Hurtgen Forest was a very important target of the American army and it was a large a
large thing maybe fifteen miles square and uh General Hodge who was the army uh commander
I forget which army it was but it was he did that he he sent division after division into
it trying to to make it safe uh destroy all the Germans there well the weather turned
bad uh a lot of things happened that coincided to make it one of the great mistake areas
of the second World War it used up as I remember nine infantry divisions without making any
progress at all and General Hodge would replace one division with another and then that would
be wiped out and that had to be replaced with another and so it was bizarre if this had
happened in the Vietnam War there would have been a mutiny or something but nothing the
troops didn't complain uh very much they complained quite a lot but this was never reported the
Battle at the Hurtgen Forest and it's well known among among uh survivors one of them
I think I talk about this man in the book The Boys Crusade he was uh he was an officer
I think a Major at that time commanding a battalion and it was Thanksgiving that's what
it was it was Thanksgiving Day and uh General Eisenhower had ordered that every soldier
was supposed to have a turkey dinner on that day no matter his his situation on the line
and at that point a bombing of our own troops took place to the extent that this officer
who's now probably younger than I am uh survived and every Thanksgiving Day he can't stand
it he goes out to the back yard and in silence sort of cries himself into an appropriate
elegiac emotion he still cannot get over this ridiculous wipe out of his unit well this
is fairly common because war's an irrational performance and even the rules the tactical
rules that you follow like always attacking from the flank if you can find it and so on
govern and give the impression that it's a rational proceeding like say a football game
where there're followed and so forth and uh nobody can ever understand that hasn't been
in it because it's described in books that have nice pages and the lines are properly
the same length and things like that nothing surprising or shameful in the presentation
of it but it is full of shame and outrage and so on Patton one reason I'm interested
in him was his guts in firing generals division commanders who weren't any good who were scared
to death or who were too complicated or who missed the point and so on he'd send them
back to the States and replace them with people and he used that he he told people that all
the time he said if you don't capture that town you're through I'm gonna get rid of you
and replace you and he would annoy them annoy the subordinate commanders by saying things
like would you give me the names of two or three Major Generals that you'd like to replace
you when I fire you and so on in other words get into action or you're finished and so
forth so there was a lot of that sort of stuff change of commands that were covered by various
uh rational excuses Paul you talk a lot also about something else that we don't hear about
men running and men deserting in hurt in droves in the vuls and deserting apparently in droves
in Hurtgen where Eddie Slovik the only deserter shot in World War Two on the American side
he deserted in the Hurtgen Forest why don't you talk a little bit about this running and
this deserting that's right well poor Private Slovik was selected to be executed as a morale
mechanism because there was so many complaints and desertions occasioned by the Hurtgen Forest
business that Eisenhower realized these have got to be stopped some how and no deserter
had ever been shot in that war they'd been given you know mild punishment so he said
to himself this is the time to invoke the death penalty for desertion so he had uh he
had Danny Slovik uh shot by a firing squad and he had that news publicized widely in
the army hoping to stem this vogue of running away uh that's all I know about that because
it was that didn't take place in my unit and I never learned about that until after the
war was over but that's an example of the sort of problems faced by high command I mean
things that can be solve only by invoking some solution which you deplore because so
many people were running that's right you couldn't kill them all you had to choose an
example and so forth that didn't do much good This excerpt is brought to you by the Massachusetts
School of Law