World Battlefronts: Battle of the Roer

The Germans fought for the Roer River, between Aachen and Cologne, as if it were the Meuse, the Marne and the Somme of the last war all rolled into one. German radio broadcasts called it “the most terrible and ferocious battle in the history of all wars.”

Hardly more than a creek in summer, the Roer was now swollen by rain. The Germans increased the flood by blowing dams and opening sluice gates, until the shallow brown water in one place spread almost a mile across the plain. Lieut. General William (“Texas Bill”) Simpson’s Ninth Army inched painfully forward until it held a 20-mile stretch on the west bank. On his right, Courtney Hodges’ First Army had to cross a smaller stream, the Inde, before it could come up to the Roer. The Germans fought like wild men for the Inde also. Driven out of the town of Inden, they lanced back in with armor and crack infantry, blew up a bridge. Ousted again, they put down an artillery barrage in which the Yanks counted 60 shells a minute.

Shell for Shell. Near Hürtgen, the U.S. artillery fire was so heavy that houses near the guns were lifted off their foundations, fell back in ruins. The Germans answered shell for shell. Doughboys bitterly asked correspondents if they were the ones who had written about a Nazi “ammunition shortage.”

The Germans had dug elaborate trench systems in and around the villages, where ordinary-looking houses covered 5-ft. concrete outer walls, 2-ft. partitions, deep cellars. Sometimes, when the trenches were under U.S. shell fire, the Germans ran into the cellars, then back into the trenches when the firing stopped. The Yanks had to clean out every village with bayonets and grenades.

Castle to Pillbox. They surrounded an old castle, sent a surrender ultimatum to the Nazi commander. He refused. When they attacked again the next day, they found that the garrison had slipped out in the night, to fight again somewhere else. But the Germans machine-dunned some of their own troops who popped out of pillboxes with white flags.

Many Americans died in the mire along the Roer River. The others kept shoving slowly ahead. Immediate objectives were Jülich and Düren, the two main enemy strongholds on the Roer. At week’s end the Ninth Army was clubbing its way into Jülich, and advance units of the First, having hurdled the Inde, were approaching Düren.

On clear days the U.S. troops, haggard and green with fatigue, got help from the fighter-bombers. On such days they could see the towers and chimneys of Cologne, the great city on the Rhine. It looked as far away as the moon.