Huertgen Forest just a footnote

By Carl Heintze

This September marks the 56th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Huertgen Forest.

In the long scheme of things that's a matter of small significance. Most people living today don't know where the Huertgen Forest is, or rather, was, or why it should be remembered. And perhaps it shouldn't be. Perhaps it ought to be forgotten.

Unfortunately for me that's not possible.

In 1944 the Huertgen Forest, technically the Staats Forest Huertgen was a triangular piece of woodland along the border of Germany and Belgium sprinkled by small farm villages, and apparently of no strategic significance in the war which was closing in on it.

It did include parts of the Westwall, better known to most people as the Siegfried Line, with bunkers, pillboxes and trenches built hurriedly by the Germans in the '30s as a defensive system on their western frontier.

The bunkers had been abandoned when German forces swept forward into France and Belgium in May 1940, but they were reoccupied again when the Germans retreated eastward in the summer of 1944.

The U.S. First Army threw a series of divisions into the Forest, supposedly to push through it to the Rhineland. They expected little opposition, but to their surprise the Germans fought back tenaciously because they thought the Americans were after a collection of dams on the Urft and Roer rivers further east which could be used to flood the Rhine plain and slow the American advance.

The battle for the Forest raged from September until February, interrupted for a month or so by the Battle of the Bulge. None of the fighting was brilliant, glorious or memorable. But the battle cost the United States more than 20,000 American casualties, all of them suffered in the most appalling conditions on the Western front.

Trench foot, exposure and similar problems were endemic.

But the most terrible part of the battle was simply its pall of gloom, a kind of indefinable mixture of darkness, damp and the feeling of approaching disaster and death. The Forest became a thing, an inescapable part of being there that lasted long after the battle had ended. It was war, the essential essence of war, of hate, death and destruction.

The few villages, Schmidt, Huertgen, etc. became piles of rubble. Fortunately, few civilians were involved, but the 1st, 4th, 8th, 9th, 28th and 78th Infantry Divisions, 5th Armored and several other units turned over their frontline infantry ranks during the battle.

In place of these casualties came a flood of replacement infantrymen, including myself, none of them with combat experience. They, in turn, sometimes within minutes of entering combat, become casualties themselves.

It's uncertain how many German soldiers died in the Forest, but probably an equal number. The German units involved also were scrapings from the bottom of the manpower barrel, scratch units, young boys and old men, the sick, the halt and the lame.

Tragically, everyone fought in what was described by one participant as a green hell for the wrong reasons in the most difficult of climates and places.

And then the battle was forgotten.

Unlike Iwo Jima, another campaign with horrendous casualties, the Huertgen Forest is at most a footnote, not the reason for a memorial.

Unlike D-Day it was neither a turning point nor the beginning or the end of anything.

Farm fields now stretch were the Forest once stood and stone crosses mark a small cemetery where some of the German dead lie buried.

The rest is silence and forgetfulness. Or at least it ought to be. But somehow I just can't forget. Nor, I think, can any of the other participants in the battle still alive.

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