The Bloody Forest - Battle for the Hurtgen: September 1944-January 1945

Informationen zum Autor Gerald Astor Klappentext The definitive account of one of World War II’s bloodiest campaigns—the five-month battle between American and German forces in the Huertgen Forest—told through the words of the men who were there. From the preface: “In the course of research and interviews while writing a series of books on World War II, I became increasingly aware of the campaign for the Huertgen Forest. While survivors of other battles sometimes criticized the strategy and the orders they were given, there was a depth of anger about the Huertgen that surpassed anything I had encountered elsewhere. The unhappiness with what occurred and the absence of much objective coverage in the memoirs of those in the top command slots convinced me to produce this history.  As I have reiterated in all of my books, which rely heavily on oral or eyewitness reports, there are always the dangers of flawed memory, limited vantage points, and the possibility of self-interest in such accounts. But the almost universal condemnation of their superiors’ critical decisions by individuals who were under fire in that ‘green hell’ offers a cautionary note on the accuracy and the truths of histories that draw from the official documents and the personal papers of the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges (who apparently left little in the way of records), J. Lawton Collins and others in similar positions. . . .  Each new war differs from that of the past, but to ignore what happened in the Huertgen enhances the possibilities for another bitter victory, if not a defeat.”1       AT THE WESTWALL   Optimism, an end to the war by Christmas, had infected the American forces by the first week of September 1944, as the Allied tide seemed poised to sweep the map clean of the Axis forces. In the Pacific, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz, MacArthur’s seagoing counterpart, had all but destroyed the Japanese navy, recaptured almost all of the islands conquered by the enemy, and begun to assemble a massive invasion force designed to carry out MacArthur’s boast of a return to the Philippine Islands. The homeland of the enemy was under siege from U.S. bombers.   In Eastern Europe, the relentless Red Armies pummeled the forces of the Third Reich after lifting the sieges of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad at horrific cost to themselves and the Wehrmacht. In the west, having evacuated Rome, the German legions continued to retreat northward. After a state of stagnation in the hedgerows of Normandy, following the invasion on 6 June, the British, Free following the invasion on 6 June, the British, Free French, and U.S. armies had broken out in a dazzling sprint that carried them to the very borders of Germany. The columns of tanks, accompanied by swift-moving infantrymen, who were supported by massive artillery and incessant raids from the air, shattered disciplined ranks of German soldiers, destroyed huge amounts of armor and ammunition, killed and wounded tens of thousands of troops, and raked in hundreds of thousands of prisoners. At the German border, the only question appeared to be whether the rampaging advance would need to halt for a few weeks to allow adequate resupply of ammunition and fuel before administering the coup de grâce.   First Army forces had begun to probe the enemy defenses at Aachen, and on 6 September, the First Army commander, Courtney Hodges, having paused over a two-day span to sit for nearly four hours while the Marchioness of Queensberry painted his portrait for Life magazine, predicted the imminent demise of the enemy. According to Maj. William Sylvan, Hodges’s aide-de-camp, “The general said tonight that given ten good days of weather he thought the war might well be over as far as organized resistance was concerned.”   A sense of an approaching finale al...

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Gerald Astor

Product details

• Authors: Gerald Astor
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.07.2000
• EAN: 9780891418559
• ISBN: 978-0-89141-855-9
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 138 mm x 215 mm x 22 mm
• Series: Ballantine Group
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > 20th century (up to 1945); Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous