"Yeah. He asked me to shoot him."
"Yeah. He asked me, too."
"Did you?" "Hell, you know I couldn't walk off and leave the poor son of a bitch to die like that."
That same day Major Roy Creek of the 507th PIR, one of the heroes of D-Day, met two men carrying a severely wounded paratrooper back to the aid station. Creek took his hand to give him encouragement. The trooper asked, "Major, did I do OK?"
"You did fine, son." But as they carried him away, Creek noticed that one of his legs was missing. "I dropped the first tear for him as they disappeared in the trees. Through the fifty years since, I still continue to fight the tears when I've thought of him and so many others like him. Those are the true heroes of the war."
ON JANUARY 14, K Company advanced to within a half mile of First Army's final phase line at Houffalize. When the linkup took place the following day, the companies faced east and attacked again, this time to breach the Siegfried Line. January 15 is generally considered the last day of the Battle of the Bulge, but no one could have convinced the GIs of that. They still had a hard push ahead to get back to positions they had held one month earlier.
It was a disheartening experience to have to fight for ground once held. The 4th Infantry Division had been in continuous combat since D-Day, June 6. 1944. Lieutenant George Wilson joined the 4th just before the St. Lo breakthrough. Now, in January 1945, he found himself fighting for terrain that was becoming more and more familiar. "We were retracing the route we had taken when chasing the Germans over four months before. Our overall mission was to penetrate the Siegfried Line at the exact same spot." Wilson was struck by the thought that of the thirty-odd officers in his regiment in September, only three remained active. In addition, the regiment had lost many replacement officers. Wilson "could not help reflecting how many lives had been lost for what appeared to be no gain after almost five months of hell."
The total of American casualties in the Bulge was 80,987. More than half came in January. Thus January 1945 was the costliest month of the campaign in northwest Europe for the US Army. Total German casualties in the Bulge are estimated from 80.000 to 104,000. The battle had political consequences of the greatest magnitude. Hitler's decision to strip the Eastern Front to seek a decision in the West led to the crushing of the depleted German forces in the east, beginning January 12 with the Red Army offensive. The Red Army overran eastern Germany and Central Europe, which led to a half century of communist enslavement. The man responsible for this catastrophe was the world's leading anti-Communist, but he chose to sacrifice his nation and his people to the Communists instead of defending against them in the East.
At the end of January, American armies in northwest Europe were again at the German border. Surely, this time they would get across the Rhine.
Chapter Ten
Closing to the Rhine: February 1-March 6, 1945
AT THE BEGINNING of February the front lines ran roughly as they had in mid December, but behind the lines the differences were great. On December 15 the Germans had crowded division on top of division in the Eifel, while the Americans in the Ardennes were badly spread out. On February 1 the Americans had division piled on division in the Ardennes, while the Germans in the Eifel were badly spread out. The Germans felt the Americans were not likely to attack into the Eifel, which was heavier forest than the Ardennes. That, however, was exactly what Patton and Bradley wanted to do. With most of First and Third armies already in the Ardennes, it made sense to conduct an all-out offensive from there. For the soldiers of ETO that meant another month of struggling through snow or mud to attack a dug-in enemy.
Conditions in February were different from January, yet just as miserable. A battalion surgeon in the 90th Division described them: "It was cold, but not quite cold enough to freeze. Rain fell continually and things were in a muddy mess. Most of us were mud from head to foot, unshaven, tired and plagued by severe diarrhoea. It was miserable. As usual, it was the infantrymen who really suffered in the nasty fighting. Cold, wetness, mud, and hunger day after day; vicious attack and counterattack; sleepless nights in muddy foxholes; and the unending rain made their life a special hell." They were hungry because, much of the time, supply trucks could not get to them. Between heavy army traffic and the rain, the roads were impassable. The engineers worked feverishly day and night throwing rocks and logs into the morasses, but it was a losing battle.
What was unendurable, the GIs endured. What had been true on June 6, 1944, and every day thereafter was still true: the quickest route to the most desirable place in the world-home!-led to the east. So they sucked it up and stayed with it and were rightly proud of themselves for so doing. Private Jim Underkofler was in the 104th Division. Its CO was the legendary general Terry Alien; its nickname was the Timberwolf Division; its motto was, "Nothing in hell will stop the Timberwolves."
"That might sound corny," Underkofler said in a 1996 interview, "but it was sort of a symbolic expression of attitude. Morale was extremely important. I mean, man alive, the conditions were often so deplorable that we had nothing else to go on but your own morale. You know, you're sitting there in a foxhole rubbing your buddy's feet, and he's rubbing yours so you don't get trench foot. That's only an example of the kind of relationship and camaraderie we had."
THE STRAIGHT line between Aachen and Cologne lay through Diiren, on the east bank of the Rur River. But rather than going directly, Bradley ordered the main effort made through a corridor some seventeen kilometres wide, south of the dreaded Hurtgen Forest. By so doing, the Americans would arrive at the Rur upstream from the dams and, once across the river, be free to advance over the Cologne plain to the Rhine without danger of controlled flooding. The first task was to get through the Siegfried Line. And every man in an ETO combat unit was well aware that this is where the Germans stopped them in September 1944.
The generals were all enthusiastic for this one. General Walter Lauer, commanding the 99th Division, paid a pre-attack call on Sergeant Oakley Honey's C Company, 395th Regiment. Honey recalled that Lauer stood on the hood of a jeep and gave a speech, saying we had fought the enemy "in the woods and the mountains and had beaten them. Now we were going to get a chance to fight them in the open." Honey commented, "Whoopee! Everyone was overjoyed. You could tell by the long faces."
On February 4, C Company pushed off into the Siegfried Line. Honey recalls "charging into a snow storm with fixed bayonets and the wind blowing right into our faces. After moving through the initial line of dragon's teeth we began encountering deserted pillboxes. At one command post out came ten Germans with hands in the air offering no resistance."
Private Irv Mark of C Company said the enemy troops "were waiting to surrender and the one in charge seemingly berated us for taking so long to come and get them. He said, 'Nicht etwas zu essen' (nothing to eat). Strange we didn't feel one bit sorry for them."
Few companies were that lucky. Sergeant Clinton Riddle of the 82nd Airborne was in Company B, 325th Glider Infantry. On February 2 he accompanied the company commander on a patrol to within sight of the , Siegfried Line. "The dragon teeth were laid out in five double rows, staggered. The Krauts had emplacements dotting the hillsides, so arranged as to cover each other with cross fire."