Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (25 page)

Sleeping on a UXB

On the night of February 22, the day before the attack was to start, the RAF launched a massive air raid on Berdorf, Elsdorf, and Niederaussen, the major fortified towns on the way to Cologne. British night air raids normally began with Mosquito bombers at low level dropping flares to mark the target, followed by the bombers dropping incendiary bombs.

Because the target area was only fifteen to twenty miles from Aachen, we went up on the roof to watch. The bombers flew in single file to unload their bombs. Although there were many lines of planes for the different targets, it still took well over an hour for some thousand planes to drop their bombs. The planes at the head of the columns would unload incendiary bombs and start large fires, and the planes after that would drop high-explosive bombs.

The Germans had reinforced their antiaircraft defenses considerably. In addition to the dual-purpose 88mm guns surrounding the area, they had numerous batteries of 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon antiaircraft guns. Searchlights pierced the misty skies with their incandescent beams. The raging firestorms, the thousands of red incendiaries leaping up from the ground and merging in an apex, the crisscrossing of the shafts of lights, and the crescendo of exploding 88mm shells was an awesome sight. It was as if some giant diabolical Christmas tree was raining death and destruction from its boughs.

After the raid was over, we started back across the roof near the elevator house to the stairs leading below. Suddenly, my buddy Lieutenant Lincoln grabbed my arm and pulled me aside. “Look out, Cooper, you’re about to step in that hole!”

Glancing down, I saw a hole in the roof approximately fifteen inches in diameter. We went downstairs to see what it was. As we approached the area on the third floor, we saw the same size hole, which was repeated on both the second and first floors. Finally, in the basement, we saw the same neat, round hole and could tell by the clear, sharp cut at its edge that the object had been traveling at a high speed when it struck the basement floor.

Trying to recall everything I had learned at bomb disposal school, I surmised that this was a 500 pound unexploded American bomb (UXB), which was probably buried twenty to thirty feet below. It had obviously been in the building since the American air raid in October. There were several other American UXBs lying around in the yard. This type of bomb was extremely dangerous; the men were told to avoid them, if possible, and leave them for bomb disposal crews.

Working around unburied UXBs on the ground was one thing, but having them in the building where you and two hundred other men were living was a different matter. As the only officer in the maintenance battalion who had attended bomb disposal school, I felt I should tell Colonel McCarthy immediately. When I informed him, he told me to keep my mouth shut, that we were moving out in the morning and he didn’t want to create a panic.

Lincoln and I both agreed that he was right. After all, that bomb had been in the building for five months and was there during our first bivouac in Aachen before the Battle of the Bulge. Of the several thousand American bombs dropped on Aachen during the September and October assaults, there were probably well over a hundred American UXBs in the city. Had we tried to move the battalion in the dark to another area, it would have created confusion, and we might have moved to an area even more heavily infested with UXBs.

We left the next morning without further event. Sometime after the war, German prisoners removed the bombs under the supervision of American bomb disposal officers. At least they did not have to concern themselves with booby traps buried underneath the fuses, as the Germans had done with the bombs they dropped in London.

New Maps of Germany

When we first entered Germany back in September, we had been moving so rapidly that we had run out of maps. Many a time I would take a grease pencil and mark the route on my plastic map case as I followed a tank column. I would try carefully not to smudge the markings, because they were the only thing I had to go on when I returned at night some thirty miles to our division rear.

When we captured Liège, we discovered a German map factory in full production. We moved a signal corps cartography group into the factory, and they started making maps for the American army. From then on, we were issued maps before each new major operation.

We had just been issued maps covering the entire Rhine Plain to Cologne and also through central Germany to Berlin. We all figured that this was the big one, the final assault to destroy the German army in the west and meet up with the Russians somewhere in central Germany.

The signal corps map group in Liège did such as excellent job of supplying us with new maps that they soon ran out of map paper. Military maps require high-quality, heavy paper. With tens of thousands of brand-new German maps available, the signal corps began to print our maps on the back side. This seemed to solve the shortage. Each liaison officer received a complete set of maps tied together in one big roll.

I unrolled my maps, spread them out on the hood of my Jeep, and started separating them according to type: 1:125,000 scale, 1:62,500 scale, and 1:10,000 scale. Then I started folding them and classifying them in numerical order. The 1:125,000 maps, in color, were to be used as large situation maps. The 1:62,500 maps, also in color, were used by the tactical commanders to plot advances. The 1:10,000 maps, in black and white, showed details of individual houses in the villages and were used as close-in tactical maps.

As I folded some of the 1:125,000 color maps, I noticed a lot of blue on the back of two of them. Upon closer examination, I was surprised to see that these were maps of southern England prepared by the Germans for the invasion of England in June 1940. They covered the area from the Thames estuary down through Weymouth and Bournemouth, the ports from which we had embarked. The maps continued farther west and covered all the major potential invasion sites on the English Channel.

When I saw these maps, I remembered when we had first arrived in Codford in September 1943. We had been assigned quarters formerly occupied by the area’s British Defense Command. The liaison officers had been assigned individual desks, and as I cleaned out my desk I noticed that the main drawer was jammed. I got it unjammed and saw a folded map caught between the top of the drawer and the bottom of the desktop. When I finally got the map out safely, I damn near collapsed when I saw stamped in large red letters the word “Bigot-Amgot,” the British code word for “top secret.”

This map should have been kept under double lock and key. I knew that a lowly first lieutenant had no business with it. Although I was excited and I am sure my hands were shaking, I was not too excited to take a careful look at it. Fortunately, I was by myself. The map covered an area south of Codford, which was in Wiltshire, extending along the coast for about fifty to sixty miles. The British camp to which we had been assigned was apparently some type of command headquarters for the defense of this area. The map showed the location of every unit from battalion down through company, platoon, squad, and outpost.

From my limited knowledge of defensive tactics, I could see immediately that this entire area was grossly undermanned; it was covered by only about a thousand soldiers instead of the usual five infantry divisions plus at least one motorized or armored division in reserve. The map showed a battalion area where a division would have been expected, and a company where a full regiment should have been. The defenses gradually diminished to the point where they had to actually cover the beaches. There were not enough outposts to cover all the exits from the beach. It appeared that there were outposts manned by at least an automatic weapon with a couple of men spaced at intervals of a mile or more along the cliffs above the beaches. They apparently used some type of messenger on a bicycle to communicate among these outposts. This British map was dated June 1940 and covered a small portion of the same area of the German map that I had just been issued.

I have often wondered if the German decision to invade England would have been affected if they’d had a copy of this map when they made their German maps in Liège. A single German division could have completely overwhelmed the pitiful British defenses shown on this map. Later, I couldn’t help but realize the great irony of being issued a map to invade Germany that had been printed on the back of a German map that would have been used to invade England.

When my mind finally returned to the real world in Codford, I wondered what to do with this map. How could I explain how it came into my possession? If I turned in the map to Major Arrington, he would have to pass it along to a higher authority, and eventually it would wind up in British hands. Probably some young British lieutenant who was as green and inexperienced as I and about my age would wind up in a general court-martial. I would be called as a key witness, which might require my transfer out of the division.

I was even afraid to show it to my buddies Lincoln and Nibbelink for fear they might advise me to turn it in. I finally chickened out. I wrapped the map in some other papers, sneaked it down to my cubbyhole in the Quonset hut in the bachelor officers’ quarters, stuffed it in my little potbellied stove, and burned it. This is probably one of the dumbest things I ever did. It would have been a rare memento.

Attack Across the Rhineland

Military historians have often agreed that until you’ve fought the German army, you have never fought a real battle. We had fought the German army, we had fought a real battle, and we had defeated the Germans. We had been heavily bloodied and suffered severe casualties. The Germans had suffered even heavier casualties than we had; however, we had a healthy respect for the German soldier and we realized now that Germany would not surrender until we had defeated all their armies and occupied all of their territory. We expected a bitter struggle right down to the end.

The final major assault across the Roer River and into the Rhineland was designed to destroy as much of the German army as possible and forge a bridgehead across the Rhine to make a major assault on the Ruhr Valley. It was felt that capturing the Ruhr would destroy German industrial potential and help bring the war to a speedy conclusion.

The plan called for VII Corps to attack on a relativly narrow front in the Düren area. After the 104th Infantry Division established the initial bridgehead across the Roer River, the 3d Armored Division was to pass through the infantry and advance to the Erft Canal, about twelve miles away, and establish a bridgehead there. The waters of the Roer River had subsided, but the fields were still soft due to the constant rain over the past few weeks. The armored columns tried to stay on the roads as much as possible. Although the British gave us night bombing support, the low-hanging clouds did not permit the massive high-level daylight bombing that we had had at Saint-Lô. We did, however, have excellent support from 9th Tactical Air Force’s P47 dive-bombers. They were constantly overhead during daylight.

Before the attack started, the entire tank force of the 3d Armored Division was deployed as artillery. The nearly four hundred tanks together with the artillery units was the equivalent of forty-five to fifty artillery battalions. With the L5 Piper Cubs skirting the overhanging clouds, the artillery delivered extremely heavy fire. We had learned our lessons well. For a narrow front of less than two miles, this was an awesome amount of artillery fire. The effect on the enemy was catastrophic.

The day before the Roer River offensive started, we received new 1:10,000 scale black-and-white maps showing the details of the villages, roads, and surrounding fields. At least twenty-four hours before these maps were issued, lowflying recon fighters had passed over and photographed the entire area. These photographs were rushed back to the signal corps map section, which made red overlays of the enemy fortifications. The maps were marked on the bottom, “Enemy installations as of February 21, 0900 hours.”

I didn’t see how they got the maps to us so quickly. The maps showed the most minute details, with the zigzagged German slit trenches marked in red. They also showed antitank guns, artillery emplacements, dug in tank emplacements, and even individual foxholes and machine-gun emplacements.

I later asked a signal corps mapmaker how he could tell whether a foxhole held a machine gun or a rifleman. He said that the rapid fire blast of an automatic weapon left a trace in the ground several feet long. This pattern was distinctly different from that made by a rifleman firing one shot at a time. In addition, he could sometimes see the pockmarks of freshly turned earth where mines had obviously been planted.

After a heavy artillery barrage, the infantry made the initial assault at 0300 on February 23. The first crossing was made using small assault boats. The infantry soon established a bridgehead in Düren against heavy resistance. An infantry assault on a heavily bombed-out city is extremely risky, because the rubble makes ideal fortifications. The Germans fought tenaciously, and our infantry suffered considerable casualties before they dislodged the Germans from the main part of the city. The engineers followed immediately and started putting up pontoon bridges. After the light personnel bridges were established, they started putting in heavy-duty pontoon bridges to accommodate tanks and other vehicles.

The initial bridgehead was small and had to be expanded to allow our armored division and its vehicles to move in. After months of shelling and bombing, Düren was a morass of firegutted buildings and rubble piles. Combat engineers with bulldozers cleared the areas where they thought the streets had been. An engineer officer who had been in heavy construction in civilian life said he thought it would be much cheaper for the Germans to build an entirely new city a few miles south than try to rebuild this one.

The 104th and the 8th Infantry Divisions fought hard to expand the bridgehead, and on the night of February 24–25, 3d Armored Division columns started crossing into the bridgehead.

Concentrating an armored assault force in a small bridgehead is dangerous, with so many vehicles and troops in a small area. Although we had air superiority most of the time, there was always the danger of an enemy air attack. We had just moved some elements of C Company Maintenance Battalion across the river and they had crawled off the road when the inevitable happened. All of a sudden, thousands of .50-caliber antiaircraft tracers erupted from the earth into a fiery red cone concentrated on a single object. It appeared to be a low-flying twin-engine German fighter plane the likes of which I had not seen before.

When I was stationed in Gloucester in May 1944, I had seen and heard the British Gloucester jet fighters being tested. I recognized immediately the same shrill, screaming noise. It was one of the new Me262s, and it came barreling over our columns like a bat out of hell at a very low altitude. The single bomb that it let go as it flashed by dropped on one of the columns about a hundred yards away. I heard them calling for medics, so there must have been casualties.

Just as the jet dropped its bomb, I saw one of our P47s coming in a sharp dive from several thousand feet headed directly toward the Me262. At this angle the pilot did not fire for fear of hitting our ground troops, but as soon as he leveled off, he started firing. The German plane seemed to take off like a rocket; it appeared to have a speed at least a hundred miles per hour greater than our P47, even in the dive. In a matter of seconds, it disappeared under a low-hanging cloud bank. Our P47s didn’t stand a chance of catching it.

This was a shock to all of our ground troops. We had heard that the Germans had a jet fighter, but this was the first time we saw it in actual combat. I thought immediately that if the Germans could bring several of these planes, they could wrack one of our columns from stem to stern. Unknown to us, the Germans apparently did not have the capability to bring these planes together in a mass attack.

The surprise of seeing the German jet in action generated some uneasy questions in my mind. How did they have jets in operation when we had none? I recalled, when I first arrived in England in September 1943, seeing a write-up in
Stars and
Stripes
about the British development of the jet engine. In May 1944, I was at Gloucester instructing in amphibious tanks. When we road-tested our tanks, the British jets would fly over. We were impressed with their speed and grace as they came screaming across the tops of the hills, and I was glad they were on our side. I had never heard of an Me262 at the time, and I was surprised now to see one in operation.

The development of the Me262 was a perfect example of the German ability to rapidly utilize new technology. One German advantage was Hitler’s supreme authority; once he made a decision to go after a new weapon or new military technology, he selected certain key people, put them in charge, and backed them to the hilt as long as they did what he said.

Hitler had a fetish for new technology, particularly if it might apply to a secret weapon. He had backed a young amateur German rocket society headed by Dr. Herman Oberth and Dr. Werner von Braun. Contrary to the advice of many of his ground force generals, he thought that military rockets had real potential. This resulted in the V1 jet-propelled pilot-less bomb and the V2 rocket. Both of these weapons affected Allied military decisions to eliminate the rocket launch sites along the coast of France, Belgium, and Holland. The political situation in England put great pressure on General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery to do something about these weapons. This overemphasis on eliminating the rocket launch sites hampered the Allied campaign in northern Europe.

The 3d Armored Division attacked in strength as it broke out of the bridgehead on the morning of February 26. Although air support from medium and heavy bombers was limited by the low-hanging clouds and drizzling rain, we had massive artillery support and good close support from P47 dive-bombers. After the bitter disappointment of seeing our November offensive ground to a halt, thanks to our narrow-tracked Shermans’ immobility in open country, we were now starting all over again.

The division passed through the bridgehead in five columns. The first objective was to penetrate ten to twelve miles to the Erft Canal and secure bridgeheads across it. The Germans had adequate time to prepare an extremely well-fortified defense in depth. We had hoped that, once we got through the dragons’ teeth and pillboxes of the Siegfried line, the going would be much easier; however, this was not the case.

Although the Germans fought tenaciously, they were resisting our superb firepower and the full strength of a heavy American armored division in assault on a narrow front. The German infantry suffered heavy casualties, and the roadsides were littered with their dead. I was shocked to see a young German soldier sitting fully erect in his foxhole, holding his rifle. He had been struck by a single projectile, and I could see daylight through a two-inch hole in both sides of his helmet and his head. He hadn’t fallen over; he just sat there passively staring out into eternity.

As Task Force Welborn on our extreme left approached the edge of the Hambach Forest to the north, it began to draw heavy small-arms and mortar fire from the woods. An infantry company dispatched toward the woods was soon pinned down. Fortunately, it had a forward observer directing fire from an 8-inch howitzer battalion on the west bank of the river. Having experience with the proximity fuse in the Ardennes, he called for the first round of HE with the fuse to mark the target. The round exploded some hundred feet in the air above the tops of the trees right at the edge of the woods. He adjusted the fire a hundred yards to the north for the second round. The proximity fuse set off the second round about two hundred feet in the air at about forty-five degrees, creating a pattern of deadly shell fragments about three hundred feet in diameter on the ground.

The effect of these shells bursting in the air decimated the German infantry on the ground, and the German commander offered to surrender. The American company commander called for a cease-fire, and the remnants of a German infantry battalion, about three hundred men, came out of the woods with their hands behind their heads. The German commander said that he had left many killed and wounded back in the woods.

Several of our task forces began to converge on Elsdorf, which they found heavily defended with log roadblocks, antitank mines, antitank guns, and assault guns, plus German infantry armed with the deadly
panzerfaust
s. The Germans would try to pin down our task forces with heavy fire, then launch a counterattack with armor on the flanks. The counterattack came soon, spearheaded by four Mark VI King Tigers and two Mark IV tanks.

Fortunately, Task Force Lovelady’s brand-new M26 had a good firing position on the flank and caught the Germans by surprise. It knocked out two Tigers and one Mark IV tank at a range of a thousand yards. The Germans had no idea that we had a tank that could knock out the Mark VI at this range.

To my knowledge, this was the first time that one of our M26 Pershings actually engaged the King Tiger in combat. Had the Tigers made a frontal assault, it is doubtful that the M26 could have knocked them out, because our M36 tank destroyers with the same 90mm gun had difficulty penetrating the Mark V Panther tank on the faceplate.

On the southern flank of the division, CCA ran into heavy resistance in the vicinity of Blatzheim and Kerpen. Task Force Doan alone lost four tanks in Blatzheim. The Germans fought desperately on the approaches to the canal, the last major obstacle before the flat, open Cologne Plain. The division had now penetrated ten to twelve miles from its jump-off point and had encountered almost every type of resistance. Combat Command A and CCB had gone all out and sustained considerable casualties. General Rose decided to commit CCR to establish a bridgehead across the canal, and soon the entire division was across.

In this area, between the canal and Cologne and extending north and south for several miles, was a series of large, open-pit coal mines. These “vobridge” pits were irregularly shaped, about a mile to a mile and a half across, and six hundred to seven hundred feet deep. Roads spiraled around the edges of the pits down to the bottom for access by dump trucks and power shovels. Beneath three to six feet of topsoil lay tremendous veins of brown coal (lignite) that extended downward six hundred feet or more. The power shovels would load the lignite into dump trucks, which in turn would take it to a long belt conveyor that carried it up the side of the pit to a large power plant.

These vobridge mines together with the adjacent power plants extended many miles north. The plants supplied a major part of the electric power not only for Cologne and other cities but also for the industrial Ruhr, the heart of the German steel industry. Combat Command A captured the Fortuna power plant at Bergheim. Purported to be the largest steam-generating plant in Europe, it had been relatively unscathed by any previous bombing action and was still in operation when we approached it on March 1, 1945.

The plant had several large cooling towers—reinforced concrete cylinders some 250 feet in diameter and 300 feet high. From these towers German observers were directing artillery fire. A few shots from our tanks knocked large, gaping holes in the top of the towers and eliminated these observation posts. Other than this, the plant sustained little damage. The operators had banked the furnaces and shut down the turbines when we approached.