Brussels was the leave centre for the First Canadian and the Second British Army. British officers used to say wistfully that, for someone who loves Paris, to go to Brussels was like having tea with the sister of the girl you love. The Belgian capital may not have been as riotous as Pigalle, but for their soldiers it offered the beer and women they so eagerly sought. And it too became a haven for deserters and black marketeers.
The political situation in Brussels was perhaps even more complicated than the one in Paris. Major General G. W. E. J. Erskine, the head of the SHAEF mission in Belgium, had tried to help the Belgian government of Hubert Pierlot re-establish order after its return from exile in London. The largely left-wing Resistance movements, rather like their counterparts in France, were hardly enthusiastic at being told what to do by conservative politicians who had spent the war years in the safety of London while they had suffered such dangers. Totalling some 30,000 members at the beginning of September, their numbers grew to 70,000. Those who had fought closely with British and American forces did not welcome the idea of being brigaded into the Belgian army and gendarmerie to act in a subordinate role.
General Eisenhower issued an order of the day on 29 September praising the work of the Resistance but also supporting the request of the Belgian government for them to hand over their arms and equipment and volunteer for military service in special battalions as auxiliaries. At a time of acute coal and food shortages when Belgium was short of manpower, this was greeted with a mixture of scorn and irritation. On 21 October, General Erskine pointed out to the Supreme Commander that the fractious members of the Resistance who refused to give up their weapons outnumbered the police and gendarmerie by more than ten to one. A breakdown in governmental control was a distinct possibility. Eisenhower then prompted the Belgian government to declare that the unauthorized possession of weapons in a combat zone was not permissible.
On 9 November Eisenhower made an official visit to the Belgian capital, where he addressed parliament. A few days later the Belgian ministry of national defence announced that all Resistance forces would be demobilized on 18 November. Two Communist ministers and a representative of the Resistance resigned from Pierlot’s cabinet in protest. But General Erskine managed to convince them at a meeting later that SHAEF fully supported the government on this measure, and nobody should want to see clashes between the Resistance and Allied forces. Resistance groups backed down and agreed to hand over all weapons to the ‘inter-Allied authorities’.
On 25 November, however, British troops and armoured vehicles were moved in to support police and gendarmerie facing a large demonstration in the government district of Brussels. Rather as was happening in Greece, this made it look as if the British had decided to maintain an unpopular government in power. Erskine was forced to justify his actions publicly, on the grounds that order had to be maintained behind the lines of a combat zone. However, until elections could be held, the military authorities had no option but to support governments which had survived in exile and were totally out of touch with all those who had suffered through a long occupation.
While American veterans of the fighting in Normandy had their seventy-two-hour passes back to Paris, a constant stream of replacements for those killed or wounded in action were sent forward from Cherbourg to holding camps. Most were teenagers freshly arrived from the United States, but there were many older men reassigned to infantry rifle platoons which had suffered about 80 per cent of the casualties, a far higher proportion than predicted.
Just about the only improvement that winter to the depressingly unimaginative system was to change the name ‘replacements’ to ‘reinforcements’ in an attempt to take away the idea that newcomers were just filling dead men’s boots. This did little good. A regimental officer with the 28th Infantry Division said: ‘We’re still a first-class outfit, but not nearly as good as when we came across the beach [in Normandy]. We have a great deal more prodding to do now. The replacements, both officers and men, are green. They don’t know how to take care of themselves. They become casualties very fast sometimes. They don’t know their leaders and their buddies well, and it is hard to get them worked in as members of the team.’ In one company twenty men reported sick, mostly with colds and trench foot, otherwise known as ‘immersion foot’. All were new arrivals who had not been taught even the most basic rules of hygiene in the field, of which the most important was to change your socks. Their company commander admitted that he had lost twenty-six men to hospital in ten days because of trench foot. J. D. Salinger in the 4th Division was indeed fortunate to receive each week a pair of woollen socks knitted by his mother.
The Communications Zone personnel in charge showed little interest in the fate of their charges. For them, it was simply a question of processing the required numbers. Replacement depots were known as ‘repple depples’, and they resembled a gangmaster’s collection point for casual labour. ‘Each morning,’ wrote a newcomer called Arthur Couch, ‘some 1,000 men would stand outside a headquarters unit where someone would read out a list of some 100 or more soldiers’ names who would go off in trucks to their division or regiment. The rest of us would go back to our tents until another name calling.’ Young replacements had often been made even more apprehensive by wounded veterans returning from hospital to combat, who took pleasure in recounting weird and gruesome tales of fighting at the front.
Men often arrived with none of the training qualifications which their forms stated. Many could not swim. After losing a large number of men crossing the Moselle, a company commander in Patton’s Third Army described the attack on Fort Driant with replacements for his casualties. ‘We couldn’t get the new untrained and inexperienced troops to move. We had to drag them up to the fort. The old men were tired and the new afraid and as green as grass. The three days we spent in the breach of the fort consisted in keeping the men in the lines. All the leaders were lost exposing themselves at the wrong time in order to get this accomplished. The new men seemed to lose all sense of reasoning. They left their rifles, flamethrowers, satchel charges and what not laying right where it was. I was disgusted and so damned mad I couldn’t see straight. If it had not been for pre-planned defensive artillery fire [the Germans] would have shoved us clean out of the fort with the caliber of troops we had. Why? – The men wouldn’t fight. Why wouldn’t they fight? – They had not been trained nor disciplined to war.’
In all too many cases, replacements joined their platoon at night, not knowing where they were or even which unit they were with. They were often shunned by the survivors of the platoon they were joining who had lost close buddies. And because replacements were seen as clumsy and doomed, the veterans kept their distance. This became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy as badly led platoons would use the new arrivals for the most dangerous tasks rather than risk an experienced soldier. Many never survived the first forty-eight hours.
Replacements were sometimes treated little better than expendable slaves, and the whole system bred a cynicism which was deeply troubling. Martha Gellhorn, in her novel Point of No Return, repeats a clearly common piece of black humour: ‘Sergeant Postalozzi says they ought to shoot the replacements at the repple depple and save trouble. He says it just wastes time carrying all them bodies back.’*
Only if a replacement was still alive after forty-eight hours at the front, did he stand a hope of surviving a little longer. One of Bradley’s staff officers mused on the fate of a newly arrived ‘doughboy’. ‘His chances seem at their highest after he has been in the line – oh, perhaps a week. Then you know, sitting in a high headquarters, like an actuary behind an insurance desk, that the odds on his survival drop slowly but steadily and with mathematical certainty always down, down, down. The odds drop for every day he remains under fire until, if he’s there long enough, he is the lone number on a roulette wheel which hasn’t come up in a whole evening of play. And he knows it too.’
‘I was lucky to be with old soldiers who wanted to help a new replacement to s
urvive,’ Arthur Couch wrote of his good fortune to be sent to the 1st Infantry Division. He was taught to fire a burst with the Browning Automatic Rifle, then immediately roll sideways to a new position because the Germans would direct all their fire back at any automatic weapon. Couch learned quickly, but he must have been in a minority. ‘The quality of replacements has declined appreciably in recent weeks,’ his division reported on 26 October. ‘We receive too many men not physically fit for infantry combat. We have received some men forty-years-old who cannot take exposure to cold, mud, rain etc. Replacements are not sufficiently prepared mentally for combat. They have not been impressed with the realities of war – as evidenced by one replacement inquiring if they were using live ammunition on the front.’
Front-line divisions were furious with the lack of training before their arrival. ‘Replacements have 13 weeks basic training,’ a sergeant in III Corps commented. ‘They don’t know [the] first thing about a machinegun, don’t know how to reduce stoppage or get the gun in action quickly. They are good men but have not been trained. Up in the fight is no place to train them.’ Another sergeant said that, in training back in the States, the raw recruits had been told that ‘enemy weapons could be silenced and overcome by our weapons’. They arrived thinking the only danger was from small-arms fire. They had not imagined mines, mortars, artillery and tanks. In an attack, they bunched together, offering an easy target. When a rifle fired or a machine gun opened up, they would throw themselves flat on the ground, exposing themselves to mortar bursts, when the safest course was to rush forward.
The principle of ‘marching fire’, keeping up a steady volume at likely targets as they advanced, was something that few replacements seemed able to comprehend. ‘The worst fault I have found’, reported a company commander, ‘has been the failure of men to fire weapons. I have seen them fired on and not fire back. They just took cover. When questioned, they said to fire would draw fire on themselves.’ Paradoxically, when German soldiers tried to surrender, replacements were nearly always the first to try to shoot them down, which made them go to ground and fight on. Newcomers also needed to learn about German tricks which might throw them. ‘Jerry puts mortar fire just behind our own artillery fire to make our troops believe that their own fire is falling short.’ Experienced troops were well used to this, but replacements often panicked.
Divisions also despaired at the lack of preparation for officer and NCO replacements. They argued that officers needed to serve at the front before being given responsibility for men’s lives. NCOs who arrived without any combat experience should be reduced in rank automatically before they arrive, and then be promoted again once they had proved they could do the job. ‘We actually had a master sergeant sent to us,’ one division reported. ‘All he had done since being in the Army was paint a mural in the Pentagon. He is a good man but we have no job for him in grade.’
‘My first contact with the enemy found me rather in a dazed frame of mind,’ a young officer replacement admitted. ‘I could not quite grasp the significance of what it was all about … It took me about four days to get where I did not think every shell that came over was for me.’ He doubtless turned out to be a good platoon leader. But many, through no fault of their own, were utterly unsuited to the task. Some lieutenants were sent to tank battalions having never seen the inside of a tank. An infantry division was horrified to receive ‘one group of officer replacements [who] had no experience as platoon leaders. They had been assistant special service officers, mess officers, etc.’
Commanders, in an attempt to galvanize their replacements, tried to stir up a hatred of the enemy. ‘Before entering combat I have my leaders talk up German inhumanities,’ stated a battalion commander with the 95th Division involved in the reduction of fortresses at Metz. ‘Now that we have been in combat, we have lots of practical experience to draw on in this regard and it takes little urging to get the men ready to tear the Boche limb from limb. We avoid putting it on thick but merely try to point out that the German is a breed of vicious animal which will give us no quarter and must be exterminated.’
The Hürtgen Forest
Hemingway’s friend and hero Colonel Buck Lanham of the 4th Division had soon found himself back in a world far removed from the comforts of the Ritz. At the end of October, General Eisenhower issued his orders for the autumn campaign. While the Canadian First Army finished securing the Scheldt estuary to open the port of Antwerp, the other six Allied armies under his command would advance to the Rhine with the industrial regions of the Ruhr and the Saar as their next objectives.
First Army’s breaching of the Siegfried Line round Aachen put it no more than thirty kilometres from the Rhine, a tantalizingly small distance on the map. Some fifteen kilometres to the east lay the Roer river, which would have to be crossed first. The left wing of First Army, supported by the Ninth Army just to its north, would prepare to cross as soon as Collins’s VII Corps and Gerow’s V Corps secured the Hürtgen Forest and adjoining sectors.
Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges chose the old health resort of Spa for his headquarters. At the end of the First World War, Spa had been the base for Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg and Kaiser Wilhelm II. There, in November 1918, the leadership of the Second Reich faced the sudden disintegration of their power as mutinies broke out back in Germany: the ‘stab in the back’ which Hitler was now obsessed with preventing twenty-six years later. Hodges took over the Grand Hôtel Britannique, while his operations staff set up their collapsible tables and situation maps under the chandeliers in the casino. The town’s parks were packed with Jeeps and other military vehicles which had churned the grass into a mass of mud. The combat historian Forrest Pogue noted that, although less than thirty kilometres from the front line, nobody bothered to carry a weapon or wear field uniform.
First Army headquarters was not a happy place. It reeked of resentment and frustration at the slow progress during that stalemated autumn. Hodges, a strictly formal, colourless man with a clipped moustache, always held himself erect and seldom smiled. He had a southern drawl, was reluctant to take quick decisions and showed a lack of imagination for manoeuvre: he believed in simply going head-on at the enemy. More like a businessman in head office than a soldier, he hardly ever visited the front forward of a divisional command post. His decision to attack straight through the Hürtgen Forest as part of the plan to close with the Rhine led to the most gruesome part of the whole north-west Europe campaign.
South-east of Aachen, the Hürtgen Forest was a semi-mountainous expanse of deep pinewoods, with a few patches of oak and beech and some pasture on the ridges. Before the noise of war dominated its eerie peace, the only sounds were those of the wind in the trees and the mew of buzzards circling above. The forest, riven diagonally by ravines, had all too many vertiginous slopes. They were too steep for tanks and exhausting for heavily laden infantry, slipping and sliding amid the mud, rock and roots. The pine forest was so dense and so dark that it soon seemed cursed, as if in a sinister fairy-tale of witches and ogres. Men felt that they were intruders, and conversed in whispers as if the forest might be listening.
Tracks and firebreaks gave little sense of direction in this area of just under 150 square kilometres. There was little sign of human habitation except for a handful of villages, with woodcutters’ houses and farms built in the local grey-brown stone at ground level, and timber-framed above. Piles of firewood were neatly stacked under shelters outside each dwelling.
After the initial forays into the edge of the forest by the 3rd Armored and the 1st Infantry Divisions in the second week of September, Hodges and his staff should have realized what they were asking their troops to take on. The subsequent experience of the 9th Infantry Division during the second half of September and October should have been a further warning. Progress had been good at first, advancing south-east towards the key town of Schmidt. Surprise was achieved because, in the words of the German divisional commander facing them, ‘In general it was belie
ved to be out of the question that in this extensive wooded area which was difficult to survey and had only a few roads, the Americans would try to fight their way to the Roer.’ Once the German infantry were supported by their corps artillery, the forest fighting turned into a terrible battle of attrition.
The Germans brought in snipers to work from hides fixed high in the trees (closer to the ground there was little field of vision). They had been trained at Munsterlager in a Scharfschutzen-Ausbildungskompanie, or sniper-training company, where every day they had been subjected to half an hour of hate propaganda. ‘This consisted of a kind of frenzied oration of the NCO instructors and usually took the following form:
‘NCO: “Every shot must kill a Jewish Bolshevik.”
‘Chorus: “Every shot.”
‘NCO: “Kill the British Swine.”
‘Chorus: “Every shot must kill.”’
The American 9th Infantry Division was attacking the sector held by the 275th Infanterie-Division led by Generalleutnant Hans Schmidt. Schmidt’s regiments’ command posts were log-huts in the forest. The division was only 6,500 strong with just six self-propelled assault guns. It had some soldiers with an idea of forest fighting, but others, such as the 20th Luftwaffe Festbataillon, had no infantry experience. One of its companies consisted of the Luftwaffe Interpreter School, which in Schmidt’s view was ‘absolutely unfit for employment at the front’. The following month ‘almost the entire company went over to the enemy’. His troops were armed with a mixture of rifles, taken from foreign countries occupied earlier in the war.