What was the Battle of Hürtgen Forest?
It was the US First Army's fight through a dense German border forest southeast of Aachen, from September 1944 to February 1945. The German Seventh Army held it to guard the Roer River dams and to cover the build-up for the Ardennes offensive. American casualties came to about 33,000.
The Hürtgen Forest was not on anyone's list of famous battlefields when the first American soldiers walked into it in September 1944. Five months later, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Army's own 4th Infantry Division both count about 33,000 American casualties there. The Army historian Charles B. MacDonald, who wrote the official history of the campaign, concluded that the real winner of the October fighting was the forest itself, which cancelled out American superiority in aircraft, artillery and tanks.1
This is the story of why the battle was fought, why the Germans fought so hard to hold the forest, and how it led straight into the Battle of the Bulge. It belongs to the Western Front of World War II, which ran from Normandy through the failed airborne gamble of Operation Market Garden to the German border, and to the military histories of the United States and Germany.
Why did the US Army fight in the Hürtgen Forest?
By mid-September 1944 the First Army of Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges had chased the beaten Germans across France and Belgium to the West Wall, the fortified line the Allies called the Siegfried Line. Southeast of Aachen the border ran through the Hürtgen Forest, a tangle of fir plantations, deep ravines and high ridges. James Gavin, who later fought there as commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, describes an army that still thought itself in pursuit of a beaten enemy, with worn-out tanks and its supplies far behind on the Normandy beaches; MacDonald notes that the front at Aachen was more than 500 road miles from Cherbourg and the beaches.2
Hodges and his VII Corps commander, Major General J. Lawton Collins, were both veterans of World War I. They remembered the Argonne Forest in 1918, which had threatened the American flank, and they feared the Hürtgen could hide a counterattack into the right flank of the drive on Cologne. MacDonald writes that they hoped to neutralize the forest by seizing the high ground on its eastern edge, around the villages of Hürtgen, Kleinhau and Schmidt. No one expected a long fight.3
What the American plans left out was the most important thing in the area. Behind Schmidt, on the upper Roer River, stood a group of dams, above all the Urft and the Schwammenauel. Whoever held them could flood the Roer valley downstream. MacDonald shows that the dams were not a formal objective of the first attacks, and that the First Army's staff long underrated what a flood could do; Collins later admitted that the dams were never assigned to his corps as a target, according to the German heritage survey of the Kall Trail.4
Why did the Germans defend the Hürtgen Forest so hard?
For the German side, the forest was worth almost any price. Gavin dates to 16 September 1944 Hitler's decision to strike back through the Ardennes toward Antwerp, and he writes that the mission of General Erich Brandenberger's Seventh Army, facing Hodges, was to hold the First Army off until that counteroffensive was ready, and to keep the Roer dams out of American hands. MacDonald shows how the autumn fighting bound German divisions that were earmarked for the Ardennes counteroffensive.5
The dams were the Germans' trump card. By MacDonald's count, which matches the First Army engineers' 1944 study shown below, the Urft reservoir held about 42,000 acre-feet of water and the Schwammenauel about 81,000. Opened or blown at the right moment, they could send a flood down the Roer that would wash out bridges and cut off any American force that had crossed the river. The German regional heritage service notes that German commanders took it for granted that any American attack on Schmidt could have only one purpose: the dams.6
The men who held the line were far from an elite. The core of the defense was the 275th Infantry Division of Generalleutnant Hans Schmidt, which had fallen back from the Netherlands. By mid-November, MacDonald counts, it had absorbed the remnants of thirty-seven different units, yet it still fielded about 6,500 men and more than a hundred artillery pieces in well-prepared positions of log bunkers, barbed wire and mines. Many of the German dead were very young: the historian Frank Möller, studying the graves at the German war cemetery in Hürtgen, found that most of the soldiers buried there were born in 1926, so they died at about eighteen.7
German commanders were puzzled that the Americans kept attacking into the woods instead of going around them. MacDonald quotes a German officer who said the Germans could never have used the forest as a base for a big attack into the American flank, because they had no forces for it and tanks could not move there. Major General Rudolf von Gersdorff, the Seventh Army's chief of staff, is quoted as saying that the forest denied the Americans the air and armored superiority that had won their earlier battles; Gavin quotes him in almost the same words.8
What happened in the first attacks in September and October?
The 9th Infantry Division crossed the border near Lammersdorf in mid-September and pushed into the forest, where small German units fighting from the trees stopped it. On 6 October the division attacked again with two regiments toward Schmidt. In ten days it cleared about 3,000 yards of forest and lost about 4,500 men, which MacDonald puts at more than one casualty per yard. Both MacDonald and the German heritage survey give the figure of about 4,500.9
The forest itself fought the attackers. Shells burst in the tops of the tall firs and showered the men below with steel and splinters, which made an open foxhole a trap; mines lay in the firebreaks and on the few tracks; and rain turned every route into mud. MacDonald and Michael D. Hull, writing in Military Times, both describe how the woods cancelled American superiority in tanks, aircraft and artillery and left the fight to the infantry.10
What happened in the battle for Schmidt in November 1944?
On 2 November the fresh 28th Infantry Division of Major General Norman Cota attacked on its own, with Schmidt as the main objective. The Germans call this fight the Allerseelenschlacht, the All Souls' battle, after the day it began. On the first day the 112th Infantry took Vossenack, and on 3 November one of its battalions marched across the deep gorge of the Kall River and into Schmidt. Cota, MacDonald writes, felt like “a little Napoleon.”11
The Germans were luckier than they knew. At almost the moment the attack began, Field Marshal Walter Model of Army Group B was holding a map exercise at Schlenderhan Castle near Cologne with the commanders of his armies, corps and divisions, and its subject was a theoretical American attack in the Hürtgen area. When the real attack was reported, Model sent the corps commander back to his post and told the others to carry on with the actual situation. He sent part of the 116th Panzer Division at once and the rest within two days, and the 89th Infantry Division was already near Schmidt.12
On 4 November German tanks and infantry struck Schmidt and drove the Americans out. The only road to support them was the Kall Trail, a narrow cart track down one side of the gorge and up the other. The first American tank on it hit a mine and blocked the track, and other tanks that tried to pass slid off the slope. Lieutenant Raymond Fleig, the platoon leader, got through to Kommerscheidt in another tank, and only a handful of tanks ever followed him across the gorge.13
For four more days the Americans clung to Kommerscheidt and Vossenack under German artillery directed from the heights. On 8 November the survivors east of the Kall were ordered back across the gorge. Near the Kall bridge, German and American medics arranged short local truces to move the wounded, while fighting went on only yards away. MacDonald calls the attack one of the most costly American division actions of the whole war: the 28th Division lost 6,184 men, while the Americans took 913 prisoners and estimated another 2,000 German casualties.14
What happened in the November offensive?
On 16 November the First Army opened its main offensive toward the Roer, and the 4th Infantry Division attacked through the heart of the forest. Its 22nd Infantry under Colonel Charles “Buck” Lanham pushed east toward Grosshau, losing men to mines, tree bursts and counterattacks; Hull writes that in its first three days the regiment lost all three of its battalion commanders.15
The 4th Division advanced a little over three miles in about two weeks. MacDonald counts 4,053 battle casualties and about 2,000 more from trench foot, respiratory disease and combat exhaustion, and the division's own public affairs office gives the same figures. The weather made it worse: rain, sleet and snow, wet clothing and cold food. MacDonald quotes a German officer from the December fighting who recalled soldiers found dead in their foxholes from sheer exhaustion.16
The Germans fed in new units as the old ones wore out. By 21 November the 344th Infantry Division had replaced the shattered 275th, while the 116th Panzer Division was pulled out to refit for the Ardennes. The 8th Infantry Division took the village of Hürtgen on 28 November, and the 4th Division took Grosshau the next day. In early December the 2nd Ranger Battalion and an armored combat command fought for Bergstein and Castle Hill, the last high ground before the Roer.17
One German soldier is remembered by his enemies. On 12 November 1944 Leutnant Friedrich Lengfeld of the 275th Division tried to rescue a badly wounded American calling for help from a minefield and was mortally wounded himself. In 1994 veterans of the 22nd Infantry Regiment placed a memorial to him at the German war cemetery in Hürtgen; both the German War Graves Commission and the regiment's association record it.18
How did the Hürtgen Forest lead to the Battle of the Bulge?
The forest fight and the Battle of the Bulge were two halves of one German plan. Behind the Hürtgen front, units of the Sixth Panzer Army were assembling for the Ardennes. MacDonald records German divisions in the Monschau area being relieved in mid-December so that they could join the counteroffensive. Gavin called the defense of the forest Phase One of the Battle of the Bulge.19
The battered American divisions went south to rest in what was thought to be a quiet sector, the Ardennes. The 28th Division was there, in Luxembourg, when the German offensive hit it on 16 December, and the 4th Division had arrived in Luxembourg only days before. On 13 December the V Corps had at last attacked toward the dams; the German offensive cut that attack short, and the Ardennes fighting soon overshadowed the battle in the forest.20
When were the Roer dams finally taken?
Only in February 1945. The 78th Infantry Division entered Schmidt on 7 February, while the 82nd Airborne Division crossed the Kall gorge on its flank. Gavin, walking down the Kall Trail before the attack, found it still lined with wrecked tanks and the unburied dead of the 28th Division, emerging from the melting snow.21
On the night of 9 February men of the 309th Infantry reached the Schwammenauel Dam. The engineers who climbed into it found that the Germans had already done what they meant to do: they had wrecked the machinery and blown the discharge valves, releasing not a great wave but a steady flow that flooded the Roer valley for about two weeks and delayed the Allied crossing of the river. Before the end of February the Americans were across the Roer and moving toward the Rhine.22
How many casualties were there in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest?
On the American side, MacDonald counts more than 8,000 men lost to combat exhaustion and the weather and another 23,000 killed, wounded, missing or captured between mid-September and mid-December, an average of more than 5,000 casualties for each division that fought there. Hull and Gavin both give about 24,000 battle and 9,000 nonbattle casualties. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the US Army put the total at about 33,000.23
German losses are much less certain. MacDonald thought any count of German losses in the wider Siegfried Line campaign would be little better than a guess. The German War Graves Commission estimates that the fighting in the Hürtgen Forest cost the lives of about 12,000 German soldiers. Its war cemetery at Hürtgen holds 3,001 dead, almost all of them German, and a second German cemetery stands four kilometers away at Vossenack.24
Who won the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, and why does it matter?
In the end the Americans cleared the forest and took the dams, but at a terrible cost and months late. MacDonald concluded that the forest fight had gained little beyond wearing down at least six German divisions and drawing in some forces meant for the Ardennes, and that by mid-December it had failed to take the only truly critical objective the forest shielded, the Roer dams. For the Germans, holding the Hürtgen bought time for the Ardennes offensive and kept the dams as a weapon into February.25
The battle has been argued over ever since. Gavin called it a battle that should never have been fought and blamed headquarters far from the front. MacDonald recorded the First Army's view that it could not leave an enemy-held forest on its flank and that one more fresh division always seemed enough to finish the job; the army's operations officer put it as “we had the bear by the tail.” MacDonald also wrote that the Americans had not changed their methods of attack despite the losses. The National Park Service calls it the longest single battle the US Army has ever fought.26
See how it compares with the other great clashes of the war in the greatest battles of World War II, or test yourself in the World War II battles quiz.
Where was the Battle of Hürtgen Forest fought?
The Hürtgen Forest (Hürtgenwald in German) lies in the northern Eifel hills of North Rhine-Westphalia, between Aachen to the west, Düren to the northeast and Monschau to the south. The fiercest fighting was around the villages of Vossenack, Kommerscheidt, Schmidt, Hürtgen, Kleinhau and Grosshau and along the Kall River gorge, with the Roer dams to the southeast. Today a marked walking route follows the Kall Trail; the Rhineland heritage service warns that unexploded munitions still make it dangerous to leave the paths.27
Read about the day the attack on Schmidt began in 2 November in history, and about the start of the November offensive in 16 November in history.
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