Battle of Hurtgen Forest Navigation Grand Tour 2019 rit 2

September 1944 became a month when the front in the west would become very extensive. Everywhere the Allies were fighting to push the Germans back over their own land borders and 'hunt' them to the rivers, the Roer, Ruhr and Rhine. The daring Market-Garden plan was about to explode, the battle for Metz was fierce and people were eager to break through the Siegfried Line to take Aachen.

While Operation Market-Garden was a new idea of warfare, a spear attack deep into enemy territory, the other battle, sixty miles to the southeast, engendered an old-fashioned medieval carnage of unprecedented proportions.

The American planners had devised a horrific scenario without realizing it themselves. The target was the dams in the river Roer. To this end, it was thought that first a very intensely wooded area, the Hürtgenwald, had to be cleared. The area was located in the triangle Aachen, Monschau and Düren. Why they decided to go through the woods will always be a matter of debate. Why didn't they go around the forest? The time it would take to pass through the forest gave the Germans the opportunity to burst the dams in the upper reaches of the Roer, flooding the valleys and leaving the Americans no closer to their target. The forest without the dams was worth nothing, the dams without the forest was worth gold, but, as Stephen Ambrose points out in his book Citizen Soldiers, the generals chose the "with forest" option and the author declared the decision "retarded criminal."

When the balance of the battle of Hürtgenwald was taken, one quarter of the American troops deployed, 33,000 men, had been lost. The 120,000 deployed GIs from the six divisions and an armored division lost 24,000 killed, wounded, missing and captured. In addition, another 9,000 had been discharged due to illness and exhaustion. Most of the Americans who died were interred in Margraten, in the Netherlands, and in Henry Chapelle, in Belgium.

The Germans had deployed six divisions, including a Panzer division, for the defense of Hürtgenwald, a total of 80,000 men. Four divisions were totally destroyed and the other two suffered heavy casualties. 28,000 Germans were victims of the fighting, including 12,000 dead. The rest were wounded or missing or were taken prisoner.

This route is specially made for the “MRA NAVIGATION GRAND TOUR 2019”.