Lieutenant Colonel John C. Harrison (who later became a justice of the Montana Supreme Court) was a 31-year-old Montana State University graduate, acting as liaison officer with corps headquarters. On October 22 he went into Aachen to report on the damage. He wrote in his diary, “If every German city that we pass through looks like this one the Hun is going to be busy for centuries rebuilding his country.”
Harrison saw not one undamaged building. The streets were impassable. It made him feel good. “I thought how odd it is that I would feel good at seeing human misery but I did feel that way, for here was the war being brought to the German in all of its destructive horror. The war has truly come to Germany and pictures of these terrible scenes should be dropped over the entire country to show them what is in store for them if they continue.”
Chapter Six
Metz and the Hurtgen Forest:
November 1-December 15, 1944
NORTHWEST Europe in November and December was a miserable place. A mixture of sleet, snow, rain, cold, fog, and flood. The already poor roads were churned into quagmires by military vehicles; veterans speak of the mud as knee-deep and insist that it is true.
In the centre of the American line, in the Ardennes, portions of First Army did go into something like winter camp. It was a lightly held, quiet area, where divisions just coming into the line could be placed to give them some frontline experience. The terrain made it the least likely area the Germans might counterattack. All was quiet there. But north and south of the Ardennes, First and Third armies were on the offensive, the weather be damned.
Replacements were steadily coming onto the line from England. The new divisions were made up of the high school classes of 1942,1943, and 1944. The training these young men had gone through stateside was rigorous physically but severely short on the tactical and leadership challenges the junior officers would have to meet.
Paul Fussell was a twenty-year-old lieutenant in command of a rifle platoon in the 103rd Division. He found the six months’ training in the States to be repetitious and unrealistic. In the field, “our stock-in-trade was the elementary fire-and-flank manoeuvre hammered into us over and over at Benning. It was very simple. With half your platoon you establish a firing line to keep your enemy’s heads down while you lead the other half around to the enemy’s flank for a sudden surprise assault, preferably with bayonets and shouting. We all did grasp the idea,” Fussell remembered, “but in combat it had one single defect, namely the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy’s flank is. If you get up and go looking for it. you’ll be killed.” Nevertheless, Fussell saw the positive benefit to doing fire and movement over and over: “It did have the effect of persuading us that such an attack could be led successfully and that we were the people who could do it. That was good for our self-respect and our courage.”
Fussell was a rich kid from southern California who had a couple of years of college and some professional journalism behind him. There were hundreds of young officers like Fussell, lieutenants who came into Europe in the fall of 1944 to take up the fighting. Bright kids. The quarterback on the championship high school football team. The president of his class. The chess champion. The lead in the class play. The wizard in the chemistry class. America was throwing her finest young men at the Germans.
AMONG THE fresh divisions was the 84th Infantry. It came into France on November 2, assigned to the new US Ninth Army, which had taken over a narrow part of the front. The 84th’s K Company, 333rd Regiment, was outside Geilenkirchen, some twenty kilometres north of Aachen.
“K Company was an American mass-production item,” one of its officers remarked, “fresh off the assembly line.” It certainly was representative. There were men who could neither read nor write, along with privates from Yale and Harvard, class of 1946.
K company’s first offensive was Operation Clipper. The 84th’s mission was to seize the high ground east of Geilenkirchen along the Siegfried, in conjunction with a British offensive to the left (north). For Clipper the 84th was under the command of British general Brian Horrocks. To K Company what that meant, mostly, was a daily rum ration, about half a canteen cup.