Excerpts from the U.S. Army
in World War II Series
(Commonly
referred to as the "Green Books”)
Siegfried
Line Campaign: Chapter 14
Objective: Schmidt
Had the Roer
River Dams been an objective of the 9th Division's October attack, it is
logical to assume that some extraordinary effort might have been made to
reinforce the division. As it was, the division commander, General Craig, had a
problem of concentrating enough strength to make a genuine difference between
the projected attack and the one-regiment thrust which the 60th Infantry had
launched without success in September.
Through September the 9th Division had operated on a front stretching from Schevenhuette, near Stolberg, south through the Huertgen Forest and the Monschau Corridor to the Hoefen-Alzen ridge, southeast of Monschau, a distance of almost twenty miles, Even after entry of the Ninth Army into the line in Luxembourg enabled the First Army to adjust its corps frontages, the 9th Division still covered a front of nine miles. One regiment, the 47th Infantry, had to remain on the defensive at Schevenhuette. (Map 6) This left but two regiments free to attack: the, 39th Infantry, which had been relieved in the Monschau Corridor by the 4th Cavalry Group, and the 60th Infantry. Even this concentration would have been impossible had not an attached unit, the 298th Engineer Combat Battalion, held much of the Huertgen Forest front with roadblocks at intervals between Schevenhuette and Deadman's Moor (Todten Bruch).
Hope for success of the 9th Division's attack obviously rested less with American strength than an expectation of German weakness. For all the sacrifices the Huertgen Forest already had exacted from the 60th Infantry, no one yet had accorded any particular respect to the enemy units defending there. The division G-2, Major Houston, estimated that German strength opposite the entire ninemile front totaled no more than 5,000 men representing some fourteen separate home guard and replacement battalions. These, Major Houston believed, possessed no definite regimental organization and probably were no more than loosely and ineffectively knit together under an ersatz division staff. Although German leadership was for the most part excellent, Major Houston remarked, morale was "characteristically low."
[Page 328]
[Page
329]
Basically, American intelligence
estimates were correct. What they failed to remark was that in this kind of
terrain high-level organization and even morale might not count for much.
Until the day after General
Collins directed a new attack, German units opposite the 9th Division had
represented two divisions, the 275th and 353d Infantry Divisions. During the
battle of the Stolberg Corridor in mid-September, the 3534 Division had been
little more than a headquarters attached to the LXXXI Corps; but subsequently
the division had been shifted into the Huertgen Forest,
shored up with conglomerate units, and transferred to the neighboring LXXIV
Corps (General Straube). In the meantime, the 275th
Division had been falling back in front of the XIX U.S. Corps from Maastricht
to the West Wall. After arrival of a new division to occupy the West Wall in
front of the XIX Corps, the LXXXI Corps commander had transferred the remnants
of the 275th Division into the forest near Schevenhuette.
So that defense of the forest might not be weakened by a corps boundary, the
Seventh Army commander, General Brandenberger, had
transferred the 275th Division in place to the LXXIV Corps. During the latter
days of September, both divisions had pursued the laborious task of rebuilding.
On 1 October, as the 9th Division
began to prepare its attack, the commander of the 275th Division, General
Schmidt, unexpectedly received orders to absorb into his division both the
troops and the sector of the 353d Division. Headquarters and noncombatants of
the 353d Division were disengaged. A man who bore the same name as the 9th
Division's objective now became lord of the entire Huertgen
Forest.
The total of General Schmidt's
infantry combat effectives when he first had moved into the Huertgen
Forest was roughly 800. By 3 October, when absorption of the 353d Division was
complete, he could point to a combat strength of 5,000, plus an additional
1,500 men in headquarters and service units. As the 9th Division G-2 had
predicted, regimental organization was shaky; nevertheless, the front had been
formally broken down into three regimental sectors. In the north was the 275th
Division's organic 984th Regiment; in the center, a variety of units from the
353d Division which were to be designated the 985th Infantry Regiment; and in
the south, where the 9th Division was to strike, a former component of the 353d
Division labeled the 253d Regiment. This regiment commanded a colorful array of
unrelated units composed of replacements, Landesschuetzen,
a few combat veterans, and others.
In division reserve, General
Schmidt had a replacement battalion numbering about 200 men and the 275th
Fusilier Battalion with about 400 men. Also available but currently engaged in
constructing defenses near Dueren were about Goo men
under one of the division's organic regiments, the 983d.
For artillery support, General Schmidt had only 13 105-mm. howitzers, 1 210mm. howitzer, and 6 assault guns. Other
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than
bazookas and panzerfausts, the assault guns were the
only weapons available for antitank defense.
Other weapons were almost as
diverse as the men who manned them. Though machine guns and mortars were of
various types, they had enough of neither. Even rifles were of various types
and makes, a fact which further complicated an ammunition supply situation
already acute. All weapons, particularly artillery pieces, had to practice
stringent ammunition economy, though presence in the division sector of an
adequately supplied antiaircraft artillery regiment was to alleviate the
artillery situation somewhat.
During the first week of October,
the 275th Division worked night and day on defensive positions. Mainly these
were field fortifications-log bunkers, foxholes, connecting trenches, wire
entanglements, mine fields, and roadblocks. The line followed generally the Rother Weh and Weisser Weh Creeks which bisect
the approximate center of the forest, though some strong outposts were
established west of the creek beds.
Like the Americans, General Schmidt at this stage apparently took no special cognizance of the Roer River Dams. His mission, as he interpreted it, was to repulse the Americans inside the Huertgen Forest in order to deny access to the high clearings near the Roer which overlook flatlands leading to the Rhine. If he considered any feature within his sector more important than the others, it was the Huertgen-Kleinhau road net which leads to Dueren. Paradoxically, neither adversary in the first big fight to occur in the vicinity of the Roer River Dams apparently was thinking in terms of this important objective.
To
the First Clearing
The American commander, General
Craig, directed attack from positions deep in the forest about a mile west of
the Weisser Weh Creek.
Ordering his two regiments to move abreast, he designated as first objectives
the village of Germeter and settlements of Wittscheidt and Richelskaul,
which lie north and south, respectively, of Germeter.
Capture of these points would sever the main Monschau-Huertgen-Dueren
highway and also provide egress from the forest into the first big clearing
along the projected route to Schmidt.
Attacking toward Wittscheidt and Germeter, the
39th Infantry on the left wing also was to guard against counterattack from
the north from the direction of Huertgen. After
occupying the first objectives, the 39th Infantry was to push on to Vossenack and subsequently southeast across the Kall River gorge to Schmidt. Upon seizure of Richelskaul, the 60th Infantry on the right wing was to
turn south to occupy high ground about two forest-cloaked road junctions.
Control of these points would block enemy movement against the division's
penetration from the direction of the Monschau
Corridor and open the way for a subsequent advance into the flank of the
corridor.
As demonstrated in later fighting
over this same terrain, the weak point in General Craig's plan lay in an
inability to protect the left (northern and northeastern) flank once the 39th
Infantry left Germeter for Vossenack
and subsequently for Schmidt. This flank would stretch eventually to at least
six miles. To help protect it, General Craig would have at
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best but
one battalion in division reserve. This probably would be a battalion of the
60th Infantry which on the first day was to feign attack eastward from a
position near Jaegerhaus, a forester's lodge southwest
of Deadman's Moor (Todten
Bruch).
If General Craig found any
consolation in regard to this situation, it would have been in an erroneous
belief which the division G-2 expressed two days after the attack began.
"It is felt," the G-2 said, "that
should a major breakthrough occur, or should several penetrations occur, the
enemy will begin a withdrawal to the Rhine River, abandoning his Siegfried
Line."20 It was late in the West Wall fighting for this kind of thinking
to persist.
To initiate the attack on
Schmidt, seven squadrons (eighty-four planes) of IX Tactical Air Command
fighter-bombers were to hit three priority targets: first, a heavily forested
plateau between the Weisser Weh
and Germeter, where the enemy had located his main
line of resistance; second, Germeter; and third, the
forest-cloaked road junctions which were the 60th Infantry's final objectives.
Supplemented by three battalions and two additional batteries of corps guns,
9th Division artillery was to follow the air strike with a sharp five-minute
preparation.
Though the attack was scheduled
for 5 October, low-hanging clouds which obscured targets from the
fighter-bombers prompted successive postponements. At noon General Craig called
off the attack until the next day. On 6 October, the weather cleared over the
targets, but local fog over airfields in Belgium persisted. To the infantrymen,
waiting with keyed nerves beneath the dark umbrella of fir branches, it looked
like another dry run. At last, shortly after 1000, a steady drone of planes
drew near.
Against targets marked with red
smoke by the artillery, the bombing began. Diving low, P-47 Thunderbolts of the
365th and 404th Groups struck with precision. Then outgoing shells from the
throats of big artillery pieces stirred the tops of the tall firs. Three
minutes of fire. Five minutes of silence. Two minutes of fire. At 1130, attack.
Men of both regiments discovered
early that the first clearing in the Huertgen Forest
was much farther away in terms of fighting and time than was indicated by the
mile that showed on maps. Still 800 yards west of the Weisser
Weh, the 2d Battalion, 60th Infantry, under Maj.
Lawrence L. Decker, smacked against an outpost position that eventually would
require almost a week to reduce. Though the 39th Infantry pushed back outposts
in its sector, it was a gradual process crowned by even more rigid resistance
from pillboxes along the east slope of the Weisser
Web. The Germans and the forest together were putting a high price on this
little piece of real estate.
Some idea of the stiff asking
price was apparent from the first. One company of the 2d Battalion, engaging
the outpost west of the Weisser Weh,
ended the first day with two officers and sixty men, little more than a
platoon. Though not engaged during the day by small arms fire, another
battalion lost a hundred men to shellbursts in the
trees.
As reflected in casualty figures,
advances were for the most part painfully slow. Because each regimental sector
contained only one trail leading east and because these and the firebreaks were
blocked with mines and felled trees, tanks
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and
other direct fire weapons could not assist. Fighting was reduced to the simple
equation of man against man, rifle against rifle, machine gun against machine
gun. Though supporting artillery averaged about 5,000 rounds a day along the
division front and fighter-bombers were active most of the time, so closely
were the combatants locked that little of this fire could be directed against
those positions posing the immediate problems. Relatively impervious to
shelling themselves, the Germans in their bunkers could direct mortar and
artillery fire to burst in the treetops and spray deadly ricochet fragments
upon the floor of the forest. On the American side, the fight amid the firs was
a plodding exercise in unsupported infantry maneuver.
Two exceptions to the pedestrian
pace developed, both on the second day, 7 October. While P-47's strafed and
bombed Germeter, a company of the 39th Infantry
slipped past German positions on the wooded plateau between the Weisser Weh and Germeter to gain the woods line overlooking the village. In
the face of immediate reaction by fire from Germans in the buildings, the
battalion commander, Colonel Thompson, hesitated to order the company from the
concealment of the woods. Before risking his men in the open astride a main
highway, Colonel Thompson wanted tanks or antitank guns and some means of
supplying them other than by long hand-carry through the woods.
In the 60th Infantry's sector, a
battalion under Colonel Chatfield faced much the same situation. Committed
around a flank of the German outpost that had stymied the 2d Battalion west of
the Weisser Weh, Colonel
Chatfield's men by nightfall were overlooking the settlement of Richelskaul. Like Colonel Thompson, Colonel Chatfield was
reluctant to debouch from the woods without armor or antitank support.
To grant passage for heavier
weapons, engineers worked around the clock clearing firebreaks and trails.
Because the Germans opposing Major Decker's 2d Battalion west of the Weisser Weh continued to hold out
obstinately, the most direct route to the rear for the 60th Infantry was
denied. Supply parties hand-carrying rations and ammunition incurred severe
losses from shelling, antipersonnel mines, and roving patrols. Not until
nightfall of the third day (8 October) did tanks and tank destroyers negotiate
the tortuous terrain to gain the woods line.
From the German viewpoint, an
American offensive in such "extensive, thick, and nearly trackless forest
terrain" had come as a surprise.21 The 275th Division commander, General
Schmidt, nevertheless had marshaled his 275th Fusilier Battalion and committed
it, as the Americans had anticipated, against the north flank of the 39th
Infantry. That regiment took care of the thrust in short order. On 8 October
the 275th Division engineers and 600 men of the 983d Regiment arrived from Dueren to strike Colonel Chatfield's battalion of the 60th
Infantry near Richelskaul. In a case like this, the
Germans instead of the Americans were prey to tree bursts and other confusions
of the forest. They fell back in disorder.
By 8 October German shelling had
increased. It stemmed from an order by the LXXIV Corps commander, General Straube, that
more than doubled the 275th Division's original artillery strength. General Straube directed support from batteries of the neighboring
89th Division,
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an
antiaircraft artillery regiment, and a volks
artillery corps.
The Seventh Army commander,
General Brandenberger, provided meager assistance in
the form of two fortress infantry battalions, but both battalions incurred
forbidding losses on the first day of commitment. By the end of the third day
the Germans still maintained a continuous line along the west edge of the first
clearing at Wittscheidt, Germeter,
and Richelskaul, but further counterattacks before
additional reserves could arrive were out of the question. The impoverished
state of German reserves was illustrated dramatically on 9 October when two
companies of overage policemen from Dueren were
thrust into the line near Wittscheidt.
The Germans in the Huertgen Forest were convinced that they faced an enemy
with a well-nigh unlimited supply of topnotch, rested, and well-equipped
combat troops specially trained and experienced in forest fighting. That the
two regiments of the 9th Division could create an impression so different from
the fact of a tired, overextended division, replete with inexperienced
replacements, represents perhaps the highest tribute that can be paid them. The
Germans were awed particularly by the efficiency of American communications as
manifested by lightning shifts and adjustments in artillery fires.
After tanks and tank destroyers
at last reached both American regiments late on 8 October, plans progressed to
break out of the forest into the first clearing the next day. At Richelskaul, Colonel Chatfield's battalion attacked in a
wedge formation behind a platoon of medium tanks. Their machine guns and cannon
blazing, the tanks stormed so quickly from the forest that the Germans had
virtually no chance to fight back. When a lieutenant dared to rise from his
foxhole to fire a panzerfaust, one of the tank
gunners sliced him in half with a round from his 75. So demoralized were the
other Germans that almost a hundred surrendered and others fled. A count
revealed fifty German dead.
In the sector of the 39th
Infantry, another day was needed before both attacking battalions could build
up along the woods line. Only two platoons that occupied westernmost buildings
of Wittscheidt emerged from the woods on 9 October.
Before dawn the next morning, a local counterattack apparently staged by a
conglomerate German force overran these platoons. Retaking the position with
the aid of tanks was all that could be accomplished here during the rest of 10 October. Of the
two platoons, which had totaled forty-eight men, only
one body was found.
Wariness over this action on the
regimental north wing forestalled any major offensive action by Colonel
Thompson's battalion at Germeter until early
afternoon when patrols reported that the Germans had withdrawn. Advancing
cautiously into the village, the battalion found only enemy dead. After five
days the 39th Infantry at last had gained one of its first objectives. From the
line of departure west of the Weisser Weh to the first clearing, the forest fighting had cost the
9th Division's two regiments together almost a
thousand men.
Toward
Raffelsbrand and Vossenack
Having gained the first clearing
a day ahead of the 39th Infantry, the 60th Infantry began the second leg of the
attack on 10 October even as the other regiment
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was
moving into Germeter. Shifting his reserve battalion
to hold Richelskaul, the regimental commander, Col.
John G. Van Houten, directed Colonel Chatfield to
re-enter the woods to secure the first of the two road junctions which were the
regiment's final objectives. The first was near Raffelsbrand,
a forester's lodge about a mile southwest of Richelskaul.
As Colonel Chatfield's battalion
attacked soon after noon on 10 October, the first impression was of dreary
repetition of the pedestrian pace which had prevailed most of the time
elsewhere in the forest. Then suddenly, as one company knocked out a pillbox
near the road leading from Richelskaul to Raffelsbrand, the drive picked up momentum. Urging their
men forward, the company commanders unhesitatingly bypassed enemy strongpoints.
The Germans began to surrender in bunches. In less than three hours Colonel
Chatfield's men seized the road junction and staked claim to the wooded high
ground around it. They had taken more than a hundred prisoners.
Despite this creditable
operation, as night fell Colonel Van Houten must have
considered his regiment in an unenviable position. His reserve committed at Richelskaul, he had no force available to prevent the
Germans cutting in behind Colonel Chatfield's advanced position. The 2d
Battalion, commanded now by Maj. Quentin R. Hardage,
still was engaged west of the Weisser Weh against the German outpost which since the opening day
of the offensive had shown no signs of collapse. Continued attacks against the
position had shrunk the battalion alarmingly.
Before daylight the next morning,
11 October, German action began to emphasize these concerns. A company-size
counterattack struck Colonel Chatfield's position at Raffelsbrand.
Though beaten off, the enemy maintained pressure here the rest of the day and
crowned it just before dark with a bayonet charge. Although tanks and tank
destroyers passed the roadblocks to reach Raffelsbrand,
their presence complicated the supply picture. As expected, German patrols and
snipers made supply through the thick forest a hazardous task.
Taking the risk of defending Richelskaul with but one company, Colonel Van Houten sent the rest of his "reserve" battalion
in midmorning to attack northwest from Raffelsbrand
toward the regiment's remaining objective, Road junction 471. This road
junction lies not quite half the distance between the two forester's lodges of Raffelsbrand and Jaegerhaus.
Hope that this move might develop
into a rapid thrust like Colonel Chatfield's was stymied, a direct result of
the fact that Colonel Chatfield's battalion had advanced so quickly the day before.
Of two companies which headed for Road junction 471, one became fruitlessly
embroiled with pillboxes which had not been cleared along the Richelskaul-Raffelsbrand road. The other became similarly
engaged with a pillbox in rear of the Raffelsbrand position.
Events on 11 October might have
proved thoroughly discouraging had not Major Hardage's
2d Battalion west of the Weisser Weh
at last begun to detect signs of collapse in the outpost that had thwarted the
battalion for five days. Driving southward against a flank of the outpost, the
battalion began to make measured but steady progress. By the end of the day,
the Germans had fallen back about 800 yards. While the weary
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riflemen
probably could detect little difference between one forest-cloaked piece of
terrain and another, the battalion's position at nightfall actually posed a
threat to the remaining regimental objective, Road junction 471.
Reports from prisoners that they
had received no reinforcements and had not eaten for three days somewhat dimmed
the luster of this advance; yet Major Hardage's
battalion after five days of Huertgen Forest fighting
was almost as depleted as the enemy unit. Any numerical advantage the Americans
may have possessed lay only in bug-eyed replacements who
had begun to arrive in small, frightened bunches.
Like the others of the two
regiments when they first entered the Huertgen
Forest, these replacements had to adjust themselves to the tricks of woods
fighting. Protection against shells that burst in the treetops was the main
thing. Foxholes, the men soon learned, meant little unless roofed with logs and
sod. If caught by shelling while out of a foxhole, your best bet was not to
fall flat but to stand or crouch close against the base of a tree so that the
smallest possible body surface would be exposed to fragments from above. As
anyone would tell you, moving about at night was tantamount to suicide.
Adjusting artillery and mortar fire by sight was impossible, even with the aid
of smoke shells. You had to rely on sound. If you had a map, you might
determine your position in the forest by means of cement survey markers to be
found at intersections of firebreaks. Numbers on these corresponded to numbered
squares on the map. Without a map, you had to depend on a compass-if you had a
compass. There was a lot to learn in the Huertgen
Forest.
While the 60th Infantry
re-entered the forest to seize the road junctions southwest of Richelskaul, the 39th Infantry attempted to move into the
open, to advance across fields from Germeter to the
regiment's second objective, the village of Vossenack.
From Vossenack the 39th Infantry was to continue
southeastward across the Kall gorge to Schmidt, the
final objective.
In this instance, men of the 39th
Infantry found that the thick forest which they hated actually might be
employed to advantage. During 11 October several attempts by Colonel Thompson's
battalion in Germeter to move across open ground to Vossenack accomplished nothing. Each time German assault
guns in Vossenack exacted a prohibitive toll of
Thompson's supporting tanks. Yet at the same time another battalion under Lt.
Col. R. H. Stumpf advanced under the cloak of a
wooded draw from Wittscheidt to a position north of Vossenack, only a few hundred yards from the objective.
Though delayed at first by a
severe shelling, once Colonel Stumpf's battalion
entered the woods east of Wittscheidt, the men found
surprisingly light resistance. By late afternoon the battalion had advanced
almost a mile apparently undetected, and was ready to emerge from the woods
onto an open nose of the Vossenack ridge northeast of
the village, where it could cut off the objective from the rear.
Despite the encouragement
provided by this battalion's success, the 9th Division commander, General
Craig, was cautious. To defeat Colonel Stumpf's move
against Vossenack, all the Germans had to do was to
hold fast in the village while striking with another force from the north into
the rear of Stumpf's battalion. General Craig
directed that Colonel Stumpf delay until
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the next
day when Colonel Thompson's battalion in Germeter
might hit Vossenack simultaneously from the west.
As night came on 11 October
Colonel Stumpf's battalion was stretched in an
elongated column of companies through the woods north of Vossenack.
This put a maximum strain on still another battalion of the 39th Infantry that
heretofore had not participated in offensive thrusts eastward, yet had been
heavily engaged nevertheless. Commanded by Lt. Col. Frank L. Gunn, this
battalion had been charged with protecting the regimental north flank against
likely counterattacks from the direction of Huertgen.
This was no minor task, as Colonel Gunn soon discovered. Though the 298th Engineers and
the 9th Division's reconnaissance troop assumed responsibility for blocking the
Weisser Weh draw, Colonel
Gunn's companies still became overextended. After Colonel Stumpf's battalion had moved fingerlike into the woods
north of Vossenack, Colonel Gunn not only had to
defend Wittscheidt but also had to send a company
east of the highway to maintain contact with the tail of Stumpf's
battalion.
Plans for 12 October were for
Major Hardage's 2d Battalion, 60th Infantry, to
continue southward down the Weisser Weh to Road junction 471 and for the 39th Infantry to
launch a co-ordinated, two-battalion attack against Vossenack. Though no battalion of the two regiments could
field more than 300 men and neither the regiments nor the division had other than
a nominal reserve, prospects for success on 12 October were relatively bright.
Both the preceding days had brought undeniable cracks in German defenses.
Regiment
Wegelein
Though persisting in the belief
that the enemy's over-all policy was withdrawal, the 9th Division G-2 noted
that the enemy's more immediate concern was to re-establish a Huertgen Forest line similar to that which had existed
before the 9th Division's attack. The most likely direction for a counterattack
to take to accomplish this, the G-2 remarked, was from the northeast against
the 39th Infantry, probably from Huertgen. In
addition, the enemy might counterattack the 60th Infantry with a complementary
drive from the south.
As to the enemy's immediate
plans, the 9th Division G-2 hardly could have been more prescient, even had he
known that on 10 October the enemy commander, General Schmidt, had been honored
by visitors who had promised help. These were the army and corps commanders,
Generals Brandenberger and Straube,
who had informed Schmidt they would send him a regiment with which to
counterattack on 12 October.
During the night of 11 October
trucks carrying 2,000 men of Regiment Wegelein rolled
north from former positions along the Luxembourg border. Commanded by a colonel
from whom the regiment drew its name, the' unit was well equipped with machine
guns and heavy and medium mortars. The men were of good quality, about half of
them officer candidates. General Schmidt had reason to expect big things from
the counterattack on 12 October.
Behind a brief but concentrated
artillery preparation, Colonel Wegelein launched his
counterattack at 0700 due southward along the wooded plateau between the
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Weisser Weh
and the Germeter-Huertgen highway. The
objective of Richelskaul appeared at first to be
within easy reach. Quickly enveloping a part of Colonel Gunn's overextended
battalion of the 39th Infantry, the Germans poured through to cut an east-west
trail leading into Germeter, a trail which served as
the 39th Infantry's main supply route.
The 39th Infantry commander,
Colonel Bond, had virtually no reserve to throw against the penetration. Receiving an erroneous report
that the engineer roadblock on the Weisser Weh road had been overrun, he requested the 298th
Engineers to send their reserve there. He told Colonel Thompson, whose
positions at Germeter were under pressure by fire, to
release two platoons to Colonel Gunn's assistance. These two platoons actually
had a strength no greater than one. Judging from the
wording of this order, Colonel Bond believed Colonel Stumpf's
battalion in the fingerlike formation north of Vossenack
also to be under attack. In reality, Colonel Stumpf
had experienced no enemy action and knew virtually nothing about what was going
on to his rear.
For his part, General Craig
alerted the division reserve-which consisted of a portion of the division
reconnaissance troop and a platoon of light tanks. Acting on his own
initiative, the reconnaissance troop commander actually committed the reserve
to cover the 39th Infantry's exposed left flank. Though General Craig approved
the move, it left him with no semblance of a division reserve. In early
afternoon he sought to remedy the situation by directing that the 47th Infantry
at Schevenhuette withdraw two companies to create a
motorized reserve.22
For reasons that at the time
appeared inexplicable, Regiment Wegelein failed to
advance farther than the east-west trail leading into Germeter.
The 275th Division commander, General Schmidt, said later that the battalion
commanders were to blame. Yet prisoners, including a loquacious adjutant, said
the fault lay in inadequate communications. Colonel Wegelein
had protested the communications arrangement before the attack, the prisoners
said, but General Schmidt would not sanction a delay to set it right. American
artillery fire had quickly dealt a death blow to a communications system that
was shaky from the start.
Perhaps the genuine explanation
lay in a combination of these two factors, plus the fact that confusion in the Huertgen Forest was not confined to the American side.
Tenacious resistance by little knots of men in Colonel Gunn's battalion no
doubt had contributed to the enemy's confusion. Although enveloped in early
stages of the counterattack, Colonel Gunn's Ammunition and Pioneer Platoon and
a platoon of Company G had held out in little islands of resistance while the
Germans surged around them. Other groups also had continued to fight, though
surrounded, including four men, three officers, and the crew of a heavy machine
gun who represented Colonel Gunn's advance command group.
Unaware of the problem on the
German side, Colonel Bond in midafternoon ordered Colonel Stumpf
to withdraw from his salient in the woods north of Vossenack,
leave one company east of the Huertgen highway to
strengthen defense of Wittscheidt, and with the rest
of his battalion attack the German penetration from the east. By nightfall Stumpf was poised for an attack the next morning, 13
October.
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