondents accompanying one of its regiments was Ernest Hemingway.

In November and December the weather added to the battle casualties: rain, snow and cold brought thousands of cases of trench foot, pneumonia and combat exhaustion. Divisions came out of the forest with rifle companies in which only a few dozen men of the original strength remained.

Place in the war

The last American attacks in the area of the forest were cut short on 16 December 1944 by the German offensive in the Ardennes, launched only a few dozen kilometres to the south. The Roer dams remained in German hands until February 1945. The 78th Infantry Division did not take the Schwammenauel dam until 10 February, and the Germans had time to wreck the discharge valves. The water flooded the Roer valley and delayed the Ninth Army’s offensive across the river by almost two weeks. For this reason 10 February 1945 is sometimes given as the nominal end of the battle, although some authors end it on 16 December 1944.

Estimates of the losses vary depending on which divisions and which months are counted. The most commonly cited figure is some 33,000 American soldiers killed, wounded, missing and put out of action by sickness and exhaustion, and some accounts give more than 50,000. German losses are estimated at about 28,000 men. Some historians regard the Hürtgen Forest as the US Army’s costliest battle in Europe after the Ardennes.

After the war the battle came in for sharp criticism. MacDonald and other authors accused the command of the First Army and of General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group of feeding division after division into terrain that robbed the Americans of all their advantages, instead of bypassing the forest or striking at the dams from the start. Defenders of Hodges’s decisions point out that leaving the forest in German hands would have threatened the flank of the troops advancing across the plain east of Aachen, and that German defence – as the fighting for Aachen showed – also held up the Americans in open country. The dispute has never been settled, and the Hürtgen Forest has remained in American memory a symbol of the senselessly costly fighting of the autumn of 1944. On the German side, the defence of the forest was regarded as an example of the effective use of terrain by weak, decimated divisions that bought time to prepare the Ardennes offensive.