Part 1 of 2

In the preface to his 1995 book A Dark and Bloody Ground, historian Edward G. Miller ponders a similar question. Commenting that the already deep well of World War II literature was experiencing a deluge of new additions as a result of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, he points out that the bulk of that literature covered the well-trodden paths through Normandy and the Ardennes. In laying out his reasons for writing on the Hürtgen Forest battles, he then goes on to offer a few thoughts on why the campaign has been largely ignored. In his opinion, the battle had been ignored because it was not as famous as those in Normandy and the Ardennes, and because it challenged the prevalent popular perception of the US Army in the Second World War. The battles for the Hürtgen Forest and the Roer River dams, which were initially joined in pursuit of the wrong objectives, did not result in a spectacular victory worthy of a Hollywood epic helmed by the likes of John Wayne or Robert Mitchum; no, they dragged out over a period of nearly five months, occurred in some of the worst terrain and battlefield conditions of the war, and ended in disappointment, death, and a personal trauma that has lingered for decades with those that fought it. They shattered half a dozen divisions and cost the Army as many casualties as the 1945 fighting on Luzon. Miller’s point, I think, was that the general population had little interest in reading about a battle that was very much a waking nightmare, particularly when any claims of ultimate American victory are dubious at best.

I think that Miller’s opinions are correct, but I would actually widen the scope. For the bulk of the American forces in Europe, that is Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, located in the center of the AEF line, the fall 1944 campaign was horrific. On the right of the group, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr.’s Third US Army battled its way past the Metz fortresses, a series of massive, largely subterranean concrete defensive works sited to guard the western approaches to the city of Metz. In three months of fighting Third Army, which had anticipated dashing to the Rhine in September and November, was able to gain and vault only the Saar. By the end of the fall Patton was preparing one last offensive that he hoped would get him to the Rhine. In the center of the line was Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges’ First US Army. Like Patton, Hodges had hoped to gain the Rhine in November, having cracked the Siegfried Line in heavy fighting in September and October. It was elements of First Army that fought the Hürtgen battles, but they weren’t the only ones that suffered, as fighting in the adjacent and more open Stolberg Corridor decimated the units tasked with pushing through it. On the left, finally, was Lt. Gen. William Simpson’s Ninth US Army. It came into the line in October after overseeing the fall of Brest on the Brittany Peninsula, and in November struck out for the Rhine. Attacking over the flat, open ground of the Roer Plain, it suffered tremendously and was halted at the Roer River- the river at which First Army’s November efforts also ended. All of this fighting was conducted in terribly rainy weather which interfered considerably with offensive operations. The terrain in Hodges’ sector was abysmal- hilly and forested- and Patton had problems figuring out how to solve the problem of the Metz fortresses. There are three great periods of killing in the ETO for the US Army, but only two, Normandy and the Ardennes, are recognized in the popular consciousness of the war. The fall campaign as a whole goes by unnoticed.

So the question is, why does the Hürtgen Forest battle, the ultimately bigger battle for the Roer dams, and the fall campaign as a whole go largely unnoticed by writers of popular history? I have a few theories. For one, all three of these engagements, despite the disparity in scale (corps, army, and army group level actions respectively), have a common thread in that they are convoluted. They’re hard to follow. Normandy is easy to write about: land at Omaha and Utah Beach, take Cherbourg, push south. The Bulge is easy to write about: the Germans attack, the Americans hold, the Americans counterattack. It’s hard to write about the fall campaign, because it’s not so simple. You have to explain the place of the campaign in the larger picture of a front that includes three army groups that control seven field armies, each of which has its own objectives that fit into a greater operational plan that is predicated on destroying the German Army in the field and capturing the Ruhr industrial area. You have to explain what the Ruhr is and why the Allies want it. You have to explain what happens with the race across France, MARKET-GARDEN and the Scheldt Estuary to explain why the front is where it is, supply problems and all. All of this is just to set the book up, and it’s hard to distill into an easy-to-understand summary for people who are general readers and likely at least somewhat unfamiliar with the military theory of the era and modern military theory in general. These challenges don’t really exist for Normandy and the Bulge because, although many of the same intricacies exist, they aren’t as fundamental to telling the greater story. There’s a happy medium to be found there in which there is enough easy-to-digest information to fill a book, whereas for the fall campaign there is no middle ground: you either have to gloss over it, like many books do, or you have to tell the story in full.

Another contributing factor to the overall lack of coverage of the campaign, in my opinion, is due to its nature. With the exception the 4th Armored Division’s encirclement of Nancy and the following Battle of Arracourt, there are no spectacular armored sweeps reminiscent of the race across France. The “story of the fighting” is a monotonous one: in Lorraine and on the Roer Plain, a constant, steady, costly, and slow advance by combined arms teams that take one hill, one village, and move onto the next. In the Hürtgen Forest, constant assaults into the teeth of German defenses for little or no gain. Rinse and repeat. It’s not like Normandy, where the hedgerows stymie American forces until they find a way to overcome them- although formations gained experience and became more adept at fighting through the woods and through fortified villages, the tactics initially developed in response to these new battlespaces didn’t really change much. The nature of the fighting in the Stolberg Corridor is the same, with tank-infantry teams attacking fortified villages and infantry seizing hills and woods on the flanks of the corridor day in and day out. There’s no satisfactory end, as at the end of the November offensives the entire army group is far short of the Rhine. If you’re someone who reads military history for the “excitement,” there isn’t much, just “business as usual.”