Original subtitles

(beeping)

(intense music)

- [Narrator] Late 1944, as weary Allied troops

edge ever closer to the German border,

they can all but taste the end of the war.

But before victory is theirs,

the Americans will fight the single longest battle

on German soil.

- It's one of the largest, bloodiest battles

of World War II, yet it's virtually unknown.

- It makes no tactical sense.

It would've been quicker to go around.

- This was the wrong fight to pick

in the wrong place at the wrong time.

- Whole units were completely decimated

and the responsibility has to be laying at the door

of the senior commanders who are sending these units in

to carry out completely impossible missions.

- It's called the meat grinder.

So many lives are wasted, ultimately for nothing,

but very few people know anything about it.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] September 1944,

the allied pursuit of the German Army has slowed down

due to the distance from supply lines

and increase German resistance.

Both the American and Russian armies

have their sights set on Berlin.

- The Soviets are coming in from the East.

There's desperation on the part of the Americans

and the Allies.

You gotta get to Berlin before the Red Army.

- Waiting would've cost them.

That was the logic in the fall of 1944

is that if we wait, you know,

the Russians will be in Germany and even past Berlin

and we won't even be in the game.

- [Narrator] From the Western side,

the next strategic objective is to move up the Rhine River

and prepare to cross it.

- The Rhine River is a deep, cold, wide river.

Hitler is ordered that the bridges be blown up.

You gotta get to the Rhine before the bridges are destroyed.

The other sense of desperation

is this war is exacting such a horrific toll.

Holocaust, civilians are starving,

soldiers dying on the battlefield.

The sooner we can end the war, the better.

But what General Courtney Hodges, who planned this,

what he underestimated was the sense of desperation

on the German side.

- [Narrator] Commander of the German Seventh Army,

General Erich Brandenberger,

favors falling back behind the Rhine River,

but Hitler himself has assured him

that reinforcements are on the way

and the Aachen Region

instead becomes increasingly fortified.

- The US Army faces two problems in its campaign

through the Hurtgen.

One, this is the first time it's fighting on German soil.

And however tough the Germans have been,

they are bound to up their game

when it gets to defending Germany.

And the second problem is that they're up against

a formidable defensive system in a terrain

they simply have no experience of.

- [Narrator] Located about five kilometers

east of the German-Belgian border,

the triangular shaped Hurtgen Forest,

known to the Germans as the Hurtgenwald,

is 140 square kilometers of state-owned forest.

- There are kind of straight lines

because it's a managed forest.

So, you know, even if you were trying to run and hide,

the enemy can conceivably see you.

- [Narrator] In 1938, Hurtgen Forest

is fortified by the Germans as part of their Western wall,

known to the Allies as the Siegfried Line.

- So it forms a near perfect canopy

under which you can build fortifications,

under which tanks and airplanes are inoperable.

- [Narrator] But the man in command

has extensive experience fighting through difficult terrain.

General Courtney Hodges is a decorated World War I veteran

and well-respected commander.

- Hodges definitely knew a lot about fighting

this type of battle.

He's partially blinded during the First World War.

He gets a Purple Heart for that action

and he throws his Purple Heart out

because he doesn't think he deserves it.

This is the mentality of this man.

- He comes from quite a well to-do Georgian background.

It would've been natural for him

to go into the Army as an officer,

but he joins up as an enlisted man.

And so for him to go from that to leftenant general in 1944

is really pretty impressive.

- [Narrator] In August, 1944, Hodges succeeds Omar Bradley

as commander of the First Army.

With a quarter of a million soldiers,

it's America's largest fighting force

comprising 18 divisions, subdivided into brigades,

battalions, and companies,

all the way down to thousands of platoons

of a few dozen men.

On September 14th, 1944,

the American Ninth Infantry Division enters Hurtgen Forest.

These few thousand men are the battle weary 39th,

47th and 60th Regiments

commanded by Major General Lewis A. Craig.

- The Ninth Infantry Division

has been pretty battle tested for a very long time.

- [Narrator] Prior to Hurtgen,

these units took part in long combat missions

throughout north Africa and France

and are severely depleted.

- [John] These battle-hardened troops

have seen almost everything.

They know what to expect,

and now they're being pushed into the Hurtgen Forest.

- Most military science

says that you don't attack in a forest,

especially an enemy who's very well fortified

and well defended.

- Which is the great conundrum

for anyone who studies tactics.

Why doesn't Hodges go around the forest

is a question we still debate to this day.

(suspenseful music)

- It showed the American determination to advance.

It told the Germans that they were not gonna be able

to scare the Allies away no matter what they did.

This was also a resounding message

to the German high command.

- [Narrator] This is the mentality

of one of General Hodges' closest advisors,

fellow World War I veteran,

J. Lawton Collins has distinguished himself

at the Battle of Guadalcanal and he's earned the nickname

Lightning Joe.

When Hodges plans to halt for two days

to allow reinforcements to catch up,

Collins argues to begin recon immediately.

He sets the pace of the offensive.

- And they're sent into the Hurtgen to see who is in there,

if anyone, and try to pierce out the other side

and hit that Siegfried Line.

- [Narrator] The Allies enter the forest with several goals,

pin down German troops

to prevent them from reinforcing their efforts further north

at the Battle of Aachen and capture the town of Schmidt.

- It was like a crossroads town,

you could fan out into the countryside

and it was a great place

to have your communications as well.

So Schmidt is a very, very important position

for either side to hold.

- [Narrator] The 39th and 47th Regiments

are ordered to divide and conquer.

- A lot of military training is about following orders,

doing what you're told, getting to where you need to be.

You don't need to worry about what the goal is.

You don't need to worry about exactly what's happening

or what the overall situation is.

Here is your job.

So you're starting off in that type of mentality.

As long as you and your mates survived another day,

it was a good day.

- [Narrator] The initial advance by the 47th Regiment

goes smoothly.

- In fact, for two days, they didn't see anyone.

And eventually they spot a staff car

with a German colonel in it and they kind of report back,

you know, this is what we've seen.

- And they find a lone German officer trying to figure out

what's going on.

So what do these men do?

They take him prisoner.

They rob him and then they send him back

to the German lines.

They don't even think they have time to deal with prisoners.

The 39th attacks through the forest and meets resistance.

They do not have as easy time as the 47th does.

- The Germans have had time to recoup.

They're back behind their own front line

and they are digging in.

It's one giant booby trap,

but you're probably not gonna lay the booby trap

right on the edge,

the further Western perimeter of the forest, are you?

You're gonna bed in behind your own lines.

- [Narrator] The 39th Regiment begin pressing forward

at Lammersdorf at the edge of the forest.

But unbeknownst to them, they are entering a deadly trap.

- The terrain in the forest itself is utterly impassible

for the Americans to come in.

The Germans had built defensive positions throughout,

strewing mines all across the forest,

building machine gun nests, bunkers.

(bombs exploding)

- They start taking casualties almost immediately.

(rapid gunfire)

This makes them realize

that this isn't going to be a cake walk

through this wood lot.

They don't know where everyone is around them.

They don't know where the enemy is.

(rapid gunfire)

- [Narrator] The Germans do not expect the Allies' attempt

to breach the Hurtgen Forest.

- The Germans were dumbfounded

as to why the Americans would do such a maneuver.

They thought it was crazy. It was insane.

And they could not believe their luck

that someone would try this.

- It must have seemed odd to them

that this fortified forest,

impregnable is what we'd call it,

impossible to pass through virtually,

is gonna be the focus of an American campaign,

which up until that point had relied on armor,

mobility, and aircraft.

You can't use any of those three things in a dense forest.

So it's like a gift to the Germans.

I'm sure they were surprised.

- The density, the thickness of this forest

also undermines the Americans in terms of communications.

It's hard to see and radar systems,

more primitive radar back then, aren't working properly.

- [Soldier] Base to one, base to one, this is base o-six,

(mumbles) responding.

- [Narrator] At one point,

the only sound coming over the radio

is a German warning of "Achtung! Achtung!"

as the nearby town Zweifel sounds their air raid sirens.

- As soon as the radio goes out,

you're in a feeling of isolation

that you don't have any support,

that you're no longer part of the greater whole.

(bombs exploding)

- Radios tended to malfunction regularly.

Sometimes the battery would die out.

Sometimes a signal wouldn't get over a hill.

In fact, one officer said

that he had to resort to the old hand signals

that they were taught in basic training

to move men around the field in front of him.

- [Narrator] What began as recon

has turned into a full fledged battle.

(gunshots firing)

The Americans are on the defensive

and woefully under-supplied.

(tense music)

- Americans and the Allies have pushed in so quickly

that they have outrun everything that they need.

They don't have water.

Some men don't have rations for days.

You can't deploy men into a force

if they haven't eaten for two or three days.

- [Narrator] After two agonizing weeks,

the 39th Division takes control of the town of Lammersdorf.

- Huge losses for tiny gains,

but the need to win, the need to advance was so overwhelming

that these losses were deemed acceptable.

- General Hodges has these objectives.

He wants this town or this key intersection

or this part of the forest.

In hindsight, it seems rather arbitrary

and he is not willing to change his mind.

The problem is at what cost?

And the Americans are suffering thousands of casualties

for each seemingly arbitrary objective.

- [Narrator] By this point in the war,

General Courtney Hodges expects the Germans

to quickly surrender due to low morale

but this is absolutely not the case.

The Germans have every advantage

with the forest fortifications.

- The way that I think most commanders would do it

if they had a second chance was to wait

until you had full concentration of your supplies,

and then to bring the brunt of your highly favorable ratio

of soldiers and tanks and planes to bear

and crush the Germans.

It was a five to one tactical advantage

in terms of military strength that the Allies had

and it's just wasted, utterly wasted.

- [Narrator] The Battle of Hurtgen Forest

is intended to build upon the successful push

that began with D-Day.

The Allies attacked the coast of Normandy

in a massive amphibious assault of 150,000 soldiers.

They faced resistance as they stormed the beaches,

achieving victory.

Finally, on June 11th, this changes the tide of the war

and provides the launchpad to liberate France

and Western Europe.

- They've got never ending resources.

It's just a matter of getting the resources up to the front.

We've got almost two million Allied troops, match, fit,

and ready to go.

- [Narrator] The British Second Army liberates Brussels

on September 3rd and Antwerp on September 4th.

Hitler starts acting out in desperation.

He appoints Field Marshall, Karl von Rundstedt

as the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in the West

and orders him to attack the advancing Allies.

Soldiers are called upon to fight to their death

rather than surrender.

- So many committed Nazis go on fighting right to the end.

And I'm not just talking about the top, like Goebbels,

all the way down to the ordinary prison guards

who will not let go of their authority

and their murderous policies

until literally the guns are taken from their hands.

- [Narrator] With German forces decimated,

their approach is more deadly

the closer they come to defeat.

- Hitler informed all of his commanders

that if they gave up ground, many of them would be dead.

You weren't supposed to give ground.

You were supposed to hold your ground at all costs,

especially when you got to the Siegfried Line

because that's German territory.

So Hitler says that you will be killed if you fall back.

- On the German side, it's desperate.

There is no choice and you're probably gonna die fighting,

but you fight because if not,

you're gonna get a gun in your back

or you're gonna be court-martialed and killed.

And these little kids, these older men,

by now they're recruiting middle aged men as well.

They're gonna damn well do what they're told.

This is Hitler's Germany, you don't have a choice.

You know, you dig in and protect your country.

- [Narrator] The Americans decide

to push through the Northeast

to capture the towns of Hurtgen and Kleinhau.

But the number of American soldiers in the Hurtgen

is quickly depleting and the mood is grim.

General Hodges calls in tanks

from the Third Armored Division

to support the 39th and 60th Regiments.

The tanks must overcome fortifications

known as dragon's teeth just to reach the embattled troops.

- Armored divisions were trying to get into the forest

to help out and support these American units.

And men had to have axes issued to them

from the sides of the tanks to go out

and physically chop the trees down

because the trees were too large for the tank to run over

and the tank couldn't run over any of them.

So these men have to go out there by hand

and chop down a road.

- What was General Hodge's thinking

when he was deploying the tanks?

It's not clear why such a decision was taken,

but the tanks were a resource and they were deployed.

- What you actually got in the forest of Hurtgen

are tanks being stranded in mud, broken down,

being knocked out and becoming a problem.

You know, the tanks are attracting fire

and causing casualties.

Far from them being the solution to the problem,

they actually make it worse.

- After you've lost a couple of divisions,

you might consider rethinking the game plan.

But the danger is you think,

well I've already lost two divisions,

I'm just gonna keep going.

You know, I'm gonna reinforce that defeat.

It's a classic military error that so many make.

Hodges ain't the first and he won't be the last.

- [Narrator] Despite continued heavy casualties,

by September 20th, the Americans reach the Weisser Valley

closing in on their objective, the Schmidt hub.

- Schmidt is like a merry-go-round.

It's like a, it is a kind of roundabout of death.

All the villages, incidentally, have been evacuated.

It's, you know, you can't live there.

It's not a place where you live any longer.

It's just a bunch of rubble.

It's just a place where you might get picked off

by sniper fire if a pill box isn't taking you out first,

if you haven't stumbled over a dragon's tooth,

I mean the whole place is like a landscape of terror.

Can you imagine, you come out at the forest

and you land up in Schmidt.

It's like, my God, who cooks up a place like that?

- The planning for the German defenses go back to 1938

when they construct the Siegfried Line.

Now, it's not used, of course,

for most of the Second World War

because the Germans are on the offense.

But when they do come on the defense,

all these measures they put in place in 1938

suddenly come to fruition and are incredibly valuable.

They've been building bunkers and pill boxes

so that they create a kind of killing zone

in which it's gonna be very difficult for you to get past.

- [Narrator] And yet Hodges and other top brass

all believe that Schmidt is an important town to capture.

- The question is how do you get there?

You've gotta come through the wood,

funneling you into a field of fire

in which you're gonna find it very difficult to maneuver.

The logic of attacking Schmidt gets completely removed

when you think that a flanking attack

could have done the same thing.

- [Narrator] October 6th marks the Americans first attack

on Schmidt.

(rapid gunfire)

Between October 6th to 16th,

the Ninth Infantry Division gains 3000 meters

at a cost of four and a half thousand casualties.

- This is First World War numbers.

This is, this is losing a man for every meter and a half.

It's a crazy number to think, how can this persist?

(bombs exploding)

(dramatic music)

How can you have all these losses

and not see that we have a problem?

- [Narrator] Bullets and tree shrapnel

decimate the Ninth Division.

- Those kind of losses that the Americans absorb in Schmidt

are monstrous.

So you waste thousands of lives over a multi-day fight

for nothing.

Schmidt's important to the overall offensive

on the vest fall, but not at that cost.

- [Narrator] The battle to take Schmidt is a failure,

but despite the beatings,

the Americans do advance to the crucial supply hub

of Monschau.

But again, they pay a high price.

The Ninth Infantry Division

is reduced to a small fraction of itself

and cannot continue fighting in the forest.

On October 16th, the nearly obliterated Ninth Division

gets some relief.

First Army Commander Courtney Hodges

calls on Major General Norman "Dutch" Cota

to renew the drive toward Schmidt.

- The 28th Infantry Division arrives in Hurtgen

and they dive into the woods.

These are men of the old Pennsylvania National Guard

and they are sent into the woods

to try to break this stalemate.

They think they're going to be able to do it.

They're battle hardened, they're ready to go.

They get into the woods

and they see the destruction

from months of terrible fighting.

You are literally stepping on the bodies of men

who died a week beforehand.

It hits you in the psyche when you think about

what these men are treading on, laying upon,

being around every single day in the Hurtgen.

- [Narrator] Fresh from his triumph at Omaha Beach,

Dutch Cota has become accustomed to victory,

but the German defenses here are surprisingly strong.

Pill box attacks proved to be deadly.

American losses reached the thousands in a matter of days.

- For those who were in Hurtgen Forest,

the entire world is reduced to basically a green inferno,

a meat grinder.

- [Narrator] On October 18th,

a battalion from the 28th Infantry Division

arrives in Aachen as reinforcements.

(bombs exploding)

And after a brutal battle,

the Germans capitulate on October 21st.

After Aachen is captured,

the 28th Infantry breached the Siegfried Line

in the Stolberg corridor.

General Hodges' men are to press forward 10 miles

to the Roer River, capture the town of Duren

before continuing to Cologne and the Rhine.

- The war point from an allied point of view

is we need the Germans to surrender.

We need them to realize the war's over.

If Germany doesn't have access to its industrial heartlands,

then it's hobbled.

It will have to capitulate.

So that's a very clear, clean target, really.

- So there is this huge push to move forward into the Roer.

A lot of the power plants are located down river.

It runs Germany.

If you can take out that area, you can seal off that asset.

If you don't do that, Germany still has a lifeline.

- [Narrator] But General Hodges continues

to pursue other less productive goals.

He insists on repeated attempts

to capture the town of Schmidt,

an ongoing goal that is as elusive as it is deadly.

- It becomes sort of a myopic obsession to capture it

and then guess what? To recapture it.

You know, if you've got compromised supply lines,

it's very difficult to hold a place like Schmidt.

You're making incremental gains

and you're losing them again.

One step forward, two back, one step forward, two back.

And it's losses on a scale that the Americans

weren't used to.

- [Narrator] On November 2nd,

the Americans begin their second attack on Schmidt

led by the 28th Division.

(rapid gunfire)

- There's no way that they didn't know

how bloody and painful it was after the first group went in.

If you were a new battalion coming in,

you saw thousands coming back out as 300.

- The Americans spent much of October in desperation

trying to take this small village of Schmidt

and suffered thousands of casualties.

What do they do?

They try it again in November.

- On November 3rd,

the First and Third Battalions

of the 112th Infantry Regiment move across the Kall Valley

in hopes of capturing Kommerscheidt and Schmidt

and cutting the Germans off from their supplies.

However, the terrain of the Kall Trail

makes movement of any kind very difficult.

- One particular unit, 2000 strong,

is eventually battered down to just 300 men.

You know, can you imagine a couple of days

in which 70% are casualties?

You know, how do you rebuild the, you know,

the morale of that unit?

It's almost impossible.

- [Narrator] After their first loss at Schmidt,

the Germans rely heavily on panzer tanks.

On November 4th, the 166th Panzer Division tanks

unload their fire on the Third Battalion at dawn,

ejecting them from Schmidt

and leaving them unable to counterattack.

The battalion descends into chaos.

133 are captured by the Germans.

- And again, you have to remember,

the Germans have had to time to fortify.

They've got back behind their natural defensive barriers.

They've been given time to regroup.

They've laid their hands on anything they can

that goes up in a puff of smoke.

It's just do what you need to do to keep them away,

stop them getting across.

Keep them out of the fatherland, whatever it takes.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, the US 109th Division

is tasked with capturing the area north of Germeter,

but within 300 yards, they meet an unexpected horror.

(mines exploding)

- I don't know that any minefield is a pleasant place to be,

but that one is just horrific,

almost impossible to navigate through.

So navigating minefields, pill boxes, trench emplacements,

heavy guns all becomes a grinder.

It becomes the meat grinder.

- [Narrator] The Wild Pig - or Wilde Sau minefield

is one of the largest minefields on the Western front.

Mines every two meters stretch over a span

of three kilometers.

- Now, how are you going to get through that?

It's impenetrable.

So you literally have to crawl through

and try to find these mines, diffuse them, and keep moving

while being shot at it.

- Ultimately, they have to resort to rolling trees

through the forest to try to detonate the mines.

That's time consuming, it's not practical

and in a forest that's this dense and thick of trees,

it takes forever.

- Even after all of those losses and that loss of territory,

machines, men, material, it's still crazy

that Hodges doesn't understand the totality of the loss.

It is, it is a loss at that time.

How are you going and overcome that loss

and go back at the enemy is another thing.

- Ultimately, General Hodges comes to his senses

and approves the withdrawal of American troops

from this little hub, this little village of Schmidt.

- [Narrator] With Schmidt lost yet again,

the focus returns to the Roer industrial area

and the Roer River.

There are seven dams at the Roer River headwater

for flood control, drinking water, and hydroelectric power.

The Schwammenauel and the Urft dams

hold up to 40 billion gallons of water

between the two of them.

- That's a huge amount of water.

I mean, if that had been released,

it's a nightmare scenario.

If the Germans had exploded the dams,

the advance through Germany would have become

not just difficult,

but might have become a near impossibility.

- [Narrator] On November 5th,

General Hodges receives a top secret memo

from General Simpson of the Ninth Army.

He is to refocus on securing the Roer River dams

before the Germans unleash a catastrophic flood.

Hodges insists that the best path to get there

is to continue to press through the deadly forest.

- General Hodges, yet again,

ignores the concerns of his officers

and the intelligence that the Germans

are considering blowing the dams to flood the entire region.

His response is damn the dams.

- One of the justifications for going through the forest

is to get to the Roer dams.

There were seven of them and two in particular

are so big in terms of the lakes that they created,

that the feeling is if they're,

if they're blown by the Germans,

they're gonna unleash a flood tide

that's gonna really slow down the advance

to the Rhine River.

And this is gonna really impede allied communication.

So we need to get to these dams

and we need to take them before the Germans blow them.

But that doesn't explain the logic

of going through the forest.

Yes, the Roer dams are at the back of the forest,

but they're not in the forest.

- What I don't understand

is why they don't go around to the sides.

Because if you look at the map

and then work your way down stream

so that you incrementally pick off each dam

that the Germans could have flooded you with.

- Hodges created this sub-objective.

I can do the dams, but I have to get to this point first.

And that's where I see this real disconnect.

When you're making a decision and you have a goal,

you tend to plan to get to that goal.

Most people want to plan to get to that goal

with the least steps possible.

Hodges is planning to get to that goal

by adding additional intermediary steps.

And the only reason that he's doing that

is because those were the steps he took

when he was successful in World War I.

You take the towns, you move the line,

and that's what he was trained in,

that's what he was successful with,

and that's what he is repeating here.

- [Narrator] At age 57, Hodges is not the man

he once was mentally or physically.

- Because of his disconnection from those around him,

he's not hearing alternate plans or alternate viewpoints,

which is leading into tunnel vision

for his overall strategy.

- Hodges, he misunderstands his soldiers.

I think there's almost a kind of,

a failure of empathy at this point for him to keep,

to keep asking this of them and to not step back

is a profound failure on his part on a human level.

- Hodges is an interesting character

when it comes to casualties.

(bomb exploding)

He's very hard as a commander and likes to drive

and keep moving and keep moving.

But his men often say that they've watched him break down

when he goes to the hospitals.

Any other time, he's hard as a rock,

but when he goes into the medical tents and sees the men,

he breaks down and cries.

- [Narrator] But meanwhile,

the Americans are having a horrible time in the Kall Trail.

(bombs exploding)

- Sending in tanks is not a good idea.

It's an even worse idea when the weather conditions worsen,

you get a lot of rain coming in,

there's a morass on the floor of the forest

and the tanks are just incapable of moving and operating.

You either gotta get past them.

You've gotta go and rescue people out of them.

- [Narrator] Amidst heavy casualties on both sides,

a small glimmer of humanity comes from an unexpected place.

German troop doctor Günter Stuttgen

has a history of treating enemy wounded

at his field hospitals.

On November 7th,

he makes contact with American medical personnel

and negotiates what will become the first

of three cease fires.

Combat stops for several hours

so wounded can be retrieved and enemy patients exchanged.

Hundreds of men survive the Hurtgen Forest

who would've otherwise been left to die.

Years later, Stüttgen was honored for his actions,

which he explained,

"Came from respect that only soldiers

"who know the horror of war can have for one another."

But in November '44, after the briefest of pauses,

those horrors continue unabated.

- The weather works to the advantage of the Nazis as well.

It becomes brutally cold.

It snows, the Germans laid thousands of mines down

the Americans couldn't see or detect.

So everything about the forest

worked to the advantage of the Nazis

and worked against the American invaders.

- [Narrator] The American offensive force

begins to be affected by a defensive mentality.

- And they're gonna be holding their ground,

staying still being in a covered position.

You get that difference between

being aggressive and offensive

versus a very defensive type reaction

where you're just trying to survive.

- [Narrator] This reaction

extends to some of the highest ranking officers.

General Ralph Huebner

leads the legendary First Division

known as The Big Red One.

He makes the mistake,

when reporting to Major General J. Lawton Collins,

of using the phrase, keeping the enemy in check.

Collins is furious at the lack of forward momentum

and orders Huebner to ramp up the attacks.

(intense artillery explosions)

For Collins and his superior, Courtney Hodges,

it's forward momentum or nothing.

But by mid-November, there is plenty of blame to go around

and much of it is laid at the feet

of General Norman Dutch Cota.

His 28th Infantry Division is relieved of duty

and the Eighth Infantry Division is brought in.

On November 16th, Operation Queen begins.

- The Hurtgen Forest campaign really occurs

in a couple phases.

The first one begins in September of 1944,

and that's an unmitigated disaster.

Finally, later in November,

a second phase, Operation Queen,

it's most of the same tactics, which again, don't work.

However, they want to try to use American air superiority,

which ordinarily would make sense.

But the forest is so dense, so thick,

that it renders bombers and war planes

completely ineffective.

- [Narrator] With no end in sight,

the situation is reported on

by one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century.

- Ernest Hemingway is reporting from the front

for Collier's Magazine,

witnesses some of this fighting

and he's completely horrified.

- [Narrator] Ernest Hemingway spent 18 days

embedded with the 3000 men of the Fourth Division.

- You have a kind of chronicler of the madness

on a very personal level.

- One of the grimmest actions is in late November,

when a regiment is sent to take

the village of Grössau and in attempting to do so,

it loses almost 2,700 of its 3000 troops.

That's over 90% casualties.

- And of the futility of the tactics

being used by the Americans,

Hemingway quipped that it would save everybody

a lot of trouble if they just shot them

as soon as they got out of the trucks.

- And describes it as passion dale with tree bursts.

That pretty much says it all.

- You got shrapnel starting off the branches

above your head so if you're not hit directly,

you're gonna be hit with something raining down on you

that's not just freezing wintry water from God's skies.

I mean, it's a nightmare.

It's a hell on Earth.

He's reminding people back in America

that this ain't just headlines.

Oh, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, Aachen.

- [Newscaster] The city of Aachen was so well restored

that refugees from the nearby internment camp

were allowed to return to their homes in the city.

The military government section went to work

establishing order.

- No, passion there were tree busts.

You know, let's break up that narrative,

that success story, and remind people success at a cost.

Hemingway will eventually write a novel

about what he witnesses.

"Across the River and Into the Trees" it's called.

- [Narrator] A more direct literary account

comes from a former professional wrestler,

the machine gun platoon leader of Company G

of the 121st Infantry.

- That amazing character, Leftenant Paul Boesch,

writes a great book about it after.

It's incredibly visceral descriptions

of what he'd gone through, what his men were going through.

- [Narrator] Lieutenant Boesch's memoir captures the horror

as he leads the 121st Infantry Regiment

through the thick forest.

Boesch sets up a command post and a carrying party

to move rations, water, and ammunition for the regiment.

(machine gun firing)

German machine gunners catch them in a brutal crossfire,

raining mortars and artillery.

(bombs exploding)

Bearing witness to the horrors of the forest,

the 121st spends Thanksgiving in hell.

(bombs exploding)

- Thanksgiving in the Hurtgen is a lot different

than what you see on any other part of the line.

It is business as usual.

- [Narrator] On November 23rd,

Lieutenant Boesch receives a message

that a hot turkey dinner is on its way

to every man in the outfit.

- They were looking to build morale,

but it's also way to remind people

what they're fighting for.

The world is gonna be safe and your family and friends

are gonna be able to have Thanksgivings

because of what you're doing here.

- [Narrator] Boesch objects.

The positions they are in are nearly right on top

of the Germans, a terrible time to eat a hot meal.

- And they'll know where we are

and they're gonna shoot at us.

And let's, you know, let's stay low and keep safe.

- [Narrator] Despite his protests and appeal to reason,

the Thanksgiving dinners are sent in

on orders from headquarters.

Privates are called back to distribute the meals.

- Hodges is playing for a headline game, really.

You know, the men were fed on Thanksgiving.

You know, as a note home to mom, you know, had hot Turkey

or whatever it is you eat, cranberry sauce.

You know, there's a kind of,

there's a superficiality to his thinking there.

Did he really think a gimmick like that was worth any life?

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] The Germans are lurking closely

and the hot meal service draws attention to Boesch's men.

(rapid gunfire)

Seven men are wounded and three killed

for a dinner no one wanted to eat.

The 121st must move on after Thanksgiving in hell

but their journey deeper into the woods

proves even more deadly.

In only three days,

the 121st Regiment loses 20% of their manpower,

50 killed, 600 wounded.

- You've got mines going off.

You've got trees exploding.

How many times can you jump?

How many times can you have that adrenaline rush

before you've wiped it out?

You just don't have the resources anymore to engage with it.

- [Narrator] But throughout this vicious string

of close-range fire fights,

Lieutenant Boesch leads his platoon

in the Village of Hurtgen amidst heavy enemy fire.

(rapid gunfire)

He and his men take cover in abandoned houses

while automatic weapons clatter and buildings explode.

(dramatic music)

In a brutal struggle, Lieutenant Boesch and Company G

managed to take the town of Hurtgen,

taking 350 German POWs.

Bodies of both American and German soldiers

littered the streets.

For his role in the strategic victory,

Lieutenant Boesch is awarded the silver star,

his second one.

The victory at Hurtgen allows American troops

to begin to make their way to the Village of Kleinhau,

the next objective.

The 121st gains in Hurtgen

finally place the troops in decent proximity

to the Roer River dams,

the objective all along of Supreme Commander Eisenhower,

but the horrible cost to get there is barely reflected upon.

- You've got this command structure,

so there's this distributed lack of accountability

for what's going on here.

Nobody is saying, why are you doing this this way?

Even Eisenhower who wants the dams protected

doesn't seem to get involved in how to get there.

And maybe that's not part of his command,

but somebody should have been tracking

just how many lives were lost.

- [Narrator] Instead of dwelling on the casualties,

the First Army commanders seize on this momentum.

November 29th, orders from General Hodges come in

to take the Brandenburg Burstein Ridge,

securing a launch position for the US First Army

to make a direct attack and secure the Roer River dams.

After enduring weeks of heavy fighting,

the 28th and 121st Regiments clear the approach

for the tanks to begin their advance

toward Brandenburg Burstein.

The 28th and 121st Infantry reached the ridge,

but the Germans have a major defensive advantage,

positions on Castle Hill.

- Castle Hill is one of the high points of the fight

and that's with no pun intended because Castle Hill is high

and it's a great vantage point.

(rapid gunfire)

- [Narrator] With only 11 tanks and 140 infantrymen left,

reinforcements are needed

to protect hard-won American gains.

- The second ranger battalion shows up, very good,

well-trained troops.

- And this is where you get into differences

between Special Forces and general infantry,

where there is more independence and decision making

where you can adjust on the fly to meet a goal or objective

without a very clear plan necessarily on how to get there.

And so you find that Special Forces training

tends to be very different in terms of initiative.

- The Second Rangers begin their advance.

They quickly overwhelm parts of the German defenses

and they will engage very violently and quickly

with the Germans who are trying to defend Castle Hill.

- [Narrator] The Germans fire on the rangers

with increasing intensity,

but Company D takes the top of a hill.

- The Germans were utilizing it to rain fire down

on the Americans and now it's in the hands

of the Second Ranger Battalion.

- [Narrator] Of the ranger reinforcements,

only 22 are still able to walk on their own

after this battle.

Nineteen are killed, 107 wounded, and four men are missing.

But due to their sacrifice from Castle Hill,

the Americans concede the Roer River dams.

On December 16th,

the battered rangers on Castle Hill

are relieved by the 13th Regiment.

But swapping Special Forces back to regular troops

will prove costly.

- And then they weren't using Special Forces.

They were using standard infantry troopers

who were trained to do what they were told,

but they're doing it in an environment

that is really biased against them.

- [Narrator] The 13th are unable to hold onto this victory,

but the struggle to control the Hurtgen Forest

is about to be eclipsed by an even bigger challenge

and the Americans won't retake the hill

until February of 1945.

- One of the reasons the Germans fight

as effectively as they do is because they are prepping

for what will become the Battle of the Bulge,

a position to the south of the Hurtgen Forest.

- Of course the bigger story

is gonna be the center of attention.

The Battle of the Bulge became that center of attention.

- [Narrator] December 16th,

the Germans launched their last ditch offensive

into the Ardennes.

- The allied planners are completely caught off guard.

They were not expecting this overwhelming German regrouping.

- When Hitler orders the counterattack,

the tanks concentrate their power

in just one section of the line,

which is an age old military tactic.

And if you can bust through that one section,

it compromises the entire line.

They pushed a bulge out roughly 60 miles

in the American line, thus giving it the nickname,

the Battle of the Bulge.

- [Narrator] On December 27th,

the 83rd Division in Hurtgen Forest

enters the Battle of the Bulge.

- Both sides sustain horrific casualties.

It's also one of the coldest periods of the entire war.

The weather claims lives also.

- [Narrator] But in contrast to the Hurtgen Forest debacle,

Allied Forces are now well organized and well supported.

- By Christmas, you know, we've got our act together.

You're even seeing a change in the law in Britain

where women are drafted overseas.

We need to back up the boys.

You need to feed the boys.

You need to supply the boys.

You need to administer the boys.

And that's what wins the Battle of the Bulge

is this extra manpower, this oomph.

Eisenhower comes up to the front, you know,

there's another 200,000+ men.

How can the Germans fight that?

(bombs exploding)

- Ultimately, Hitler's last ditch gamble fails.

The Americans win.

That's really one of the last ditch efforts by Hitler

and the Germans to hold the American line.

- [Narrator] The Battle of the Bulge is officially won

on January 25th, 1945,

but it comes at a high cost.

Of the 500,000 Americans who fight,

19,000 are killed in action, 47,500 wounded,

and 23,000 or more are missing.

- The Battle of the Bulge is a major turning point

and it is heroic.

Churchill's right to call it a great victory.

But you can't help but to think that at least in part

there's that horrible moment of Hurtgen Forest

that kind of haunts them.

- [Narrator] Finally, after five grueling months,

there is still unfinished business in the Hurtgen Forest.

On February 10th, 1945, at long last,

the Roer Dam is taken by the American forces.

This gives them control of the Urft Dam

and 20 billion gallons of water.

However, the Germans rally around the Schwammenauel Dam

and blow the valves open to flood the area.

- The Germans do exactly what intel

was hoping they wouldn't do.

They blew the dam.

(suspenseful music)

(dams exploding)

But when the dams blew,

it wasn't this overwhelming tidal wave of water coming down

through the area like intel thought it would be.

It caused localized flooding.

It slowed down some of the movements of divisions

through the area,

but it didn't cause this huge tidal wave of water.

It was much ado about nothing for many of the planners.

- [Narrator] On February 17th,

the forest is cleared by the 82nd Airborne Division

when they reach the Roer River.

The Americans are finally finished in the forest of hell,

which claims between 35,000 and 60,000 soldiers missing,

wounded, or dead.

The Americans use their position at the Roer

to support an allied attack on city of Cologne.

On March 7th, the Americans crossed the Rhine

as their troops pushed forward to Berlin.

Two months later, the war in Europe ends.

On May 8th, 1945, the war in Europe is officially over

as Berlin is captured and Germany surrenders.

- Hurtgen Forest is difficult

when you think about the sacrifices made by the soldiers.

(rapid gunfire)

On one hand, men died seemingly for nothing.

(loud explosions)

But all this fighting,

it did serve a role in the larger scheme

of the Second World War.

And ultimately, the Allies made it to Berlin

and won the war.

- What's most telling about this battle

in terms of the embarrassment

in the way in which it was fought

is the amount of space that Eisenhower,

the Supreme Commander, gave it in his memoirs.

- It is a starting of the Nazi defeat on the Western front.

- He devoted under 70 words to a battle

that went on for five months

and resulted in between 35,000 and 60,000 casualties.

- [Narrator] Supreme Commander Eisenhower

has political ambitions.

He becomes the 34th president of the United States

and lives to the age of 78.

General Courtney Hodges continues to be held in high regard

until he retires from the military in 1949.

- I think history has diminished his narrative

because he's not the hero that we've come to expect

of great American military leaders,

but I don't think we can put it all on Hodges' shoulders.

- [Narrator] J. Lawton Collins

continues in the military for another decade

and survives to the ripe old age of 91.

General Norman "Dutch" Cota is denied further promotions.

He's eventually pushed out of the military

due to failing health.

Lieutenant Paul Boesch survives the viciousness

of Hurtgen Forest.

His memoir and other written accounts

provides a tenuous connection

to this largely forgotten chapter of history.

- The entire history of the Second World War

has many omissions.

Hurtgen Forest is one of the most significant ones

and it should definitely be more studied

and more understood by everyone.

- For a lot of the men who came out of Hurtgen,

it impacted them for years afterwards,

where they would talk about the bursting trees.

They would talk about the mine fields,

or talk about losing a friend in Hurtgen.

Why is that important?

Why should we learn from this defeat of the US Army?

Look at the men who were on the ground.

I think it would shed a lot of light

on what warfare was like, how destructive it could be

and how, when you go into something

maybe with not as good a plan as you thought you had,

that it could have disastrous consequences.

(solemn music)