Returning from the patrol, the captain ordered an attack. "It was cold and the snow was deep," Riddle recalled. "There was more fire from the emplacements than I ever dreamed there could be. Men were falling in the snow all around me. That was an attack made on the belly. We crawled through most of the morning." Using standard fire-and-move-ment tactics, the Americans managed to drive the Germans beyond the ridge. "When we reached the road leading through the teeth," Riddle said, "the captain looked back and said, 'Come on, let's go!' Those were the last words he ever said, because the Germans had that road covered and when he was half-way across he got hit right between the eyes. There were only three of us in our company still on our feet when it was over."
Another twenty-five men turned up, and the new CO, a lieutenant, began to attack the pillboxes along the road. But the Germans had been through enough. After their CO fired the shot that killed the American captain, his men shot him and prepared to surrender. So, Riddle relates, "when we reached the pillboxes, the Germans came out, calling out 'Kamerad.' We should have shot them on the spot. They had their dress uniforms on, with their shining boots. We had been crawling in the snow, wet, cold, hungry, sleepy, tired, mad because they had killed so many of our boys." The Americans were through the initial defences of the Siegfried Line, and that was enough for the moment.
THE 90th DIVISION reached the Siegfried Line at exactly the spot where the 106th Division had been decimated on December 16. At 0400, February 6, the 359th Regiment of the 90th picked its way undetected through the dragon's teeth and outer ring of fortifications. Shortly after dawn pillboxes that had gone unnoticed came to life, stopping the advance. A weeklong fight ensued.
The Germans employed a new tactic to confound the Americans. Captain Colby explained it: "Whole platoons of infantrymen disappeared as a result of the German tactic of giving up a pillbox easily, then subjecting it to pre-sighted artillery and mortar fire, forcing the attackers inside for shelter. Then they covered the doorway with fire, blowing it in. The men soon learned it was safer outside the fortifications than inside."
Patton inspected a command pillbox: "It consisted of a three-storey submerged barracks with toilets, shower baths, a hospital, laundry, kitchen, storerooms, and every conceivable convenience plus an enormous telephone installation. Electricity and heat were produced by a pair of diesel engines with generators. Yet the whole offensive capacity of this installation consisted of two machine guns operating from steel cupolas which worked up and down by means of hydraulic lifts. As in all cases, this particular pillbox was taken by a dynamite charge against the back door." To Patton, this was yet another proof of "the utter futility of fixed defences. In war, the only sure defence is offence, and the efficiency of offence depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it."
That point was equally true when applied to the Atlantic Wall. At the Siegfried Line in February, as at the Atlantic Wall in June 1944, the Germans got precious little return on their big investment in poured concrete.
LIEUTENANT John Cobb, 82nd Airborne, had arrived in France on January 1. By the end of January, he was a veteran. On February 8 his platoon was to accompany a squad of engineers using mine detectors to clear a trail across the Kail River valley.
The site had been the scene of a battle in November in which a battalion of the 28th Division took a terrible pounding. Cobb's was the first American unit to move back into the valley, dubbed by the 28th "Death Valley." Cobb described what he saw: "Immobile tanks and trucks and the bodies of dead American soldiers were everywhere. The snow and cold had preserved the dead and they looked so life-like it was hard to believe they had been dead for three months. It was as if a snap-shot of a deployed combat unit had been taken, with everything as it was at a given moment in the past. The command posts, the medical aid station with men still lying on their stretchers, and the destroyed supply trucks were all in their proper places just as if someone had set up a demonstration from the field manual-but the actors were all dead."
By February 8, Ninth Army, north of Aachen, had gotten through the Siegfried Line and closed to the Rur, but it could not risk an assault across the river so long as the Germans held the upstream dams. First Army, meanwhile, was working its way through the Line south of Aachen. On the tenth, V Corps won control of the dams, only to discover that the Germans had wrecked the discharge valves, thus creating a steady flooding that would halt Ninth Army until the waters receded.
While they waited, the GIs sent out reconnaissance patrols and practised river crossings. For Company K, in the centre of Ninth Army's front, that meant sending squads at night in rubber boats over the flooding Rur. Engineers worked with the infantry on assault-boat training and demonstrated the use of pontoons, rafts, smoke generators, and how to shoot communication wire across the river with rockets and grenade launchers.
D-day was February 23. After dark on the 22nd, tanks drove to the river's edge. Engineers lugged the 400-pound assault boats through deep mud to assembly areas. Huge trailer trucks with girders and pontoons for the heavy-duty bridges ground forward to final staging areas. In the 29th Division the shivering men gathered beside the boats to huddle together in the mud and water.
The river was two- to four-metres deep, 300 to 400 metres wide, with currents running more than ten kilometres per hour. On the German side the banks were heavily mined from the river to the trench system that commanded the river. Conditions were similar along the whole stretch of the Rur.
At 0245, February 23, the Rur River line, 35 kilometres long, burst into fire. It was one of the heaviest barrages of the war-every weapon the Americans had, hurled against the enemy; a 45-minute deluge of bullets and high explosives designed to stun, kill, or drive him from his position. Ninth Army alone had more than 2,000 artillery pieces firing 46,000 tons of ammunition.
"In the middle of it all," a lieutenant in the 84th wrote, "a lone German machine gunner decided he'd had enough. He fired a long burst of tracers at his tormentors. It was his last mistake. Every tank, every antiaircraft gun, every machine gunner within range returned the fire. Waves of tracers and flat trajectory rounds swept towards the hole, engulfing it in a single continuous explosion. We cheered lustily, and Captain George Gieszl commented, 'Now that's an awfully dead German.'"
At 0330 the first assault waves shoved their boats into the river. In the 84th, assault companies had several boats overturn, but most of the men swam to the enemy banks, many without weapons (there were only thirty rifles in one 130-man company). The troops moved inland. Behind them engineers worked feverishly to build footbridges and to get a cable ferry anchored on the far bank. By 0830 the job was done, and ammunition, supporting weapons, and communication wire were ferried across. By 1030 elements of the assault companies had entered the town of Dtiren.
By the end of February 24 the engineers had treadway bridges over the Rur, allowing tanks and artillery to join the infantry on the east bank. K Company crossed on a narrow swaying footbridge that night. It beat swimming, but it wasn't easy. The men had 30 or 40 pounds of gear. Half the duckboards were under water, and there was a single strand of cable for a handhold. The Germans were pumping in artillery, close enough to be disconcerting. Sergeant George Lucht recalled his dash across the bridge:
"The Germans had regrouped and their artillery was falling on both sides of the river, and I was thinking. Boy, this is just like Hollywood."