A squad to Wilson’s right got caught in a minefield. The lieutenant leading it had a leg blown off. Four men who came to help him also set off mines, and each lost a leg. Wilson started over, but the lieutenant yelled at him to stay back. Then the lieutenant began talking calmly to the wounded men around him. One by one he directed them back over the path they had taken into the minefield. One by one, on hands and knee, dragging a stump, they got out. Then the lieutenant dragged himself out.
Wilson had seen a lot, but this was “horribly gruesome. Five young men lying there, each missing a leg.” After the war he declared that the S-mine was “the most frightening weapon of the war, the one that made us sick with fear.”
Behind the minefields were the dragon’s teeth. They rested on a concrete mat between ten and thirty metres wide, sunk a metre or two into the ground to prevent any attempt to tunnel underneath them and place explosive charges. On top of the mat were the teeth themselves, truncated pyramids of reinforced concrete about a metre in height in the front row, to two metres high in the back, staggered in such a manner that a tank could not drive through. Interspersed among the teeth were minefields, barbed wire, and pillboxes virtually impenetrable by artillery and set in such a way as to give the Germans crossing fire across the entire front. The only way to take those pillboxes was to get behind them and attack the rear entry. But behind the first row of pillboxes and dragon’s teeth, there was a second, often a third, sometimes a fourth.
Throughout the length of the Siegfried Line, villages along the border were incorporated into the defence system. The houses, churches, and public buildings were built of stone and brick. The second floors of the buildings and the belfries on the churches provided excellent observation posts.
The US Army had no training for driving Germans out of villages where the streets were jumbled and tanks had difficulty manoeuvring, where gunners had crisscrossing fields of fire. It was going to have to learn such basic things as the first rule of street fighting-stay out of the streets-and the second rule-a systematic, patient approach works, while audacity and risk taking don’t. Reconnaissance pilots, meanwhile, had taken tens of thousands of photographs, creating an intelligence picture almost as complete as that developed for the Normandy beaches. Commanders were given maps that plotted all known strongpoints.
FIRST ARMY’S mission was to break through the Siegfried Line. That route would be along the narrow Aachen corridor, between the fens of Holland to the north and the Hurtgen Forest and Ardennes to the south. To avoid getting caught up in the urban congestion of Aachen, breakthroughs would take place north and south of the city. When the two wings linked to the east, Aachen would be enveloped and could be neutralized.
Aachen had little military value. It was more a trading centre than a manufacturing site. But Aachen’s psychological value was immense. It was the first German city to be threatened, symbolic enough by itself, and a city central to German civilization. The Romans had medicinal spring baths there, the Aquisgranum. It was the city where Charlemagne was born and crowned. It was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire-what Hitler called the First Reich.
Hitler was determined to hold the city and, to do so, sent in the 246th Volksgrenadier Division, about 5,000 boys and old men with a small assortment of tanks, assault guns, and artillery pieces. He ordered the CO, Colonel Gerhard Wilck, to hold the city “to the last man, and if necessary, allow himself to be buried under its ruins.”
For six days prior to jump off, First Army’s heavy artillery pounded forty-five known German pillboxes immediately in front of the American 30th Division. This stripped away camouflage, ripped up the barbed wire obstacles, set off hundreds of mines, and forced the Germans to take cover. Otherwise it had little effect except to let the Germans know where the attack was coming.
H-hour (the planned hour of attack) was set for 1100, October 2. At 0900 hours the American artillery shifted targets from the German front to antiaircraft batteries in the rear, sending up clouds of black smoke that hampered German visibility. Unfortunately, it also hampered American visibility. The 360 medium bombers and 72 fighter-bombers committed to the pre-assault bombing of German positions went astray. Only a half-dozen bombs fell in the target area-almost a total failure.