“Both German and American troops paid dearly for their leaders’ misjudgments.”

By Craig S. Chapman

IN THE run-up to World War II, Nazi Germany poured much of its treasury, manpower and a third of its annual cement production into constructing a series of defensive fortifications along its western border. The Nazi propaganda machine touted the line of concrete bunkers as the nation’s West Wall. The Allies named it the Siegfried Line. Troops from both sides would eventually call the pillboxes death traps.

The structures had many forms and sizes. A typical pillbox had a single firing port and could house 10 to 26 infantrymen in a 1,000 to 1,200 sq. ft. enclosure. With concrete walls four to eight feet thick and a steel reinforced roof seven feet in height, the bunkers could protect the troops from enemy direct and indirect fire. However, their real strength came in their numbers. Germany installed over 5,000 of these pillboxes from its Dutch border to the Swiss frontier. The emplacements were designed to provide a wall of mutually supporting small arms fire a kilometer or more in depth.

One portion of the line near Belgium was built with a bit less density, a stretch along a single, forlorn ridge known as the Schnee Eifel. The Schnee Eifel is an eight-mile-long, steep-sided, heavily wooded hogback nestled within Germany’s Eifel region. One paved east-west road ran past its southern tip near the town of Brandscheid. However, only narrow cart paths ran up its slopes or along its spine. The ridge offered poor trafficability and limited fields of observation. For military planners, it was only useful as an obstacle. German engineers took advantage of the Schnee Eifel’s natural features to sprinkle its western slope with over a hundred pillboxes with more placed in depth on the ridgeline. It seemed enough. Other sectors along the French border with more forgiving terrain garnered greater resources.

Hitler’s West Wall propaganda paid dividends. The challenge of attacking a fortified line discouraged France and England from taking an aggressive stance during the Czech crisis of 1938. A year later, concern over the seeming impregnability of the Siegfried Line deterred the Western Allies from attacking Germany after Hitler invaded Poland.

The West Wall fell into disuse once the Wehrmacht overran France in June of 1940. Civilians looted the stored provisions. Telephones and cables disappeared. The army removed some of the steel doors to reinforce new fortifications along the expanding Atlantic Wall. The war seemingly passed by the West Wall — it would return. In a strange twist of fate, the string of bunkers on the murky Schnee Eifel would factor prominently in three separate battles.

After its devastating losses in France and Belgium following the Normandy campaign in the summer of 1944, the German army retreated to the Siegfried Line in September. Troops from the 2^nd SS Panzer “Das Reich” Division hustled to the bunkers in the Eifel with the American 4^th “Ivy” Infantry Division snapping at their heels. Oberfuhrer Otto Baum entrenched his veteran panzergrenadiers in the farmland southwest of the Schnee Eifel and in the Losheim Gap to its north. He ordered his ersatz replacements to occupy the pillboxes on the forested ridge where he expected little action.

The defenders reacted with dismay when they saw their fortifications. The Seventh Army commander grumbled, “The general picture, on our arrival at the West Wall, was sad!”

Besides being overgrown and in poor condition, many bunkers were poorly sighted, leaving dead space in their fields of fire. The firing ports could not accommodate modern machine guns.

The 1^st SS Panzer Corps commander also noted, “The troops holding the sector were so weak that they were not even able to occupy all pillboxes.” They only got a day to catch their breath.

The 4^th Infantry Division struck the Siegfried Line on September 14. Unfortunately, the V Corps attack order drew the division’s southern boundary at the southern tip of the Schnee Eifel, channeling the Ivy Division into the bunkers on the murky ridge.

Advancing out of a morning fog, the 12^th and 22^nd Infantry regiments overran several empty pillboxes and overwhelmed the few defended ones. The weakness of a linear defense became apparent. Once the Americans found a gap, they isolated then suppressed a pillbox. A satchel charge through the firing port, a flamethrower blast down the exhaust pipe, or an armor-piercing tank round through the rear door soon had most defenders begging to surrender. Those that did not learned the hard way.

“The rest were all blown to pieces and wounded all to hell,” one staff officer reported.

Down the line the Americans went. The pattern was the same: isolate, suppress, reduce, then count the bodies and prisoners. The two regiments tore a four-and-a-half-mile hole in the Siegfried Line in a matter of hours. One regimental commander bragged about how easily they had reduced the vaunted bunkers. “We have made them death traps.”

The lesson was not lost on the Germans. Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Weidinger listened over the phone to the dying words of one of his company commanders. “They’re coming with flame-throwers now—terrible heat—dust and smoke—I can’t stand it anymore.”

Weidinger made a sober assessment: “Modern offensive weapons showed themselves to be far superior to the weakly armed and manned bunkers.”

The thick woods and muddy trails of the Schnee Eifel accomplished what the bunkers could not. The 4^th Infantry Division could not exploit its breakthrough. American tanks bogged down on soggy, narrow paths steadily interdicted by German artillery. Supplies were slow coming forward. Panzergrenadiers reinforced the replacements and stymied the advance in tree-to-tree fighting. American senior leaders called off the offensive after realizing the German defense had congealed. The Americans had to wait for logistics to catch up. In the meantime, other sectors outside the German Eifel offered better offensive options.

Once the Americans reverted to defense, a question arose: What to do with the Schnee Eifel? The pillboxes on the ridge were the only part of the Siegfried Line in the German Eifel still in American hands. Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, First Army commander, did not want to waste time and resources retaking fortifications already captured once the offensive resumed. He ordered the Ivy Division to hold the Schnee Eifel.

For three months, the Americans entrenched six miles of the forested ridge while rotating units through the region. The 106^th Infantry Division arrived at the front on December 11. The Golden Lions, as they were known, took over from the previous division “man-for-man, position-for-position.”

Maj. Gen. Alan Jones and his staff were soon perplexed by the dispositions they inherited. Two infantry regiments occupied the Schnee Eifel. Yet, only cavalry outposts and a few anti-tank companies, deployed as infantry, guarded the pastureland southwest of the gloomy ridge and the Losheim Gap to its north. General Hodges apparently prioritized retaining the Schnee Eifel pillboxes over defending the mobility corridors.

The Germans noticed the strange defensive array, too. On December 16, the first day of the Battle of the Bulge, two regiments, reinforced with armor, poured through the Losheim Gap and another charged out of Brandscheid into Bleialf. The 422^nd and 423^rd Infantry Regiments, stood at the ready on the Schnee Eifel where hardly a shot was fired. Meanwhile, the division journal recorded disturbing reports of enemy movement four kilometers to their rear. “8 to 10 tks <sic>…quite a bit of infantry with them on way to Auw.”

The German onslaught resumed early the next morning. One American infantryman on the Schnee Eifel watched as the Germans bypassed the ridge.

“The sight of so much German armor, artillery, and infantry going past us to our rear areas was fearsome!” he recalled.

Surging through the two mobility corridors, the German double envelopment reached the crucial bridge over the Our River at Schonberg and cut off the regiments on the Schnee Eifel.

Too late, General Jones ordered his two regiments to abandon the Schnee Eifel and attack rearward to retake Schonberg. The order to retreat did not sit well with the infantrymen. One company commander overheard his men complaining, “Why all the running and no fighting?” The men filed off the ridge through heavy snow drifts, leaving the precious bunkers to the enemy.

The order to attack Schonberg was unrealistic. The Germans had the regiments surrounded. Tanks, StuG III assault guns, Jagdpanzers, and 88mm Flak guns lined the roads to Schonberg, bumper-to-bumper. The Americans only had the weapons and ammunition they carried on their backs. The Germans pounded the hapless American infantrymen with artillery and heavy weapons. After two days, they compelled the 422^nd and 423^rd Infantry to surrender.

In a perverse turnabout, the decision to hold the Schnee Eifel pillboxes turned them into death traps for the Americans.

Germany’s success in the Battle of the Bulge was short-lived. By early February 1945, the German salient in the Allied lines collapsed and they fell back to the border. Because of heavy losses, von Rundstedt preferred retreating to the Rhine, but Hitler intervened. The Fuhrer insisted on defending the West Wall bunkers and, according to von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, “forbade the surrender of even the smallest outpost without his permission.”

The edict to defend the pillboxes did not please the German generals or their men. “The troops still regarded the West Wall as a fatal burden,” lamented a Fifth Panzer Army staff officer. General Hans Felber, a corps commander, remarked. “These defensive installations were of a residential value only.”

The generals had no desire to sacrifice their men inside the bunkers: better to fight from outside trenches. They issued orders to leave two men behind in each pillbox. That way they could truthfully tell Hitler that each fortification was defended to the last man.

On the American side, the 4^th Infantry Division spearheaded the VIII Corps’ attack into the German Eifel and for a particular reason. American senior leaders, unlike their German counterparts, worried about the strength of the Siegfried Line fortifications. Because the bunkers on the Schnee Eifel had been penetrated the previous September, the generals figured the ridge was the likeliest spot for a new breakthrough and the Ivy Division was the logical choice to lead the way. Once again, the Americans disregarded the Schnee Eifel’s natural features, more focused on the questionable enemy pillboxes.

At 0600 hours, Feb. 4, infantry from two regiments hit the seams between the Schnee Eifel pillboxes. The battalions had a slightly harder time isolating the bunkers because most of the enemy fought from outside trenches. The fight only lasted a short time before the demoralized enemy troops gave up. The American regiments reached the crest and swept up hundreds of prisoners while suffering few casualties.

The Ivy Division busted through the Siegfried Line bunkers with ease. The exploitation, however, was a bit delayed. The icy slopes were the problem. “Can’t get the tanks over the hill,” the 22^nd Infantry’s journal noted.

Troops worked through the night, chopping grooves in the ice to give the tank treads some traction. The 22^nd Infantry plowed into Brandscheid the next day. Armed with bazookas, the Americans riflemen eliminated one bunker after another. Whenever they encountered stubborn defenders, they brought forward a tank or tank destroyer that proceeded to “shoot the hell out of the pillboxes.” The concrete fortifications proved highly vulnerable to American firepower. “The 90mm TDs [tank destroyers] blew very large holes in the bunkers.” By the end of the day, Brandscheid had fallen and the paved east-west road past the Schnee Eifel was finally cleared.

The Americans achieved their penetration of the Siegfried Line and pushed east beyond the Schnee Eifel—after five months and three battles.

In retrospect, the irony is hard to escape. The Americans should have avoided the densely forested Schnee Eifel. Yet, they chose to penetrate the Siegfried Line over the damp and shady ridge, twice. Hitler and the American generals prized the concrete bunkers and insisted they be defended. Yet, the soldiers on the ground knew how vulnerable they truly were. Both German and American troops paid dearly for their leaders’ misjudgments.

Craig S. Chapman is the author of Javelins in the Half-Light: The Schnee Eifel Battles, 1944-45 from Osprey Books. An avid researcher and award-winning author, Chapman has published three military histories. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he completed dual careers in information technology and the U.S. Army/National Guard. He has given talks at prestigious venues such as the North Carolina State Capitol, Mount Vernon, and Fraunces Tavern in New York City. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife Mary Ann.