It tried to move forward, but it was like walking into hell. From their bunkers the Germans sent forth a hail of machine-gun fire and mortars. Everything was mud and fir trees. “The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,” Private Clarence Blakeslee recalled, “and the nights were so bad I would pray for daylight.”
For two weeks the 28th kept attacking, as ordered. There were men who broke under the strain, and there were heroes. On November 5 the Germans counterattacked. An unknown GI dashed out of his foxhole, took a bazooka from a dead soldier, and engaged two German tanks. He fired from a range of 25 metres and put one tank out of action. He was never seen again.
By November 13 all the officers in the 28th’s rifle companies had been killed or wounded. Most of them were within a year of their twentieth birthday. Virtually every frontline soldier was a casualty. Colonel Ralph Ingersoll of First Army staff met with lieutenants who had just come out of the Hurtgen: “They did not talk; they just sat across the table and looked at you very straight and unblinking with absolutely no expression in their faces, which were neither tense nor relaxed but completely apathetic. They looked, unblinking.”
GENERALS Bradley and Hodges remained resolute to take the Hurtgen. They put in the 4th Infantry Division. It had led the way onto Utah Beach on June 6 and gone through a score of battles since. In the Hiirtgen the division poured out its lifeblood once again. Between November 7 and December 3, the 4th Division lost over 7,000 men, or about ten per company per day.
Sergeant Mack Morris was there with the 4th: “Hiirtgen had its firebreaks, only wide enough to allow jeeps to pass, and they were mined and interdicted by machine-gun fire. There was a Teller mine every eight paces for three miles. Hurtgen’s roads were blocked. The Germans cut roadblocks from trees. They cut them down so they interlocked as they fell. Then they mined and booby trapped them. Finally they registered their artillery on them, and the mortars, and at the sound of men clearing them, they opened fire. Their strongpoints were constructed carefully, and inside them were neat bunks built of forest wood, and the walls of the bunkers were panelled with wood. These sheltered the defenders. Outside the bunkers were their defensive positions.”
First Army put the 8th Infantry Division into the attack. On November 27 it closed to the town of Hurtgen, the original objective of the offensive. It fell to Lieutenant Paul Boesch, Company G, 121st Infantry, to take the town. When he gave the signal, the company charged. “It was sheer pandemonium,” Boesch recalled. Once out of that forest, the men went mad with battle lust.
Boesch described it as “a wild, terrible, awe-inspiring thing. We dashed, struggled from one building to another shooting, bayoneting, clubbing. Hand grenades roared, fires cracked, buildings to the left and right burned with acrid smoke. Dust, smoke, and powder filled our lungs, making us cough, spit. Automatic weapons chattered while heavier throats of mortars and artillery disgorged deafening explosions. The wounded and dead- men in the uniforms of both sides-lay in grotesque positions at every turn.” The company took nearly 300 prisoners.
The 8th Division didn’t get far beyond Hiirtgen. By December 3 it was used up. A staff officer from the regiment was shocked when he visited the front that day. He reported, “The men of this battalion are physically exhausted. The spirit and will to fight are there; the ability to continue is gone. These men have been fighting without rest or sleep for four days and last night had to lie unprotected from the weather in an open field. They are shivering with cold, and their hands are so numb that they have to help one another on with their equipment. I firmly believe that every man up there should be evacuated through medical channels.”
IN LATE November the 2nd Ranger Battalion entered the forest. Following heavy losses at Pointe-du-Hoc and Omaha Beach on D-Day, and an equally costly campaign in Normandy, the battalion had been attached to various divisions and corps as needed. Although the battalion had taken more than 100 per cent casualties, the core of the force that Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder had led ashore on June 6 was still there. Altogether the battalion had 485 enlisted men and 27 officers, less than half the size of a full-strength battalion.