Dog Company

As the sun went down, white flakes of snow pelted the faces of Dog Company as they trudged through ankle-deep mud. Twisted hulks of trees flanked the fire trail cut into the forest. Rotting remains of the front half of a horse sprawled across the trail. One of the tragedies of war are the innocent animals caught in the crosshairs of battle. Helmets, equipment, and the debris of a lost battle littered their path. As Dog marched through the mud and snow, a boot caught Morris Webb’s eye. He kicked it aside, and a dead man’s bone fell out of the worn leather and rested in the muck.

The macabre scene continued as the men spotted a burned-out Jeep—a lone sentinel guarding one of the forest’s many destroyed churches. Hit head-on by an 88 mm round, its lifeless driver seemed to welcome Dog Company into one of the tiny hamlets that were scattered inside Germany’s dense Hürtgen Forest. The charred corpse sat in the rusted vehicle with its blackened hands affixed to the steering wheel. Only the dead soldier’s torso and skull remained intact. He dutifully wore his M1 helmet, which had been scorched to a charcoal-indigo color by the shell that had engulfed him in flames. The odd grin on his unrecognizable face exposed shiny ivory teeth that gleamed in the sun’s fading rays that filtered through the diffused clouds of the gray November sky. Dog Company fixated on the driver; the spectral figure eerily pointed the way to the remains of an old building which would become their new command post.

A mile or so from the Jeep, nearly a battalion of doomed Americans and their burned out trucks, tanks, and even an intact aid station hauntingly remained frozen in time, stuck there behind German lines on the gorge-like Kall River trail. A violent German counterattack had sealed their fate.

Like moles, the Rangers clambered into the cellar of the nearby structure after nearly stumbling over a headless German soldier still wearing his boots and tattered field-grey uniform. A starving black cat had crawled inside the body and poked its face out where the soldier’s head should be. “Get out of there, you son of a bitch!” A Ranger kicked the cat away from the corpse.

Several days earlier, the Rangers had moved to Germany’s Hürtgen Forest. They were attached to V Corps and nominally under the control of the 28th Division. Dog Company was about to engage in one of the U.S. Army’s most protracted battles fought on German ground during World War II, and one of the longest single battles in the Army’s history. A flawed strategy would also make the battle in the Hürtgen one of the most deadly of World War II. The number of men killed and wounded—a staggering 40,000—approached America’s losses for the entire Vietnam War. Worse, it was largely a battle that didn’t need to be fought. As legendary Major General James Gavin, whose 82nd Airborne Division fought in the forest, noted, “For us, the Hürtgen was one of the most costly, most unproductive, and most ill-advised battles our army has ever fought.” The Allies could have bypassed the forest. Instead, they rushed headlong into a German meat grinder.

The Hürtgen Forest covered a rectangular area: each side roughly twenty miles long, with the city of Düren in the corner to the north-west and Roetgen to the southwest. In the southeast corner were several hydroelectric dams on the Roer River, which snakes through the dense forest. The area includes more than fifty square miles of lush hills and deep ravines with very few roads and many fortified positions. Gigantic conifer trees blocked the sunlight from reaching the thick, green, mossy floor.

Rain and fog, dense trees, deep ravines, and the ever-present shelling transformed the Hürtgen into a dark green hell. Ernest Hemingway described it as “Passchendaele with tree bursts,” referring to the World War I battlefield where heavy artillery turned the field into a charnel house littered with the bodies of hundreds of thousands of butchered men on both sides. The forest’s trees magnified the killing power of the German artillery. The combatants deliberately detonated shells across the forest’s canopy, causing a deadly rain of shrapnel and razor-sharp conifer splinters that sliced through flesh and bone.

Throughout the forest, the Wehrmacht had carefully constructed a factory of death. Pillboxes, bunkers, and barbed wire blocked passage through much of the forest. Across the vast forest floor, the Germans had also strewn hundreds of thousands of mines intended to kill and maim American soldiers. Almost every position within the forest was preregistered by German artillery. Several towns within the forest were located on key terrain, and many guarded approaches to large river dams. These dams were crucial to the outcome of the battle. As long as the Germans controlled the dams, they controlled the Roer. By opening the dams’ floodgates, they could flood large swaths of land in the Hürtgen, making it impassable. Only after months of needlessly sustaining enormous casualties did the Allied high command finally recognize the strategic importance of the dams. But by that time, it was too late for the tens of thousands of American soldiers who died in the battle.

High ground located in the forest also overlooked one of Germany’s best-kept secrets of World War II: within the nearby Ardennes Forest, Hitler had established covert assembly areas for troops that were to carry out the powerful counteroffensive Hitler was preparing. For months, Hitler had amassed tens of thousands of men, tanks, and artillery in the nearby Ardennes forest. He was planning an operation on the Western front, designed to change the tide of the war. If Allied forces penetrated Hürtgen’s high ground, they would lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Hitler’s operation. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the Germans were therefore prepared to defend this territory at all costs.

The key towns within the forest were Hürtgen, Germeter, Vossenack, and Schmidt, all of which sat on important positions overlooking the river and its dams, some near the Bulge assembly areas. Schmidt was adjoined by a high ridgeline, which linked it to the town of Bergstein, the location of Hill 400, one of the area’s highest hills. The top of Hill 400 provided a crucial vantage point of strategic importance. The Germans called the hill Burgberg or “Castle Hill” since it purportedly contained the ruins of a medieval fortification.

Since September 1944, the Allies had been battling in this death trap. The Hürtgen’s narrow roads and trails made it almost impossible to maneuver tanks and neutralized the Allies’ dominance in firepower. With their blinders finally off, the Army recognized the importance of controlling the dams. Into this dark and bloody killing field would march the men of Dog Company.

Trained as an offensive strike force, the Rangers prepared for a mission to clear and hold key terrain near Schmidt after the armor units had taken it. “The mission assigned on November 4 was to reinforce the CCA (Combat Command A of the 5th Armored Division) in a three-day attack which was to pass through the ruptured west wall at Lammersdorf and, sweeping in an arc to the south, assault an enemy-held portion of the Siegfried line from the rear. Intelligence showed that more than 100 fortifications were located in the area.… The plan of the attack hinged on the 28th Division’s ability to take and hold Schmidt, an important enemy road center.”

The 2nd Ranger Battalion formed into three teams for the operation. Dog and Charlie Company took an inner track “of the sweep and were to hole up for the first day.” The overall plan “was to then swing south and west in a semicircular drive, with the Rangers mopping up all resistance bypassed by the two armored infantry spearheads. Flamethrowers were to be used freely during the operation.”

Yet Dog’s role in the proposed plan never materialized, because the 28th Division suffered a staggering defeat at Schmidt. On November 1, All Souls’ Day, the 28th Division, known as the Pennsylvania Keystone Division or “Bloody Bucket,” attacked Schmidt and the crucial ridgelines dominating the area. In what was named the “All Souls’ Day Battle,” the 28th fatefully descended into the misty, wet, and dark forest. Rounds from hundreds of machine guns and pillboxes tore into the men as they battled their way past the abandoned and destroyed vehicles and tanks from the 9th Division’s failed attack on Schmidt in September. Muddy roads and trails, as well as hundreds of shell-craters, greeted the men as they battled dug-in German positions.

The Bloody Bucket’s 112th Infantry Regiment took the lead in securing the crucial towns of Kommerscheidt and Schmidt, which guarded the approach to key Roer dams. Crossing the Kall River Bridge, the men had to negotiate several minefields and face hundreds of prepared bunkers and redoubts—most hidden from plain sight—until the decimated unit finally captured Schimdt.

Because of Schmidt’s crucial importance, the Germans deployed the 89th Infantry and the 116th Panzer Division, or “Greyhounds,” in an impressive counterattack. In one of the most devastating World War II defeats dealt to an American regiment, the German units forced America’s 28th Division out of Schmidt and cut it into pieces as the division attempted a retreat through the Kall river valley and across the bridge towards Vossenack. The steep gorges and icy, winding trails of the Kall made the perfect site for an ambush as the Germans pounced on the Pennsylvanians.

The unlikely hero of the battle was a German doctor. In a great display of humanity, regimental doctor Captain Günter Stüttgen negotiated an unofficial truce near the Kall River Bridge that mercifully allowed the Americans and Germans to evacuate their wounded, preserving thousands of lives. The German medics, in particular, helped save many American lives.

On November 8, the U.S. military stopped fighting. At night, the 300 remaining troops of the 112th Infantry Regiment withdrew after losing 1,900 soldiers. The total losses of the 28th Infantry Division amounted to more than 6,000 men out of approximately 25,000. Sharing the same fate of the 9th Infantry Division earlier, the 28th Infantry Division was mauled in the forest.

In the midst of this defeat, the Rangers went on a grueling, five-mile forced march during the second week of November. They slogged through the snow and mud to the town of Vossenack, where they relieved the remnants of the 28th Division. Following headquarters’ decision to scrub the Rangers’ mission, due to the 28^th Division’s failure to capture Schmidt, the Rangers became a quick reaction force. They were placed on two-hour alert as a “counterattack force in the Vossenack area,” and in the event of a German breakthrough, the Rangers would go in to plug the breach in the American lines. Now in the front lines of the Hürtgen, Dog Company and the entire 2nd Ranger Battalion were under constant attack from artillery, mortars, and aggressive German patrols.

Dog Company occupied nearby foxholes and the basements of several old buildings. They created a perimeter defense with tripwires, barbed wire, and flares. Each side probed the other; frequent German infiltration patrols hit the Ranger perimeter, sometimes tripping the flares—as did wayward animals. When a flare went off, “it could have been a cow or a German patrol. We had to go out and reset it again,” explained Bill Hoffman.

Portions of the Hürtgen Forest, initially a deeply lush and forbidding place of soaring conifers, had become what Hoffman called “the land of six-foot trees,” because “tree bursts and artillery just chopped up everything.”

The shell came sailing through the night air, exploding near the Dog’s command post. The German 88 mm guns and self-propelled artillery, which frequently bombarded the positions, had pre-registered the coordinates of the buildings that Dog Company occupied. As shrapnel tore through one Ranger’s helmet in several places, Webb and Hoffman sprung into action to save their wounded comrade.

The two men drove through the winding trails of the Hürtgen in a Jeep with the injured man. Hoffman remembered, “We laid the guy across the windshield of the Jeep, which was folded down. He was in a litter. Morris held onto him, and I drove.” The men made the hellish ride in the dark with artillery bursting on both sides of them. They passed through a T-junction, which the men referred to as “Purple Heart Corner” because the Germans had preregistered the crossroad and frequently shelled it. Hoffman and Webb successfully ran the gauntlet at Purple Heart Corner, but the heroic journey would be in vain. The men delivered the wounded Ranger to Doc Block’s aid station, but he died of his wounds shortly afterwards.

In another act of heroism, Ruggiero attempted to rescue a Ranger who had been wounded near the perimeter. Running back to a Ranger-occupied house, he yelled into the basement, “Tell that medic to get his ass up here, right now!”

The new medic came up carrying his bag and wearing a helmet painted with red crosses. “One of the guys got hit up there, right up by the hill up there,” Ruggiero told the greenhorn. “You run the same way I run. Stay right on my fanny. Run as fast as you can.”

As the two men took off, the shelling resumed. “They could see us,” Ruggiero recounted. “Shells landed nearby, but we finally got up to the guy. The heel of his foot was almost blown off. We moved him into a ditch, just so we could get out of their sight. I didn’t bank on it, but I thought that the red cross on the helmet might stop the German shelling, but it didn’t.”

“No, no. Lomell’s in that house,” said Ruggiero. “We run into there, the Germans will know that there’s guys in there. You stay here, do what you can for him. I’m going to make a run for it [to find transportation].”

The nimble dancer started to run as the shells fell around him. Popping up near the door to one of the other houses, McBride waved him in. Ruggiero recalled, “I hit one hole after another. I dove into them to avoid the shells. It was pretty hot. You couldn’t see every hole. I ran down one, popped up, and went into another.” When he finally neared McBride, Ruggiero made a dive for the commander and knocked him right down the steps.

Dusting himself off, McBride got up and said, “God damn you, Rugg, what the hell are you doing? I don’t know whether to give you a kick in the ass or put you in for a medal.” McBride then brought out a Jeep that they used to rescue the fallen Ranger and the medic.

As the artillery took its toll on Dog, German wonder weapons, subsonic V-1s, eerily buzzed through the air overhead. The V-1 attack was concentrated on Liege and Antwerp, miles away. Mist and fog enshrouded the forest as exploding shells from German artillery blasted the trees—or what was left of them—producing deadly tree bursts. The constant bombardment resulted in cases of shellshock. After being hit, one Ranger didn’t know his name and couldn’t speak or recognize anyone. He lapsed into a chronic vegetative state and was sent back to the rear.

The brutal and cruel conditions acted as a catalyst, as the men’s hatred against the Germans grew and intensified like a volcano about to erupt. Vengeance seized the hearts and souls of the men. The abysmal living conditions didn’t help matters. Mud, snow, and dampness from living in the foxholes and moving around in the morass resulted in frozen feet or trench foot for many of the Rangers. Hoffman explained: “We lived a dog’s life. The holes weren’t real deep, but they were enough to lay down in. You couldn’t really sit up in it. We’d lie in the inside in blankets. We found a couple of old German canteens, which we filled with gasoline. We put a wick in it. It was a really smoky light, and it only provided a little bit of light. You couldn’t wait to put the thing out it was so smelly. It was a little bit of comfort as opposed to being in the dark. The logs provided some overhead cover. They were shelling the area. Trees were coming down.”

Life in the buildings wasn’t much better than conditions in the foxholes. “The living conditions were terrible,” Ruggiero confirmed. “Most of the houses were blown up and hit pretty hard. There was no place to go when you had to go to the bathroom.” To remedy this, the previous unit that had occupied the house set up a large bathtub in the living room as a makeshift toilet. Most of the newly arrived Rangers also made use of the tub. “I wouldn’t do it. No sir,” Ruggie vowed. “I noticed there was a big hole in the roof where a shell had come through. Another one comes through, I don’t want to be squatting over [the tub].”

Instead, the sergeant held onto his K-Ration boxes and used those as a toilet. “In that particular place, I got kidded an awful lot about it.” But one night, he really needed to go. “I was looking for a place to go. I wasn’t going to fool around with that big tub that was chock full. Every now and then the Germans would fire that damn 88. Those shells would come in pretty close. I had to go pretty bad, so I found a nice soft spot by the door of this particular building. I said to myself, If I can’t hold it anymore, I’m just going to have to stick my fanny out of the door. I went out and did my duty.” When he came back in, the sergeant advised his men to do the same if they needed to go to the bathroom, but none of them did.

On the night of November 18, command alerted the Ranger battalion for the potential relief of the 28th Division’s 109th Infantry. At the same time, Fox Company received a direct hit on their command post but, miraculously, took no casualties. The men of the 109th weren’t so lucky.

As they passed through the Ranger lines, 120 mm German mortar fire fell on the close column of outgoing 28th Infantry Division troops. Doctor Block and the others in the medical section, including Frank South, rushed to their aid. The Rangers brought in nineteen Americans from the 28th. Nine soldiers had been killed on the road, including a full-bird colonel. Morris Webb recalled Doctor Block’s attempts to rescue the wounded men. In the pitch-black darkness, the doctor began feeling around their bodies. Then he “pulled up a handful of teeth and brains.” The normally stoic Block lost his composure and vomited on the muddy road.

By November 21, orders came for 2nd Ranger Battalion’s Able and Baker companies to link up with the 12th Infantry Regiment. Since November 17, the 12th Infantry Regiment had been part of Operation Queen. The advance was very slow and bloody, as German antitank guns gored the unit. The Rangers remained in a counterattack position for possible deployment to exploit a breakthrough created by the 28th. In addition, the Keystone Division directed the Rangers to send a patrol to “determine the exact location of the right flank of [the 12th Infantry Regiment’s] 121st Infantry Battalion.”

Captain Sid Salomon’s B Company moved out late at night to probe an area of the forest that was still thickly wooded in an attempt to find the battalion’s right flank held by K Company of the 121st Infantry Battalion. According to Salomon, it was so dark “you had to put your hand on the shoulder of the man in front of you. If you put your hand in front of your face, you couldn’t see it. The forest was so dark in general that even in the daytime you had a hard time seeing.”

The Rangers first linked up with a scout, a sergeant who was given the task of leading them to K Company. “He was supposed to guide us in. He wouldn’t get out of the dugout. My first sergeant, Ed Andrusz, told him to get out, and when he didn’t, he just yanked the sergeant by the collar and gave him a bash to the jaw.” The sergeant still refused to move.

B Company then moved in the direction they thought was the location of K Company. But the men walked straight into a dense minefield near Germeter. Every step became a matter of life and death. Mines went off one after another. Screams of wounded Rangers pierced the air. Several men lost their legs, and another man was killed. In the midst of the chaos, Salomon ordered the company to halt, dig in, and pull out their trench knives to gently probe the positions around them for the deadly mines. As B Company held their position in the minefield, the men “received intense mortar and artillery fire.” One direct hit on a foxhole used as the company’s command post added to the twelve casualties during the period, “[including] one [that] was fatal.” The company also repulsed an enemy patrol attempting to “turn their right flank.”

At sunrise, the men made their move. “When dawn came, we pretty much looked to find out where we were. We grabbed a couple of [Germans and took them prisoners] as they made their way through the minefield. They were scared to death.” As Salomon recalled, “I was pretty rough with them because I was absolutely livid that so many of my men had been hit.” The captain had taken German in high school and barked an order in German at one of the prisoners: “Start calling names. Call Fritz, Johann, and everyone else. Start calling the names of your comrades,” he commanded in an attempt to lure the other Germans from their hiding places.

Thankfully, A Company and portions of D Company helped rescue Salomon’s trapped and wounded men. During the relief of B Company’s position, a heavy firefight ensued between the combined forces of A and D Companies and the Germans. “For almost forty-five minutes, B Company was trapped under a three-way crossfire, but fortunately, no casualties were incurred during this action. [However,] intense enemy artillery caused seven more casualties this day; the company was now down to less than fifty percent and many of the top NCOs were hit.”

When the firefight was over, medic Bill Geitz, who punched Lomell on D-Day, helped evacuate the casualties. As Geitz was moving to tend to a wounded Ranger, he stepped on a mine, which blew off his leg. Ruggiero recalled the heroic efforts to bring out Geitz and several of the other wounded Rangers. “With men laying on their stomachs, Dog Company formed a human chain where we reached out in front of the other guy and probed the area with our knives to make sure we didn’t step on any more mines.”

Down to half strength, Salomon’s B Company retrograded back to the battalion perimeter near Vossenack. Salomon bore witness to the intense brotherhood within the battalion. “The other men had heard what we were undergoing up there, and we didn’t have to dig a foxhole. The foxholes had already been dug [for us] by the battalion.” Salomon’s men returned to Vossenack right around Thanksgiving Day. “When we got back, we all got a good night’s sleep that night. The mess sergeant had saved a hot turkey dinner for us. We didn’t eat anything while we were up there, so we all ate ravenously. Wouldn’t you know it, we all had the GIs [the runs].”

On November 26, the battalion received orders from the 8th Division: “Reconnoiter areas taken yesterday, Hürtgen and Kleinhau, with view of occupying said areas. Make recommendations as to whether movement into the area should be made by day or by night.” With Operation Queen in full swing, V Corps had pierced the heavily defended German lines. At great cost, they occupied the villages of Hürtgen and Kleinhau and looked to continue on to Schmidt. The butcher’s bill for the attack was enormous—the Germans mauled the 8th Division “Golden Arrows” just as it had done to the 9th and 28th Divisions. In a maddening on again, off again situation, the Rangers had received orders to act, only to be told to stand down. From the 445th Antiaircraft Battalion, twenty “deuce-and-a-half” trucks were attached to the 2nd Ranger Battalion as troop transports in preparation for a counterattack mission.

When the reconnoiter orders came in, Rudder tapped Bob Edlin to scout Schmidt. The hero of Lochrist and the rest of the Fabulous Four ditched their noise-making steel helmets and stealthily entered the forest armed with tommy guns and trench knifes. The men slipped through Kommerscheidt and into the outskirts of Schmidt without seeing even one German. At the edge of the town, the Ranger from Texas had a premonition to enter the town alone.

He slipped into the village of Schmidt alone, tommy gun in hand, hugging the buildings for cover as he probed deeper into the crucial German city, which had earlier been the focus of two massive battles. “I was sneaking around buildings. Absolutely nothing. There should have been some self-propelled weapons in sight, some activity somewhere. … It smelled like a trap.”

Edlin rejoined Courtney, Dreher, and Burmaster. “I’ve had enough,” he explained. “Let’s get back to the battalion as quick as we can.” Edlin reported back to Rudder his suspicions about the seemingly empty town; Rudder relayed the information up the chain of command and continued to hold his position.

On December 5, Captain McBride and the other company commanders submitted names of the men recommended for rotation back to the United States, giving some hope for relief. Unbeknownst to the men, they were on the eve of another of their greatest battles. To the men’s dismay, Colonel Rudder received orders to report to First Army headquarters. Rumors ran rampant as to why the “old man received his summons” and was leaving his beloved Rangers.