The order reached the riflemen of the 112th Infantry Regiment as they pushed east from the village of Germeter: take Schmidt, cut the German supply road to Monschau, and hold. By the third of November 1944 they had done exactly that, seizing the town in a single battalion’s assault. The capture looked like a breakthrough in the brutal autumn fighting of the Hurtgen Forest. It was not.

The next day the Germans came back with the tanks of the 116th Panzer Division, and the battalion in Schmidt collapsed. Many of its men were taken prisoner. The tanks rolled on toward the Kall Trail, and the Americans learned, at terrible cost, that taking ground in the Hurtgen was one thing; keeping it was another. The forest straddled the German-Belgian border, a dark, dense tract of pine covering fifty-four square miles of steep hills, three miles east of the frontier.

In the autumn of 1944 it sat directly in the path of the American First Army, whose next objective lay beyond the town of Aachen: the dams on the Ruhr River. Those dams held back millions of gallons of water. If the Germans opened the sluices, the resulting flood would stall any American advance in the region for weeks. With winter approaching, units of the First Army were ordered forward.

Reaching the dams meant crossing the Hurtgen. The Germans could hardly believe their luck. Field Marshal Walter Model, commanding Army Group B, knew his forces could hold in the forest against almost any attack. The Americans’ overwhelming advantages in numbers, vehicles, and air power were neutralized at a stroke inside the dense, dark woods.

The Germans called the coming battle the “miracle of the West. ” Their infantry, entrenched and concealed, waited with mortar and artillery support. Though the Americans initially outnumbered the defenders five to one, the weather and terrain gave the advantage to the Germans. As experienced American soldiers fell killed or wounded, the army fed poorly trained replacements into the fight.

The results were catastrophic. The forest lay within two corps sectors of the First Army, the Fifth and the Seventh. In all, fourteen American divisions would see action there at different times. The initial defense fell to two understrength German infantry divisions, numbering about five thousand men with a thousand in reserve.

Their commander, Lieutenant General Hans Schmidt, would be steadily reinforced as the battle developed. Fighting in Aachen was still underway in mid-September 1944 when American divisions probed the edges of the forest. The first attacks were turned back. Some villages fell, but the Americans could not push deep into the woods against the strength of the German defenses.

On the fifth of October, the 39th and 60th Infantry Regiments of the 9th Division attacked toward Schmidt. They cut the road between Monschau and Duren but paid heavily for it. The 2nd Battalion of the 60th Regiment lost two thirds of its men in a single day. The 39th stalled under enfilading fire and heavy artillery bombardment.

By the sixteenth of October the Americans had advanced only three thousand yards into the forest, at a cost of forty-five hundred men. The 9th Division was relieved by the 28th Division that same day, and the advance continued. The 28th Division attacked on the second of November. Its 109th Infantry Regiment, attempting to take the woods north of Germeter, was caught in a minefield three hundred yards from its line of departure.

It eventually managed to advance a mile in two bloody days. The 110th Infantry was tasked with clearing the forest along the Kall River and seizing Simonskall, a vital supply route for the push on Schmidt. That regiment also took severe losses. The 112th Infantry attacked from Germeter, captured Vossenack and a nearby hill, then halted.

On the third of November came the capture of Schmidt and the cutting of the German supply road to Monschau. The elation was short-lived. The next day the German counterattack, spearheaded by the tanks of the 116th Panzer Division, retook Schmidt and shattered the American battalion holding it. In an attempt to turn the tide, the 707th Tank Battalion sent a company of eight M4 Sherman tanks through the Kall Trail to support the infantry.

Five were destroyed. The 116th Panzer attacked again, and this time the Americans knocked out five Panzer IVs and stopped the advance. The Germans also counterattacked Vossenack and recovered part of the town. On the eighth of November the Americans withdrew from Schmidt and the Kall Trail.

The first phase of the battle ended in a German victory. The second phase was code-named Operation Queen, an Allied offensive against the Ruhr River. The American 4th Infantry Division was to clear the northern half of the Hurtgen Forest between Schevenhutte and Hurtgen, capture the town of Hurtgen itself, and advance toward the Ruhr south of Duren to seize the dams. Hurtgen was heavily fortified, defended by sixty-five hundred German troops with one hundred fifty guns.

Operation Queen began on the sixteenth of November. The two infantry regiments of the 4th Division, the 8th and the 22nd, advanced in parallel. The 8th Regiment met ferocious resistance at Roth near the creek and fell back. The 22nd Regiment likewise retreated.

Three days of fighting cost the two regiments three hundred casualties. Engineers began blasting paths through the forest to bring tanks forward, and German reinforcements arrived as well. On the twenty-first of November the Fifth Corps launched its attack. The 8th Infantry Division advanced toward Hurtgen.

The 121st Infantry Regiment made daily progress of less than six hundred yards under heavy German fire. It captured the town of Hurtgen on the twenty-ninth of November and fought its way a mile north to Kleinhau. At Vossenack-Merode, two American companies seized the village on the northeastern edge of the forest, but the Germans drove them out. The 1st Infantry Division suffered more than three hundred dead.

In mid-November, the 2nd Ranger Battalion had relieved the 112th Infantry Regiment on the fourteenth. On the sixth of December the Rangers moved to Bergstein and then attacked Hill 400. The hill took its name from its height, four hundred meters, or thirteen hundred fifteen feet, above sea level. It lay one kilometer east of the village of Bergstein and formed part of the Siegfried Line defensive system, crowned by a watchtower.

The fighting was ferocious. The Rangers captured its bunkers with heavy sacrifices against entrenched German troops. They beat back five German counterattacks, including assaults by paratroopers, until only twenty-five men remained on the hilltop. On the final day of the battle the Germans recaptured Hill 400 and held it until February 1945.

The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest ended in a decisive German victory. American losses numbered thirty-three thousand killed and wounded, plus another nine thousand non-battle casualties. German losses were about twenty-eight thousand, including prisoners of war. As the slaughter in the Hurtgen ground to a stalemate, the Germans prepared for a major offensive in the west, through the great Ardennes forest.

The Americans had no way of knowing that the battle they had just fought was only a prelude. The concentration of strength they saw in the woods was becoming the spearhead for the last great German gamble of the war in the west. The men who survived the Hurtgen would be called upon again, within weeks, to meet the panzers breaking out of the Ardennes in what history would remember as the Battle of the Bulge.