By Michael Haskew, Editor
For three months during the autumn and winter of 1944, the U.S. First Army was locked in a death grip with the tenacious German defenders of the Hurtgen Forest, an area of 54 square miles east of the Belgian frontier. When the battle was over, First Army had lost at least 33,000 men killed, wounded, or captured. Fighting from extensive, prepared defenses, the Germans lost approximately 28,000.
The Hurtgen became a killing ground for two prominent reasons. The Americans sought to take pressure off elements of the Ninth Army fighting to capture the city of Aachen, the ancient seat of power for Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, and the fortified Siegfried Line, or Westwall, at the German border. They also sought to capture the Roer River dams, which held back waters that would inundate the countryside if the Germans chose to destroy them, impeding Allied progress indefinitely. The most direct route to the dams was through the Hurtgen. Only the launching of the German Ardennes Offensive in mid-December shifted the focus of fighting on the Western Front as Hitler’s last gamble for victory played out.
The dams were not captured until February, and the sacrifice in the Hurtgen remains one of the most arduous chapters in U.S. Army history. “Artillery shells bursting in the tree tops splintered the trees, showering the soldiers below with fragments of wood and steel,” wrote Robert S. Rush, historian of the U.S. 22nd Infantry Regiment. “Those who fought there maintained, ‘Show me a man who was in the Hurtgen and if he says he has never been scared, he is lying.’”
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