"The great lesson however is to be found embodied in the passage in the Field Service Regulations which warns against "drifting aimlessly into action" for in the last analysis it is to be observed that this battle was unpremeditated and was fought without definite purpose other than the natural one of closing with the enemy at once and upon every occasion." --The 7th Marine Division report of the 1942 Battle on the Matanikau River, Guadalcanal. Casualties, 60 KIA and 100 wounded. There was another, much larger battle in World War II which should not have been fought for the same reasons. Perhaps there were many such battles but the sheer stupidity of this one stands out as a giant amongst dwarves. The battle took its name from the German forest in which it was fought, the Huertgen. Beginning in September, 1944 it raged until December of that year. One hundred and twenty thousand men of the United States First Army plus thousands of replacements would engage the Germans. In a war in which casualties of ten percent were considered severe the troops fighting in the Forest would suffer twenty-five percent. Front line units losses would exceed fifty percent. Fought during the thrust to invade Germany the battle was not even dignified with a name or recognized as a battle until long after the war. Fifty years later I look back and ask why it was fought. Never has the expression "Having lost sight of their goals, they redoubled their efforts!" rung louder or meant more. Background to Blood Bath It began in August when Operation Cobra commenced. The masterful Allied breakout from their beach heads in France, drove Allied forces forward, the stunned Germans reeling before them. Everyone sensed the imminence of a German collapse the western front moved forward in what seemed an unstoppable advance. It was widely believed that the war would soon be over. The mentality at all levels of US command was the same. The Germans were beaten -- all that was needed was to keep the pressure on. Advance, Advance, Advance. Then the First Army hit the Huertgen Forest. Twenty five miles long, five to seven miles wide, it sits on a high plateau eroded by swift streams, like a chain of low mountains. Populated by 75 to 100 foot fir trees so old and growing so close together as to block out the sun, it had fire breaks but few roads. The Forest concealed the German's two final lines of defense the Siegfried and the Schill. Here the Germans could hold. The forest was a defender's dream and an attacker's nightmare. But to planners the Forest was only a twenty five mile segment of over a 120 mile wide advance on Germany. Lt. General Courtney Hodges, the First Army commander, gave it about the same amount of attention. Hodges had assumed command of the First Army's quarter of a million men only a month before when General Omar Bradley took command of 12th Army Group. The First Army was a D-Day veteran with 3 months of combat experience. Perhaps his short time in command of the Army was a contributing factor in the ensuing carnage. Perhaps it was the attrition of his best troops caused by the fighting on D-Day and the ensuing struggle to break out of the beach head and through the hedgerows. Perhaps it was stupidity. The first unit responsible for attacking the Forest was VII Corps commanded by, Major General J. Lawton "Lightning Joe" Collins. On September 12th he ordered the advance into the Forest hoping and expecting to breach the Siegfried and Schill lines before they could be manned. The Siegfried Line was up to three miles wide with mutually supporting concrete and log pill boxes. In the Huertgen they were virtually invisible. Effectively protected from tanks by pyramid shaped concrete "Dragon Teeth" each would require an infantry assault to neutralize. But the Siegfried and Schill Lines lacked one thing for a successful defense as the First Army made a tentative advance towards them. There were only a few German soldiers manning the lines. This omission was quickly corrected by the energetic and able General der Panzertruppen Eric Brandenberger who demanded troops to man the lines. Hitler himself ordered reinforcements to support the West Wall. As American troops entered the Forest two German divisions arrived to challenge the American advance. In the twisted nightmare of the Forest, the battle began. It would not end until three months later. The fighting in the Huertgen was as furious as any in the European Theater. Comparing it to World War I war correspondent Ernest Hemingway called it "Passchendale with tree bursts". "A Witch's Lair" said another historian. Not until five US Army Infantry Divisions -- the 1st, 4th, 8th, 9th,and 28th -- were mauled did the killing stop. The 9th Division lost 4,500 casualties in four weeks, a casualty per yard gained. The 28th suffered 6,000 dead and wounded. Just the attempt to seize the crossroads town of Schmidt in September in the Forest cost the 9th and 28th Divisions almost 10,000 casualties. Their daily advances were measured in yards. The battle evolved into a series of engagements fought over the same real estate for more than three months. In early September, VII Corps attempted to drive between the Forest to its south and the German city of Aachen to its north. This quickly evolved into two battles, one for the city and the other for the Forest. After five days Collins' men had managed an 11 mile wide breach of the Siegfried Line and small penetrations of the Schill line. Brandenburger moved 15,000 German defenders with their artillery into the breach, stiffening the defense. Collins attempted to consolidate and exploit his gains by using his 9th Division to attack the Forest on an east-west axis. One 9th Division mission was to take the high ground occupied by the crossroads town of Schmidt. The casualties were appalling, every attack by the Americans was matched by a counter attack by the Germans. One battalion of the 9th engaged by only by artillery endured 100 casualties. To win the battle for Schmidt and the Forest the Germans continued to send in ad hoc groups of soldiers. Fighting on their own soil, they were resolute. The attack failed and First Army redoubled the push. Major General Leonard T. Gerow's V Corps was ordered to drive through the Forest. He sent in his 28th Infantry Division against Schmidt. Briefly they took the town until Panzers drove them out in a rout. Major General James M. Gavin commander of the 82nd Airborne Division assigned to the sector months later did a reconnaissance of the area the 28th Division had fled from the previous autumn: February 8, 1945. The 82d Airborne Division began operating in the Huertgen Forest. Although I had seen heavy pill box fortifications in Sicily, they were nothing compared to those of the Huertgen Forest. In the Huertgen they were huge... They were dark blending with the trees and the landscape around them; usually they were so covered with leaves and pine needles that they were hardly visible. I was startled when I first realized that I was looking at one ...a short distance away and hadn't realized it was a pill box. In addition to the pill boxes, concertina wires, antipersonnel mines, and, antitank mines, reduced fighting to its most primitive form: man against man at grenade distance. The forest could not be traversed by jeep. The mud was too deep... started down the trail most of the snow had melted... impassable for a jeep due to the wrecked vehicles and tanks. There were four abandoned tank destroyers and five disabled tanks. There were very many dead bodies all wearing the 28th Infantry Division badge... an abandoned aid station with dozens of litter cases... long dead. A hard road with American mines across it and American dead behind them, about ten feet away, a string of German mines with German dead behind them... a dramatic example of what the fighting must have been like in the Huertgen. It was savage, bitter, and at close quarters." A "No-No Question" Asking the V Corps staff "why in the world they had attacked through the Huertgen Forest in the first place?" Gavin was told it was a "no-no question". Observation of the V Corps staff in action convinced Gavin that a significant factor in the disaster was that the V Corps staff didn't have a clue as to the abysmal terrain in which their troops had floundered. They had fought the battle using grease pencils and maps instead of getting out and judging the situation for themselves. If the VII and V Corps staffs were guilty of incompetence, guiltier still was the First Army staff. They had allowed their army to drift into a major engagement with no thought out plan. Even if their troops had successfully traversed the Forest and crossed the Roer River, on its other side, their soldiers would have been at the mercy of the Germans, who stilled controlled the Roer River and its dams. Anyone making the east bank of the river would immediately be isolated from support and supplies by the opening of the dam's floodgates and destroyed. The true importance of the dams was not even recognized until December. What led to the poor staff work at all levels at this stage of the war was the metamorphosis of the battle of Europe? The staffs had become victims of their own success. Preparing for D-Day they had had ample time to plan for every contingency. Even while they were in France holding on to the beachhead and consolidating their gains they still had time for planning. Then the nature of the war suddenly changed from battling it out to a the fluidity of pursuit. After the breakout from Normandy in early August units raced across France quickly outdistancing their radio contact with headquarters and supplies. Events rapidly overtook planning. By the time a staff plan was complete the objective was history. Staff officers slipped into complacency and sloppiness. Their attitude became, "Why plan? The German Army has disintegrated in the west. All that we have to do is give our generals free rein and the war will soon be over." Two thing were wrong with their assumption. From the division level up the German Army still retained its cohesion to a surprising degree. This formed the basis around which units could be organized from available forces. Second, the nature of the battle was changing again. Divisions of the First Army were now charging into a natural defense line so strengthened that negated all the advantages of armor, air, and mobility they had on the Germans. When the Huertgen was reached the war turned from a rout into a battle aginst static defenses. This was not realized at higher American Headquarters until much later. This failure cost the lives of too many men. There were other causes for the disaster. One was "Victory Fever". With the war in its final stages no soldier wanted to be among the last maimed or killed. Another factor was battle fatigue. Battle fatigue casualties rose dramatically in September of 1944. On October 4th General Eisenhower issued his commanders a special report on the subject. While there were certainly many soldiers who feigned the symptoms, -- the thousand yard stare, hysterics, digging a fox hole with their fingers, etc. -- the report concluded the majority of cases were real. The report concluded that the commanders were to blame for the increase. The habit, wrote Eisenhower, "at all levels of command" of consistently sending in their one "best" unit on every tough assignment was a significant cause of the malady. The result was that the "best" units suffered appalling loses in the ranks of their most competent junior officers and NCO's. The core of the team would end up dead or wounded and in their place would be untried strangers from the repo-depots. The surviving veterans would suffer "Burn Out". They'd had enough, the odds of surviving were against them and they lost it. For many of the replacements, strangers in a new group, on their initial action ordered into heavy fighting it was too much to take. They crashed in turn. The study on battle fatigue was a brilliant treatise -- but it came too late. Squads, platoons, companies, and divisions which on D-Day were the "best" became substandard. Now composed of raw replacements and burnt out veterans, their senior commanders were blithrly ignorant of the continuous debilitating effect of the stress and attrition on the unit. Instead they would again order their one "best" unit to take the most difficult objective. General Collins ordered his 3rd Armored Division into the Huertgen on September 12th. It was his best unit. Commanded by Maj. General Maurice Rose, who in Collins' opinion was the "best" divisional commander in the army, the troops accomplished little. After the action their unusual lack of drive was noted and commented on. The same story was repeated by other divisions. An Unknown Battle Thirty three thousand casualties in one small pocket of the European Theater in three months with no gain to show should have been noticed by the press and historians, but it wasn't. To begin with the First Army was press shy. General Bradley was not a publicity hound as was General Patton of the Third Army. Contributing to the invisibility of the battle of the Huertgen Forest was a stunningly unsuccessful airborne assault. Completing the illusion, that it never happened, was the shattering German counter offensive which concealed its end. Five days after First Army sent in it's first reconnaissance Operation Market Garden, the two phased airborne and armor assault crafted by British General Bernard Law Montgomery, began. This thrilling news event captured the attention of war correspondents and the public. If successful it would shorten the war. Montgomery himself said so! Market Garden, failed ten days later with the loss of seventy-six percent of the attacking forces. The attempt and its aftermath ate up news space. If Operation Market Garden concealed the beginning of the unacknowledged battle of Huertgen Forest then the Battle of the Bulge hid it's end. A crushing attack or the last spasm of a dying giant it matters not. Instantly German and American forces and news media focused their attention on the incredible happenings in the Bulge drawing the final shroud around the disaster in the Forest and effectively concealing from view. Even the commander involved were amazingly silent. General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Crusade in Europe recorded that the Battle of the Huertgen Forest was one of the most bitterly contested battles of the entire campaign. "Thereafter, whenever veterans of the American 4th, 9th, and 28th Divisions referred to hard fighting they did so in terms of comparisons with the battle of the Huertgen Forest, which they place at the top of the list". Yet the Supreme Commander never makes any other references to the battle. Bradley is equally silent. His book only obliquely mentions the battle and only in terms of how the earlier loses in men in the Battle of the Huertgen contributed to the German breakthrough in the Bulge. The Bulge The effects Huertgen legacy lived on that winter. The divisions decimated in the Forest had been sent south into the Ardennes to recuperate and re-man. It was a quiet, safe sector. The 28th Division which, in attempting to capture the town of Schmidt sustained 6,184 casualties in the Forest was ordered there to regroup and rearm. The 4th Division was critically under strength and hadn't replaced their previous losses in the Huertgen when the Germans struck. The inability of these weakened units to hold in the Ardennes campaign was a principal factor in the early success of the German offensive implied Bradley in his autobiography. Lessons Learned? Accomplishing nothing, only the maiming and killing of tens of thousands on both sides and setting the stage for the largest European Campaign counter offensive attack. Yet its not remembered because it didn't happen. It wasn't publicized. You don't advertise your mistakes. Hopefully you learn from them. At least that's what the US. Army Command and General Staff School believed. In the 1970's they were using the Battle of the Huertgen Forest as a case study to teach the lessons that it is imperative senior commanders know first hand the conditions under which their troops were fighting and that battles cannot be fought nor won with maps. There is another lesson to be learned here. Have a clear objective. The generals in command of the Huertgen campaign it would appear had the objective of chasing the enemy and gaining territory. But once you as a general or a manager have identified a solution to a problem you are also responsible for revisiting it to see if the situation has changed. The wind blows, armies move, war is fluid. A correct decision made in September may no longer be valid in November. Had the generals done this the months of bloody struggle could have been avoided. First Army could have noted the change in the mode of fighting. They then could of sealed off the Forest with sufficient forces, swung north in relatively prime condition and embarked on a new plan. How much the 33,000 casualties of the Battle of the Huertgen Forest contributed to the later losses endured during the Battle of the Bulge will never be known. Back to Cry Havoc #11 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1995 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com