Our Tortured Souls: The 29th Infantry Division in the Rhineland, November–December 1944

By Joseph Balkoski

The acclaimed WWII historian continues his in-depth chronicle of the 29th Infantry Division as it made its brutal push into Germany.

By November of 1944, the U.S. 29th Infantry Division had stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day and embarked on an epic and arduous path toward Allied victory. In Our Tortured Souls, acclaimed military historian Joseph Balkoski picks up the story of the 29th on the eve of the all-out offensive intended to carry the Allies to the Rhine River by Christmas and end the war soon afterward.

The plan for the 29th seemed simple enough. As part of General William Simpson’s Ninth Army, the division was to drive ten miles eastward, breaking through several German strongpoints, crossing the Roer, and seizing Jülich, beyond which lay the Rhine and Germany’s heartland. 

The offensive encountered problems from the very beginning, on November 16th, when it took days to crack the German’s first line of defense. By the time the offensive was halted on the banks of the Roer three weeks later, the 29th Infantry Division had suffered 2,600 casualties and fallen short of its objectives. Balkoski reconstructs this tragic chapter in the division’s history with his trademark combination of meticulous research and vivid st

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780811749909

Book preview

OUR TORTURED SOULS

ALSO BY JOSEPH BALKOSKI

Omaha Beach

Utah Beach

History of the 29th Infantry Division in World War II

Beyond the Beachhead

From Beachhead to Brittany

From Brittany to the Reich

OUR TORTURED SOULS

The 29th Infantry Division in the Rhineland, November–December 1944

Joseph Balkoski

STACKPOLE BOOKS

Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Balkoski

Published by

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All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books.

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Balkoski, Joseph.

Our tortured souls : the 29th Infantry Division in the Rhineland, November–December 1944 / Joseph Balkoski.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8117-1169-2

1. United States. Army. Infantry Division, 29th. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Regimental histories—United States. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Germany—Rhineland. I. Title.

D769.329th .B36 2013

940.54'21343—dc23

2012034669

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8117-4990-9

For

Robert M. Miller

CO, Company F, 175th Infantry (5th Maryland),

29th Infantry Division

1942–1944

Loyal soldier, neighbor, and friend

Contents

List of Maps

Introduction

ONE          Watch on the Rhine

TWO         Three Towns in Germany

THREE     Preventing Wholesale Slaughter

FOUR        Paying for a Bad Guess

FIVE          We Have a War on Again

SIX             The Momentous Now

SEVEN       As Far Away as the Moon

EIGHT       They Are Doomed Men

References

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Maps

1.  The Western Front: November 1944 Allied Offensives

2.  29th Division Front, November 16, 1944

3.  1st Battalion, 115th Infantry Attack, 12:45 P.M., November 16, 1944

4.  1st Battalion, 175th Infantry Attack, 12:45 P.M., November 16, 1944

5.  115th and 175th Infantry Attack on Siersdorf, 12:20 P.M., November 17, 1944

6.  115th and 175th Infantry Attack on Siersdorf, 7 A.M., November 18, 1944

7.  116th Infantry Attack on Setterich, 2:15 P.M., November 17, 1944

8.  175th Infantry Attack on Bettendorf, November 17, 1944

9.  115th Infantry Attack on Dürboslar, November 19, 1944

10.  175th Infantry Attack on Schleiden, November 19, 1944

11.  175th Infantry Attack on Aldenhoven and Niedermerz, November 20, 1944

12.  116th Infantry Attack toward Koslar, November 20–24, 1944

13.  175th Infantry Initial Attack on Bourheim, November 21, 1944

14.  175th Infantry Reseizes Bourheim, November 22–24, 1944

15.  116th Infantry at Koslar, November 25–28, 1944

16.  175th Infantry at Bourheim, November 25, 1944

17.  175th Infantry at Bourheim, November 26, 1944

18.  115th Infantry Attack on Kirchberg, November 27, 1944

19.  116th Infantry Attacks to the Roer, December 1–2, 1944

20.  116th Infantry Attacks to the Roer, December 3–6, 1944

21.  115th Infantry at the Sportplätze and Hasenfeld, December 5–8, 1944

22.  29th Division Sector along the Roer River, December 25, 1944

Introduction: 29, Let's Go!

Had the men of the 29th Infantry Division realized in November 1944 that their World War II combat history had not even reached its halfway point, they would have wondered if their illustrious outfit could endure any longer. The loss of 16,500 men in the division's first five months of combat had a decidedly enervating impact on the 29th, a unit that at full strength consisted of little more than 14,000 GIs. It had all begun on Omaha Beach, when 1,300 29ers had become casualties in an eighteen-hour period. In the nearly continuous combat that had ensued in Normandy, Brittany, and Germany, personnel within the division's twenty-seven rifle companies had turned over so many times that by autumn a D-Day veteran was an object of curiosity among the neophytes who comprised the vast majority of the units.

In From Brittany to the Reich, the previous installment of this 29th Division series, we left the Blue and Gray Division poised in western Germany to launch an all-out offensive, scheduled for November 16, 1944. At least among General Gerhardt's loyal staff in the division's war room tent, it was a moment of earnest optimism, for the U.S. Army's top brass had proclaimed that if all went well, the Americans should reach the mighty Rhine River by Christmas with the 29ers leading the way. Beyond that lay Berlin—and, even better, a troopship at a German wharf crammed with happy GIs heading home to the States.

Cheerful reveries of that kind, however, were premature. By that stage of the war, in fact, it was far more natural for riflemen at the tip of the 29th Division's spear to display much more cynicism than optimism. Every battle they had fought so far in World War II had been considerably more arduous and costly than the generals had foreseen. Whatever the future would bring—and this time the 29ers would have to cope with appalling weather as well as an implacable enemy—even the lowliest GI realized the quickest route home would require pummeling the enemy into extinction, the same blunt conclusion that Generals Grant and Sherman had reached in the Civil War's terminal stage. It would not be easy—nothing the 29th Division had done against the Germans ever was—but sooner or later, the Jerries must crack and Gerhardt's men would thereupon surge into the heart of the Fatherland.

That day, when it finally came, would be glorious. But all 29ers participating in General Ike's Great Crusade could not fail to ponder sorrowfully the multitude of brothers-in-arms currently buried deep within the soil of France and Holland; the goal for which those men had sacrificed their lives must be fulfilled. The dead would not experience the imminent victory. The only thing left of them was memories. Those memories, however, were more than strong enough to hold the 29th Infantry Division together until the inevitable, crashing finale.

Lincoln had said it best: The living 29ers must take increased devotion to that cause for which they—these honored dead—had given the last full measure of devotion.

29TH INFANTRY DIVISION ORGANIZATION

In mid-November 1944, because of a theater-wide shortage of U.S. Army infantry replacements, the 29th Infantry Division conducted offensive operations with a complement of men far short of the 14,300 stipulated by official tables of organization. The core of the 29th Division consisted of its three infantry regiments: 115th (1st Maryland); 116th (Stonewall Brigade); and 175th (5th Maryland). All three had considerably fewer men than the prescribed figure, 3,100. According to a venerable U.S. Army custom, the word regiment is considered superfluous when designating units of regimental size, and references to the 115th Infantry, for example, always imply regiments.

A regiment was configured into three 870-man battalions, designated 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, typically commanded by a major or lieutenant colonel. Battalions in turn were broken down into companies: A, B, C, and D in the 1st; E, F, G, and H in the 2nd; I, K, L, and M in the 3rd. (By convention, no U.S. Army regiment contained a J Company.) Companies D, H, and M were heavy weapons companies, armed with six 81-millimeter mortars and eight machine guns. All other lettered companies were rifle companies. Each battalion also contained a headquarters company of 126 men.

Rifle companies were organized into three forty-one-man rifle platoons and a single thirty-five-man weapons platoon, equipped with three 60-millimeter mortars and two machine guns. In turn, each rifle platoon was broken down into three twelve-man rifle squads and a five-man platoon headquarters. Led by a staff sergeant, a rifle squad was equipped with eleven M-1 rifles and a single Browning automatic rifle.

The 29th Division also included thousands of non-infantry soldiers, among them artillerymen, engineers, cavalrymen, military policemen, signalmen, and musicians, as well as medical, ordnance, and quartermaster personnel.

29TH INFANTRY DIVISION, NOVEMBER 18, 1944

ONE

Watch on the Rhine

1. GET ON YOUR HORSE

The Democrats will win.

Major General Raymond McLain, erstwhile Oklahoma City banker with no formal education beyond sixth grade, who now commanded a multitude of American soldiers as large as Robert E. Lee's army at Gettysburg, articulated those four words into his telephone so precisely that a listener could not possibly misunderstand. The time was thirty-eight minutes past midnight on November 16, 1944, in the cluttered and hectic command post of McLain's XIX Corps at Heerlen, Holland. The general had just acquired an urgent piece of news from his boss at U.S. Ninth Army in nearby Maastricht; it was imperative that McLain pass the message on to his restless subordinates straight away.

The calamitous war into which most of the globe had plunged more than five years ago had passed into a new phase, one that the confident Allies expected would be terminal. Nazi Germany could not hang on much longer. Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken, Winston Churchill had recently cabled President Roosevelt.

The recipient of McLain's cryptic telephone message, Maj. Gen. Charles Gerhardt of the 29th Infantry Division, knew exactly what those four words signified, and his already edgy manner intensified considerably when he absorbed them. Should any enemy wiretappers be listening in on American communications, McLain had concocted a somewhat amateurish code to thwart the Germans from discerning that they were about to be struck by a lightning bolt courtesy of the U.S. Army. According to that code, in conversations with subordinates, McLain would bring up the recent American presidential election, in which Roosevelt had just won a fourth term as chief executive. The subject, however, was just a cover: should McLain chat about the Republicans, it would indicate that the Americans’ grandiose and long-awaited offensive on the Western Front would be postponed for a day or more; if McLain instead touched upon the Democrats, the secret connotation was that the offensive would begin in a matter of hours.

Short of the fall of Berlin, nothing would symbolize Germany's demise more than an Allied crossing of the Rhine River. Within the hour Gerhardt telephoned his three regimental commanders, urging each to get on your horse and prepare their units for the assault that would traverse the thirty-five miles of flat Rhineland terrain currently separating the 29th Division from that majestic waterway, the sacred river of ethereal Germanic folklore, imposing feudal castles, and thunderous Wagnerian opera. What a brilliant achievement it would be if the 29th, the storied Blue and Gray Division, could reach the Rhine first!

Could the worn-out German Army hold back the onrushing American horde? No foreign army had stormed across the Rhine since Napoleonic times; such an impressive legacy, coupled with the German Volk’s spiritual devotion to the Rhine, hinted that the enemy would make a supreme effort to defend every foot of the Fatherland west of the river. The Führer needed only to allude to the stirring conclusion of Germany's most revered patriotic anthem, Die Wacht am Rhein, written in 1840, to remind his troops of their sacred duty: Lieb’ Vaterland…Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein—Dear Fatherland…firm and true stands the watch on the Rhine!

Letter of Instruction Number 10, published on October 21 by Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley's efficient staff at U.S. Twelfth Army Group, directed three American armies to advance to the Rhine on a broad front of 160 miles, stretching from Aachen, Germany, in the north, to Nancy, France, in the south. On November 16, the same day McLain passed his urgent Democrats will win message to Gerhardt, Bradley traveled to Ninth Army headquarters at Maastricht to discuss current and future problems with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, his British counterpart in command of Twenty-First Army Group. Three days later, in a Top Secret Memorandum for Record, Bradley noted: Field Marshal Montgomery wanted my estimate as to how soon we could reach the Rhine.…I told him I realized, as he did, that my estimate was a pure guess and would depend entirely upon the resistance met. However, I would hazard a guess that we would be on the Rhine in the vicinity of Cologne by December 15; that I hoped we would be on the Rhine in the vicinity of Frankfurt about the same time.

No soldier could rise to the exalted rank of general officer in the U.S. Army unless unadulterated optimism was a core trait, but the current state of affairs on the Western Front hardly warranted a buoyant attitude. Allied supply shortages, notably in ammunition, had improved only slightly since the enemy had solidified its defense of Germany in September. Too, northern Europe's late autumn weather had set in, with all its deleterious effects on offensive ground and air operations. Above all, as Bradley's 1915 West Point classmate and current boss, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, revealed in a cable to the American and British Chiefs of Staff, German morale on this front shows no sign of cracking at present. I am of the opinion that the enemy's continued stolid resistance is a main factor postponing final victory.

Bradley recalled, Nevertheless, no one entertained seriously the proposal that we bed down for the winter.…We would hammer the enemy with all possible force in an effort to splinter his armies west of the Rhine. At a November 21 press conference, Ike offered a similar argument, drawing the forthright conclusion: To get peace, we have got to fight like hell. (His aide revealed that Ike would wince when he saw himself quoted in the papers as saying ‘hell.’) The German has to be hit with everything we've got, Eisenhower continued. Finally the breaking point will come. At present we are keeping up the pressure at maximum strength along the entire front.

In initiating the Allies’ massive November offensive, Ike was actually only following orders. His boss and mentor, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall, had cabled him from Washington on October 23: We consider that an immediate supreme effort in western Europe may well result in the collapse of German resistance before the heavy winter weather limits large operations and facilitates defensive strategy. The Combined Chiefs of Staff direct that [you] conduct operations with the objective of completing the defeat of Germany by January 1.

The Western Front: November 1944 Allied Offensives.

From behind his desk in the new Pentagon building, Marshall held an entirely different perspective on the war than Eisenhower. Ike focused overwhelmingly on combat operations that would ultimately bring about the downfall of Nazi Germany. Marshall, on the other hand, held no direct command of combat troops and on a daily basis dealt not only with soldiers and sailors, but also politicians, government bureaucrats, diplomats, industrialists, newspapermen, servicemen's families, and, above all, President Roosevelt.

Marshall's heavy burden of responsibility for the country's war effort, against not only Germany but also Japan, readily enabled him to grasp that over time America's zealous military and industrial mobilization had severely strained its people, economy, and government. The U.S. Army had expanded by more than fortyfold in four years, and despite a rocky beginning, its soldiers had gained an impressive proficiency that recently had brought victory after victory against their reviled foes. But, according to Marshall, those victories had yielded an imprudent complacency among the American people, a sense that Allied forces were unbeatable and a victorious end to the war was on the immediate horizon. In a speech following an October 27, 1944, dinner at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Marshall warned: I hope that while [our troops] are in the present bitter grip of battle in the cold and mud, no echoes reach them from home indicating the belief that the war is practically over in Europe and we are free to turn to other interests. I am fearful of the revulsion of feeling that would follow such a disclosure in the midst of the present battle, when the greatest concentration of effort is imperative if we are to bring this war to an early conclusion.

For years, millions of American workers had loyally labored, directly or indirectly, in roles supporting the war effort, despite long hours, tough working conditions, rationing, and low wages with little or no hope of raises. How long could they keep it up? Even as Gerhardt's 29th Division stood poised for its crucial attack, a major work stoppage of East Coast telephone operators, triggered by a pay structure they considered grossly favorable to management, brought inter-city communications to a standstill. As legitimate as were the operators’ grievances, Marshall noted, Our soldiers must be keenly conscious that the full strength of the nation is behind them, [and] they must not go into battle puzzled or embittered over disputes at home which adversely affect the war effort.

By November 1944, Marshall noted with alarm that essential American war manufacturing had actually begun to slacken. Presented with the irrefutable evidence that short of total destruction of their war machines, Germany and Japan would never surrender, Marshall grasped that much bitter fighting lay ahead, so bitter in fact that he predicted, The consumption of munitions will far exceed any previous totals, and production must therefore be maintained accordingly. Nevertheless, American industrial plants had begun to lay off workers in large numbers as government contracts diminished or disappeared entirely. Too, the American work force looked ahead to a brighter future in the postwar world, and with victory in Europe and the Pacific so tantalizingly close, tens of thousands had yielded to the temptation of leaving war work for higher-paying jobs in non-essential industries.

According to Henry Kaiser, the eminent industrialist whose prodigious production of cargo vessels had helped overcome the U-boat menace and enabled the United States to convey vast quantities of war materiel across the world's oceans, shipyards were losing men so fast, it is becoming very critical. In a November 16, 1944, New York Times article headlined War Effort Periled by Workers Who Quit Vital Jobs, Kaiser claimed that in his main California shipyard, 26,000 workers—nearly 30 percent of the workforce—had departed over a three-month period following the liberation of France. After meeting with Roosevelt in the White House, Kaiser urged FDR to address the nation and urge war workers to hang on in order that our fighting men may not be let down.

No wonder Marshall would soon complain wearily to Eisenhower: Making war in a democracy is not a bed of roses. He elaborated on that theme after the war when he recalled, We had to go ahead brutally fast.…We could not indulge in a ‘Seven Years War.’ A king can perhaps do that, but you cannot have such a protracted struggle in a democracy in the face of mounting casualties. I thought that the only place to achieve a positive and rapid military decision was on the lowlands of northwestern Europe. Speed was essential.

To prevent the American war effort from fracturing, Marshall demanded that Eisenhower strive to bring about Germany's surrender as soon as possible. Supply shortages, poor weather, and mounting enemy resistance be damned: Bradley's three American armies—more than half a million men—must push ahead to the Rhine in November and reach that waterway before Christmas. It would be the greatest U.S. Army offensive to date in World War II.

Three times before—on Omaha Beach, in Normandy, and at Brest—the 29th Infantry Division had successfully participated in crucial Anglo-American operations aimed at crushing the German war machine in northwestern Europe. Now again, on November 16, 1944, the 29th stood ready to contribute mightily to the rapid military decision in Europe that Marshall coveted. Would the latest offensive lead to Hitler's downfall, or was that goal still a long way off? No one yet knew, but as far as the 29th Division was concerned, Gerhardt fully intended to comply with Marshall's prime directive to Eisenhower: Nothing will be held back.

2. AS FLAT AS THE KANSAS PRAIRIE

November 16, 1944…

On the far side of the world, at Isley Field on the island of Saipan in the Marianas, airmen from the U.S. Twentieth Air Force waited restlessly for the Pacific skies to clear so they could fly 100 of their new B-29 Superfortresses on a 2,500-mile round-trip bombing mission against Tokyo. As the first air attack on the Japanese capital since the Doolittle Raid more than two-and-half years previously, the raid was sure to generate headlines on the home front. On the island of Leyte in the Philippines, where on October 20 Gen. Douglas MacArthur had already gained headlines with his memorable I have returned speech, troops of the 32nd Infantry Division launched an attack against a bleak finger of high ground known as Corkscrew Ridge to dislodge its seemingly immovable Japanese defenders. In Delhi, India, an article in the U.S. Army's China-Burma-India theater newspaper, Roundup, detailed the first press conference given by the new theater commander, Maj. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, a recent replacement for the legendary Vinegar Joe Stilwell. Declared Wedemeyer to the reporters: Our job is to kill Japs.

On the home front, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's popular daily newspaper column, My Day, highlighted a program at Dartmouth College to train returning veterans as craftsmen. Meanwhile, soldiers from the 106th Division, the final and highest-numbered infantry division raised during World War II by the U.S. Army, were crammed into troopships roiling across the Atlantic, ready to disembark in England the next day.

In London, which had recently been struck by several of the enemy's deadly new V-2 Vergeltunsgwaffen (Weapons of Retaliation) rockets, Churchill cabled Roosevelt, accepting FDR's congratulations for the RAF's destruction on November 12 of the German battleship Tirpitz in Norway. Churchill also expressed regret about Roosevelt's obvious disinclination to travel to Europe in December for a summit. Their next meeting, Roosevelt insisted, would have to wait until after FDR's January 1945 fourth-term inauguration.

War news on November 16, 1944, was not entirely of monumental importance. In a House of Commons debate that afternoon, Churchill replied to a member's question about the shortage of beer among British Army units in Italy by declaring, English beer, with the necessary keeping-qualities, is not at present available in sufficient quantities to meet the demands for all theatres of war. Local breweries in Italy are being developed as quickly as possible. Later, as Churchill discoursed on the need to address the severe housing shortage in Britain, he was interrupted by his nemesis, Nancy Astor, the Virginia-born viscountess—and longtime friend of Gerhardt and the 29th Division—who in 1919 had become the first female to take a seat in the Commons. Will the Prime Minister assure the people of the country that houses will come ahead even of beer? Replied Churchill: "Yes, sir [sic], certainly if it were proved that one necessarily excluded the other."

In Italy, the exhausted U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies, deprived of men and materiel by the paramount Allied effort in France and Germany, had been halted by the enemy short of the Po River Valley and were preparing to face a bleak winter in the inhospitable Apennine Mountains. On November 16, from airfields in southern Italy, U.S. Fifteenth Air Force B-17 Fortress and B-24 Liberator bombers attacked German railroad marshalling yards near Munich and Innsbruck.

On the Eastern Front, the triumphant Red Army had recently marked the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Revolution and, more important, the completion of its summer 1944 offensive, which had inflicted upon the Germans a defeat as thorough as Stalingrad. Along a front of more than 1,200 miles stretching from the Baltic to the Aegean, the Soviets had evicted the enemy from Mother Russia and stood just 330 miles from Hitler's Führerbunker in Berlin. If the Red Army wished to reach that final objective, however, it would have to wait patiently for its logistical tail to catch up. Nevertheless, the Soviets pressed ahead into Hungary, by now reduced to a decidedly reluctant German ally. By November 16, the Red Army had advanced into the suburbs of the ancient city of Budapest.

Everywhere, the end was in plain sight…

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army's 29th Infantry Division occupied a frontline position just inside Germany, a few miles east of the Dutch border, in a bleak and lonely locale of the Rhineland. The 29th's three-mile piece of the Allied line, an uncommonly narrow sector for a division, represented a tiny fraction of the 400-mile Western Front and an even more infinitesimal element of the global theaters in which millions of Allied soldiers were struggling to bring down the Axis powers on November 16, 1944.

The very idea of warfare in that part of Germany struck many as ironic: in the aftermath of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles had specified that the Rhineland must remain entirely demilitarized. Hitler had marched his troops into the Rhineland in 1936 in brazen defiance of the treaty, and although that act had occurred only eight years in the past, it now seemed like ancient history. Most certainly no longer demilitarized, the Rhineland in November 1944 would become the scene of some of the 29th Division's toughest and most costly fighting in World War II.

Formed in 1917, the 29th Division, nicknamed The Blue and Gray because the National Guard units selected to comprise it were drawn from states that had fought on opposing sides in the Civil War, had played a small part in bringing about Germany's defeat in World War I with its participation in the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive, the largest operation in U.S. Army history to date. In the postwar version of the 29th Division that emerged in 1923, the outfit returned to its militia roots and was comprised entirely of Maryland, Virginia, and District of Columbia National Guard units. For guardsmen, however, gaining military proficiency during peacetime in two-week summer camps and one-night-per-week drills at local armories proved a nearly insurmountable challenge, as all American soldiers and sailors were forced to struggle through the palpable apathy related to military matters that pervaded the country following the Great War. But starting in 1939, the army's new chief of staff, General Marshall, worked fervently to alter the nation's perception of its soldiers, and on February 3, 1941, the 29th Division joined America's military rebirth when President Roosevelt called it into active service—in peacetime—for one year. Pearl Harbor would expand that one year into duty for the duration, which ultimately would amount to nearly five years for those guardsmen lucky enough to survive the World War II cataclysm. Forty consecutive months of spirited and increasingly realistic training, first in the States and later in England, thoroughly prepared the 29th for its first moment in combat. That moment came on the sands of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, a juncture so critical to America's war effort that within hours Roosevelt would address the nation by radio, asking fellow Americans to join with me in prayer to support the men who had just executed the momentous invasion.

The D-Day success had cost the 29th dearly, as 1,300 29ers became casualties in the division's first eighteen hours in combat. As tough as June 6 had been, however, the ensuing battles in Normandy, Brittany, and Germany were worse. For 132 of the 163 days since D-Day, the 29th Division had been in close and extraordinarily violent contact with the enemy, a numbing series of seemingly unremitting battles that had triggered 6,500 casualties in the division's six-week effort to seize St. Lô; 3,500 more to liberate Vire as the Allies initiated the Normandy breakout; an additional 3,000 in the savage siege of Brest; and finally 1,700 in the futile fighting on the Dutch-German border in October. Several thousand more men had been dropped from the division's rolls due to non-battle casualties, including an astonishing number afflicted with the malady categorized by the army euphemistically as combat exhaustion. A grand total of 16,000 men lost in combat, of whom about 3,400 were killed or died of wounds, signified an unprecedented loss rate for a single U.S. Army division in World War II over a five-month interval. So alarming were the 29th Division's casualties, in fact, that the highest reaches of the American command in the European theater took notice, and that unwanted attention would nearly cost Gerhardt his job.

The 29ers had understandable reasons to exhibit frustration over the division's most recent efforts. Despite their furious exertion to take possession of Brest's magnificent harbor, finally fulfilled on September 18, no Allied vessel would ever disgorge troops or supplies there for the rest of the war. Further, although the 1,700 casualties endured by the 29th Division in its first month of combat in Germany were low compared to the previous four months of fighting in France, the division had accomplished nothing of significance in October and in fact had suffered several disheartening setbacks at the hands of a rejuvenated enemy. For a division that had never failed to accomplish its mission, including the critically important D-Day invasion, the division's entry into Germany had been a supreme letdown, particularly to Uncle Charlie Gerhardt.

Would Bradley's big November offensive restore the 29ers’ broken confidence? Gerhardt resolved that it would. True, the Germans had inflicted some hard knocks upon his command lately. But Gerhardt and his men had learned from those unfortunate affairs, and much to his credit, at the 29th Division's new and innovative rear-echelon Training Center, Gerhardt had disseminated to as many of his men as possible fresh and improved combat methods that he was convinced would yield battlefield success. Moreover, although the 29ers had periodically coped with severe supply shortages since September, particularly in artillery ammunition, in the upcoming assault the division's stockpiled materiel would enable it to employ the potent infantry-artillery one-two punch it had rehearsed so carefully in England and had put into practice in Normandy. In Brittany, fighter-bombers had been effectively added to the mix, and the results had been auspicious.

Maj. Gen. Charles Hunter Gerhardt, Jr.: Uncle Charlie.

No 29er could claim that McLain had given the division insufficient time to prepare for its pivotal November mission. On November 6, ten days before the assault would jump off, he had directed the 29th to take over a sector of the front line between the nondescript Rhineland mining villages of Baesweiler and Oidtweiler, relinquished to it by the 2nd Armored Division. The front in that locale had not budged for more than a month, and accordingly, the 29ers discovered reasonably habitable, although waterlogged, dugouts, trenches, and foxholes courtesy of the 2nd Armored. For men who were used to Gerhardt's strict order that rear-area command posts and forward fighting positions could not be situated in buildings, the new frontline sector, while not truly comfortable, was much better than they had expected.

Nevertheless, the Germans were close, in most places within rifle-shot range, and any rifleman who did not pay heed to his sergeant's warnings to maintain constant vigilance did so at his peril. The Germans certainly displayed their customary vigilance, so much so that ten days of Gerhardt's obligatory aggressive patrolling, as well as oral reports and photographs provided by air observers, did not provide American frontline battalion commanders with a precise analysis of the enemy's defenses, a deficiency that would soon cost the 29th Division dearly. The enemy had gradually built up his forces in this sector to an extent that patrolling and prisoner-of-war interrogation failed to bring out, a 175th Infantry post-battle report observed.

The 29th Division's new sector was as flat as the Kansas prairie, if somewhat more soggy, but since the 29ers had spent almost all of October in similar terrain near Geilenkirchen, their new surroundings were hardly a shock. Familiarity, however, bred neither contentment nor confidence, just a dull acknowledgment that the Rhineland landscape, vastly different from Normandy and Brittany, would demand fundamentally different tactics on the part of assaulting infantrymen. Several October attacks and raids carried out by the 29ers had gone so badly awry that they could in truth be categorized as disasters, but as the 29th Division had proved in June when it entered the wholly unfamiliar bocage terrain in Normandy and suffered some shocking setbacks, U.S. Army soldiers had so far in the war demonstrated a healthy streak of flexibility on the battlefield. Had the 29ers learned enough in October to succeed in November?

As an infantry division, in which the ordinary dogface usually had to walk rather than ride to reach his objective, the 29th intended to advance to the Rhine more methodically than swiftly. Gerhardt must leave the sensational blitzkrieg to his lefthand neighbor and West Point classmate, Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon of the 2nd Armored Division. Gerhardt's determination to reach the Rhine certainly matched Harmon's; the job would just take a little longer. Gerhardt planned to fulfill his assignment in stages, the first and most important of which necessitated a breakthrough of the enemy's frontline strongpoints, centered in three Rhineland villages named Siersdorf, Setterich, and Bettendorf, focal points of the local mining industry. But as any good 29er already knew, no place occupied by German soldiers, even the derided Volksgrenadier, was ever easy to capture.

In the offensive's next stage—assuming the first was achievable—the 29th Division would advance six miles across flat pasturelands to the Roer River, passing through or around more Rhineland mining villages such as Dürboslar, Schleiden, Aldenhoven, Koslar, Bourheim, and Kirchberg. Those places had no military significance other than the obvious detail that they were enemy-occupied, but they would soon be written into 29th Division history books in decidedly unheroic prose.

29th Division Front, November 16, 1944.

Upon attaining the line of the Roer, McLain's orders specified that the 29th must seize its primary objective short of the Rhine, the city of Jülich. The 29th Division staff agreed that such a task, involving an assault across a major river against a historic German city whose reputation as an impregnable fortress dated to the seventeenth century, would be an extraordinary challenge. If the enemy's will did not crack—and no one expected it would—the Germans were sure to defend Jülich with the same fanaticism they had displayed at Aachen.

But beyond the German Army, the 29th Division faced a dilemma at Jülich whose solution was not taught at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. Over the past decades, the Germans had constructed seven dams twenty-five miles upstream to provide hydroelectric power for settlements in the lower Roer Valley. The dams’ military implications did not at first dawn on the Allies, but in October 1944, several alarmed U.S. Army intelligence officers began to provide a stark warning to their superiors that the enemy might have a surprise in store that could impact American plans profoundly. One report went so far as to note: By demolition of some of [the dams], great destructive waves can be produced, which would destroy everything in the populated industrial valley [of the Roer] as far as the Meuse [River] and into Holland.

Should the 29th Division succeed in crossing the Roer, securing Jülich, and plunging ahead toward the Rhine, the destruction of the upriver dams would trigger massive floodwaters in the division's rear, in which no bridge built by American engineers could survive. The 29th would thereupon be paralyzed by a dearth of supplies, and in the event the enemy launched a vigorous counterattack—a likely occurrence—Gerhardt's men would have no line of retreat. An even more worrisome contemplation was the consequence of a flood wave surging downriver as the 29th was in the process of traversing the Roer. Such an event could cause the deaths of hundreds of unlucky 29ers and the loss of large amounts of equipment. The man to whom Gerhardt and McLain looked to for guidance in matters pertaining to the upcoming offensive, U.S. Ninth Army commander Lt. Gen. William Simpson, could only await developments, since the Roer dams were located far to the south, in the U.S. First Army's sector, not the Ninth's. Simpson did not want to admit it, but reaching the Rhine might prove impossible unless someone solved the Roer conundrum.

Despite all the potential difficulties: what if the Americans managed to reach the Rhine? As Bradley informed Montgomery on November 16, We would try for a bridgehead, but the honor of launching an assault across that remarkably broad river would not be bestowed upon the 29th Division, nor any other Ninth Army unit. The job would instead be a First Army responsibility, while Simpson's Ninth attacked on a northeasterly axis to reach the Rhine at Neuss, opposite Düsseldorf, both centers of German war production on the fringe of the great Ruhr industrial zone. At Neuss, the Ninth would be poised to turn north, driving up the Rhine's west bank and eventually linking up with Montgomery's British troops coming from the opposite direction. Should the 29th Division and its neighboring units achieve that goal, hordes of Germans would be pocketed before they could escape across the Rhine. Moreover, as a Ninth Army report declared, Heavy caliber guns in the sector could bring portions of the Ruhr River valley under fire. The threat to the Nazi arsenal was obvious.

As long as American generals paid little heed to the predicament posed by the Roer dams, an attitude most of them had so far displayed, the Rhineland, with its flat farmland and profuse hard-surface roads, seemed the perfect place for the U.S. Army to carry out blitzkrieg at a level even more sophisticated than its originators. After all, was not the Rhineland a part of the lowlands of northwestern Europe on which Marshall had craved the rapid military decision that would win the war?

If Bradley paid heed to Marshall's ambitious directive to complete the defeat of Germany by January 1, the Americans must execute a deep and rapid penetration into the Rhineland, reaching the Rhine on a broad front within a few weeks. That goal demanded an even more decisive repeat of the U.S. Army's stunning success in Normandy, during which it had driven a hole through German lines, rushed mobile units through the breach, exploited the enemy's disorder, and finally cracked the front wide open, sending enemy survivors reeling back to Germany in defeat. As every American staff officer planning for the November offensive understood, however, success in the first step was the prerequisite for the rest: the First and Ninth Armies would get nowhere near the Rhine unless they smashed one or more holes through the robust enemy defensive line, an accomplishment the Germans themselves had achieved so spectacularly against the French Army defending the Meuse River in May 1940 prior to the panzers’ dramatic seven-day surge to the English Channel. But in November 1944, now in a defensive rather than an attacking role, the Germans fully appreciated the importance of doggedly holding their forward defenses, thereby preventing the Americans from using their renowned mobility and repeating their Normandy success.

Warfare in the Rhineland in November differed fundamentally from warfare in Normandy in July, and for the U.S. Army to match its earlier victory, it would have to overcome some acute handicaps. Above all, to achieve success, the Americans needed to see what they were shooting at, and their massive firepower, on both the ground and in the air, would be considerably diminished as inevitable late-autumn overcast, rain, and eventually snow set in, and the interval between sunrise and sunset lessened by the day—in due course to only eight hours. At the height of the Normandy campaign, in contrast, seventeen hours of daylight had worked to the Allies’ advantage.

On the Rhineland's monotonous, level pastures, virtually no high ground existed from which American observers could distinguish enemy strongpoints and call down pinpoint artillery fire and air strikes to neutralize them. In 1946, when 29th Division historian Joseph Ewing had prepared a first draft of his official divisional history, 29 Let's Go!, Lt. Col. John Cooper, the commander of the 110th Field Artillery Battalion, commented, Cut out all references that give a ‘hill’ and ‘dale’ effect. This is entirely false.…There was no ‘high ground’ on the 29th Division front. The whole area was as near as a table as land can be. The only posts suitable for precise American observation of the enemy were located in village church steeples, as well as the occasional coal-slag pile, rising incongruously from the otherwise flat terrain, sometimes to an astonishing height, like an old-fashioned sugarloaf on a dining-room table. Those kinds of observation posts, however, stood out so obviously from the surrounding landscape that they were easy targets of German artillery. Further, in the omnipresent mud of a Rhineland autumn, U.S. Army tankers would face severe difficulties when operating their vehicles off the hard-surface roads, thereby limiting the Americans' mobility and tactical options when assaulting a tough German strongpoint.

A coal-slag pile in the Rhineland.

Of all the variables impacting American military operations, none troubled Bradley more than supply. If in the November offensive U.S. troops had to crush the enemy's forward defenses as a prerequisite for a mobile campaign, huge quantities of ammunition, particularly artillery shells, would be expended in the battle's first stage. Although the late-October and early-November combat lull in the Ninth Army's sector enabled the 29th Division and its neighboring divisions to hoard howitzer rounds, should the American assault bog down into a slugging match, cannoneers would consume most of those rounds with little