World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY (West): Models for Destruction

Aachen was doomed, but the destruction of Charlemagne’s historic residence was now no more than an episode in the tense tactical drama on the western front. The battle that raged in mounting fury northeast of the German border city was far more significant. This week there were ample signs that here the Allies hoped they might achieve their breakthrough to the Rhine.

The two arms which Lieut. General Courtney Hicks Hodges’ First U.S. Army had thrown around Aachen in a classic bear hug had posed two deadly questions to the Germans : 1 ) should the ancient spa (and modern textile and coal mining center) be defended to the last cellar, as a Stalingrad-like model for the German home front? 2) was it also the focus of the main Allied offensive to smash the Siegfried Line?

The Nazi command—not Aachen’s 20,000 unevacuated civilians— quickly answered the first question. It chose certain destruction of the city rather than surrender a point that had become tactically valueless. But the High Command could not so quickly make up its mind about the second and more important question.

By midweek, when Aachen had been beaten into mortar-stained destruction, the German command apparently came to its decision: the battle centered on Aachen was indeed the real thing. Now quick to act, the Germans plunged into desperate attacks to break the left arm of Hodges’ army. Recklessly they expended sorely needed first-rate fighting “men in futile efforts to smash the most advanced spearheads. In two days they spent more than 60 tanks, gave up the intensive battle for the next two days to gather more strength.

Big Guns. From the sore spot at Arnhem—the most dangerous point for break out into the north German plain—the enemy pulled out more tanks and men, hurled them against Hodges’ lines in a new assault. The Americans had seen the reserves and the armor piling up, were braced for the onslaught. When it came this week, the battle became one of the fiercest yet fought in the west.

At first German tanks overran U.S. forward positions. Then a thunderous cannonade from more than 100 big guns massed in the assault area broke the attack, forced the German armor to back up.

By now, it was clear that the Germans feared the First Army’s strength most of all the forces they faced in the west. They warned themselves of U.S. concentrations “for a grand-scale assault” aimed at the Cologne plain east of Geilenkirchen (twelve miles north of Aachen). To dispose his forces to meet it, the enemy shifted his dwindling reserves under the protection of swarms of mobile antiaircraft guns. Still Allied airmen in complete command of the air took a heavy toll of men & material.

Big Bombs. Whether the Germans had rightly guessed where the main blow would fall or whether they had been maneuvered into shifting their strength to the wrong spot was still an Allied secret. But it was no secret that when the blow fell its fury would be worse than anything the Germans had felt before in the west.

The preparatory blows had begun in the mightiest air offensive of the war. In massive daylight attacks by fleets of up to 3,300 R.A.F. and U.S. planes, record tonnages of explosives poured fire upon Cologne and Duisburg. In two fearful attacks, Cologne (pop. 700,000) got more than 6,000 tons of bombs.

Duisburg (pop. 421,000), at the confluence of the Rhine and Ruhr, one of western Germany’s great transport centers, got a record 4,500 tons in one day attack, took more punishment that night, rocked under 5,000 tons next day. In 24 hours, said the BBC, Allied air forces had dropped on flaming Duisburg a greater weight of bombs than the Luftwaffe had dropped on London in the entire war.

Big Blows. Thus while the German propagandists made what they could out of Aachen’s stand to the death, Cologne and Duisburg were being beaten down without choice of surrender. Both more important militarily than Aachen, they were also more of a loss to the German defenses, and probably a heavier blow to German morale.

In shattered Aachen itself the fighting had run the range from dive-bombing of German headquarters buildings, through tank skirmishes, to the rooting out of individual Germans from cellars. The enemy fought as if the city were the cornerstone of the whole front, launched attack after futile attack upon Crucifix Hill, where the cross itself had been used as an observation post. Even after their one escape gap had been sealed, the Germans rushed through the rubble to new attacks, shouting “Heil Hitler!”

After three days, Americans fought their way to a vast shelter, routed out some 3,000 begrimed, hungry, thirsty civilians. Among them were many men of military age. These and the other men seemed eager to be friendly with the Americans, but many of the women and older men glared at the invaders. The G.I. attitude: stony impassivity.

The older women, looking back at their smashed homes as they trudged to the safety of a U.S. camp, wept. Said one, still unconverted to reality: “If the English had only given in in 1940 we would have peace now.”

Elsewhere along his 500-mile front the enemy held grimly, gave up only yard by yard. Along the coast, in the battle for Antwerp’s approaches, the Canadians gouged out hard-won gains (see below). In northeast Holland, from which the Germans borrowed reserves, the British moved in greater strength, opened a new salient below Arnhem. To the south, Lieut. General George S. Patton’s Third Army had to give up its ten-day fight in the underground passages of tunneled Fort Driant (TIME, Oct. 16). In the wilderness fighting of the Belfort sector, the U.S. Seventh Army found a spot from which the enemy apparently had borrowed strength to apply elsewhere, advanced on Bruyères and its high ground.

Wherever the action boiled, the enemy fought with courage and resourcefulness, as if he were making his last stand. He must have known that the Wehrmacht could not long afford such expenditures as Aachen demanded, that it could not stand many such supply-choking air blows as Cologne, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg had taken during the week. But he gave not an inch unless Allied soldiers died for it, and he did not lose his head. He looked for winter and winter’s slowdown, and fought on, hoping that the Wehrmacht might yet see the spring.