The Hürtgen Forest, also known as the “killing field.”
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest is an epic disaster for Salinger and the 4th Division; casualties are staggering for the U.S. Army. Salinger’s literary tone turns shell-shocked, a muted elegy for the innumerable GIs, including himself, lost in the slaughter.
ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger’s 4th Division entered the Hürtgen Forest on November 6, 1944. It was incredibly eerie, almost medieval. Primal fears came out in the Hürtgen Forest.
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: Just south of Aachen lay the Hürtgen Forest. Roughly fifty square miles, it sat along the German-Belgian border, within a triangle outlined by Aachen, Monschau, and Düren. The Roer River ran along the eastern edge of the Hürtgen. Beyond it was the Rhine. The U.S. First Army wanted to [get close] to the Rhine, which General James Hodges decided required driving the Germans out of the forest.
Generals Omar Bradley and Hodges remained resolute to take the Hürtgen. 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. Not many D-Day veterans were still with the division; most were dead or badly wounded. In the Hürtgen, the division poured out its lifeblood again.
If the Americans ever got down into the river valley, the Germans could have been bypassed to the south, with the dams as the objective. The forest without the dams was worthless; the dams without the forest were priceless. But the generals got it backward and went for the forest. Thus did the Battle of Hürtgen Forest get started on the basis of a plan that was grossly, even criminally stupid.
The Hürtgen Forest, also known as the “killing field.”
EDWARD G. MILLER: The decision to fight originated in the heady days of Allied optimism in the late summer of 1944. The unexpected success of the Normandy breakout led the GIs of the First Army’s VII Corps (and the rest of the Allies for that matter) to believe they were fighting a defeated enemy. The Americans were eager to smash through the German border defenses and cross the Rhine. Barring the way to the Rhine, however, was the Roer River. Between the VII Corps and the Roer was a densely populated, but narrow, terrain corridor and a large forested area south of Aachen.
WERNER KLEEMAN: My opinion was, it was a waste of time to fight in the Hürtgen forest. If you have to get to the area behind it, go around; don’t go through it. The Germans knew every road and they had artillery shells that exploded so that the tree branches would come down and kill soldiers. That, to me, was a suicide mission.
LIEUTENANT GEORGE WILSON: The country was obstacle enough in itself, yet the Germans had two additional advantages. They always knew exactly where we were, having just left there themselves, and thus easily called down shelling on us. They also had prepared in advance a series of defensive positions. Their bunkers were made of thick logs with a few feet of dirt on top. The bunkers were almost immune to artillery which had to arc in overhead. Tree bursts bothered them very little, and there was no chance of our tanks getting anywhere near them for direct fire. The infantry had to take them the hard way, going in after them one at a time, sometimes through barbed wire.
ALEX KERSHAW: The Germans used tree bursts, timing the fuses on 88-millimeter artillery shells so the shell would explode in the treetops. The explosion would rain thousands upon thousands of shards of wood and hot metal shrapnel on the men below.
MAJOR GENERAL RAYMOND G. BARTON: Added to the natural obstacles of tall, closely knit woods, steep hillsides and lack of roads were deliberate mine fields, wire entanglements and booby traps planted by the enemy during the weeks of inactivity in this sector. Continuous rain, snow and freezing weather severely hampered our operations, and during the next month the regiment suffered as many casualties from trench foot and exposure as it did from battle.
ALEX KERSHAW: They called it the meat factory, because it ground up so many Americans. Guys were dying, one per yard.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM GAYLE: The companies moved through the same bit of woods, were pinned down in front of the enemy wire, cut to pieces by the unremitting and inescapable tree bursts, [and] in the afternoon [they] went back to the holes they had left in the morning . . . to spend another cold night in icy water.
American troops advancing in the Hürtgen Forest.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: Higher commanders had regarded the objectives given the 12th Infantry as nothing but local attacks to straighten the line and thought they would be easy. The heavy opposition the 12th had encountered seemed so out of proportion to the limited objectives that there was a feeling in Division and Corps staffs that the reports of losses were being exaggerated.
J. D. SALINGER (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951):
He [D.B., Holden Caulfield’s older brother and a soldier during World War II] once told Allie and I that if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
JOHN McMANUS: There was a constant parade of new faces [to replace casualties], especially in the rifle companies. It’s hard to get to know the new guys; they don’t necessarily have identities the guys you trained with back in England did, and a lot of them are gone quick, dead or wounded. You probably resent them a little bit, too, even though it’s not their fault, because they’re replacing your buddies. You also don’t want to witness them getting chewed up and destroyed like everybody else; an emotional distance has to be maintained in order to retain sanity.
The new guys don’t know what they’re doing. That makes them dangerous. If you’re the vet in a foxhole with a newbie, you’re afraid to trust him to stay awake on guard duty or not to give away your position by firing a rifle senselessly or making unnecessary noise. So you maintain a constant state of alertness until it wears you down to nervous exhaustion.
EDWARD G. MILLER: Imagine you’re J. D. Salinger. Two years before the Hürtgen Forest battle you’re living on Park Avenue and suddenly, on a dark, sleety night in late November 1944, you’re in the back of an uncovered two-and-a-half-ton truck. You’re bouncing along in the truck, pitch black at night, ten, eleven o’clock, and you go to the assembly area and some voice in the darkness tells you, “Okay, jump out.” You get off the truck and you still can’t see anything. It’s wet. You haven’t slept in days. You haven’t had a hot meal in days. You haven’t had anything akin to a shower in weeks. You’re tired going into it. You stay tired. You go forward; chances are you’re going to come back later that day wounded. You might come back dead. You haven’t learned the names of anybody you’re with, the people you’re bleeding with, you’re fighting with, you’re going through this sheer hell with; you don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who you are. The only hope you have is that the new guy is the one killed or wounded, not you. The average age especially for the rifle replacements by late 1944 was eighteen, nineteen years old.
LIEUTENANT ELLIOT JOHNSON: I was a forward observer at Hürtgen Forest. . . . I knew another forward observer. He went out with his crew. White phosphorus was thrown at them. Two of the men burned before his eyes. He came running to where I was in another part of Hürtgen Forest. I went down the road to meet him. He was sobbing and falling into my arms. He kept saying, “No more killing, no more killing, no more killing.”
JOHN McMANUS: The rate of personnel turnover in 4th Division companies was mind-boggling, something like 200 percent casualties. [That is, so many replacement soldiers were killed or wounded that its casualty rate surpassed 100 percent.]
LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM GAYLE: In Hürtgen Forest the 4th Infantry Division was virtually expended for the second time since it landed in Normandy. Seven thousand men were lost in four weeks of this operation, which meant a turnover of 100 percent to 200 percent in rifle companies and battalion staffs. The total gain purchased at such a price was less than ten square miles, falling far short of planned objectives.
EBERHARD ALSEN: Major General Norman “Dutch” Cota, the commander of the 28th Division—to which Salinger’s 12th Infantry Regiment was temporarily attached—decided to split up the regiment’s three battalions and give each one its own combat mission. The commander of the 12th Regiment, Colonel James S. Luckett, pointed out that the hilly and densely forested terrain might allow the Germans to surround each battalion, something they would not be able to do if the battalions remained in physical contact. His objection was overruled. What Colonel Luckett feared actually happened. Each of the three battalions was surrounded, and they suffered more than five hundred casualties, including the deaths of 120 men, before they could break out and retreat.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: At 1400 hours the battalion commander notified Col. Luckett that he was gaining no ground and that his losses were heavy and increasing. He stated that the fire was so heavy that all attempts to advance were resulting only in more casualties. Col. Luckett informed the commanding general of the 28th Division of this situation and requested further instructions. He was told bluntly to use fire and movement and to continue the attack at all costs. . . . The battered remnants of the once proud regiment never succeeded in taking either of the important enemy positions in its sector and were in fact virtually lost to the division.
JOHN McMANUS: Salinger’s regiment was like most of the other American outfits in the Hürtgen: it got destroyed. The thick woods and lousy weather made it hard for commanders to coordinate regimental movements. The intensity of German artillery fire also negated movement. It was not at all unusual for company-size units to get swallowed up, surrounded, cut off, or destroyed amid the brooding fir trees. The firebreaks were the only places where soldiers could advance in any numbers. Naturally, those firebreaks were zeroed in on with a prodigious volume of machine-gun and artillery fire. Any opening in the trees was swept with grazing fire—waist high or even lower. A man could hug the mud for dear life, only to take a bullet in his shoulder, through his head, or in the back of his thighs since these were generally the highest silhouette parts of his body.
The enemy artillery shells—generically called .88s but also including quite a bit of higher-caliber stuff—usually exploded in the treetops. The resulting bursts sent metal and wood fragments downward, ripping through a man’s back, his abdomen, or, most frequently, his arms. Shrapnel wounds were so common that medics were simply overwhelmed. Most ran out of bandages, sulfa powder, and morphine. The mud, rain, and cold only added to their problems because soldiers often had pneumonia, trench foot, or just common head colds. If a man didn’t have overhead cover, his foxhole was practically useless because tree bursts would shred him. If he was caught in the open in the middle of a barrage, the safest thing to do was to huddle against a tree. Of course, the problem with that was that trees often took direct hits and exploded or toppled over. The sheer volume of shells exploding in such a confined forest created an avalanche of noise and the sense that the explosions would never stop. Men spent so much time huddling desperately for cover that they felt isolated, cut off from the outside world. The darkness of the forest added to that sense.
In my opinion, this isolation led to a greater rate of combat fatigue cases—and certainly this was the case for Salinger. As for the effect of all this, most participants in the Hürtgen were shattered forever by the abject misery, the shelling, the hopelessness of the entire mess. Some could never set foot in woods again. Quite a few were, from that point on, angry and skeptical about the quality of their leadership. The trauma of Hürtgen never left those who were there.
ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger’s division was chewed up in the battle for Hürtgen Forest. Hürtgen Forest was called the Green Hell. The 4th was literally bled dry.
J. D. SALINGER (“The Stranger,” Collier’s, December 1, 1945):
“Uh, he [Vincent Caulfield] died in the morning. He and four other G.I.s and I were standing around a fire we made. In Hürtgen Forest. Some mortar dropped in suddenly—it doesn’t whistle or anything—and it hit Vincent and three of the other men. He died in the medics’ CP [Command Post] tent about thirty yards away, not more than about three minutes after he was hit.” Babe had to sneeze several times at that point. He went on, “I think he had too much pain in too large an area of his body to have realized anything but blackness. I don’t think it hurt. I swear I don’t. His eyes were open. I think he recognized me and heard me when I spoke to him, but he didn’t say anything at all.”
—
ELIZABETH FRANK: J. D. Salinger and Louise Bogan first crossed paths when he wrote to her in November 1944. He may have thought she was the poetry editor of the New Yorker. She wasn’t; she was simply its poetry reviewer. We don’t really know what she thought about the poems themselves, but she was deeply touched that he had written to her from overseas and that his life was in danger. And she passed the poems along to her friend at the magazine, William Maxwell, hoping that he would deal with Salinger.
The poet and New Yorker poetry critic Louise Bogan, to whom Salinger sent poems from the Hürtgen Forest.
New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell.
LOUISE BOGAN:
I send you another of Sergeant Salinger’s letters. Perhaps getting in touch with this here agent, Harold Ober, would stem the tide. This poor young man has been bombarding me with poems for a week or so. I have written him; but in these situations it is better if you write him too. There isn’t time to send them back to him; so will you write a note?
Love, Louise.
P.S. They came Air Mail.
ELIZABETH FRANK: There was an element of concern in her letter about him, although she couldn’t really do anything further with the poems. Bogan was not terribly comfortable being bombarded with poems. Salinger was sending her fat envelopes filled with poems he wanted her to read, and she simply didn’t know what to do with them.
LOUISE BOGAN:
I send you another of Sergeant Salinger’s letters. It now appears that he is in France, so everything becomes more touching.
ELIZABETH FRANK: By November Salinger was actually in the Hürtgen Forest. But clearly what she means is that she recognizes that he’s in the army, that he’s serving overseas and probably in dire straits.
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger is in hell, surrounded by death, but he must publish something—a story, a poem, anything—in the New Yorker before he dies.
WERNER KLEEMAN: On a November night, while we were stationed in Zweifall, Germany, J. D. Salinger, who was fighting alongside us, suddenly received an order from his drunken commanding captain. It was about 9 pm and Salinger was told to go and stay in a foxhole with his regiment for the night. I felt sorry for him, and then remembered the blanket I had pinched from the Hotel Atlantique. I gave it to him, along with a pair of woolen socks that my mother had knitted and sent to me. He thanked me and left. The next day when I met up with him, I asked, “How was the night?” He told me that, contrary to the captain’s orders, he found a place to sleep in a house a few blocks away and did not in fact go to the regiment to sleep in the soggy, snow-filled foxhole.
MARGARET SALINGER: Winter brought the conditions of the 12th from unbearable to unspeakable. Their numbers had been increased by 2,228 replacements, bringing its original 3,080 to 3,362. A terrible month of fighting in Hürtgen Forest saw 1,493 battle casualties, and a loss of an additional 1,024 men from nonbattle causes, mainly from freezing to death in foxholes, half full of icy water, dug in the alternately frozen and wet ground, snow and mud, with no winter boots nor warm coats, nor an adequate supply of dry blankets for a bedroll in the foxholes.
—
WERNER KLEEMAN: One dreary evening around 8 pm, when we were both staying in the same house in Zweifall [a house shared by the Signal Corps and the CIC], he suddenly said to me, “Let’s go and look up Hemingway.” With that we put on our coats, took a flashlight and started walking. After about a mile, we found a small brick house and noticed a marker P.R.O., which meant “Public Relations Office.” A few steps up we found a side doorway, which we entered. Inside we found Captain Stevenson, who was in charge of the office, and there was Hemingway, stretched out on a couch. A visor on his forehead, he was busy writing on a yellow pad. The office had its own generator to produce electricity for war reporters who had checked in for the night. The rest of the town lay in blackness. I felt elated to have this chance to visit once again one of the world’s giants, the author who had recently finished For Whom the Bell Tolls. I had met up with him about two months before in Bleialf, when I was able to inquire about the two beautiful women he loved and admired, Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman. And now, here I was, sitting with Giant and the young aspiring author, Salinger, who had already published several stories. While we sipped champagne from aluminum cups, I was fascinated, thinking that I was in the presence of such gifted men and was able to observe them in such a natural setting. And when I received Jerry’s letter 17 years later, I thought about how yes, I did remember that evening just as if it were yesterday. Something so unusual and eventful stays in one’s mind for a lifetime. There, in the midst of my official duty, was this unique experience.
DAVID SHIELDS: This is the moment at which—amid war, champagne, and male bonding—Salinger revealed his anatomical deformity to Hemingway, according to Kleeman.
NOAH ROSENBERG: To this day, Kleeman still marvels at Salinger’s ability to discuss with Hemingway, at length, the characters from one of Hemingway’s stories. “He knew all of the people that Hemingway mentioned,” Kleeman recalled with wide eyes. “Two hours later, I wouldn’t remember names like that!”
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger came to be embarrassed by his own literary ambition. Between battles, he developed a friendship with Hemingway and relentlessly submitted his work to the New Yorker and many other magazines.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Werner Kleeman, 1961:
I have the feeling you must have been saddened, too, over the fact and circumstance of Hemingway’s death. Remember the little house where we were staying during the Hurtgen Forest business? I remember his kindness, and I’m sure you do too.
DAVID SHIELDS: Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961.
—
ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger and the American infantry had fought the European war based on terrain. It didn’t matter how good your technology was; the infantry had to move across each individual landscape—beach, hedgerow, swamp, countryside—fight, and clear the enemy off it. The natural obstacles were the ones that ended up being the most deadly because they gave the Germans perfect defensive positions from which to attack and defend. Hürtgen Forest was the perfect example—some of the worst terrain fought over in the Second World War.
Not only did the perpetually dark forest floor hide a network of ingenious booby traps and mines, but the terrain was also a nearly perfect defender’s ground, full of German soldiers in a deadly network of bunkers and fortified positions.
The surroundings were completely oppressive. Above you loomed a hundred-foot canopy. You couldn’t go more than two or three yards without coming against endless tree stumps. The ground below you was mined.
EDWARD G. MILLER: The 4th Infantry Division, in a ten-day period in October, gained about three miles and lost at least a thousand casualties per mile.
DAVID SHIELDS: One American captain remarked that they took three trees a day, but each tree cost them a hundred men.
DEBORAH DASH MOORE: Soldiers describe that battle as one where they wish they could crawl inside their helmets. Bullets came from all different directions. They ricocheted off of the trees. You didn’t know where the enemy was.
ALEX KERSHAW: Guys would literally have their arms blown off. Half a leg missing. And they’d be laughing as they were taken off in a stretcher because they knew they were going home.
EDWARD G. MILLER: Salinger was consumed with what every soldier was: to get close enough to that tree and pray to God that somebody else buys it.
ALEX KERSHAW: Both sides shelled the hell out of this forest. The only way Salinger could have survived an intense shelling would have been to literally hug a tree.
STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: I had a young Jewish kid from New York City in my company, maybe only eighteen, an All-City basketball player with a good future ahead of him. He was a replacement for one of my men. After the artillery barrage was over, I went to check on the guys. I found him lying in a half-ready foxhole, dead, not a mark on him. Killed by the concussion from a shell. We lost a company commander the same way in Hürtgen Forest. How many other people got killed or wounded by tree bursts, I don’t know, but they were terrible.
EDWARD G. MILLER: The isolation for Salinger of being in the foxhole all night. The water filling it up. His boots are leaking. He’s soaked. He’s freezing. He doesn’t know if the Germans have sent out combat patrols or not. The fear of the unknown is just eating away at him. The nights are so bad that he prays for daylight, and at daylight he prays for darkness because in the daylight he’s going to fight again.
German veterans of the Eastern Front would tell you today that it was the most brutal combat they, too, faced. The forest area was not very large. The worst of the fighting took place in an area that was maybe seventy square miles. If you look at the casualty rates for the Germans and the Americans, there was, simply put, a lot of killing in a very small area.
ALEX KERSHAW: Whole companies of two hundred men would be down to twenty or thirty after four or five hours.
GORE VIDAL: They just threw one wave in after another wave after another wave.
STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: Another young Jewish boy from New York City got a direct hit on his foxhole. And he lay there most of the night, yelling for someone to shoot him because he was in so much pain. He would yell out, “Shoot me, shoot me.” I could hear him, you know? I was in a foxhole with one of my men and I really started shaking. And I thought it was because I was chilled. At least that’s the excuse I made.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: We flushed three Krauts out of a hole right on our path. We started them across a firebreak, a tank fired at us down the firebreak, the prisoners started to run, the patrolmen opened up on them with their tommy guns, and the three Krauts were kaput. Our men went so far as to run over and pump lead into their heads to stop their yelling. It made me a little sick.
EDWARD G. MILLER: Salinger’s unit, the 12th Infantry Regiment, had nothing to show but casualties for its efforts.
FIRST LIEUTENANT JOHN B. BEACH: There were dead bodies all over the place.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANKLIN SIBERT: God, it was cold. . . . The supply line was littered with dead. The men that came out with me were so damned tired that they stepped on the bodies. . . . They were too tired to step over them.
—
EDWARD G. MILLER: The Germans used several types of mines in the forest, and not all of them, in fact few of them, could be detected by the American mine detectors. GIs who stepped on mines typically might lose a foot, part of a foot, a leg, part of a leg; they would be blown backward and there would be powder residue on them. If they were lucky, the mine fragments were hot enough that it would sear the wound and they might not bleed to death.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: During the night, and in the daylight hours that followed, men from Co. G made several attempts to reach the wounded man who lay in the [forest] but were driven back each time by German machine-gun fire. The wounded man, whose left leg had been blown off halfway to the knee, was a member of Co. B, and he had been leading a patrol from his company in an attempt to contact Co. F. Lying helpless in the dark and moaning with pain, he fell victim of a fiendish German plot. Enemy soldiers crawled out to him in the dark, removed his helmet and field jacket, and robbed him of his cigarettes and personal possessions and then placed a booby trap under his back so that when our medics finally reached him, they would be blown to bits the minute they moved him.
EDWARD G. MILLER: Ernest Hemingway was a correspondent with and spent a lot of time in the 22nd, because the Regimental Commander, Charles “Buck” Lanham, and he were quite good friends by that point in the war. After the war, one of Hemingway’s books, Across the River and into the Trees, had a character named Colonel Canfield. Supposedly, Canfield was modeled on Lanham. One of the great lines in that book is Canfield saying, “I always thought that it would have made more sense just to shoot the replacements in the rear areas than to go to all the trouble for them to de-truck, go to the front, where they were going to be killed, anyway, and then transport them to the rear.”
ALEX KERSHAW: Cold, wet, depressing, dark, and incredibly dispiriting—trying to maintain any kind of morale in that battle was very difficult for Salinger.
BOB WANDESFORDE: I hadn’t washed or shaved for weeks. Everything I wore or carried was mud brown. I had trench foot; my hands and face were black; my fingertips and lips were split and raw. I had eaten almost nothing but K rations and C rations in my filthy black canteen cup . . . and had slept in bombed-out houses or in the snow for over a month. But I didn’t look any worse than the rest of my outfit, and I considered myself lucky to be alive.
PAUL FUSSELL: For those in the know, the horror of Hürtgen could be read in the number of self-inflicted wounds and the unprecedented rates of desertion. It was a desperate moment on the Western front when, to halt the increasing desertions, pitiable serial deserter Private Eddie Slovik was formally shot to death as the only execution for desertion in the whole European Theater.
STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: I’d taken cover under a tree during another artillery assault, and the force of the explosion and shrapnel landing on me knocked me out. It gave me a concussion and killed my radioman. I didn’t know where I was or who I was or what I was doing. Someone got me to an aid station, and I was evacuated from Hürtgen on November 24, 1944. That happened to a lot of soldiers.
When I got to the hospital I was examined, and they called me “combat-exhausted.” What they did was give you a pill that put you to sleep for twenty-four hours. Soldiers called it the “Blue 88.” They did it three times, so you slept for about three days.
ALEX KERSHAW: It was an epic disaster, the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. The 4th Division sustained an estimated 5,260 battle and nonbattle casualties. There were unimaginable scenes of destruction.
—
EDWARD G. MILLER: When the Battle of Hürtgen Forest was over, privates were platoon leaders. In one company of the 22nd Regiment, the only existing soldier who started that battle on November 16 and was still a member of that company the first week of December was one lieutenant. The 28th Infantry Division and its attachments lost almost six thousand soldiers—killed, wounded, missing, taken prisoner—in about two weeks.
Throughout the war the 4th Division was authorized at about 14,300 soldiers. In the course of the war from D-Day until May 1945, it sustained something like thirty-five thousand casualties—about 250 percent casualties in the division. Ninety-five percent of those casualties were in rifle units.
ALEX KERSHAW: For those who fought it, Hürtgen Forest was the most enraging defeat. Salinger experienced the defeat firsthand. The Germans inflicted well over twenty-four thousand casualties on American forces, in addition to nine thousand casualties due to fatigue, illness, and friendly fire. Salinger saw the futility and horror of that immense loss of life.
MACK MORRISS: Behind them they left their dead, and the forest will stink with deadness long after the last body is removed. The forest will bear the scars of our advance long after our own scars have healed, and the infantry has scars that will never heal.
EDWARD G. MILLER: The amount of artillery fired was so great that even today the German government contracts with a company to do explosive ordnance disposal work in the Hürtgen Forest.