As the depleted members of the 1st Infantry Division entered the ancient city of Aachen
in October of 1944, they would be met by fierce and unrelenting German resistance.
Crawling through one demolished building after another as the autumn winds howled over the
capital of the First Reich, the American soldiers had to fight passionate Volkssturm
members who hid in the shadows waiting for an opportunity to surprise the invaders.
The skirmishes would often be resolved by the side who could
hurl more grenades at the enemy or by M4 Sherman tanks leveling entire buildings.
Still, after the GIs captured a pivotal property, armed civilians emerged from the
floorboards to assault the invaders during the night, including women and children.
It would become one of the most brutal urban battles fought during
World War 2 by the US forces. Blinded by ill-founded conviction and fear of the SS,
the Germans in Aachen would resist the invasion of the symbolic city to their last breath…
Symbolic Value
Aachen held little tactical value to the Allied forces advancing through Germany in
the summer of 1944. It had no significant military industry or military bases,
so it mainly stood intact, having been ignored during previous Allied bombing raids.
And even though it stood in the way of the heavily industrialized Ruhr valley,
the Allies had numerous ways of advancing without seizing the city.
Nevertheless, Aachen had a significant symbolic value to Hitler and the Germans loyal to the
Nazi regime. It was the ancient center of the Holy Roman Empire, what the Nazis called the
First Reich, which they claimed was the precursor of their modern Nazi movement.
Additionally, the 1,000-year-old city would be the
first settlement besieged by Americans inhabited by ethnically German people.
The symbolic value of Aachen had a profound psychological effect on the defenders,
and the scale of this sentiment could not be wholly grasped by the Americans
as they prepared to attack. One of the German officers defending the town would later say:
(QUOTE) “Suddenly we were no longer the Nazis, we were German soldiers.”
The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force,
under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, wanted to capture the Ruhr,
Germany’s industrial heartland, as swiftly as possible, as that would drastically shorten the
duration of the war by denying the Third Reich its ability to produce armament.
Eisenhower then tasked General Courtney Hodges’s First Army to break through the
front near Aachen. Hodges considered that taking the city would be easy as he was
sure it was held only by a small garrison, which would quickly surrender once besieged.
The General was not wrong, but there was something else.
As the Allies first approached Germany’s border, Aachen was lightly defended, with most of the
German troops composed of militia members of the Volkssturm, many of them young boys or older men.
Still, what these fighters lacked in training and armament,
they made up in determination and recklessness.
Hodges didn’t understand the city’s colossal value to Hitler and how he
would do everything in his power to defend it.
Setting The Stage
Aachen was not entirely defenseless; despite lying in a valley, it had the
benefit of being partially protected on its flanks by the Siegfried Line,
a heavily fortified defensive wall erected by the Germans to protect the Ruhr region.
The defensive line was made out of thousands of bunkers, pillboxes,
trenches, and machine-gun nests. The Allies knew that getting past this wall would be difficult,
and to avoid it, they orchestrated Operation Garden Market to circumvent
the defensive wall by crossing the Rhine through the Netherlands and establishing
a path for an invasion that completely ignored the primary German defenses.
Still, the operation had a significant drawback:
by diverting so many troops to the Netherlands and establishing pervasive supply lines, Hodges
and the other forces in central Germany were left with little resources and depleted supply chains.
The lack of supplies and reinforcements meant that the advance on Aachen and
the surrounding region was slower and less effective than previously planned,
which gave Hitler enough time to reinforce the city.
The reinforcements included General Friedrich Köchling’s Eighty First Corps, which comprised
the 183rd and 246th Volksgrenadier Divisions, and the 12th and 49th Infantry Divisions.
The forces were also bolstered by the 506th Tank Battalion and 108th Tank Brigade,
totaling over 20,000 men and 11 tanks.
A Slow Incursion
To successfully encircle the city, the first infantry division slowly advanced in a frontal
direction. Meanwhile, the 3rd Armored Division attempted to go south to capture the town of
Stolberg and position themselves to eventually rush Aachen from there.
The 3rd Armored Division suddenly faced an essential section of the
Siegfried Line and the men were stunned by the intricate chain
of reinforced bunkers and pillboxes, minefields, and anti-tank obstacles.
Fortunately for the Americans, the heavy defenses were manned by a small force, as
the bulk of the Germans troops were still on the Eastern Front trying to hold back the Red Army.
On September 22, 1944, the men from the 16th infantry regiment received a taste of
the threat that lay ahead. While attempting to capture the town Eilendor just south of Aachen,
they were met by a surprising artillery attack on a scale beyond what they thought possible.
One of the soldiers described the barrage as the worst shelling of his life,
even more devastating than what he had experienced on D-Day.
As the infantrymen slowly crawled into the town, they found themselves attacked
by old men, women, and even children wielding old guns and kitchen knives.
Astonishingly, the Germans were able to hold back the American First Army, which lacked fuel,
ammunition, and resources, and were forced to wait until October to continue the campaign.
Surrounded
To prepare for the battle, the Allies unleashed a devastating shelling campaign
from September 27 to October 2. By this time, Operation Garden Market had failed,
and the Allied forces in central Germany had been resupplied.
With no way to cross the Rhine through the Netherlands,
the only option was through central Germany, and the Aachen region now became essential.
The 30th Infantry Division began its advance on October 2,
but the troops had to advance at a lumbering pace, taking one pillbox
at a time as most of the defenses had come out unscathed after the American shelling.
Meanwhile, the 120th Infantry Regiment, the 117th Infantry Regiment, the 49th Infantry Division,
and the 2nd Armored Division were able to advance from the north to the very outskirts of Aachen,
where they began to engage the enemy troops in the suburbs.
The entire city was now almost entirely surrounded by the Allied forces,
and the town was right in front of them for the taking.
Into The City
To avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, Lieutenant General Clarence R. Huebner
sent a last-minute letter to the German commanders inside the city
urging them to surrender as they were completely surrounded and outnumbered.
The plead was rejected, as most of the defenders were dedicated Nazis ready to
fight for the symbolic city, and anyone who might have considered taking the Allies’
offer was too afraid of the SS, who had by now taken control of the defending forces.
On October 11, the Allies launched another artillery campaign against the central city area.
The idea was to avoid more brutal street fighting like what they had had to endure in the suburbs.
The American artillery then leveled every single building within reach,
leaving little shelter for the defending Germans.
With nowhere to run, the defenders were forced to counterattack and try to capture
the high ground around the city to end the unrelenting shelling. Still, the German
offensives were weak and disorganized, and the Americans could easily repel every single one.
With a large part of the city leveled, two battalions of the 26th Infantry Division
were able to pierce the city limits entering the town’s dense urban center.
To their surprise, they were met with heavy resistance.
Urban Warfare
Even though over 60 percent of the city lay in ruins,
the gothic architecture in the city’s center proved exceptionally resilient to bombardment,
and the American soldiers had to rely on door-to-door combat to advance.
The city center was designed in a series of maze-like twisting streets and avenues
surrounded by hefty stone buildings that were hundreds of years old.
To avoid being ambushed in large groups, the Americans were divided into assault platoons,
each bolstered by a single M4 Sherman tank.
The GIs used the tanks to destroy every building that they thought could shelter German troops.
Incredibly, the cityscape was still teeming with German forces hiding amid the ruins,
the sewage system, and the buildings’ basements.
The Americans kept facing one daunting encounter after another, leaving them
physically and psychologically drained, as they often found themselves fighting children,
women, and old men determined to make them pay for every inch of the city they were taking.
And as the Americans made gains and established defensive posts,
they would often be ambushed in the middle of the night by militiamen hiding in the
same buildings that had apparently been secured.
The battle quickly became a close-combat nightmare,
with hand-to-hand combat and grenade detonations becoming the norm.
Moreover, the Sherman tanks were also the target of the furtive militia forces hiding behind the
devastated rooftops carrying anti-tank missile launchers and sticky grenades.
Exhausted and terrified of the constant ambushes, the US forces had to fight room by room and
corner to corner as they slowly advanced to the very heart of the city. But as they drew closer
to the headquarters of the Nazi command, the defenses became more challenging and resilient.
Then, in a questionable move, the US was forced to drag heavy lumbering artillery
units to the city’s center to tear down the reinforced Nazi positions.
Counterattack
On the night of October 13, the Germans managed to sneak several hundred troops
and six assault guns into the city. The reinforcements immediately responded
to the Allied forces by assaulting the Nazi headquarters in the city’s center.
The counterattack turned into a long and intense battle that lasted for several hours with no side
achieving a definite victory. Fortunately for the Allied forces, their comrades outside the city had
made a decisive push against the German troops still holding some territory to the northwest.
The Allies then managed to completely surround the city in a moment that would define the battle,
cutting off any possibility of German reinforcements entering
the city and leaving the dwindling forces in the heart of the town to fend for themselves.
By October 18, the Allies managed to force the defending Germans into the basement of the
Quellenhof Hotel, their headquarters building, thanks to artillery fire and air support.
However, the last batch of elite forces taking shelter inside the hotel refused to
surrender and fought formidably using sniper fire,
grenades, and tactical repositioning to inflict severe damage to the Allies.
It would be until the US forces threatened to demolish the building that the last
few German soldiers surrendered, leaving the Ancestral First Reich Capital in Allied hands.
By October 19, the few remaining Volkssturm forces were eliminated,
and the city was now a pile of rubble, with over 80 percent of the buildings destroyed.
In total, the US first Army suffered over
8,000 casualties while the Germans sustained over 10,000. By trying to
protect a symbol of Nazi ideology, Hitler needlessly sacrificed thousands of lives.
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