In late October the Allied Armies in Western Europe faced a serious supply problem. Though the important Belgian port of Antwerp had been taken, the Ger- mans held the banks of the Schelde Estuary, denying access to the port.
The Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, continued his strat- egy of advancing on a broad front and building up along the Rhine River before striking into the heart of Germany. In September he had deviated slightly from this approach when he supported Montgomery's Twenty-first Army Group by sending the U.S. First Army north of the Ardennes.
By November, the drive had slowed around the Germany city of Aachen, but new plans were formulated for the First Army to move into the Rhineland and cross the Rhine River south of Cologne (Köln). A new force, the U.S. Ninth Army under Lt. Gen. William H. Simpson, was to protect the First Army's north flank while Patton's Third Army in the Lorraine advanced along the south flank.
The last major obstacle before the Rhine, in the First Army's area was the Roer River. Because of the heavy rains in the late summer and early fall of 1944, the Roer was swollen. If the German-held dams along the Roer were destroyed, the resulting flood would sweep away bridges and trap any forces that had man- aged to cross the Roer. Earlier the Allies had attempted to destroy the dams by bombing but had failed. Directly in the path of the First Army was the Schwammanuel Dam, some ten kilometers south of the town of Düren.
On October 21, the same day that General Hodges' First Army received its orders, Aachen fell to the Americans after bitter fighting. To Hodges the VII Corps looked like the logical choice for the main effort. Only one big problem remained— the Huertgen Forest, technically known as the Rotgen, Wenau, and Huertgen Forests, but generally dubbed Huertgen by the Americans. Hodges was convinced that the forest had to be taken in order to secure his right flank.
Opposing the Americans in the Huertgen area were elements of the German Seventh Army-LXXIV Korps with its Twelfth, 353d, 344th, 272d, and 275th Volksgrenadier Divisions (VGD), and the Eighty-ninth Infantry Division.
The forest was a gloomy expanse below Aachen where the trees, terrain, and weather multiplied the problems facing the Americans. The roads in the area were poor; the best of them ran north and south, more or less along the top of the ridge lines. The whole forest complex comprised some fifty square miles thick with pine trees. The trees grew close to the roads and left a dense blanket of needles mak- ing the planting of mines and boobytraps relatively easy. The area was cut by ridge lines and deep gullies. The natural defense this afforded was improved by an unusu- ally heavy rainfall, which not only soaked the ground, making it difficult for vehi- cles to move off the roads, but soaked the men as well. Finally, the November late afternoon brought heavy fog and mist. As winter approached, snow and cold fur- ther hampered the attackers.
The atmosphere of the forest was cold, wet, and hostile, littered with emer- gency ration containers, stripped and splintered trees, stacks of unearthed mines along muddy, almost impassable firebreaks and trails, shell and mine craters by the hundreds, and bloated bodies yet to be removed by graves registration. Artillery was especially deadly in the forest as falling shells burst on hitting the tree tops, showering metal all around and not only increasing the effective damage radius of the burst, but turning foxholes without overhead cover into graves.
The town of Schmidt, directly in the path to the Schwammanuel Dam, had to be taken. Lest the main effort be weakened by leaving the responsibility for Schmidt with the VII Corps, General Courtney Hodges transferred the objective to V Corps. Hoping to assist the First Army's drive toward the Rhine by luring enemy strength away from it, Hodges directed the V Corps to attack, if weather permitted, on the first day of November and, regardless of weather, no later than the second. He also directed General Leonard Gerow, V Corps commander, to seize the woodline overlooking the nearby town of Huertgen so that a division of the VII Corps later might use it as a point of departure.
With the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division already in dire straits in the Huert- gen Forest, Gerow turned to a veteran division of heavy fighting in Normandy, the Twenty-eighth. The Twenty-eighth was a Pennsylvania National Guard Divi- sion, known to the Germans as the "Blutiger Eimer" (bloody bucket) after its crim- son Keystone patch (symbolic of the state) and the ferocity of its onslaught near Mortain during the beachhead breakout. As part of the V Corps, the Twenty- eighth had participated in earlier attempts to pierce the Siegfried Line in the Ardennes-Eifel, but since then had been resting near the town of Monschau.
After taking Schmidt, the Twenty-eighth Division was to move into the rear of German positions in the Monschau Corridor. Though intent on husbanding the bulk of the V Corps for a later attack south of the Roer Dams, Gerow never- theless ordered a combat command of the Fifth Armored Division to prepare to attack against the face of the corridor as the Twenty-eighth came in from the rear. Gerow also provided strong reinforcements to the Twenty-eighth Division. In addition to the normal attachments of a battalion each of medium tanks and self- propelled tank destroyers, the division received a battalion of towed tank destroy- ers, a chemical mortar battalion, a detachment of forty-seven "Weasels" (light, highly maneuverable all-terrain type, jeep-size, tracked cargo carriers), and the
entire 1171st Engineer Combat Group of three engineer battalions. A self-propelled 155mm howitzer battalion, a 105mm towed howitzer battalion, and two 155mm towed howitzer battalions were added to the division's artillery complement for direct support. In general support were two batteries of 4.5-inch (114.3mm) guns, two 155mm gun battalions, and one 8-inch (203.2mm) howitzer battalion.
The Twenty-eighth was ordered to use an entire regiment, the 109th, for the task of gaining the woodline overlooking Huertgen on the division's left flank, which would then permit elements of the VII Corps to pass through and take the town. Since the division would require a direct line of supply into the Monschau
Corridor once Schmidt had fallen, its 110th Regiment, on the right flank, was ordered to open secondary roads leading into the corridor through the woods below the village of Richelskaul. This left the Twenty-eighth Infantry Division with only one regiment, the 112th, for making the main thrust to Schmidt.
The First Army's commander, General Hodges, considered the plan "excel- lent." He particularly liked that the thrust to secure the woodline overlooking Huertgen might appear to the enemy to be the main effort. However, the Twenty- eighth's commander, Major General Norman D. Cota, was decidedly unhappy with the attack plan. Cota felt that the dictates for employing his forces imposed by Army and Corps left him with little initiative.
A big, ruddy-faced New Englander whose friends called him "Dutch," Cota had gained a reputation for personal daring and courage while an assistant divi- sion commander in Normandy. Cota had taken over command of the division in August, succeeding Brigadier General James E. Wharton, who had been fatally wounded. But Cota was not one to shirk an assignment, no matter how much he might dislike it.
Cota's dilemma was how best to use the limited freedom left him to over- come the immense difficulties imposed by the divergent missions and by the harsh nature of the terrain. The Roer and subsidiary streams, including the Kall River, sliced the sector into three sharply defined ridges, all of them bald but surrounded by dense forest. Cota's attack first had to move to the Germeter-Vossenack Ridge in the center. Since Cota had no force available to take the ridge on the left, the Brandenberg-Bergstein Ridge, he would have to operate under enemy guns firing from that ridge with no help except from artillery, which had a limited ammuni- tion allotment. Since the third ridge, crowned by Schmidt, was higher than the Germeter-Vossenack Ridge, Cota's troops would have to fight an uphill battle all the way to Schmidt.
The roads—such as they were—ran along the open high ground. A dirt road linked Germeter and Vossenack. From Vossenack, the map showed a narrow cart track, about two meters wide, dropping precipitously to the Kall River, then ris- ing tortuously through a series of hair-pins to the towns of Kommerscheidt and Schmidt. Only light vehicles could negotiate it in its present state. This meant that the engineers would have to widen the trail if tanks were to be able to reinforce the 112th. The existence of this track could not be verified from aerial photographs and had not been confirmed by patrols; yet the Twenty-eighth Division would have to rely on its being there for no other route existed for supplies and armor to reach the troops at their objective. Through Schmidt ran the main highway leading from the Monschau Corridor, the principal supply route for the German Eighty-ninth Division, and another highway leading downhill to the Schwammanuel Dam. Thus the Germans would be better able to bring reinforcements into the area than the Americans.
General Cota hoped that his attached engineer units could open the cart track to tanks and that fighter-bombers could interdict German armor attempt- ing to reach Schmidt. Yet, this would seem unlikely given the generally poor November weather and the short daylight period. In the path of the Twenty-eighth
was the German 275th Division, which had opposed the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division. Moreover, the Twenty-eighth would be making the only attack along some 170 miles of front, thus providing an opportunity for the Germans to inter- vene with all their available reserves at a single point. The Twenty-eighth was going out on a limb, a very thin and unsteady limb.
The Germans were aware of the presence of this new American division but assumed that its objective was the town of Huertgen. Thus they proceeded with plans to relieve the Eighty-ninth Division in the Monschau Corridor. The Eighty- ninth was to be reorganized for use in the forthcoming Ardennes Offensive, and the Schmidt area was to be an important staging area on the north flank of the counteroffensive.
The Twenty-eighth Division's attack was to begin with a preliminary thrust along the Germeter-Huertgen highway to the woodline overlooking Huertgen. At the same time, an infantry battalion was to clear the Vossenack Ridge with the help of tanks. Beginning at noon, the 112th Infantry was to make the main attack from Richelskaul through a wooded draw south of the Vossenack Ridge, across the Kall River, through Kommerscheidt, and then into Schmidt. The 110th Regiment was to attack in the woods below Richelskaul while holding out one battalion to pro- vide a nominal division reserve. Except for assigning a company of tanks for Vosse- nack, General Cota bowed to the difficulties of the terrain and assigned the rest of the tanks and the self-propelled TDs to augment division artillery.
Operating in close support of the 112th Infantry was the 1171st Engineer Combat Group. The engineers were assigned to work on the forest supply trail from Germeter through Vossenack, across the Kali River, and on to Kommer- scheidt and Schmidt. Company B, Twentieth Engineers, was to be responsible for opening and maintaining the road from Richelskaul to Vossenack and on to the Kall River bridge; Company A was charged with bridging the Kall if necessary and opening and maintaining the road from the river through Kommerscheidt to Schmidt. Company C was to be held in battalion reserve in the woods west of Germeter with the stipulation that it could only be committed with the approval of the engineer group commander. The Twenty-ninth Combat Engineers were directed to improve the cart track across the Kall gorge.
Cota charged the engineers with providing security for the trail since no infantry would be available to defend the gorge. The engineers would be the only force to prevent the Germans from cutting the trail and isolating the troops in Kommerscheidt and Schmidt. But they interpreted their orders from General Cota to mean security for their own personnel, and nobody, including Cota, contested this interpretation. The success or failure of the operation hung on the possession of the track across the Kall.
Due to the expected poor condition of the Kall trail and the exposed nature of the Vossenack ridge, engineer vehicles (with the exception of three-quarter-ton weapons carriers and quarter-ton jeeps) were not to accompany the leading engi- neer troops.
When the target jump-off date of November 1 arrived, rain, fog, and mist grounded fighter-bomber support and forced postponement of the assault. Yet,
according to General Hodges' original directive, the attack had to be made the next day, regardless of the weather. The hope that the Twenty-eighth Division might divert German reserves from the main drive by the VII Corps ceased to have any merit as a rationale for the attack on November 1 since the army group com- mander, General Omar Bradley, agreed to postpone the attack of the main corps. Because new divisions scheduled to augment the drive had been slow in arriving, Bradley moved the jump-off date from 5 November to 10 November. Even this date was highly tentative since to insure a big air bombardment, D-Day had to have fair weather. Bradley specified that the main attack begin on 10 November or the first fair day thereafter but in any event no later than 16 November.
That a two-week time difference might be developing between the Twenty- eighth's attack and the corps attack seemed to have gotten little attention. No one seemed to acknowledge that German forces would be free to attack the Twenty- eighth Infantry Division and still be available to oppose the main effort. Hodges made no move either to alter the Twenty-eighth's deadline date or to arrange for help should it run into trouble.