How do you find information on the Battle of Hurtgen Forest?

Answer 1

Info on the Battle of Hurtgen ForestHere are suggestions from FAQ Farmers:

• You might try reading this web site, BATTLE OF HURTGEN FOREST, then after that go to Google.com and type in Hurtgen Forest. There are also several very good books about about that battle. One being "Forest in Hell" by Paul Boesch.

• Visit the following website about The Battle of the Hurtgen/Huertgen forest: tiscali.be/huertgen

• I am a WW2 researcher and I found this about the hurtgen battle (sorry for the bad English). First, the official numbers of American KIAs are false, they try to hide the real bloody failure, for censor politics stuff and for hide they stupid military tactics applied in this battle. Americans claimed to have only 33.000 KIA v/s 28000 Germans killed. Those numbers were heavily diminished in the American side and nearly doubled in the German side. The real numbers are: 50,000 Americans soldiers were killed in the Hurtgen Battle, and "only" 15,000 Germans suffered the same destiny. This is confirmed by many WW2 independent researchers. The Battle of Hurtgen Forest are the biggest and bloodiest example of bad&inhuman military tactics (Applied in this case for the USA army).

• Basically the Hurtgen forest was an attacker's nightmare: An objective that cannot be bypassed, protected by superb defensive terrain. In most respects it was a harder objective than the beacheads at Normandy. Wheras the beaches were totally exposed to the full force of allied naval gunfire, the forest was far inland. Japanese forces didn't even bother defending beaches in the Pacific, considering it a waste of troops. Instead they preferred taking up positions forested hills which could be heavily entrenched. Also, wheras the Atlantic wall was an obvious target that had been reconnoitered intensly by aircraft and spies, of which maps of German emplacements had been drawn so deatailed that naval gunire could be placed more accurately off of those maps than they could have if spotted by live observers, the Hurtgen Forest was an objective encountered in the midst of a fast moving blitz. In late 1944, the allies were using blitzkrieg tactics against the Germans. These tactics are powerful but not without risk. Sun Tzu perhaps put it best by saying that when an opportunity presents itself, it must be attacked immediately without waiting for reinforcments. This keep the enemy off balance, but limits the ability of one's forces to mass agaisnt an objective. It also streaches one's supply lines and one risks running into something too well defended to overcome, with correspondingly high casualties. Hurtgen was a vital objective because it controlled access to a series of dams on one of the main rivers the Allies needed to cross to get into Germany. By controling the dams, the Germans could flood the rivers, so the Allies dared not cross until they were secured. But no one knew how prepared the Germans were to defend it. At the time German resistance seemed to be collapsing. The American forces could have waited for reinforcements, but for all they knew there were only a few exhausted Germans holed up in the woods. While they were waiting, the Germans could be reinforcing either there or somewhere else. So they attacked. Well, it turned out there were a lot of Germans in the forest, they weren't exhausted, and they were dug in deeply. They had probably been entrenching there for weeks if not months. It was the perfect place, for the Allies had to come there eventually. Also the Germans had all of the resources they needed to defend it, because they were massing their forces nearby for the Battle of the Bulge. If the Allies broke through they would have discovered the preparations, so the Germans were even more motivated to defend it. In short, the trees in the forest detonated artillery shells above the ground meaning that exposed attacking troops got torn up but troops in foxholes, especially well developed ones with overhead cover which the Germans often had were mostly unaffected. In addition the trees prevented allied armor from getting through except along a single trail which the Germans heavily blocked, mined, booby trapped and defended. As a result the few German tanks in the area were able to fight unopposed. All of the German positions were heavily protected by obstacles such as barbed wire, and by prolific use of mines of all types. The weather made the troops miserable, made them sick, and made the ground muddy. It also grounded Allied aircraft most of the time, and forested hills are hard for aircraft to attack anyway. The ultimate result was that it took longer to get through the forest than it did to get there from the beaches in Normandy, and nearly one in seven Americans killed in WW2 died in that single operation. That is based on 33,000 Americans KIA. if you go with Mario's figure of 50,000 it would be about 1 in 5, which is kinda hard to believe, but possible given the inensity of the fighting.

• The URL of my Battle of the Huertgen Forest website has changed to: http://home.scarlet.be/~cv920172/index.htm

• You can find quite a bit of information about Huertgenwald on my website PARADISE UNLIMITED HTTP://WWW.TKSANDERS.COM .click on the Gott Mit Uns section. It is a story about Ernest Hemingway who was there as a war correspondent...hope this helps.