HURTGEN FOREST - NOVEMBER 1944

by David Thibodeau

Late on November 4th, Battery B got the command "March Order!"

March Order in the Field Artillery means "pack up. we're moving out." The rumor was that we were going north to the Aachen, Germany area, and it was to be "the Death Blow" for Germany.

The sour-faced First Sergeant came, however, to tell me it was my turn to go up front with the Forward Observer again. It turned out to be three times and out. We loaded up in a jeep with a new Lieutenant fresh from the states. I will call him Lt. Sonderling*. With us was a man from the Signal Unit named "Blackie."

We rode the jeep hour alter hour in blackout conditions, in with a long line of GMC 6X6 trucks loaded with Infantrymen from the 12th Regiment of our 4th Infantry Division. One truck in front of us slid off the road sideways into a deep ravine, tumbling over and over as it went down, filled with 20 or so soldiers. Maybe those badly hurt were lucky considering what lay ahead for us all.

Long before dawn we disembarked from the jeep and headed into the woods. Our Commanding General, Raymond O. Barton, was dropping off the regiment in relief of the 28th Infantry Division, which had been badly shot up in the Hurtgen Forest. Before the battle was over, three divisions, the 28th, the 4th. and the 9th, had taken 36,000 casualties in about 6 weeks. This was all a month before the famous Battle of the Bulge.

All night long "Blackie" had been regaling Lt. Sonderling with his exploits, and all the limes he had been up front, the souvenirs he had collected, and all about his girl back home.

Sonderling was a strange, distant man. He never looked at you, never responded to "Blackie's" continual high-pitched yakety-yak, never even asked us what our names were. He seemed cold and detached; not a man to inspire confidence.

As we walked into the woods, there was a continual sound of artillery up ahead, like a thunderstorm getting nearer and nearer. But it was we who were getting nearer and nearer to the thunderstorm of artillery and mortar shells.

Pretty soon, "Blackie" began to complain of a sideache. In a few minutes he said he couldn't go on, and sank down by the trail. Sonderling shouldered the radio pack and told Blackie to head back to find the battery. I heard later from King, the man who replaced him, that Blackie was fine when he reached safety.

No more sideache.

The trees in this hemlock forest were shattered, knocked down crisscrossed over each other like jackstraws, few with tops left on them, and the woods, were full of dead bodies, both American and German. We relieved the 28th Division unit by unit, squad by squad, foxhole by foxhole, as it began to get light.

In a couple of hours King arrived, and he and I took up residence in a log bunker the Germans had built, roofed over with earth. The artillery and mortar bursts were almost continuous. A pile of dead Americans was about 20 yards from us, stacked up like logs at a timber landing waiting to be loaded. I still remember the odd impression it gave me to see their boots neatly laced up and tied confused rows. There were five dead Germans in a V-formation just outside our bunker, shot down by American defenders a few days earlier in a futile charge. As it was cold that early November, the gray-faced bodies had not yet begun to decompose. By the second day, as no food or water was coming up, I went out during a lull and took their water canteens.

Eventually we were able to make short trips to get some K-rations, but apart from that King and I stayed in the bunker. We didn't see anything of Sonderling until the 4th morning, November 10, when an attack had been ordered. It had snowed during the night. The objective was a crossroads ahead of us. So we started out, and right away the Infantry guys ran into a minefield of shoe mines. "Schuhmine"' in German.

They blow off one foot, and several men were being carried back screaming, with one foot gone. So everything stopped and the word was the Engineers were going to bring up a Bangalore torpedo to blow a path through the minefield. Everybody laid down in the snow. Sonderling tried to fire an artillery mission, and it seemed to me our shells were landing well to the rear of us, on our own people.

It was a long lime, waiting for those Engineers. A different kind of sound came to our ears, and someone said the Germans were coming, and they were, coming right at us firing their rifles. Our people seemed to panic, and one Browning Automatic Rifleman (BAR Man), threw away his BAR and took off.

BAR GUNNER DIORAMA

King, I, Lt. Sonderling, and the Infantry Company Commander, went back fifty yards or so to the bunker where Sonderling and the Captain had started from. When the Germans got real close, somebody said, "Let's get out of here!" Sonderling gave me a shove and said, "You go first." The entrance to the bunker faced east, toward the approaching Germans.

* Sonderling is a fictitious name. It means "strange" in German.

On the morning of November 10, 1944 I became a statistic MIA. After Lt. Sonderling pushed me out the bunker entrance saying "You go first", I ran past the pile of dead bodies I wrote about last week, then got turned around in the dimly lit, shattered forest, and took shelter in a handy foxhole to get my bearings.

Sonderling had been radioing the fire direction center to fire concentration 242, a prearranged barrage by the whole 42nd Field Artillery Battalion, 16 howitzers in all, to turn back the German attack, but he couldn't get through.

Our 4th Infantry Division has been "gung ho" in the early stages of the Normandy campaign, charging German machine guns, but as it got shot up by about 300% casualties, the men became wary, fearful, sort of demoralized. By the Hurtgen Forest, they were capable of actual panic, and that's what happened when the Germans caught us in the open with their counterattack.

I remembered a Major back at Mortain. When everybody else was hugging the ground in a shallow road, some even crawling under a tank for shelter from the German .88 shellbursts, this Major was standing erect, map in hand, gesticulating in the direction of the Germans. After I was relieved, I heard the next day the Major got a bullet right through both sides of his helmet, smashing his brain.

I waited in the foxhole for things to quiet down, so I could find Lt. Sonderling and King, when I started to hear voices in a strange tongue. I took off my helmet so I could hear better. They set up a machine gun and it traversed back and forth over my head, then I heard the sound of footsteps. I left my helmet off, as I had made up my mind to try to surrender. I had a German P-38 pistol, but didn't intend to shoot it out with an infantry squad. I saw legs go by on the right side, more going by on my left side, then I heard them coming right at me.

I jumped up, bareheaded, with hands raised. The first guy tightened up on his trigger, but didn't fire. A non-com waved me aside. A young Lieutenant, his Luger upraised, asked me "Vere are your comrades?" I replied, "All Kaput."

LUGER P-08
Luger P-08

The Germans appeared to be 16-year olds. They walked along, Mauser rifles at the hip, and a Sergeant motioned me to sit at the base of a tree.

"Vell," he said, "vat did you expect when the Chermans captured you?"
"I expected to be shot," said I.
"Dat is your Jewish propaganda!" he said.
They assigned a sort of developmentally disabled kid to march me back to a big log bunker at a crossroads, filled with German soldiers and officers. They treated me courteously, and one officer offered to trade me his German cigarettes' for my Lucky Strikes, to which I readily agreed.

Concentration 242, which Sonderling had been calling for then came down on the crossroads where we were, and it kept blowing out the candles in the bunker.

There were two other Americans with me by then. The developmentally disabled guy then marched us through the woods to Battalion Headquarters, then we went by truck to Division Headquarters, in a concrete blockhouse. There a General was barking orders over the telephone. When the phone rang, he answered with "Heil Hitler!".

Whe he finished on the phone, he came to look us over. He lifted my pants leg, and noticed with satisfaction that I did not have winter underwear.

HORIZONTAL FLOURISH LINE

 

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