Here was the Grimm forest primeval, a place of shades. Although this is a small map, it is so highly detailed and carefully crafted that I believe it comparable to Relic’s own professionally-made maps. Lots of untouched foxholes here, Below:  Construction of  the”Dragon’s Teeth” (Hockerlinie), of the “Westwall” near Lammersdorf. Forestry is a mod created by SirSengir which adds many new items, ores, and machines to Minecraft. A very good relic hunting trip in the Eifel, Battle of the Bulge relics. Was the Kall Trail open? Antwerp was on the verge of falling to the Canadian First Army. Ernest Hemingway, who for several weeks would live in a fieldstone house south of Stolberg near the village of Vicht while filing reports for Collier’s, suggested that it would “save everybody a lot of trouble if they just shot them as soon as they got out of the trucks.”. Had the generals seen the battlefield clearly, reclaiming Schmidt would have been the least of their concerns. Sometimes on request he ghost-wrote love letters for young GIs, reading his favorite passages to fellow journalists. More pops followed, more shrieks, more maimed boys. A tank company trying to negotiate the steep Kall trail managed, with a great deal of winching around the hairpin turns, to get three Shermans across the ravine to help repel an initial German lunge at Kommerscheidt from Schmidt. Yet First Army hewed to its plan for a frontal assault, afflicted by what General Thorson later called “a kind of torpor in our operations.” Hodges in late October had told Bradley that the Roer reservoirs were half empty—unaware that they were being replenished—and that “present plans of this army do not contemplate immediate capture of these dams.” It was assumed that, if necessary, bombers could blow open the reservoirs whenever the army asked. It was in the midst of this 32,000 acre forest that the Allied forces and German military waged war against each other, costing the lives of many ill-prepared young men who never stood a chance in what has been described as those who were there, as “the Death Factory”. Soldiers at dusk fashioned litters from tree limbs and overcoats. Dead men from the 9th Division still littered the forest, bullet holes in their field jackets like blood-ringed grommets. Battle of the Teutoburg Forest; Part of the Early Imperial campaigns in Germania: Cenotaph of Marcus Caelius, 1st centurion of XVIII, who "fell in the war of Varus" ('bello Variano'). The Battle of Hurtg… Apr 7, 2015 - This Pin was discovered by Philip Lizee. In Rott, Cota’s perplexity only deepened. William ‘Bill’ E. Loy Jr is a lifelong resident of Elon, North Carolina and a decorated World War II veteran. I really don’t know what to think anymore. The Hurtgen Forest, located 50 square miles from the Belgian-German border, is recognised as the scene of a series of bloody battles in 1944-45. The soldier was obviously sewing buttons onto his uniform and eating and drinking his rations, in this freezing foxhole, before German mortars have hit their positions. Plus a visit to the excellent Vossenack Museum. Definitely worth a visit. You’re getting yours, aincha?”. One regiment took four days to move a mile; another needed five. (121st Infantry, 8th Division), Scenic hike – A  beautiful, historic, flat walk along the Kall River from Simonskall (optional). Rick Atkinson won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for An Army at Dawn, the first volume in his World War II Liberation Trilogy. Peevish and insulated, ever watchful for hints of disloyalty, Hodges showed an intolerance for perceived failure that was harsh even by the exacting standards of the U.S. Army. “I’ve condemned a whole regiment of the finest men that ever breathed,” a distraught officer told reporter Iris Carpenter. Fighter-bombers incinerated recalcitrant towns with napalm, and one potato village after another was blasted to dust by artillery. But Hodges saw no reason to delay clearing the Hürtgen and seizing Schmidt. More and more of the perfect groves were gashed yellow with machine-gun bullets or reduced to charred stumps—“no birds, no sighing winds, no carpeted paths,” Forrest Pogue reported. The kids are fine and so adorable. Examining a badly wounded man for injuries in the dark woods, a 28th Division medic reported, was “like putting your hand in a bucket of wet liver.” A surge in head wounds stirred debate in the ranks about whether German snipers were aiming at the bloody buck­et insignia painted on their helmets. People are still injured, maimed and killed by explosives in the forest. Others smashed radios, mine detectors, and the engine blocks on four surviving jeeps; three antitank guns were spiked and the only functioning Sherman booby-trapped. Eleven thousand artillery rounds chewed up German revetments and flayed the forest with steel from shells detonating in the tree canopy. Army records described the color of his close-set eyes as “#10 blue.”, “God gave him a face that always looked pessimistic,” Dwight Eisenhower once observed, and even Hodges complained that a portrait commissioned by Life in early September made him appear “a little too sad.”, A crack shot and big game hunter—caribou and moose in Canada, elephants and tigers in Indochina—Hodges had earned two Purple Heart citations after being gassed in World War I but deemed them excessively “sissy” and tore them up. Cota ordered two road-repairing companies from the 146th Engineers into the line as riflemen. Here lay the most promising frontage on the entire Allied line. Model ordered the corps commander back to his post, but other officers—including two army commanders—were instructed to continue the war game, using dispatches from the front to help orchestrate the battle. Any hope of maintaining formation was dispelled quickly by the blackness of the night and by German shelling. THE FIGHT FOR THE HÜRTGEN had taken a turn, though it was several hours before the command post in Rott got word that an infantry battle had become a tank brawl. After Eisenhower left, Hodges gave Cota yet another tongue lashing. It also adds bees which can be placed in Bee Houses, Apiaries or the larger multi-block Alveary. A gentleman.” A reporter wrote that even in battle “he sounds like a Georgia farmer leaning on the fence, discussing his crops.” General Omar Bradley, who as Hodges’s subordinate used to shoot skeet and hunt quail with him on Sunday mornings at Fort Benning, later recalled, “He was very dignified and I can’t imagine anyone getting familiar with him.” Now his superior, Bradley still called him “sir.”. 13:14. By late October, as First Army coiled to resume its attack, unnerving details about the Roer and its waterworks had begun to accumulate. “Damn the dams,” they would tell one another again and again. Residents and forest officials battle forest fire in Sumatra. Small bespoke tours are much more personal and interesting and a good way to make friends, or to share our mutual interest in WW2. By mid-October the division was still far short of Schmidt and had suffered 4,500 casualties to gain 3,000 yards—a man down every two feet—and no battalion in the two spearhead regiments could field more than 300 men. On Wednesday, November 1, after lunch in Spa with the V Corps commander, Major General Leonard T. Gerow, Hodges made a rare visit to a division command post. “We had not studied that particular part of the zone,” Collins later acknowledged. World War Guided Battlefield Tours – My guided tours cover the historical locations, associated with World War 2, in Belgium, Czech republic, France, Germany, Holland, Luxembourg and Poland, SPECIALIZING IN PRIVATE, GUIDED, WORLD WAR 2 TOURS, FOR VETERAN’S FAMILIES, (including 28th Infantry Division, 4th Infantry, 83rd infantry, 9th Infantry, 78th Infantry, 2nd Ranger Battalion, 3rd & 5th Armored Divisions etc), Hurtgen – The beautifully rebuilt Hurtgen Church & a nearby battle scarred house. The enemy’s industrial centers in the Ruhr and the Saar regions remained paramount objectives in the north and center, respectively, with Berlin as the ultimate target. After 36 hours the regiment would hold only a narrow, mile-deep salient into enemy territory, a salient almost mirrored by Germans infiltrating the U.S. ranks. To his troops, Cota issued a message of encouragement, which closed with the injunction “Salute, March, Shoot, Obey.”, German losses for the week had totaled about 3,000. Senior officers in First Army would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain the tactical logic behind their Hürtgen battle plan. Just before sunrise on Saturday, November 4, German artillery fire crashed and heaved from three directions around Schmidt. Hodges, he added, was “very dissatisfied….All we seem to be doing is losing ground.” Not until 3 p.m. on Wednesday, November 8, did the withdrawal order reach the battered last-stand redoubt. 2002. But the brisk brrrr of machine-gun fire from pillboxes on the division’s right flank mowed down men in the 110th Infantry Regiment—“singly, in groups, and by platoons,” the division history recorded. Not least of First Army’s quirks as it prepared to renew the drive toward the Rhine was what one correspondent called “slightly angry bafflement” at continued German resistance, a resentment that the enemy did not know he was beaten. “The wounded lie on blood-stained mattresses….One has lost most of his intestines from a grenade fragment.” Another soldier, with an arm and a foot nearly severed, pleaded, “Comrades, shoot me.”, On the American side of the line, U.S. quartermaster troops dragged dead Germans feet first from a wrecked barn, while a watching GI strummed his guitar and belted out “South of the Border.” But the enemy kept its death grip on the forest. Cota’s misgivings had been waved away despite his warrant that the attack had no more than “a gambler’s chance” of success. A lieutenant who considered the pell-mell flight “the saddest sight I have ever seen,” added, “Many of the badly wounded men, probably hit by artillery, were lying in the road where they fell, screaming for help.”. Date of experience: November 2016. “Please tell the truth.”, Soldiers in the claustrophobic forest debated whether they could stave off the enemy long enough to finish smoking the carton of cigarettes they carried, or merely an open pack, or perhaps only the Lucky Strike they had just lighted. Army engineers grooming the trail ran for their lives, as German sappers mined the switchbacks, set up ambushes, and cut off more than a thousand GIs east of the ravine. The Battle of Hurtgen Forest. Just the rumor of another panzer attack sent spooked riflemen scouring for the gorge, but any illusion of refuge there soon vanished. Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, Gerow called back with permission. Site of blown bridge. 1944, Hürtgen Forest Battle. Artillery and mortar barrages pounded Kommerscheidt through the night, and catcalling enemy infiltrators crept so close in the encroaching draws that Jewish GIs hammered out the telltale H—for Hebrew—on their dogtags. He was permitted to keep his command partly because so many other leaders had been lost in the division that four majors and a captain led infantry battalions. The forest's rough terrain starkly contrasts with that of the adjoining Rhine Valley. The 2nd Battalion of the 112th Infantry, whose two sister battalions were trapped in Kommerscheidt, finally broke after four nights of murderous shelling on the exposed nose west of the Kall gorge. Among those sent to the rear for psychiatric examination were two GI collectors, one with a cache of ears sliced from dead Germans and another with a souvenir bag of teeth. There by chance Model had just started a map exercise with his top commanders, positing a theoretical American attack near the Hürtgenwald. At 8:30 an American platoon on the southern perimeter broke in panic, unhinging the defense. A large sign posted in the forest warned, “Front line a hundred yards. By day’s end the 110th had gained not a yard, and by week’s end the regiment would be rated “no longer an effective fighting force.”. If you book a 3 day Hurtgen Tour, we can visit the beautiful, North Eifel, medieval town of Monschau, with it’s traditional chocolate box style, half-timbered houses, narrow cobbled streets and ancient castle. A killer. The mobility and superiority of tanks and aircraft were largely canceled out. Panzer drumfire from Schmidt soon reduced nine Shermans to six, and nine tank destroyers to three. Enemy forces now crowded the 28th Division on three sides, threatening the Bloody Bucket with annihilation. Unissued / Unused material. Hodges was an old-school soldier: He had flunked out of West Point—undone by plebe geometry—and risen through the ranks after enlisting as a private in 1905. Plus an insight into the  6 day battle here, the heavy fighting in and around the beautifully restored Merode Castle (39th Infantry) and a bullet scarred house in the village itself. and it was good to visit such a place, knowing that the volunteer staff fully appreciated our interest. Soldiers shed their mess kits and other clattering gear—the senior officer among them mistakenly threw away his compass—and engineers abandoned two tons of TNT with which they had planned to demolish pillboxes in Schmidt. For nearly a week the green 78th Division, reinforced by a regiment from the 82nd Airborne and eventually the veteran 9th Division, had retaken ground won and then lost in the Hürtgen battles of late fall: the Kall gorge—where dozens of decaying, booby-trapped corpses of 28th Division troops still lined the trail—and then Kommerscheidt, and finally ruined Schmidt, captured in a cellar-to-cellar gunfight on February 8 after 40 battalions of U.S. artillery made the rubble bounce. Mortar pits were overrun, bazooka rounds bounced off panzer hulls like marbles, and yowling enemy infantrymen raced toward Schmidt from the south, west, and east, some banging on their mess kits in a lunatic tintinnabulation. Ernie Kovacs, U.S. comedian and television personality. (because i found  German mortar shells nearby, crators and several other foxholes), Kesternich – a village where 2 ferocious battles occurred, house to house, hand-to hand combat and the story of how a medal of honor was won, Huge piece of shrapnel I found, on the edge of an American foxhole, near Grosshau, in January 2019, 7  x unfired GERMAN MG42 machine gun rounds, from an ammunition belt, found for my customer’s on the Kall Trail (9-10-2019), Ordensburg Vogelsang (Massive former Nazi training/education complex in the Eifel), Paustenbach (Hill 554) – The heavy fighting to take this strategic hill, that lasted almost 2 weeks and cost many lives on both sides. Single American divisions continued to gnaw and be gnawed: Attacks in coming days by the 4th and 8th Infantry Divisions, like those by the 9th and the 28th, gained little at enormous cost, with battalions reduced to the size of companies and companies shaved to platoons. Radios worked fitfully, and messengers were ambushed or forestalled by descending curtains of artillery. My main areas of expertise are Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Scheldt, the liberation of Brabant, Hurtgen Forest, Battle of the Bulge, Operation Veritable, and the 1945 Allied Rhine crossings. Spreading across the forest like the fingers of a hand are ridges that run southwest to northeast, the largest of them being the Monschau corridor, which extends from Monschau to Duren on the other side of the forest. 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