By David H. Lippman
On February 8, 1945, Lt. Gen. Sir Brian Horrocks climbed onto a platform halfway up a tree. From there, as he wrote later, “I could see in front of me a peaceful looking valley with small farms dotted here and there. On the far side lay the sinister Reichswald Forest. Over this valley 30 Corps were about to attack.” Horrocks’s men, watching one of the heaviest British artillery barrages of the war, expected a walkover. Instead, they would suffer some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
The Reichswald was the five-mile gap between the Maas and Rhine Rivers and the natural advance route from the German-Dutch border to the Ruhr. Since the British had closed on this sector in October 1944, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had seen this valley of geometrically planted forests, towns, and small cities as the site for his next attack. It lay at the absolute right flank of the German West Wall defenses. Clearing it out would require a setpiece attack.
Montgomery planned the attack in two stages. First would be the British blast through the Reichswald. Next, south of the valley, the U.S. Ninth Army would strike across the Roer River a few days later, providing an anvil for the British Army’s hammer.
Monty’s plan to blast his way through the Reichswald was delayed, first by the necessity of opening Antwerp and the Scheldt Estuary to seaborne traffic, then by the Battle of the Bulge, which temporarily took 30th Corps away from the Reichs-wald to backstop the Americans on the Meuse River.
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