The General said tonight that given ten days of good weather he thought the war might well be over as far as organized resistance was concerned.
Major William C. Sylvan and Captain Francis G. Smith, Jr.1
The long columns of olive drab American tanks, half-tracks, and trucks trundled east, ever east. “Moved at 1330 [1:30 p.m.] with objective of Namur,” recorded the operations officer of TF Lovelady. The daily summary for September 4, 1944, continued: “Met very little resistance and suffered no casualties. Still moving along highway at 2400 [midnight]. Bright moonlight, cold, morale good, men tired.”2
The first tinge of autumn, the endless motor-march, and the G.I.s were indeed tired, damned tired. The sergeants and officers definitely felt it; they’d been going on a few hours of sleep a day, if that. The vehicles were sputtering, overdue for overhauls, spark plugs fouled, treads loosening up, tires balding, burning oil—the works. Two-thirds of the division’s 232 M4 Sherman tanks had broken down at least once and limped along with field fixes.3 The 3rd Armored Division had been fighting and moving steadily since July 26, covering nearly 300 miles in forty days. One hundred and ten miles more would bring them to the German border and the fortified West Wall at the historic city of Aachen, gateway to the Reich. If the Americans could get there before the Germans . . .
Just that possibility very much worried German General der Infanterie (three-star equivalent) Günther Blumentritt, chief of staff at OB West. In his view, “The best course for the Allies would have been to concentrate a very strong striking force to break through past Aachen to the Ruhr area,” the German industrial center. Blumentritt opined that “such a break-through, coupled with air domination, would have torn to pieces the weak German front and ended the war.”4 Push hard and finish.
Maurice Rose saw it, too. So did Collins, Hodges (even him), and Bradley. Rose never heard of Blumentritt, a name of interest in the bowels of Twelfth Army Group G-2, if there. But the 3rd Armored Division commander surely felt the hot breath of the horses pulling time’s winged chariot. Kinder-hearted generals—and there were many—would have let up, rested the guys, given them and their over-taxed vehicles a break for a day or two, then gone back to the chase. Not Rose. As a subordinate observed, “He was firm and prompt of decision, brooking no interference by man, events, or conditions in order to destroy the enemy.”5 Rose’s private fire burned white-hot. Only he knew why. But burn it did. As his men longed to let up, Rose applied the spurs, and when need be, the whip.
Field Order No. 13—an inauspicious number, that—charted the course: Mons, Charleroi, Namur, Huy, Liege, Verviers, Eupen, and then Aachen, Germany. A fine Belgian motorway paralleled the Meuse River as far as Liege, and the broader Meuse valley arrowed straight into Nazi Germany. The succession of towns along the Meuse called to mind the popular tune “A String of Pearls,” a favorite selection of G.I.s lucky enough to hear Major Glenn Miller and his U.S. Army Air Forces band. With apologies to Major Miller, though, this Belgian string of pearls looked to host German die-hards bent on delaying the 3rd Armored Division’s eastward thrust. To handle these anticipated obstructions, Maurice Rose sought bridges spanning the Meuse. These would allow the division to send columns of tanks and half-track infantry back and forth on either side of the waterway. Then the Americans could use a one-two punch, CCA north or CCB south, to prize the Germans out of their defensive posts.6
Combat Command B led out south of the Meuse River on September 4, 1944. Rose’s peep accompanied the front column. That day, for the first time, Maurice Rose wore the two silver stars of a major general. His promotion finally came through, bumping him up almost a month into his division command. By U.S. Army tradition, promotions merit a ceremony and toasts. Rose had no time for such niceties. He pinned on his second star and moved out.7
In hopes of finding a bridge over the Meuse, Rose told Truman Boudinot to go right through Charleroi to Namur. Combat Command B did so, driving all night, sometimes getting the speedometer up to thirty-five miles per hour. The Americans pulled up in south Namur at 5:30 a.m. on September 5. But German engineers got there first. The main bridge was down.
After a brief fracas that cost three G.I.s wounded, TF Lovelady eliminated two German armored cars and a few game enemy riflemen, too. With the location cleared, brave American armored infantrymen hopped out of their half-tracks. Moving forward by sprints and stops, bent low to avoid German bullets, the G.I.s climbed, jumped, and dodged across the Meuse River, working their way over the slippery chunks of the dumped bridge. Two understrength platoons of American riflemen from Company E, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment eventually scrambled up the far bank. Task Force Lovelady didn’t have a bridge. But they held a site.8 That was something.
With the wrecked bridge approaches (relatively) secured, the American 23rd Engineers went to work despite occasional hostile harassing fire. Laying out 510 feet of treadway metal and supporting floats would not go quickly. The 23rd Engineer officers estimated that it might take until the morning of September 6 to complete the pontoon bridge. Somehow, defying the calculations, the engineers did the job by 7:00 p.m. Tanks and riflemen went over and took control of the far side.9
OK—but not fast enough for Maurice Rose.
At Rose’s urging, the rest of CCB also spent the daylight hours of September 5 searching for a useable bridge. In the larger task force of Combat Command B, Colonel John “Jack” Welborn had taken command of the 33rd Armored Regiment. He was a keeper. A young West Pointer (Class of 1932), Welborn, like Rose, started in the infantry, then transferred to the cavalry, and finally to the armored force. Welborn fought in North Africa and Sicily with the 2nd Armored Division and landed at Utah Beach on D-Day in command of the 4th Infantry Division’s attached 70th Tank Battalion.10 This officer wouldn’t require any prodding.
Determined to find another way across the Meuse, Welborn and his soldiers joined the bridge quest. It took well into the afternoon, but a patrol along the riverbank finally located a minor span. It wasn’t great, but it might work as a one-way crossing. Combined with the 23rd Engineer pontoon project, the small connector sufficed to give Rose the flexibility he needed to move north and south of the Meuse.11
While CCB and the engineers grappled with Germans in south Namur, Brigadier General Doyle Hickey’s Combat Command A passed through the north side of Charleroi. He’d allowed forty-five minutes to get through Charleroi, but the cheering crowds held up the Americans for almost three hours with the by-now customary bottles of wines, kisses, food, and flowers. It took well into the night to unscrew the impromptu street carnival. At 6:30 a.m. on September 5, Hickey’s men finally pressed on and secured north Namur. Once again, joyful Belgians generated more trouble than any Germans. At a certain point, liberating got to be same-old, same-old.12
Behind Hickey’s CCA, Rohsenberger’s Combat Commander Reserve followed. They halted just west of Charleroi late on September 4. Rohsenberger’s men also encountered crowds of celebrating Belgians. When CCR pushed on to Namur at 2:00 p.m. on September 5, the Americans met more local revelers. It took until well after dark for CCR’s task forces to reach their designated night positions. During the night, Rohsenberger’s soldiers picked up confused, dispirited German prisoners “in large numbers,” as noted in the CCR war diary. It remained to be seen how Rose would use CCR as the advance continued. For now, they had orders to follow and support CCA.13
At Namur, most of September 5 went by as the engineers built their Meuse River bridge and TF Welborn metered vehicles one by one across their small span, too. The combat commands encountered scattered opposition. All to the good, but Rose was already looking ahead. He ordered Major John Tucker’s 83rd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion to assemble for their next mission. At daylight on September 6—or as soon as the treadway bridge was up—the 83rd planned to move both north and south of the Meuse toward Liege. The battalion would be hunting more bridges, and Germans, en route. As the scouts waited for the 23rd Engineers to complete their pontoon crossing, a German bicycle platoon blundered into the 83rd’s position. The recon men opened fire. The surviving bicyclists gave up immediately.14
During the day, Major General Joe Collins drove into Namur. His armored car and security vehicles waded into the crowds near the 23rd Engineers’ bridging site. Even when a German 88mm antitank round whizzed overhead, the happy citizens of Namur continued to crowd the plaza near the river. Freedom and alcohol made for a lot of extra courage among the townspeople. Collins saw that the Germans were still actively shooting back on both sides of the Meuse.15
For the VII Corps commander, this wasn’t a social call. He had an oral order to give. Collins sought out newly promoted Major General Maurice Rose at Omaha Forward. Tipped off on the radio by Chief of Staff Long John Smith, Rose had showed up at his command post a few minutes before Collins. Omaha Forward occupied the lawns of another impressive mansion. This particular great house overlooked the Meuse River. German bullets and shells kept things lively—Omaha Way Forward, as usual.
Collins joined Rose just inside the open portico facing the Meuse. The dainty French door hung ajar as the men met. Gunfire cracked, and now and then the thud of something bigger crunched. It amounted to hearing fire, not taking fire—at least not a lot. Collins was not amused.
“Maurice, where is your front line?”
Rose pointed just across the river. That set off Collins. Everybody said the corps commander had a temper. This afternoon, Lightning Joe didn’t hold back. Maurice Rose received both barrels.
Nearby staff officers and NCOs continued with their command post duties. But they strained to hear the details. They couldn’t make out much. Except for the harsh tone, all from one party—that sure came through. “There ensued a chewing out of one general officer by another never before heard and was most embarrassing to the hearer,” remembered Major Haynes Dugan of division G-2. Dugan thought he heard Collins wrap up with “If you ever do this again, I will relieve you.” Rose, of course, didn’t say much except “Yes, General” and “No, General.”16
After venting, Collins got down to business. Farther south on the Meuse at Dinant, the 9th Infantry Division had run into a significant defending German force, maybe two infantry battalions with some panzers, too, the whole lot backed by artillery. It constituted the first well-organized German opposition since the end of the Falaise Pocket battle. Collins ordered Rose to send a battalion-sized tank/infantry task force to help the stymied 9th Infantry Division. 17
These periodic diversions of combat power rankled Rose, but they were a Collins trademark, constantly diddling with a battalion here, a battalion there, like the earlier venture to the old World War I battlefield of Château-Thierry. Normally, Rose objected. Shipping a valuable tank/infantry task force backward to screw around at Dinant—that wasn’t going to do anything to crack the West Wall. But given Collins’s initial outburst, the division commander assented.18
The corps commander then offered his impressions of the Belgian crowds in Namur. Rose had already seen plenty of that for himself, but again, the 3rd Armored Division commander kept his mouth shut. Rose never said much. This looked to be an especially good opportunity to stay quiet. Collins concluded by shaking Rose’s hand, congratulating his subordinate on his promotion to major general.19
The two men weren’t friends. Neither knew the other well, aside from their relationship as fellow soldiers. They might both wear two stars, but each understood fully who was in charge. Still, the proprieties must be observed.
At daybreak on September 6, 1944, the 83rd Recon didn’t get off smoothly at all. It was a dull gray rainy day, not a good one for moving on slick roads or through muddy fields. Company D to the north of the Meuse ran immediately into antitank and mortar fire. The thin-skinned M8 Greyhound armored cars, ill-armed M5 Stuart light tanks, and four-wheel-drive peeps had to back off. Companies A and B couldn’t get south of the river. They didn’t get to the two bridges in time, and the combat commands took priority. The recon teams wouldn’t be getting to Liege anytime soon. Frustrated, Rose told them to advance to Huy, about halfway to Liege, to try to find bridges there. The scouts pulled that off, pinpointing a pair of intact crossings and notifying the combat commands.20 Well, that counted for something. For Rose, the 83rd remained a work in progress.
The 83rd’s problems mirrored similar frictions in the combat commands. To the south, soaked by the rain, CCB finally attacked at 11:40 a.m. German outposts popped up at every other road junction. Task Force Lovelady, for example, reported engaging an antitank gun, a half-track, three trucks, and a bus full of German troops. At one point, a single Luftwaffe fighter plane dove down and strafed the moving task force column. Three G.I. riflemen in a half-track were wounded. The series of enemy contacts slowed up the task force. They only got as far as Huy.
This time, though, they grabbed a standing bridge, one of the two found earlier and reported by the 83rd Recon. On the road near the span, the task force’s lead Sherman crew put a main gun round into a racing German vehicle which erupted into “a fountain of fire.” That was probably the demolition stock.21 In any event, TF Lovelady owned a sound Meuse River bridge.
The larger CCB task force, built around the 33rd Armored Regiment, also ran into several enemy roadblocks. Task Force Welborn fought well. The rain, though, imposed a penalty. Without the helpful spot reports provided by friendly pilots—funny how the outnumbered Luftwaffe flew despite the foul weather—the lead American Shermans moved tentatively. No crew wanted to eat a blazing 88mm bolt in the bow. Even after a long day trying various sloppy farm roads, TF Welborn couldn’t pick a way much past Huy.22
They did, however, follow the scouts of the 83rd Recon to a small roadway span across the Meuse. This crossing might bear 33-ton M4 Sherman tanks as long as the Americans sent them over one by one. As Jack Welborn’s accompanying engineers squinted through the rain and prepared to make a proper assessment of the structure, Major General Maurice Rose’s peep appeared from the middle of the stopped row of American tanks and half-tracks. Rose ignored Welborn’s little gathering. At the general’s insistence, his driver, Tech-4 Glenn Shaunce, gunned the peep’s motor and the quarter-ton truck bounced onto the shallow up-ramp. Without the slightest pause, the general’s peep rolled right across the bridge. Nothing blew up. That worked for Welborn. The colonel waved across the first tank.23
Combat Command B did more than take bridges on September 6. As directed by Major General Collins, CCB sent a task force south under command of Lieutenant Colonel Rosewell King, who’d been patched up after being wounded near Soissons on August 29. Task Force King started out at 9:40 a.m., the first task force to cross the Meuse. Maurice Rose clearly understood the priority of this mission. The task force neared Dinant by midday and went into action. Backing up the embattled 9th Infantry Division, King’s tankers and armored infantrymen engaged German SS troops, killing an unknown number. At one point, Major General Collins watched armored infantrymen, backed by Shermans, storm houses held by the unyielding Waffen SS soldiers. Task Force King secured key high ground at the cost of one American killed and several wounded. The next morning, the 9th Infantry Division grabbed the Meuse River crossing at Dinant.24
To backfill TF King, Rose sent Sam Hogan’s task force from CCR to Combat Command B. TF Hogan also banged into an enemy roadblock. The task force linked up with CCB and refueled by 10:00 p.m. on September 6.25 Thanks to the 83rd Recon, TF Lovelady, and TF Welborn—with an assist from Maurice Rose—Truman Boudinot’s CCB owned two Meuse River bridges at Huy to use in the morning.
North of the river, Combat Command A had to wait until almost 3:00 p.m. to get going. American troops shivered as sheets of rain pelted the stalled columns. Once the tanks and half-tracks rolled, they found problems. At alternating tree stands, German rear guards used well-concealed antitank guns and panzerfaust rocket launchers to delay the advance. Each knot of hostiles required a firefight and used up valuable daylight. After the gray day faded to black, CCA stopped north of the Meuse near Huy.26
The slow going on September 6 didn’t sit well with Maurice Rose. Wet weather dumped on both sides, and Liege had the general’s full attention. The Belgian industrial center had rings of forts dating back to medieval times. If a lot of Germans settled into those hardened positions, it would be extremely painful to dig them out. The 3rd Armored Division probably couldn’t do it without bringing in two or more American infantry divisions.27 And that kind of ugly set-to would end any chance of getting to Aachen.
Rose couldn’t risk a street-by-street donnybrook in Liege. According to the G-2 estimates and pilot reports, the Germans expected more of the same, one American combat command advancing north of the river and one to the south. The enemy disposed accordingly, with obvious positions visible on the western edge of Liege. Rose saw his chance. The Germans looked for U.S. attack right down the highway handrailing the Meuse. Well, give it to them. Mount an obvious push with CCA, the matador’s cloak, to distract the enemy. Keep the Germans busy. Then swing around with CCB, take the dominant heights in eastern Liege, and slam the back door shut—another Mons.28
The 83rd Recon got away cleanly before dawn on September 7, 1944, a very fine start to the day. The scouts reached western Liege by 3:00 p.m. and reported Germans present, including panzers. At least two bridges were gone, wrecked completely. The Meuse River turned almost due north at Liege. So to continue on toward Aachen, Germany, those crossings needed eventual attention.29 But killing Germans came first.
Major General Rose followed the scouts’ reporting by radio. The recon soldiers told him enough. The Germans faced west. Betting on the value of speed and maneuver, the general unleashed both CCA and CCB at 1:00 p.m. Doyle Hickey’s Combat Command A went right at Liege north of the Meuse. This clearly attracted a lot of German attention.
At the same time, Truman Boudinot’s Combat Command B swung well south of the river. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Lovelady had checked out a route that used pretty decent farm trails. Maurice Rose, naturally, moved with TF Lovelady, relishing the increasing evidence that the Germans were looking the other way. It wasn’t raining on September 7. Even on the dirt country paths, Combat Command B moved out.30
TF Lovelady, the bigger TF Welborn, and Maurice Rose in his peep arrived on the high ground in the southern neighborhoods of Liege by 7:19 p.m., just as the last light faded. The Germans missed the entire envelopment. Now they’d pay. Boudinot set out five strong tank/infantry roadblocks, as at Mons. Boudinot and Rose both expected substantial German traffic overnight.
Boudinot was not disappointed, thanks to Combat Command A. Approaching the western districts of Liege north of the Meuse, Hickey’s soldiers ran into four batteries of German flak guns: at least six 88mm pieces, several 40mm (about 1.5 inches) pom-poms, and a few nests of 20mm light cannons, some vehicle-mounted, some not, but all dug in, about two dozen in all. German 88mm cannons could shoot down planes or hit tanks. These gun crews trained their tubes for the latter. The German flak commander evidently hoped Hickey’s tanks and half-tracks would impale themselves on these lethal weapons. Instead, Hickey turned to his accompanying gunners, the 67th and 54th Armored Field Artillery battalions. They coordinated a time on target, bringing down thirty-six 105mm (4-inch) shells at the same instant, then repeating the fatal deluge multiple times. The hammering went on for more than ten minutes. As the final explosions echoed, a pall of dust rose over the open-topped German positions and vehicles. When the dirty shroud subsided, nothing moved. Cannons pointed up at crazy angles. No men in gray German uniforms could be seen. They were finished. Hickey’s tanks and half-tracks surged past the wrecked batteries and onward into Liege. Behind them, Rohsenberger’s CCR followed. Except for TF Hogan over with CCB, CCR hadn’t been needed yet.31
As Maurice Rose hoped, the night of September 7–8 turned into another Mons event. “Chaos reigned for the Germans,” wrote TF Lovelady’s Captain Roberts, “and the very madness of it all was somewhat confusing to us.” Hundreds of Germans in vehicles and on foot bumbled into well-chosen American roadblocks.
In one night encounter, Generalleutnant (two-star equivalent) Konrad Heinrich of the German 89th Infantry Division and his staff car driver tooled up to a U.S. position. The TF Lovelady riflemen riddled what G.I.s described as a “sporty convertible cabriolet,” killing the general. As the evening wore on, the G.I.s rolled up 150 captive enemy soldiers, too. In the wee hours of the next morning, TF Hogan’s infantrymen captured Generalmaior (one-star) Bock von Wolfingen along with 600 other prisoners. TF Welborn added 700 more. Combat Command B’s road watch teams knocked out an assault gun panzer, two trucks, twelve sedans, thirteen wagons, and eight towed 20mm antiaircraft cannons.32
North and west of Liege, Combat Command A didn’t have as much action, but they added to the bag of prisoners. Most of the Germans were flowing east, toward home. Seven Mark IV Panzers motored into the gunsights of CCR Shermans; the enemy lost all seven, their crews, and some accompanying infantrymen.33 It was the one potentially dangerous opposing combat unit that appeared during the German bug-out from Liege. Combat Command Reserve erased it quickly.
The 3rd Armored Division spent most of September 8 cleaning up the enemy resistance in and around Liege. The 23rd Engineer Battalion built another treadway bridge over the Meuse, this time blessedly unmolested by German fire. The two days had been costly for Rose’s division, with sixteen Americans dead and nearly a hundred wounded. The 1,500 or so enemy soldiers taken captive represented a decent haul, but not much compared to the numbers taken at Mons. Maybe there weren’t many Germans still willing to duke it out. Or possibly, the rest had slipped away. But not all. Hundreds of German remains lay all around Liege, an unwelcome burden for the otherwise ecstatic Belgians. The 3rd Armored Division declared the city secure at 6:10 p.m.34
Maurice Rose didn’t stop to enjoy it. He never did. Beating the Germans to the West Wall—the idea consumed Rose. And how that man could concentrate his energies. As Liege’s people cheered and milled about, and G.I.s oiled their M1 rifles and tinkered with ailing Sherman tanks, Rose looked east. He ordered the 83rd Recon to prepare to head out at 5:00 a.m. on September 9, 1944, and the combat commands to follow, destination Verviers, halfway to Aachen. The German frontier was forty miles ahead.35
The 83rd Recon wriggled a few patrols all the way to the east side of Verviers by 3:00 p.m. on September 9, 1944. Their reports proved sobering. The Meuse was no longer an issue, but with each mile traversed, the ground rose steadily on either side of the main highway. Thickets of trees grew closer to the roads. The secondary farm trails narrowed to one Sherman in width. And there were German panzers hidden in the woods south of the major route.36
Moving on country lanes north of the main highway, Hickey’s Combat Command A faced what they called “light resistance,” a few hit-and-run scrapes. Navigating the tricky back roads took a long time. Hickey’s soldiers didn’t reach the high ground northwest of Verviers until 9:00 p.m. There the task forces coiled for the night, setting all-round defenses like an Old West wagon train. The infantry placed a ring of two-man listening posts at least a hundred yards out. Then came a hard circle of tanks and half-tracks with men ready on the machine guns. Infantry foxholes secured the combat vehicles. Finally, in the center went the aid station, the ambulances, the command post, and the supply trucks. It was a procedure run nightly.37
Combat Command B, with Rose accompanying, had a much tougher day. The Germans didn’t have much remaining in Belgium. But what they had left showed up on the way to Verviers. A brand-new German outfit, the 105th Panzer Brigade, offered the first serious opposition in weeks.38
The 105th Panzer Brigade represented yet another Adolf Hitler brainstorm. Unhappy with his veteran panzer generals, the irascible führer refused to replenish their battered mobile divisions. Instead, the erstwhile lance corporal demanded creation of new formations, each a sort of German combat command: one panzer battalion and one panzergrenadier battalion. The 105th built up around officers and NCOs drawn from survivors of the 18th Panzergrenadier Division, an organization smashed by the Russians in their summer 1944 offensive. The 105th’s battlewise leaders inherited rookie soldiers imbued with Nazi fervor but not a lot of training. The brigade’s thirty-three Panthers and eleven Mark IV assault guns arrived factory-fresh, so new they hadn’t even benefitted from the manufacturer’s usual break-in checks.39 The just-issued panzers and their hopped-up but ill-prepared crews would get their shakedown courtesy of the 3rd Armored Division.
With TF King returned from their Dinant sojourn, Boudinot’s Combat Command B sent TF Hogan back to Liege to wait with Combat Command Reserve. At 11:00 a.m., CCB rolled east at full strength. General Rose accompanied. Based on the 83rd Recon updates, all anticipated trouble.40
They found it.
At 3:49 p.m., Task Force Lovelady started taking high-velocity 75mm shots. Panthers. It had to be. The German panzer men knocked out three Shermans in quick succession; three Americans died and twelve were wounded, all three crews gone in seconds. Lovelady’s other tank crews backed off the roadway, seeking cover. A minefield protected the Germans. This knot would take some work to unravel.
To suppress these German panzer men, the 391st Armored Field Artillery Battalion went into action. Their M7 self-propelled 105mm howitzers could stop and start shooting in minutes. Over the next few hours, the artillerymen banged out hundreds of rounds, pummeling the Germans and pinning the hostile panzers in place.41 All the G.I.s knew the drill. Send a bullet, not a man.
Major General Rose was on hand, as usual, right at the edge of TF Lovelady’s firefight. Lieutenant Colonel George G. Garton of the 391st and a few of his staff officers stood near Rose, watching the back-and-forth. At 5:45 p.m., an accurate batch of German mortar projectiles impacted almost on top of the officers. Red-hot, jagged metal shards whirled out, killing Captain Ballard P. Durham and cutting up Garton and three others. By some miracle, the deadly fragments all whizzed right by Rose. The general helped get the wounded to the medics for treatment. Then Rose walked right back to his prior spot.42 The firefight wasn’t over yet.
Fortunately, not long after Durham’s death, U.S. P-47 Thunderbolt fighters appeared overhead. Directed by a savvy forward air controller, the American fighter pilots knocked out three Panthers. They would have gotten more but the airmen ran out of munitions. Before they departed, the fliers reported the location of several other German panzers. Guided by these welcome spottings, TF Lovelady’s experienced Sherman crews went Panther stalking. To kill one, it helped a lot to know where a Panther sat. A Sherman’s 75mm cannon couldn’t punch through the foe’s sloped frontal armor. To nail a Panther, you had to hit it from the side or back. Lovelady’s tankers did just that, taking out four enemy armored vehicles. Even so, the long fight used up almost all remaining daylight. They weren’t going to get into Verviers today.43
Task Force Welborn also ran into panzers. Overexcited G.I.s saw large dark shapes in the tree line and reported two Tigers. They were Panthers, but that fine distinction mattered little with armor-piercing slugs winging back and forth. The Germans hit a U.S. Sherman and an accompanying half-track, killing one G.I. and wounding ten. Again, American P-47 Thunderbolts intervened with effect. The fighter-bombers knocked out more than one panzer; the rest pulled out for parts unknown. Minefields, blown-down trees, and road craters, each guarded by a few plucky Germans, held up TF Welborn well into the night. They, too, halted short of Verviers.44
Cleaning out the rest of the 105th Panzer Brigade occupied most of September 10, 1944. Colonel Rohsenberger’s CCR moved up southwest of Verviers to prepare for the next day’s operation. Combat Command A knocked out more Panthers; the rest left, heading east. Combat Command B also had some fleeting contacts, breaching small minefields and shouldering aside more felled trees. Task Force Lovelady drove off some suspected panzers at dark and picked up ten prisoners, too.45 Whatever remained of the 105th had lost interest in opposing the Americans, especially their fighter-bombers.
In a development that gratified many, TF Welborn’s lead elements found an abandoned German Army warehouse on the south side of Verviers. The enemy’s black bread and sausage didn’t go over well. But the chocolate and cigars sure did. The treats went well with the friendly welcome in the streets of Verviers. Once again, the local citizens merrily rejoiced in their newfound freedom. Belgian Resistance men whispered warnings, though. There were Germans ahead—a lot of them.46 That unhappy story never grew old.
At first light on September 11, the 83rd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion headed east toward Eupen, the last major Belgian town, the end of the line. A few miles out of Verviers, German stay-behind teams with burp guns and panzerfäusten struck at a scout M8 Greyhound armored car, killing two Americans and wounding four. Other hostile ambushers engaged nearby 83rd platoons. The U.S. recon men reported “stiff resistance.” They couldn’t get to Eupen. The scouts held up short. Both leading combat commands moved right through them.47
Nine other Americans died on the road to Eupen. With Rose along for the ride, Combat Command A moved out at 8:00 a.m. Again, they used the north side of the main highway. German harassing fire killed four American soldiers and wounded a dozen more. Hickey’s men reached the north side of Eupen by midafternoon. Following CCA, Combat Command Reserve spent the remaining daylight hours on the road. By midnight, they’d halted to the west of Eupen.48
Also launching at 8:00 a.m. on September 11, Combat Command B advanced to the southern side of Eupen. On the way, Task Force Lovelady clashed with German riflemen, two antitank gun crews, and a single Mark IV Panzer. The Americans prevailed in the firefights but lost a Sherman and two more U.S. soldiers killed plus several wounded. The task force led the rest of CCB into Eupen around 3:00 p.m.
No well-wishers turned out. The streets were largely deserted. A few houses and businesses displayed Belgian flags. Many more buildings showed white bedsheets. “There were no flowers, no tidbits, no hugs or kisses,” recalled an officer in TF Lovelady. Wary Americans noticed the many signs written in German.49
Every G.I. in the 3rd Armored Division knew what came next.
It all boiled down to the next few days. Both the Americans and the Germans felt it, the former running on empty, the latter bloodied and reeling. Could Major General Maurice Rose and his G.I.s break through the West Wall?
The spirit was willing but the flesh—and steel—were weak. Gasoline was getting harder and harder to come by. Artillery shells didn’t arrive in volume anymore. Beat-up vehicles creaked and moaned. Riflemen stumbled ahead in a daze. For the deepest personal reason a man could have, Maurice Rose possessed all the willpower in the world to finish the great drive with the killer blow. And yet . . . and yet.
Captain A. Eaton Roberts, surgeon of Lieutenant Colonel William B. Lovelady’s hard-fighting 2nd Battalion, 33rd Armored Regiment, recognized the problem. They had come so far, done so much, and now at the moment of truth, at the fearsome gates of Mordor, the wheels were literally coming off. Roberts saw it and wished he did not.
Signs of high endurance were beginning to line the faces of tankers and infantrymen alike. There had been practically no physical rest and certainly no mental rest since the very day of our commitment, early in July. Our vehicles were beginning to feel it, too. They lugged and chugged and tossed and turned like old men with bad stomachs.50
Bernard Law Montgomery saw it, too. He’d warned of this moment over and over, at length. Before D-Day, the American generals and most of the British, too, were fixated on getting ashore. Prior to June 6, 1944, only Monty looked past the beachhead, playing chess instead of checkers, seeing the endgame on the horizon. Patton glimpsed it, too, but he was not high enough in the chain to make a difference.51 So it fell to Monty to make the case.
“The quickest way to win this war,” Montgomery argued, “is for the great mass of the Allied armies to advance northwards, clear the coast as far as Antwerp [Belgium], establish a powerful air force in Belgium, and advance into the Ruhr.” The Ruhr contained the core of German military production. Take that, and Hitler’s war machine would cease to run. Monty sent his proposal directly to Eisenhower on August 22, 1944.52 But the British commander had been saying it for months. Of course, Monty had someone in mind to take charge of this war-winning thrust: himself. Modesty wasn’t one of his virtues.
Monty referred to his scheme as the “single, full-blooded thrust.” In the field marshal’s reckoning, by September 1 he’d employ his own Twenty-First Army Group (fifteen divisions), Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group (twenty-one divisions), and the First Allied Airborne Army (five divisions, two British and three American), a mass of forty-one divisions, although Monty graciously rounded down to forty without ever mentioning that any others that may be needed had to be American. The British didn’t have any extra divisions left.53
Where would this pile driver hit? They’d go at the Ruhr “via Aachen and Cologne,” exactly the route ahead of Joe Collins and VII Corps, led by Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored Division. Montgomery intended to punch through the West Wall there, with a supporting attack to the north going past Antwerp then through the southern Netherlands and into the north part of the Ruhr basin; the West Wall was incomplete on that part of the German frontier.
For what it was worth, the top-ranking Germans dreaded the very offensive Montgomery advocated. It amounted to their 1914 Schlieffen Plan, but in reverse—same good routes, same potentially decisive outcome.54 Of course, the Schlieffen Plan failed when the German foot soldiers couldn’t out-march determined French, British, and Belgian defenders. There was a lesson there, and gasoline engines didn’t guarantee a better result in 1944. At any rate, the German generals’ opinions only emerged after the war ended. In August and September 1944, nobody on the Allied side ran their plans by Berlin.
Had the concept been presented by anyone but Monty, the Americans might have listened. But by the late summer of 1944, the Yanks had lost their patience with Bernard Law Montgomery. It grew easy for American generals to poke fun at the sometimes pompous bantam Englishman who, as of September 1, 1944, became Field Marshal Montgomery by grace of His Majesty King George VI. Monty forever prattled on and on about “knocking Jerry for six” or “tidying up the battlefield” like some Hollywood caricature of a supercilious Brit. He left no doubt that he considered Eisenhower a hopeless amateur lacking in frontline experience, Bradley a colorless plodder mired in routine, and Patton some sort of occasionally useful madman. Monty didn’t consider Hodges at all. (Who did?) Until September 1, 1944, the date of his elevation to five-star equivalent, Montgomery ran the ground war in northwest Europe.55 Like him or not, American senior commanders Bradley, Hodges, and Patton had to obey him.
Now that changed. With his Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) established in France, Ike Eisenhower took over the ground war effective September 1, adding land force commander to his role as overall Allied theater commander. It drove Monty to distraction. The British field marshal clearly realized what must be done, and why. But Ike and his American generals just didn’t get it.
On September 11, as Maurice Rose and his men stood at Eupen, Belgium, the Allied front from the North Sea to Switzerland belonged to six armies: Monty’s Canadian First Army and British Second Army, Bradley’s U.S. First Army and U.S. Third Army, and the new Sixth Army Group’s U.S. Seventh Army and French First Army, both having landed near Marseilles on August 15, 1944. Up and down that long line, there were two good ways into Germany. Montgomery correctly named the best, the axis leading to the Ruhr factory towns. The second-best traced through Metz and into Germany’s other production nexus, the Saar basin. Though hampered by worse terrain, the Saar avenue offered an option to jab north toward the Ruhr. George Patton’s Third Army happened to be aligned on the Metz-Saar approach.56
Therein lie the problem. Monty’s thinking would be the right answer in a staff college war game. Indeed, the Ruhr thrust would garner high marks, with a B- for those who selected the Metz-Saar alternative. But in a real war, with real people, other considerations mattered. Among his frustrated American peers, Anglophile Eisenhower already had a reputation as being way too accommodating to Montgomery. Putting all Allied eggs, including Bradley’s divisions, into the obnoxious Monty’s basket? Ike just couldn’t do that to his West Point classmate Omar Bradley, nor to his fellow U.S. generals, especially Patton, who would have bridled at such a decision.57 The reaction of the long-suffering American public can only be imagined, and by the way, 1944 was a presidential election year. So the supreme commander wanted options, a way to make all happy. Why not go with both drives, Monty in the north and Patton in the south? (The Sixth Army Group didn’t figure much; by disposition and composition, especially their shaky French units, they were confined to a supporting effort.) In an ideal setup, fireball Patton would be pointed at Aachen rather than the lackluster Hodges. Ike, though, was a realist and a shrewd poker player. He’d play the cards he’d been dealt.
So that would be it—a broad front, Monty’s Twenty-First Army Group to the north and Bradley’s strong horse Patton to the south, sort of a continental version of Maurice Rose’s recent tactics along the Meuse River.58 Surely the richest countries on earth could afford both pushes. The two attacks might well befuddle the Germans, stretch them thin, and if one didn’t succeed, maybe the other would. Perhaps they both would. All it took from the Eisenhower level was adequate provisioning.
That’s where Ike’s even-handed plan came a cropper. By September 11, 1944, Allied logistics neared implosion. While the American-led Sixth Army Group drew sustenance from Marseilles, Montgomery’s and Bradley’s forces received most of their supplies through the Normandy beaches. The ports that should have supplied the two northern army groups—the core of Monty’s “full-blooded thrust”—remained closed. German die-hards holed up in Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. The Allies gained the harbors at Cherbourg, Le Havre, and Ostend, but all three barely functioned due to considerable sabotage by their final batch of German defenders. The British handily took Antwerp, home to a superb set of quays and docks. Unfortunately, though, the Canadian First Army found itself enmeshed in a lengthy campaign to clear entrenched German regiments guarding the fifty-mile Scheldt estuary, the water connector to Antwerp. Without control of the Scheldt, Antwerp’s fine facilities sat idle. On top of these serious port issues, the French railroad system had been bombed to smithereens prior to D-Day, a great way to foul up German troop movements, but also a major headache once the Allies broke loose from Normandy and motored east to the German border.59 The farther the Allies moved east, the greater the strain.
One hundred and thirty-two American quartermaster truck companies with 5,958 vehicles, including some stripped from late-arriving U.S. Army combat divisions, rolled east day and night in the famous Red Ball Express. They delivered an average of 7,000 tons a day, supplemented by about 500 tons of daily aerial resupply, weather permitting. That all sounded great, except Bradley’s fighting forces needed 13,650 tons every twenty-four hours. Being closer to the coast, Monty’s British and Canadian armies, along with the single Polish division, suffered only spot shortages.60
Still, running on half-rations assured problems, and with each passing day, things got worse. Units slowed, guns didn’t fire, and vehicles broke down. Division after division ran out of gasoline by early September. Supplies, or the lack thereof, began to reduce Eisenhower’s choices far more than any spat with Montgomery. Predictably, the British field marshal wagged his finger and indulged in smug lecturing. With only half the necessary sustainment, only one thrust would do—his. Monty’s remonstrances grew so strident and so personal, that at one point during a September 10 conference, the normally even-tempered Eisenhower growled, “Steady, Monty, you can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.”61
Yet in the interests of sound strategy, logistical limits, Allied solidarity, or perhaps just an unwillingness to keep arguing, Ike split the loaf again. Monty received SHAEF’s only uncommitted force, the First Allied Airborne Army, for a strike across the Dutch extension of the northern Rhine River; this would become the Arnhem operation, the ill-fated “bridge too far” drop. Hodges’s First Army, still under Bradley’s command, gained supply priority to cooperate with Montgomery’s major airborne-armor push—so much for the touted Aachen axis, now reduced to an ancillary effort. To mollify the slow-boiling Bradley, Ike continued to offer logistical support for Patton’s Third Army advance toward the Saar.62 Everybody got something. Nobody got enough. Except the Germans. They gained a handful of critical days; not many, but sufficient to man the West Wall. Decisions, to include compromises, have consequences.
The West Wall loomed like an ominous, continent-spanning open jaw. Nazi publicity photos long highlighted the barricade’s most recognizable feature, the West Wall’s murderous welcome mat: five rows of close-set, man-sized triangular steel-reinforced cement prongs able to rip the underside off any Allied tank, and thereby leave would-be attackers stalled and helpless, easy meat for well-aimed German gunfire. Both sides called these stark impediments dragon’s teeth. According to ancient Greek legend, Cadmus sowed a plowed field with dragon’s teeth, and each razor-pointed seed spawned a fierce warrior.63 In September 1944, desperate German commanders, short on troops, trusted that their dragon’s teeth might do as much.
Names matter. The Americans referred to the dragon’s teeth and the covering bunker complexes as the Siegfried Line even though to Germans, it was always the West Wall. The actual Siegfried Line dated back to World War I. Doughboys of the Great War like Maurice Rose and Courtney Hodges remembered that fortified belt as the Hindenburg Line.64 They misnamed and underestimated that one, too.
If you can’t even get the name right, it doesn’t bode well. Most of the American G-2 experts thought little of the German border defenses, supposedly outmoded, ill-prepared, and sparsely defended. The First Army G-2, Colonel Benjamin A. “Monk” Dickson, told Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges to figure on meeting a hodge-podge of “Police, L of C [lines of communications, logistics elements], Signal and other service units, hastily gathered and thrown in to man the West Wall.” Dickson rated these troops as “probably miserable” in quality. He assessed the enemy’s options as “minimal resistance,” “retreat,” or “collapse and surrender.” So there. Gratified by Monk Dickson’s optimism—never a good trait in an intelligence chief—Hodges referred on September 11, 1944, to “the Siegfried Line—or what there is of it.”65
Flush with such happy talk, Hodges ordered his First Army’s three subordinate corps to close on the West Wall. By design, and his own strong influence on Hodges, Major General Joe Collins’s VII Corps had long set his course for the prime real estate of Aachen and the Stolberg corridor, teeing up a straight shot to Cologne and the Rhine River only fifty-four miles to the east. Hodges hoped for another jolt courtesy of Lightning Joe.66
For his part, Collins didn’t try anything tricky. The VII Corps would bum-rush the West Wall with three formations abreast. From north to south, the 1st Infantry Division keyed on Aachen city, Maurice’s Rose’s 3rd Armored Division received what passed for the best tank ground in front of Stolberg, and the 9th Infantry Division drew the short straw, an assignment to crunch through the dense Hürtgen Forest, a place that soon became infamous. Collins ordered his generals to “push on to the east with the hope that we might crack the West Wall before it could be fully manned.”67 Hope is not a recommended method of war. Yet given how well things had gone for the past seven weeks, who could blame Lightning Joe for indulging in some wishful thinking?
Maurice Rose saw it differently. He was ever a cold-eyed realist, especially with regard to the Germans. Those people never quit easily. Now they defended their home ground, the “sacred soil of the Fatherland” so often invoked by Hitler and his fellow Nazis. Rose did not dismiss the West Wall as some slipshod joke. These same Germans built high-quality MG42 machine guns, mighty Panther tanks, and rugged Focke-Wulf 190 fighter planes, as well as the formidable Atlantic Wall beach defenses and the impressive autobahn (automobile trail), the world’s first modern highway system. If the Nazi regime constructed protective border fortifications between 1936 and 1938, one should expect quality work, whatever the actual structures entailed. But as Rose’s key subordinates recalled, “The intelligence picture was quite vague up to this time.”68 Rose knew what he didn’t know. It was high time to fill in the blanks.
On September 12, 1944, with the division grouped near dreary Eupen, Belgium, Rose did something he hadn’t done since he took command. He stopped insisting on constant forward movement and ordered his lead task forces to take a good, hard look at the fortifications ahead. In military terms, the pursuit was complete. To Rose, this West Wall effort shaped up to be a deliberate attack, a prepared penetration of the German border defenses.69 Such an operation demands a solid picture of the enemy’s layout. As the British liked to say, time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.
The 83rd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion gave it a try after dawn on September 12. They got almost nowhere. Endeavoring to go overland in their unarmored peeps and lightly protected half-tracks and armored cars, the scouts found the closely wooded terrain leading to the German frontier to be so muddy as to be “impassable.” When the recon teams tried roads, they found all varieties of intentionally blown holes in the pavement, nests of interlocked downed trees, and clusters of man-made iron and concrete obstacles. Many of the roadblocks sported active German protectors. The scouts couldn’t get by. Well, Rose hadn’t counted on much from the 83rd. This difficult ground didn’t suit their wheeled vehicles.70 More than any equipment upgrade, the outfit desperately needed a true cavalryman in command, a man with a nose for the bad guys.
Rose had just such a man: Lieutenant Colonel Bill Lovelady, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 33rd Armored Regiment. This sawed-off dynamo showed a knack for finding a way into the foe’s vitals. When Rose directed both CCA and CCB to send forward patrols at 8:00 a.m. on September 12, the division commander knew damn well who would get the nod in Combat Command B. Lovelady did not disappoint. Under a leaden sky, the task force commander threaded around mud bogs and abandoned roadblocks. The lead American vehicle crossed the international boundary at 2:51 p.m. Within minutes, the G.I.s rolled into the village of Roetgen, Germany. As the olive drab tanks clanked down the main street, locals waved white towels and sheets—no stomach to tangle with rumbling Shermans. When he received the radio report, Colonel Boudinot exclaimed, “Tell Lovelady he’s famous! Congratulate him and tell him to keep on going!”71
Lovelady needed no urging. By 4:02 p.m., the forward tank platoon broke out of a dark stand of trees. Just a few yards into the open grass pasture, the first Sherman lurched, the tank commander holding up his right fist. All halt. A few hundred yards ahead the dirt trail ended abruptly. Stretching from left to right, as far as the Americans could see, ran a cordon both medieval and sinister, gray as the scudding clouds above. Five densely packed rows of concrete pyramids, most chest-high, the storied dragon’s teeth spiked up in grim serried ranks, exactly as the intelligence analysts had warned. Well, here they waited, a formidable obstacle indeed. No tank or truck could drive through the dragon’s teeth. A few bursts of machine gun bullets from the east announced that somewhere out there, the Germans saw TF Lovelady. That would do for today. Having already lost two G.I.s killed and ten wounded while destroying two German trucks and taking twenty prisoners, Bill Lovelady backed his vehicles into the wood line.72
North of TF Lovelady’s probe, Colonel Leander L. Doan led his tanks and infantry forward. In a few sharp roadside fights en route, TF Doan lost three tanks and seven G.I.s killed, plus more than twenty wounded. Battling through, TF Doan halted a few hundred yards south of the last set of trees fronting the dragon’s teeth. They reached that spot by 4:38 p.m. on that sad, dim afternoon. Leander Doan, West Point Class of 1927, was a tall, rangy Texan whom wise guys nicknamed “Tubby,” which he was not. He was, instead, a man who preferred to see things for himself, much like Maurice Rose. Doan kept his vehicles hidden back in the shadowy timber, but he and some staffers carefully worked forward tree to tree. They stopped at the edge of the opening. A broad mat of grass beckoned. Two football fields ahead, athwart any possible advance, squatted the forbidding, silent rows of dragon’s teeth. As Doan and his colleagues took a gander, a few German civilians and a Romanian man walked up to the Americans. The Romanian stated he’d once served in the German military—when or where, he did not say—and told Doan there were no German forces guarding the frontier. Doan listened, but wisely decided to send out his own men that night to take a closer look.73
Three infantry foot patrols sallied forth. The one farthest south came back after a trip 600 yards past the dragon’s teeth. They didn’t see any hostiles. The next, just about aligned on where Doan made his own visual inspection in the late afternoon, turned around after seeing a “large group of Germans,” number and exact activities undefined, on the American side of the concrete barricade. The northern patrol made it to the dragon’s teeth and walked around them. The American soldiers found stakes for barbed wire but no such tangle-foot present. The patrol leader believed that the cement tetrahedrons might be cracked with demolitions. As he wasn’t an engineer, that represented an educated guess at best. Doan thought the patrol results “incomplete and unsatisfactory.”74 Or, in other words, typical—men like Doan lived in the world of half-truths and suggestive indicators, hints as to what might be. Good commanders connected the dots. Doan’s task force would have to work it out under fire in the morning.
What did Rose make of the day’s work? The Armored Force School at Fort Knox would advise against using an armored division to crack a fortified line. That duty should go to infantry outfits, with tanks plunging through to exploit the gaps blown, like in Operation Cobra back in Normandy. Well, the 1st Infantry Division near Aachen and the 9th Infantry Division before the Hürtgen Forest had their own challenges. Rose might get an infantry battalion from one or both of these neighbors if Joe Collins felt generous. By and large, though, 3rd Armored Division would have to skin this cat themselves.75
So Maurice Rose thought about it. He’d personally gone far enough forward to see the dragon’s teeth. Behind that obstacle belt would be German machine gunners in concrete bunkers, 88mm antitank gun cannon crews hidden in camouflaged firing emplacements, and panzers tucked in behind earthen firing ramps. The Germans wanted the Americans to come right at them, head-to-head, shoulder-to-shoulder. Instead, Rose borrowed a tactic from Georgie Patton. Based on Lovelady’s and Doan’s reports, Rose decided to “grab ’em by the nose and kick ’em in the ass.” Doyle Hickey’s CCA would go straight into the Germans, holding the enemy’s nose, punching hard. And Boudinot’s CCB, with Lovelady sniffing out a seam in his own inimitable way, would burrow from south to north to unhinge the German defensive belt, ass-kicking to follow.76
Nobody in the 3rd Armored Division had trained to bust fortified lines. But the veteran officers and NCOs certainly remembered hedgerow tactics. Rose would cash in on that experience. After all, Rose and the other old-timers understood that the West Wall wasn’t the Great Wall of China, but instead the usual diabolical German pinball machine, created to bump a confused attacker between mutually supporting pillboxes and bunkers dotted every few hundred yards to ensure crisscrossing fields of fire. You could spend many days—and way too many lives—ensnared in such a fatal labyrinth. The dragon’s teeth were simply an extra good deal, stuck there to keep the tanks on the wrong side of the fighting, out of range of the key German machine gun bunkers yet exposed to high-velocity German panzer shots. Aerial photos indicated there was a second such band of dragon’s teeth and concrete bunkers five miles east of the first set. The entire West Wall defensive zone extended six miles in depth.77
If Hodges and Collins and Monk Dickson had it right, the outmatched Germans would battle back a bit then fold up, like in Operation Cobra or what just happened west of Liege. You’d feel them starting to give way, West Wall or not. Rose would know in a day or two. So be it. The general set the time of attack for 9:00 a.m. on September 13, 1944.78
Rain drizzled on the olive drab tank hulls west of the dragon’s teeth. Rose stood right there at the rim of the forest as Tubby Doan’s armored infantry moved forward on foot. The riflemen slipped through the concrete obstacles and fanned out. Engineers trailed behind, dragging satchels of demolitions. Sherman tanks banged at the firing slits of a covering pillbox. No response. Nothing.79 The rain dripped off helmet edges. Maybe that Romanian guy was right.
He wasn’t.
About 12:30 p.m., as the American riflemen wound their way through a draw to go toward the next visible gun emplacement, two German machine guns rasped, the fast yammering of the deadly MG34s. Caught in the open, squads of surprised G.I.s dropped prone, squirming for folds of cover in the broad field. Most were trapped out there. Some sprinted back to the dragon’s teeth, where the riflemen tried to hunker down behind the triangular objects. American tank guns punched back at the same pillbox they’d hit ninety minutes earlier. Evidently the Germans inside still wanted to play.80
One brave G.I. medic raced forward, sprinting while crouched low to the ground. He went to aid two wounded Americans out near the enemy enclosure. In the lee of the concrete mushroom, the medic reached the pair of stricken infantrymen. The corpsman spoke German and hollered for the Germans inside to surrender. The reply was decidedly negative. With that, the medic dragged his casualties to cover in a nearby dimple of dirt. But those U.S. infantrymen, as well as the ones still stranded in the open expanse or huddled back at the dragon’s teeth, were stuck. The constant rain meant no air support today. Of course, American artillery could help, but the only known target—the pillbox—was way too close to the prostrate friendly riflemen.
Doan had to get his tanks through the cement spikes. For two hours, defended by their infantry colleagues and protected by Sherman tank gunnery, soldiers of the 23rd Engineers worked under fire, setting and blasting charges to break apart the dragon’s teeth. The rain made the wires slick and the fuses touchy. Even when the explosives went off, the pesky robust pyramids shed a few brittle chips and shrugged off the rest of the blasts. Meanwhile, German machine gun fire, punctuated with occasional mortar bombs, tormented the engineers and ensured the American riflemen did not advance. Two hours crawled by.81
About 3:00 p.m., an infantry lieutenant came up on Tubby Doan’s radio net. The man was a replacement, so Doan didn’t know his name. But the young officer clearly had his head in the game. He sent welcome news. Three hundred yards south of the luckless engineer attempts, the lieutenant and his platoon found a way over the dragon’s teeth. It appeared local farmers piled up dirt between the teeth so they could bring tractors and wagons to and from their fields. The earth bridge was in some low ground, handily out of sight of that dangerous German bunker. The passage looked tricky, muddy, and probably mined, too.82 It had to do.
With Rose’s urging, Tubby Doan sent 1st Lieutenant John H. Hoffman, commander of Company E, to take charge. Hoffman led up four tanks to test the mud mound. Hoffman’s first M4 Sherman pushed a flail. The implement looked like a pavement roller attachment with chains on it. As the thing rotated, the ground pressure and flapping chains would detonate land mines. That was the idea, at least.
This wet afternoon, the flail didn’t find any mines. But the driver found the going too slippery, and the 33-ton tank slid slowly to the side, blocking the path. Brave tankers dismounted and hooked a tow cable to their Sherman; Hoffman got out and linked the other end to his own tank. Then the lieutenant’s vehicle engine howled. Mud clots flew.
Nothing. The flail tank stayed mired. A German mortar shell burst a football field away. Somebody had seen the American tank effort going on.
Hoffman waved up a third tank. That one connected up a cable and the two mobile Shermans pulled together. Up popped the flail tank. OK, enough. Hoffman ordered his M4 tanks to move out.83 Go, go, go.
Doan immediately told the rest of the battalion to follow. Within ten minutes, twenty U.S. Shermans roared through the gap. In Doan’s words, “the tanks began to cruise the pillbox area.” In quick succession, Tubby Doan and his tankers knocked out six enemy bunkers. The Americans found several 88mm cannons unmanned; their panicked Luftwaffe crews had taken to their heels.84
As his Sherman crossed the sloppy dirt pass-through, Doan found out he had a major problem with his infantry, which he very much needed to keep going. Doan’s 1st Battalion, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment teammates had been savaged, reporting more than sixty men dead and wounded. The real number might be much higher. The battalion commander, Captain Louis F. Plummer, was out of it, badly hurt. A lieutenant took charge over whatever able-bodied men could be assembled. From way back at Combat Command Reserve headquarters in Eupen, Lieutenant Colonel William R. Orr hurried forward to take charge. But with night coming on, it would probably be morning before the armored infantry reorganized. Right there to see the problem, Maurice Rose sent word to VII Corps: to keep going, we need a battalion from the nearby 1st Infantry Division. Luckily, Major General Joe Collins had anticipated the problem. The 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment would arrive after nightfall.85 Problem averted.
The Germans, however, had other ideas. A few minutes after the American tanks began to shoot up the first line of pillboxes, the Germans unleashed what Doan called “a murderous artillery fire.” Worse, as the tanks pushed east to get clear of the shell bursts, they thumped right into a second row of bunkers with panzers and 88mm cannons interspersed. Several brave German panzergrenadiers from the 9th Panzer Division—those guys again—even ambushed four separate Sherman tanks using panzerfaust rocket launchers. These Germans weren’t going anywhere. Without their infantry partners to go after the German panzerfaust teams, Doan’s tanks suffered horribly. Ten Shermans went up in flames, to include the battalion commander and a company commander. Tough Lieutenant Hoffman went off the radio net—he was wounded, his tank immobilized.86 The great triumph turned to wormwood in a few tragic minutes.
By midnight, the Americans had only eight tanks still working east of the dragon’s teeth. Although the 1st Infantry Division’s battalion marched in to do their part, the 1st Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment was in bad shape. So were CCA’s two tank outfits; Lieutenant Colonel Rich Richardson’s task force had gone into the maelstrom, too. At Maurice Rose’s order, Lieutenant Colonel Sam Hogan’s tanks and infantry were on their way up from Eupen, but they’d only allow CCA to hold on—maybe—to the narrow crack they’d clawed through the first band of the West Wall.
The long, brutal day had levied quite a toll on Combat Command A, with dozens killed and hundreds wounded. Disrupted communications meant nobody, from Rose down to the squad sergeants, could be sure of the actual numbers. Two battalion commanders down, numerous company commanders gone, three battalions shredded, men missing, horrific wounds—and Maurice Rose witnessed every bit of it from all too close up.87 The Germans stood strong. It sure didn’t feel like a breakthrough.
While Major General Maurice Rose watched Colonel Tubby Doan’s slugfest to the north, Combat Command B attacked in the south. Painful as CCA’s West Wall purgatory became, in the cold calculus of combat, the sacrifice might have accomplished its purpose by grabbing German attention. Rose’s plan envisioned hitting hard with CCA and thereby freeing up CCB to pry a hole into the German depths. A lot rode on this prong of the division’s push.
Thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Bill Lovelady’s reconnaissance in force on September 12, Colonel Truman Boudinot’s Combat Command B marked two likely lanes of passage through the dragon’s teeth. Accordingly, Boudinot committed Lieutenant Colonel Rosewell King’s task force to the north and Task Force Lovelady to the south in a side by side advance.88 One or both would get through. The old sweats, of course, guessed it would be Lovelady. It usually was.
Whereas CCA tried an infantry attack to lead the way, CCB’s two task forces went with the old formula: send a bullet, not a man. As engineers slipped forward to yank cable, cement blocks, and steel girders out of the single-vehicle gap trails discovered in the dragon’s teeth—presumably put there to permit German counterattacks, like sally ports in a feudal castle—CCB’s field artillery battalions opened up. They smothered identified cement bunkers with shell after shell. The six howitzer crews of Battery A, 391st Armored Field Artillery Battalion, reported shooting 581 105mm projectiles. Their impacts barely scarred the thick domes of the pillboxes, a tribute to German engineering and the sadistic overseers of Organisation Todt, the Reich slave labor directorate. But those inside the sturdy bastions evidently suffered drastically from the relentless shake, rattle, and roll. Sped by the artillery suppressive fires, both TF King and TF Lovelady scooted right through the five rows of dragon’s teeth. By day’s end, the task forces were locked in head-to-head engagements with the denizens of the next set of pillboxes, the back end of the first fortified belt.89 So far, so good.
Then it wasn’t. When the first barrier of cement teeth were overrun, German engineers focused on the obvious American routes. Before the lead Shermans rounded the bend, the Germans detonated buried charges, blowing holes in the none-too-good roadways. Both TF King and TF Lovelady found their paths blocked. As their American riflemen and engineers worked to secure and clear the holes, German mortars dropped round after round. The foot soldiers suffered losses, first in ones and twos, then by fives. The Germans understood just how to use their obstacles like flytraps to draw in the G.I. ground troops, then hammer them. Task Force King lost two tanks and a lot of riflemen as night fell. With the rain and the loss of leaders, King couldn’t tabulate the casualties.90 King’s men needed help.
In front of TF Lovelady, as their riflemen struggled, a pair of Panthers of the 9th Panzer Division appeared. The big panzers drilled holes through four U.S. Shermans and a half-track, killing multiple American infantrymen and tankers and wounding even more. That did it for the day. With his attached 36th Infantry Regiment rifle company woefully shy on healthy officers and sergeants, Lovelady pleaded for more riflemen. King seconded the request; his infantry, too, had been torn up. Apprised of the situation by radio, Maurice Rose committed his last armored infantry battalion, CCR’s 3rd Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment. They wouldn’t get to CCB until midnight. Colonel Boudinot sent them to buttress TF King. The 83rd Recon Battalion, Rose’s final uncommitted element, fell in behind TF Lovelady to provide more combat power.91 The scouts with their peeps and armored cars and light tanks were completely wrong for the job. But they were all the 3rd Armored Division had left.
Come another gray, rainy morning on September 14, 1944, both task forces advanced, fighting all the way. Another costly day ensued. Rosewell King himself was hit, his second wound in two and a half weeks. This time, he wouldn’t be coming back. The changeover to Major Herbert M. Mills slowed the task force. They fell in behind TF Lovelady.92 It all came down to that bunch. Again.
Somehow, by tenacious efforts, TF Lovelady threaded through German roadblocks and past bunkers. After blowing away a German antitank gun crew using Sherman gunfire, infantry maneuver, and artillery bursts, Lovelady approached the second belt of dragon’s teeth by sunset on September 14.93 One more good push . . .
They got there, short of ammunition, shy on tanks, not many infantry, out of everything but guts. By the end of September 15, 1944—drizzling, misty, no air for the third day running—Lovelady’s exhausted G.I.s stood at the far end of the second band of the West Wall. They’d bulled through, barely. Ferocious German counterattacks stopped them cold. Lovelady’s final thrust cost the Americans seven tanks, a tank destroyer, and an ambulance, and even worse, five men killed and thirty-three wounded. That sad outcome added to the entire division’s list of 953 soldiers killed and wounded, plus 79 M4 Shermans burned out, with more travail to come as TF Lovelady and the other forward task forces dug in and held on to their dearly-won, needle-thin corridors through the West Wall.94 In front of Bill Lovelady and his G.I.s the high road led to Cologne and the Rhine River. Never Never Land. They’d almost made it. Almost.
Almost.