The day dawned cold and misty. Though the mist limited ground observa- tion, both the V Corps and VII Corps artillery used more than 4,000 rounds in the preliminary barrage. Fifteen minutes before the ground attack, direct support artillery shifted to planned targets. By H-Hour the Twenty-eighth Division artillery had fired 7,313 rounds—sizable for a one-division attack. However, fighter-bomber aircraft were not able to operate until midafternoon. The weather forced cancel- lation of two of five air group missions. Even then most planes failed to locate assigned targets, roaming instead far afield in search of targets. Perhaps the most notable air action of the day was the mistaken bombing of an American artillery position in which seven men were killed and seventeen wounded.
At nine o'clock, men of two battalions of the 109th Infantry climbed out of their foxholes and slit trenches and headed north on either side of the Germeter- Huertgen highway. Harassed as much by problems of maintaining direction and contact between units in the thick forest as by German fire, the battalion west of the highway moved with surprising ease. By early afternoon the men were digging in at the woodline overlooking Huertgen. But the other battalion almost from the start ran into a dense antipersonnel minefield just short of the village of Wittscheidt. Every effort to find a path through the mine field only resulted in more casualties. Every time engineers tried to clear the mines, machine guns and mortars drove them to cover.
The next day, 3 November, the battalion east of the road was seeking to flank the minefield when some two hundred Germans struck the battalion at the wood- line. Though noisy, the counterattack posed no real threat, but the battalion east of the road could not know this. Confused by a garbled radio message, the bat- talion commander, following the age-old maxim to march to the sound of the guns,
sent two companies toward the noise of the counterattack. As these companies became hopelessly enmeshed in the other battalion's fight, the day's attempt to outflank the minefield and take the other half of the 109th's Infantry's objective came to an end.
Though the 109th Infantry still had a reserve battalion, attempts to thwart German infiltration behind the advance battalions already had tied up this force. By the evening of the second day, 3 November, the 109th Infantry's position had almost set. The regiment had forged a narrow, mile-deep salient into the forest between the Weisser Weh Creek and the Germeter-Huertgen highway. The Ger- mans nevertheless continued to hold the network of trails in the creek bed in a countersalient into American lines. For the next few days, while the men dug deep and roofed their foxholes with logs, the 109th Infantry tried both to eliminate the countersalient and to take the other half of the objective east of the highway, but to no avail. Every movement merely increased the already alarming number of casualties and drove the companies and platoons deeper into the forest.
The 110th Infantry began what would prove to be a frustrating campaign dur- ing which no one recognized that the infantry needed direct fire support. Two bat- talions attacked at noon on 2 November, one to take pillboxes below the Raffels- brand road junction, the other to push through the woods to the little settlement of Simonskall alongside the Kall River. Seizing these two objectives was the first step toward opening secondary roads into the Monschau Corridor and a possible alternate supply route to Schmidt.
Shelling had already covered the forest floor with a layer of limbs and debris and left deep gashes on the trunks of trees. Opposing lines were within hand- grenade range of each other. The Germans were dug in behind thick bands of con- certina wire, tripwires, mines, and booby traps. Log-covered bunkers and foxholes almost flush with the ground augmented the pillboxes. This atmosphere of death and doom was intensified by the dim light filtering through the thick branches of the fir trees.
No sooner had the troops of the two attacking battalions risen from their foxholes than a rain of machine gun and mortar fire brought them to earth. After several hours of painful, costly infiltration, one battalion reached the triple con- certinas surrounding the pillboxes. Squads and platoons got lost; mortar shells landing among assault teams carrying demolition charges set off the explosives and blew up the carrying parties.
All communications failed except for spasmodic reception over little SCR- 536 radios. The chatter of machine guns and crash of artillery and mortars kept frightened, forest-blind infantrymen pinned to the earth. In the late afternoon, the decimated units staggered back to the line of departure, having given up efforts to advance.
These men obviously needed armor help or heavy direct fire weapons if they Were to make any progress. But again on the second day of supporting operations, 3 November, nobody made any effort to get tanks or tank destroyers forward. The dedicated infantrymen again rose from their holes and went forward. With no supporting fire to back them up they were quickly cut down by the Germans. The
results were the same as on the previous day. In one company, only forty-two men made it back to the line of departure.
As 3 November came to an end, neither the regimental commander nor Gen- eral Cota made any effort to send tanks down the muddy, mine-infested firebreaks and trails toward Raffelsbrand. Cota came up with another possible solution. He called upon the 110th Infantry's remaining battalion, the one earmarked as a divi- sion reserve, to move to Vossenack and before daylight the next morning to go south through the woods to Simonskall, thereby cutting in behind the pillboxes and entrenched Germans at Raffelsbrand. Yet this meant deploying the Twenty-eighth Infantry Division's only reserve very early in the operation. Should disaster occur elsewhere in the division's zone, he would be left with few options.
On the previous day, 2 November, the Second Bn., 112th Infantry, under Lt. Col. Theodore S. Hatzfeld, had attacked with a company of tanks eastward from Germeter to gain the town of Vossenack and clear the Vossenack Ridge. German assault guns firing from the Brandenberg-Bergstein Ridge knocked out several tanks, but the spinelike village of Vossenack was in American hands by early after- noon. As the tanks sought cover among the damaged buildings, the infantry began to dig in. Rather than take up positions in the fringe buildings of the village, the infantrymen were ordered to dig in on the exposed northeastern nose of the ridge within full view of German observers on the Brandenberg-Bergstein Ridge.
The Twenty-eighth Infantry Division's main effort began at noon on 2 November with an attack by the two battalions of the 112th Infantry under Lt. Col. Carl L. Peterson, a slender, wiry man with reddish blond hair and moustache who had grown up in Bradford, Pennsylvania, among the miners and oilfield work- ers who constituted the core of the regiment's noncoms. The regiment began to move east from Richelskaul to pass through the woods south of Vossenack and cross the Kall gorge to Kommerscheidt and Schmidt.
The leading battalion had hardly begun to move when the first company came under intense small-arms fire. For the rest of the day the men of the com- pany hugged the ground, unable to advance. Apparently impressed with the rela- tive ease with which Hatzfeld's Second Bn. had gained Vossenack, Colonel Peter- son committed no more of his regiment, calling for only a few volleys of artillery fire. Peterson wanted to wait until the next day and move on Schmidt by way of Vossenack, thus setting back by at least half a day the plans to take Schmidt.
3 November
Starting at 0700 and passing through Vossenack, the First and Third Battal- ions of the 112th Infantry (the Second Bn. holding Vossenack) headed southeast into the Kall gorge. The Germans were strangely quiet. The Third Bn., under Lt. Col. Albert M. Flood, led the advance.
Company K, under Captain Eugene W. O'Malley, with one heavy machine gun section from Company M's Second Platoon attached and supported by the Third Tank Platoon of Company A, 707th Tank Bn., was ordered to spearhead
the battalion. Echeloned 300 to 400 yards to the left rear of Company K was to be Company L, with the other section of Company M's Second (machine gun) Platoon attached and the Second Tank Platoon, Company A, 707th, in support. Company I, with the First Tank Platoon, Company A, 707th, was to follow L.
The day was cold, not quite freezing, with a heavy mist and a morass of mud blanketing the area. There was no artillery preparation before the attack except normal harassing missions. The riflemen crossed the line of departure at Germe- ter and shifted into the customary five-yard intervals between men. The move- ment was uneventful until about 0730 when the formation halted at the church in Vossenack to reorganize and make adjustments to a new line of departure—the main street of Vossenack. As the direction of movement was shifted from east to southeast, a brief but intense German artillery concentration struck the battalion. The troops took cover in nearby buildings, but one man in Company L was wounded. While the infantry reorganized, the supporting tanks of Third Platoon, Company A, 707th Tank Bn., moved up to the nose of the high ground south- east of Vossenack and fired their machine guns at the woodline to the southeast in an effort to neutralize any opposition.
The men of Company K, Third Bn., had received their monthly pay in Ger- man Invasion Marks only three days before. Most were veterans of Normandy, the pursuit across France, and most recently, the Monschau Forest and the Siegfried Line. They had been awakened at 0500 and were moved out at about 0630. At
112th Infantry Regiment Attack on Schmidt
2-3 November 1944
German Counterattack
the line of departure they were instructed to drop their blankets and overcoats as the company moved out on point.
Company K moved out across the open ground to the south of Vossenack, its left flank guiding on the Vossenack-Kommerscheidt trail. Shells from German light mortars fell with muffled explosions in the muddy ground, but there was no artillery fire. The men moved rapidly, and by 0845 the lead elements were across the clearing and into the woods. According to plan, the tankers of Company A, 707th, ceased firing with their MGs and began using their main guns as direct fire artillery against Kommerscheidt, beyond the wooded Kall River gorge.
Descending the steep wooded slope toward the Kall River, the men of Com- pany K were now hit by artillery fire. One man was wounded and three were killed. Occasional sniper fire also began to harass them; a man laying telephone wire was wounded in the leg and a staff sergeant killed.
At the Kall River the company's scouts came upon ten Germans and opened fire, killing one. The other nine surrendered. The Germans offered no other resis- tance, and the men of Company K, surprised by the ease of their attack thus far, waded out into the icy water of the Kall. They forded the river at a point just south of a mill, Mestrenger Mühle, shortly after 0900.
Sporadic German artillery continued to fall in the wooded valley, but failed to halt Company K's advance up the steep eastern slope. When the GIs reached the edge of the woods slightly southwest of the village of Kommerscheidt, they saw the little town clearly. Shells from supporting Shermans back near Vossenack were falling among the scattered buildings. A small group of Germans fired from the open field between the woodline and the town. Company K returned the fire, and eight Germans came forward to surrender. As the German POWs came in, Company K's scouts moved across the fields and into the village to reconnoiter, the supporting tank fire lifting as the tank crews spotted the scouts. When the scouts signaled all clear, Company K moved into its first objective, a drab little commu- nity of scattered houses. They had captured their initial objective by 1300.
Prisoner interrogations disclosed that the troops taken were part of the Third Kompanie, Eleventh GAF Fortress Bn. and Seventh Kp., 984th Regt., 275th Volks- grenadier Division. The fortress battalion consisted of three companies of approx- imately one hundred men each and had come down to the area from Düren. The unit had been committed on or about 1 November on the right flank of the 984th. Perched on the sloping eastern portion of the ridge line, the town of Schmidt was clearly visible from Kommerscheidt. Woods fringed the ridge on all sides, and along a dirt road that ran between the towns there were several pillboxes. The Company K commander had begun to reorganize his men to continue into Schmidt when the Germans fired a short but violent artillery concentration at Kommer- scheidt. As soon as the fire lifted, the company headed down the road toward Schmidt; only occasional shots from German landsers (infantry) contested the advance. As the GIs moved forward, a group of Germans near a pillbox, marked by the wreckage of an American plane on top of it, opened fire. The Americans drove some of the Germans back into the pillbox and the others into a wooded draw to the west.
A base of fire from the attached machine gun platoon and flanking fire from a group of riflemen disposed of the Germans in the pillbox. At the outskirts of Schmidt Captain O'Malley split his company; one group continued through the town's center, and the other went into the southwest section of the town that lay along the Schmidt-Strauch road. The Germans in Schmidt offered little resistance. The attack had evidently come as a complete surprise. Some were captured in the houses while they were eating, and some were reported to be drunk. Others were caught as they rode bicycles or motorcycles into the town, and still others were taken as they strolled along the main road into town from the west.
By 1430 Company K had advanced into Schmidt. Neither in Kommerscheidt nor in Schmidt had there been appreciable German resistance although G-2 sources determined later that a battalion of the 275th Division with a strength of eight officers and 276 men had been charged with the area's defense.
At the start of its move from Vossenack to Schmidt, Company L was eche- loned to the left rear, its Second and Third Platoons forward. When Company K entered the Kall Woods, Company L was still in the open between Vossenack and the woods and came under heavy mortar fire. The Third Platoon on the right then went along the main Vossenack-Kommerscheidt trail as it neared the river. The platoon then joined the remainder of the company in fording the river 300 yards north of the bridge. The company's advance kept pace with that of Company K, which was fording the stream to the south at about the same time (0900).
Company L continued up the steep slope beyond the river, keeping inside the woods in order to skirt the open fields to the north of Kommerscheidt and approach the town unobserved from the east. One stray German soldier was taken prisoner, and later, about noon, some of the men reported they saw Germans in the houses of Froitscheidt, across a shallow wooded draw to the east. The com- pany halted almost abreast of this settlement, set up two heavy machine guns, and fired on one of the houses. Nothing happened; so the company commander, Cap- tain Jack W. Walker, sent a patrol to the buildings only to find them unoccupied.
The advance continued and by 1400 had reached a position at the edge of the woods east of Kommerscheidt. When Captain Walker checked in with his bat- talion HQ, he learned that Company K had already taken Kommerscheidt and that Company L was to move immediately to assist in taking Schmidt.
Walker shifted his attack formation to put the First and Second Platoons for- ward and the Third in support. Company L then moved south, unopposed, toward Schmidt, staying within the woodline east of the Kommerscheidt-Schmidt road. Two German troop shelters with smoke streaming from them lay along the route of advance, but they found only one German, fatally wounded. It was now well after 1500. Another message from battalion said Company K was already in Schmidt and directed Company L to move ahead quickly. The men pushed on and entered Schmidt at the junction of the Bergstein and Harscheidt roads near the eastern end of town, taking approximately thirty prisoners. Falling darkness and harassing sniper fire hampered the company in its mop-up operations. Finally, total darkness and a battalion order to switch over to the defense halted the mop-up.
The Third Bn.'s reserve company, Company I—except for its First Platoon, which was on security guard at division HQ—followed the advance of the other two companies. Near Vossenack mortar fire severed contact to the 60mm mortar section at the rear of the column. The rest of the company entered the woods south of Vossenack before the section leader could reestablish contact. Because mor- tar fire continued to pound the open ridge and because he did not know his com- pany's objective, the section leader kept his men in Vossenack and attached them to Company H. The main body of Company I had no difficulty after entering the
Kall Woods and moved on into Schmidt shortly after 1600.
When the Company M commander, Captain Guy T. Piercey, received word that Company K had captured Kommerscheidt, he directed his 81mm mortars in Vossenack and his machine gun platoon on the Vossenack ridge to move up quickly in order to provide fire support for the subsequent attack on Schmidt. However, with Company K's rapid advance into Schmidt there was no reason for the weapons men to halt in Kommerscheidt, so they moved directly into Schmidt. It was well after dark when they arrived.
At the start of the attack on Schmidt the Third Bn.'s medical aid station had been located in the woods west of Germeter. After the battalion reached Vosse- nack, 2d Lt. Alfred J. Muglia, Medical Administrative Corps, established a for- ward collecting point. He used two jeeps and an M29 Weasel to transport patients back to the Germeter aid station. That afternoon, when the Third Bn. had reached Schmidt, Lt. Muglia and several medics moved forward in a Weasel to reconnoi- ter for another aid station site. On the narrow and slippery Vossenack-Kommer-