The battle for Hurtgen Forest (or Hurtgenwald as it was known the Germans) began in late-September 1944, just days after American troops launched an attack on the fortified city of Aachen on the Seigfried line. Aachen was suppossed to guard the entrances to the Rhine river, and was a formidable obstacle for troops under Lt General Courtney H. Hodges's First Army. The city was also the gateway to the Hurten Forest, considered by Hodges as a potential problem, as the Germans could use it to assemble infantry and armour for a counter-attack. For this reason, while the bulk of his command concentrated on capturing Aachen, Hodges sent along a sprearheading force of the 9th Infantry Division and the tanks of the 3rd Armored Division to outflank Aachen, and overrun the Hurtgen before it could properly defended by the Germans. The capture of the foreest would also bring the First Army to the banks of the Rhine, opposite which lay the sprawling city of Cologne - on the underbelly of the mighty, industrialized Ruhr valley.

The 9th Infantry and its armor entered the forest on 19 September in high hopes. Their orders were simple enough: break through the tangled mass of firs and capture a vital cross-road at the town of Schmidt. The capture of schmidt, based on the highest ridge in the area, would give American troops an important vantage point, from where they could observe and and push-on towards the Rhine. Also the Schwammenauel dam, just behind Schmidt, was important objective as it held the bulk of the Roer River's headwaters. The 9th Division was to prevent the Germans from destroying the dam at all costs. If they failed, the resulting floods would create an impetrenable terrain through which Americans could never advance. Hodges wanted the forest taken at the soonest, and his intelligence officers assured him that it could be in a few weeks. German troops in the area were believed to be both weak in numbers and spirit, largly made up of reservsist and old men. Still, there were some unsettling reminders of the prowess of Germany's soldiers.

By October 1944 for one, optimistic hopes that the war would be over by december were turning sour. True, the Germans were being pushed back everywhere; withdrawing faster than the allies could advance. But this was largly due to the former's heavy losses and the latter's lack of supplies. By September chronic shortages had hit every allied army. Still Hodges and his superior US Lt General Omar N. Bradley of the American Twefth Army Group were confident of pushing into Germany by December.

But a nagging worry were the reports of stiffening German resistence everywhere. In Mid-September, a major British airborne and armored assault by the British 2nd Army in Holland was thwarted by the shattered remnants two SS Panzer divisions and other depleted Werhmacht (Land Army) divisions. At the assault of Aachen meantime, the preliminary bombardment had created more problems than it had solved, when troops from the 1st and 30th Infantry Division found rubble hindering their progress into the city. The city fell on October 21, only after costly street fighting. South of that, US troops had approached the Ardennes Forest in Belgium where thick woods prevented forther progress - or so it was believed. Beyond that, in France, US Lt General George S. Patton's Third Army was being frustrated in Lorraine.

The probing advance of the 9th Division was intended to break the deadlock, but the divison was unprepared for the dangers it would face in Hurtgen. Intelligence had informed divisional commanders that the area was manned only by 'second-rate German troops in rudimentary, rather than deliberate positions.' In reality, the area itself was a natural defensive post for the enemy. US officers should have realized that the terrain was a formidable obstacle. A thick forest, overgrown with a thick snarl of firs and other evergreens, covered both flatlands and steep ridges. Occassionaly, open plateaus and farming hamlets broke up the wide expanses of forest, but were almost always covered by man-made obstacles. For months, the German Todt labor organization had packed the whole area with pillboxes (both concrete and log variety), positioned to create interlocking fields of fire. They also laid miles of booby-trapped concertina wire and minefields.

Liittle surprise that the 9th Division made little or no progress. Their drive on Schmidt was a particular disaster when strong german forces, based in Hurtgen town, mounted repeated jabbing attacks on American's left flanks. Stalled and cut-off, the division's casualties began to mount. Replacements were fed in, but the division gained only 3000 yards before being pulled back in late-October. In just a month of combat, the 9th had suffered 4500 casualties. On the other side, German morale soared.

RIGHT: Daunting Terrain. The Hurgten in winter. Unlike in their previous campaigns, the Americans did not possess good maps of the area, and that was one reason why so many of their assults failed or suffered miserably high casualties. Aerial reconnaissance over the area, which would led to good maps revealed nothing but trees; miles and miles of trees. Neither German armor nor infantry could be spotted among the thick canopy of firs, and the same usually applied to troop buildups, roads and defenses.

THE 'KEYSTONE' DIVISION ENTERS THE FRAY

As the 9th Division retired, the generals fed in the veteran 28 Infantry Division to take its place. Known as the 'Keystone' division, owing to its Pennsylvanian heritage, the division would soon earn the sombre nickname 'the bucket of blood division' because of the heavy cost in lives it paid in Normandy and the following campaigns. The trials and the defeats of the 28th Division would soon come to epitomize the struggle of the US Army in Hurtgen.

Led by Major General Norman D. 'Dutch' Cota, a popular and intelligent officer who had led a infantry battalion ashore on D-Day, the division was fed the same facts as before. Hurtgen is "manned by second-rate troops," the intelligence officers said, "who are the remnants of some battered German divisions, especially those in the Germeter-Hurtgen area who are in thinly held positions with a series of field fortifications rather than deliberate defenses". Although Cota may have believed them, the actual foot-soldiers who relieved 9th Division on October 26th had a more realistic appraisal of things. Entering the forest, they could not but help see the scars of war. Broken and muddy trails led down into the dense thickets and God knows where else. They were pockmarked with craters and the relics of war - helmets, tools, tin cans, blood-stained field jackets, and loose mines. And then there were the dead - both Germans and Americans lay where they had fallen; some were in pieces, others with dirty blankets over their bodies, but most enmeshed in the perpetually muddy earth, as if they were some macabre offshoots of the forest. In this hellish landscape, there lurked an air of despair, and when the GI's of the 28th felt it, they lost all hope. The division had barely enetred battle, but morale had already begun to slip away.

As the doughboys settled into their cold, wet foxholes, Lt General Leonard Gerow of the US V Corps, began planning the division's first combat mission. In typical Gerow style he specified missions for each of the 28th's three infantry regiments (the 109th, the 110th and the 112th), rather than leave it to Cota, who was more suited to the task. The 109th Infantry was to attack towards Hurtgen Town to block any counterattacks on the division's flanks, while the 110th was to strike south from Germeter to form a defensive corridor near Simonskall, which would serve as an important re-supply route. The final regiment, the 112th was to take Schmidt. It was believed that this last regiment would have the toughest job of all, for it had to first capture Vossenack, before traversing for several miles down the narrow and muddy Kall River trail to the village of Kommerscheidt, before moving on to Schmidt, where enemy resistance was bound to be stiff. For this reason, the drive of the 28th Divison would be trailed by a larger follow-on advance into the forest by the First Army on November 5. But, when the day of the attack came, bad weather forestalled the intended drive of the First Army, but Hodges saw no reason why the 28th shouldn't proceed on its own. It was a huge blunder. Although US intelligence officers had known that the forest was held by troops from the German 89th Infantry Division and the 275th Volksgrenadier Division, they failed to detect the a third division - the 272nd Volksgrenadier. Furthermore, they had also failed to take into the account that the 89th Division had recently been reinforced by the 1023rd Reserve Grenadier Regiment, the 189th Fusilier Battalion, the 5th, 9th, and 14th Luftwaffe Field Battalions, as well as 1403rd Festing (Fortress) Infantry Battalion. The 28th Divison was outnumbered four to one. Bitterly dissapointed over the cancellation of the First Army's drive, Cota reluctantly ordered his regiments into attack.

Dutch, all smiles. US Maj General Norman D. 'Dutch' Cota is offered a snack by his faithful doughboys in happier times. During Hurtgen, the popular Cota would be severely tried and often lost the respect of his men when things began to go wrong for the division.

At dawn on 2 November, following a short artillery barrage, the 109th Infantry Regiment stumbled out of its defensive perimeter and headed towards Hurtgen town. Within minutes, the entire regiment was swallowed up by the forest. Officers had little help in locating their commands even when separated by no more than a few feet of foliage. Then they discovered that their maps were inaccurate. Lost and bewildered, many platoons abandoned the attack and dug-in. Others moved on - in the face of heavy fire from pillboxes and machine-guns - towards what they believed was Hurtgen. One battalion actually fought its way to its objective overlooking Hurtgen town but was thrown back by German counterattacks on its flanks. Another battalion, which was rushing through a sparser part of the forest struck a minefield, and took a beating. When engineers were sent in to clear the way, German mortar and machine-gun teams homed in, ripping through their ranks. There was little else to do except withdraw. Those wounded who could not be retrieved were left behind, and they were a great many that day. Few would survive the cold night to see daylight again.