Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II by Belton Y. Cooper

Author:Belton Y. Cooper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: World War II, General, Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Military, History
ISBN: 9780307415004
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-18T06:00:00+00:00

The Failure of the November Offensive

Although the American First and Ninth Armies had penetrated the Siegfried line, the assault that began on November 16 had been a grave failure. The Ninth Army to the north had the mission of making the main effort in an attempt to break through the last vestiges of the Siegfried line, cross the Roer River, and fan out onto the Cologne Plain. VII Corps was to protect the Ninth Army’s right flank and capture Cologne, the largest industrial city in the Rhineland and an important rail and road communication center. The final objective was to secure bridgeheads on the Rhine River and attempt to trap the main elements of the German army on the west bank.

The operation failed for a number of reasons. The American armies had advanced extremely rapidly after the Saint-Lô breakthrough. The Germans had done an excellent job of demolishing the docks and harbors along the English Channel. The only usable port at that time was Cherbourg, and the distance by truck was almost six hundred miles through France and Belgium and into Germany. To make things worse, the chalklike ground of western and northwestern France became saturated after two months of almost continuous rain. This was particularly true around Reims, one of the main central supply hubs of the entire western front. The ground and roadbeds would no longer support heavy traffic, and under the constant pounding of tanks, trucks, and other vehicles the roadbed in many areas completely collapsed.

To offset these problems, the army organized what later became known as the Red Ball Express. The communication zone (COMZ) troops had thousands of two-and-a-half-ton GMC trucks running bumper to bumper twenty-four hours a day. Because the air force completely dominated the skies with the new Black Widow night fighter, contrary to all training the trucks ran with their headlights on as fast as they could go.

The army had long since lost confidence in the use of GHQ tank battalions working with infantry to achieve a major breakthrough, so they had used the armored divisions to perform this function. This was completely contrary to Armored Force Doctrine, and it dissipated the armored divisions’ strength.

With no heavy assault tank with wide tracks to negotiate the muddy fields, the attack on November 16 resulted in disastrous losses. In addition to CCB’s loss of forty-eight out of sixty-four tanks in twenty-six minutes, two combat commands from the 2d Armored Division lost approximately a hundred tanks under the same conditions in the Jülich area as they approached the Roer River. These losses were unacceptable, and the two divisions could not maintain their combat effectiveness under such conditions.

Few, if any, military historians have ever understood the importance of our not having the M26 heavy tank in time for the November offensive. Many combat soldiers felt that the initial assault on November 16 would have succeeded if we had had the Pershing, with its better protection and better mobility in muddy terrain. It would have been possible to break through the Cologne Plain and capture the bridgeheads on the Rhine River.

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