Why Couldn’t German Officers Explain How the U.S. Army Broke the Siegfried Line With Basic Tools?

In the last week of September 1944, a map section at Zidana’s core headquarters ran off 450 copies of a single photograph and sent them forward to one division. The picture was aerial cover flown on the 8th of September printed at a scale of 11,000 to 1 with the German defenses drawn in on top of it.

95% or more of the concrete works in that sector had been located and plotted before American infantry captured any of them. 450 sheets for one division meant that every rifle squad going in could have carried the map for the ground in front of it. The core rated [music] what it had assembled as the equal of the intelligence handed out before Omaha Beach.

The men inside that concrete were working from a different set of papers, >> [music] >> which is to say from almost none. German accounts of moving into the Westwall that autumn describe damp rooms and rusted fittings. The telephone lines no longer carried a signal. There was no stored water and there were no rations.

In many works, the steel doors were gone, shipped west after 1940 >> [music] >> to be built into the Atlantic Wall. And the cleared fields of fire in front of the embrasures had grown over across four summers. In some sectors, the divisions falling back from Normandy were thin enough that only every third or fourth structure could be occupied at all.

In January 1945, the engineer section of the 18th core airborne gathered everything first army and its subordinate core had learned about breaking the line and issued it as a restricted pamphlet. Its conclusions gave the state of the defenses full credit for how cheap the first penetration had been.

Fields of fire uncleared, antitank ditches begun and abandoned half dug, wire absent, the works only partly manned and manned by poor troops, and almost nothing in the way of anti-tank guns or mobile artillery behind them. Then the same pamphlet said something about method that has very little to do with any of that. The elaborate [music] technique for reducing concrete strong points, the one worked out for the Atlantic Wall and taught at the engineer and infantry schools back in the United States, had been neither used nor applicable. Long

before that machinery would have been called for, the occupants came out. Zix Corps set down its own answer as a list of four items. Best technique for reducing a Siegfried Line pillbox. One platoon of infantry, tanks, good artillery liaison, guts. The mechanism underneath that sentence is not a story about firepower.

German instructions for holding a bunker put most [music] of the garrison outside it. 30 or 40% of the complement stayed in the concrete. [music] The rest fought from slit trenches and fighting holes dug around it, which is where the real resistance came from. American mortar and artillery fire delivered before any assault drove those men indoors, and that was its purpose.

The reports are blunt that destruction was not. A 105 mm gun firing over open sights needed something like 10 accurate rounds set square against a face to break the concrete at all. What the shelling achieved instead was to shut the garrison into a room that fired in one direction and depended on its neighbors for everything else.

Neutralize the neighbors with tank and small arms fire, and an assault team could walk around to the back where the door was. Everything after that was hardware a squad could carry. 15 lb of TNT lashed to a pole would blow in an embrasure fitting or a rear door. And 25 lb satchel charges finished the job. Where the ground was flat enough, engineers ran a jeep towed arc welder up to the entrance and welded it shut.

And then a bulldozer or a tank fitted with a blade pushed earth over the door and the firing slit until both were gone. Prisoners taken later said what frightened them about it was the prospect of being buried alive. The tank obstacles fell to the same kind of thinking. On the 12th of September, engineers working with 7th Corps found a lane through five rows of dragon’s teeth where the Germans had packed the gaps between the concrete with earth so their own vehicles could withdraw behind the line.

Somebody had already scraped part of it away. About a foot of each tooth stood exposed and the exposed foot was cut off with explosives. Tanks went through the gap the defenders had made for themselves. One rifle company reported that six works in its stretch had to be taken three separate times because the Germans came back into them whenever the ground changed hands.

Blowing a door and an embrasure did not put a structure out of use and only flattening it did. That is the background against which one particular bunker sits on the main road running from Lammersdorf to Rollsbruch in front of Company K of the 39th Infantry on the 22nd of September 1944. It was set down into a hollow with steep banks around it.

Steps led to the entrance. The ceiling ran about 6 ft of reinforced concrete under 5 ft of earth. There were two doors in the front face, each with an aperture beside it for a machine gun, which meant the entrance covered itself. Nothing about it was unusual for that stretch of the line. The assault team got men onto the roof and around the blind sides, which was the standard opening and normally the end of the matter.

Bazooka rounds went into the outer door. Pole charges were placed against it and fired >> [music] >> and the door held. Gasoline was poured underneath and lit with a thermite grenade and the men inside stayed where they were. By dark, the men inside had not moved and the company stayed where it was. The arithmetic everywhere else on the line explains why that was so rare.

155-mm self-propelled gun firing at 2 to 4,000 yd with a concrete-piercing fuse took three to five hits to get through 6 ft of wall. And an 8-in howitzer at 8,000 yd averaged one direct hit for every five rounds sent. Those are the figures for killing a bunker with artillery. And they are also why the engineers barely touched their demolition kit.

Across the October fighting satchel, charges were written up as unnecessary. And flamethrowers went into the attack and then ended up lying around the battlefield. Some dropped by wounded men who never got to use them. The set-piece crossing of the Worm River on the 2nd of October showed the method with time to prepare behind it.

Two battalions of the 117th Infantry pulled out of the line for 2-day training periods 3 km to the rear. Engineers built a sand table showing every bunker, road, ridge, house, and tree. They corrected it after each patrol came back. Every man in the assault companies walked his own route across it with a finger.

The battalions rehearsed the footbridges in a gully of stagnant water the same width as the worm using spans 2 ft wide and 15 to 20 ft long with cleats nailed across them for footing. The air support that morning was worthless. The medium bombers came in from the west instead of the southwest. The bombardiers lost their orientation. And nine of the 10 groups dropped either short or long.

Ground observers agreed it had achieved nothing at all. Prisoners taken afterwards said some of them had been asleep in the bunkers while it happened and had not known a raid took place. The artillery mattered and not for the reason people assume. Its job was to move men from outside the concrete to inside it.

The other half of the record sits in the enemy’s own filing. Their commanders could describe the American method in detail on paper in their own language. Manfred Gross in the standard German survey of the Westwall records that captured American field reports on bunker assault technique were translated and circulated to the crews holding the works.

So that they could take measures against what was coming. Corroboration for that runs the other way across the front. In January 1945, a US rifle company commander noted that tank dozers might stop being useful because the enemy had begun planting mines around the bunkers. Some of them fired by remote control aimed at the dozer.

Down in the Saar sector, Patton’s infantry started welding pillbox doors shut for a reason that had nothing to do with the men inside to begin with. Enemy infantry kept filtering back into cleared works behind the front and reoccupying them. That is not an army that failed to understand what was being done to it.

That is an army reading its enemies training material and issuing countermeasures. The Germans also worked out the correct answer, and it was not a piece of equipment. It was a change in where the crew stood. A bunker was a shelter against shellfire and bombing, a place to hold reserve ammunition and rations and to carry wounded into.

When the attack came, the crew was supposed to leave it at once and fight from the field positions outside so that every weapon the section owned could bear with only the fixed machine guns still firing from the embrasure. Reserve units were eventually ordered to build those positions between the works and to fight from them under heavy attack rather than from the concrete alone.

A German study of the September 1944 fighting in the Schneeifel sector by the historian Kramer puts the whole failure in one sentence. Nobody tells these troops how to defend the Siegfried Line. And here is why no order could repair that afterwards. On the 14th of September, 1944, the German Commander-in-Chief West, Gerd von Rundstedt, issued a holding order declaring the line decisive for the Battle of Germany and directing that it be held installation by individual installation to the last round and to complete destruction with the order to be

announced at once to every command authority and unit. The two instructions cannot both be obeyed. Fighting from field positions outside the concrete means giving up the installation, at least on paper, and the man who did it stood in open defiance of the commander in chief West in writing. The tactical answer required abandoning the exact thing the order said must be held until the structure [music] itself came down.

So, German officers could account for the American method well enough. What they could [music] not do was issue the remedy in a form anybody was permitted to follow, and nobody who signed that order was confused about what it would cost. Two armies wrote down the same half hour of fighting and filed the results in two countries and two languages.

Neither set meant for any reader outside the unit that produced it. Setting the halves beside each other is the slow unglamorous part of making one of these. Hit subscribe if you want the slow part [music] to keep going. By December, the order had hardened. The commander of the German First Army, General von Obstfelder, issued a directive for the conduct of the fighting in the Westwall.

A copy sits in the federal archives under RH 3018’s. It opened by stating that the line had to be held at all costs and that only dying is possible there. Anyone [music] abandoning his fighting position under attack was to be shot at once without trial. Commanders of individual works were to be put under written obligation to hold to the last, and each army was to report back that the paperwork had been done by a stated date.

The Americans noticed the effect without knowing the cause. One company commander advised getting prisoners to the rear fast and not bunching up around them on the flat observation that the enemy was willing to shoot his own men rather than let them be taken. Gross’s summary of what all this produced is the plainest sentence in the German literature on the subject.

Crews shut inside behind their own steel could not fight outward at all. And where they refused to surrender, the attacker destroyed the work with the garrison in it. What the American report does not record about Lammersdorf is nearly everything a historian would want. There is no Westwall number for the bunker, no unit named for the men inside, and no casualty figure for Company K across those two days, though the same document counts the engineers lost at the dragon’s teeth 10 days earlier to the individual man. On

the morning of the 23rd of September, 3 months before that directive was written, the company called on the bunker again and got machine gun fire back. A Teller mine and a beehive charge on the ventilator head blew the pipe away. 12 Teller mines went into the opening where the pipe had been. Then, 24 more on top of them, and the roof held.

A charge stripped the earth off the concrete. Six to eight beehive charges went in one after another at the same spot, each cutting a little deeper, and three more into the hollow the others had made for a total penetration of 2 and 1/2 ft through a ceiling 6 ft thick. Bazookas and flamethrowers worked the apertures between attempts and did nothing.

Then, about 300 lb of TNT went into the hole on top, tamped down, and fired. The occupants came out and surrendered, 30 of them, and told their captors that smoke had reached them through the firing apertures, but not through the vents or the doors, that no gas came under the door, that they had smelled burning phosphorus, and that the candles inside had dimmed and gone out several times.

Why Couldn’t German Officers Explain How the U.S. Army Broke the Siegfried Line With Basic Tools?

In the last week of September 1944, a map section at Zidana’s core headquarters ran off 450 copies of a single photograph and sent them forward to one division. The picture was aerial cover flown on the 8th of September printed at a scale of 11,000 to 1 with the German defenses drawn in on top of it.

95% or more of the concrete works in that sector had been located and plotted before American infantry captured any of them. 450 sheets for one division meant that every rifle squad going in could have carried the map for the ground in front of it. The core rated [music] what it had assembled as the equal of the intelligence handed out before Omaha Beach.

The men inside that concrete were working from a different set of papers, >> [music] >> which is to say from almost none. German accounts of moving into the Westwall that autumn describe damp rooms and rusted fittings. The telephone lines no longer carried a signal. There was no stored water and there were no rations.

In many works, the steel doors were gone, shipped west after 1940 >> [music] >> to be built into the Atlantic Wall. And the cleared fields of fire in front of the embrasures had grown over across four summers. In some sectors, the divisions falling back from Normandy were thin enough that only every third or fourth structure could be occupied at all.

In January 1945, the engineer section of the 18th core airborne gathered everything first army and its subordinate core had learned about breaking the line and issued it as a restricted pamphlet. Its conclusions gave the state of the defenses full credit for how cheap the first penetration had been.

Fields of fire uncleared, antitank ditches begun and abandoned half dug, wire absent, the works only partly manned and manned by poor troops, and almost nothing in the way of anti-tank guns or mobile artillery behind them. Then the same pamphlet said something about method that has very little to do with any of that. The elaborate [music] technique for reducing concrete strong points, the one worked out for the Atlantic Wall and taught at the engineer and infantry schools back in the United States, had been neither used nor applicable. Long

before that machinery would have been called for, the occupants came out. Zix Corps set down its own answer as a list of four items. Best technique for reducing a Siegfried Line pillbox. One platoon of infantry, tanks, good artillery liaison, guts. The mechanism underneath that sentence is not a story about firepower.

German instructions for holding a bunker put most [music] of the garrison outside it. 30 or 40% of the complement stayed in the concrete. [music] The rest fought from slit trenches and fighting holes dug around it, which is where the real resistance came from. American mortar and artillery fire delivered before any assault drove those men indoors, and that was its purpose.

The reports are blunt that destruction was not. A 105 mm gun firing over open sights needed something like 10 accurate rounds set square against a face to break the concrete at all. What the shelling achieved instead was to shut the garrison into a room that fired in one direction and depended on its neighbors for everything else.

Neutralize the neighbors with tank and small arms fire, and an assault team could walk around to the back where the door was. Everything after that was hardware a squad could carry. 15 lb of TNT lashed to a pole would blow in an embrasure fitting or a rear door. And 25 lb satchel charges finished the job. Where the ground was flat enough, engineers ran a jeep towed arc welder up to the entrance and welded it shut.

And then a bulldozer or a tank fitted with a blade pushed earth over the door and the firing slit until both were gone. Prisoners taken later said what frightened them about it was the prospect of being buried alive. The tank obstacles fell to the same kind of thinking. On the 12th of September, engineers working with 7th Corps found a lane through five rows of dragon’s teeth where the Germans had packed the gaps between the concrete with earth so their own vehicles could withdraw behind the line.

Somebody had already scraped part of it away. About a foot of each tooth stood exposed and the exposed foot was cut off with explosives. Tanks went through the gap the defenders had made for themselves. One rifle company reported that six works in its stretch had to be taken three separate times because the Germans came back into them whenever the ground changed hands.

Blowing a door and an embrasure did not put a structure out of use and only flattening it did. That is the background against which one particular bunker sits on the main road running from Lammersdorf to Rollsbruch in front of Company K of the 39th Infantry on the 22nd of September 1944. It was set down into a hollow with steep banks around it.

Steps led to the entrance. The ceiling ran about 6 ft of reinforced concrete under 5 ft of earth. There were two doors in the front face, each with an aperture beside it for a machine gun, which meant the entrance covered itself. Nothing about it was unusual for that stretch of the line. The assault team got men onto the roof and around the blind sides, which was the standard opening and normally the end of the matter.

Bazooka rounds went into the outer door. Pole charges were placed against it and fired >> [music] >> and the door held. Gasoline was poured underneath and lit with a thermite grenade and the men inside stayed where they were. By dark, the men inside had not moved and the company stayed where it was. The arithmetic everywhere else on the line explains why that was so rare.

155-mm self-propelled gun firing at 2 to 4,000 yd with a concrete-piercing fuse took three to five hits to get through 6 ft of wall. And an 8-in howitzer at 8,000 yd averaged one direct hit for every five rounds sent. Those are the figures for killing a bunker with artillery. And they are also why the engineers barely touched their demolition kit.

Across the October fighting satchel, charges were written up as unnecessary. And flamethrowers went into the attack and then ended up lying around the battlefield. Some dropped by wounded men who never got to use them. The set-piece crossing of the Worm River on the 2nd of October showed the method with time to prepare behind it.

Two battalions of the 117th Infantry pulled out of the line for 2-day training periods 3 km to the rear. Engineers built a sand table showing every bunker, road, ridge, house, and tree. They corrected it after each patrol came back. Every man in the assault companies walked his own route across it with a finger.

The battalions rehearsed the footbridges in a gully of stagnant water the same width as the worm using spans 2 ft wide and 15 to 20 ft long with cleats nailed across them for footing. The air support that morning was worthless. The medium bombers came in from the west instead of the southwest. The bombardiers lost their orientation. And nine of the 10 groups dropped either short or long.

Ground observers agreed it had achieved nothing at all. Prisoners taken afterwards said some of them had been asleep in the bunkers while it happened and had not known a raid took place. The artillery mattered and not for the reason people assume. Its job was to move men from outside the concrete to inside it.

The other half of the record sits in the enemy’s own filing. Their commanders could describe the American method in detail on paper in their own language. Manfred Gross in the standard German survey of the Westwall records that captured American field reports on bunker assault technique were translated and circulated to the crews holding the works.

So that they could take measures against what was coming. Corroboration for that runs the other way across the front. In January 1945, a US rifle company commander noted that tank dozers might stop being useful because the enemy had begun planting mines around the bunkers. Some of them fired by remote control aimed at the dozer.

Down in the Saar sector, Patton’s infantry started welding pillbox doors shut for a reason that had nothing to do with the men inside to begin with. Enemy infantry kept filtering back into cleared works behind the front and reoccupying them. That is not an army that failed to understand what was being done to it.

That is an army reading its enemies training material and issuing countermeasures. The Germans also worked out the correct answer, and it was not a piece of equipment. It was a change in where the crew stood. A bunker was a shelter against shellfire and bombing, a place to hold reserve ammunition and rations and to carry wounded into.

When the attack came, the crew was supposed to leave it at once and fight from the field positions outside so that every weapon the section owned could bear with only the fixed machine guns still firing from the embrasure. Reserve units were eventually ordered to build those positions between the works and to fight from them under heavy attack rather than from the concrete alone.

A German study of the September 1944 fighting in the Schneeifel sector by the historian Kramer puts the whole failure in one sentence. Nobody tells these troops how to defend the Siegfried Line. And here is why no order could repair that afterwards. On the 14th of September, 1944, the German Commander-in-Chief West, Gerd von Rundstedt, issued a holding order declaring the line decisive for the Battle of Germany and directing that it be held installation by individual installation to the last round and to complete destruction with the order to be

announced at once to every command authority and unit. The two instructions cannot both be obeyed. Fighting from field positions outside the concrete means giving up the installation, at least on paper, and the man who did it stood in open defiance of the commander in chief West in writing. The tactical answer required abandoning the exact thing the order said must be held until the structure [music] itself came down.

So, German officers could account for the American method well enough. What they could [music] not do was issue the remedy in a form anybody was permitted to follow, and nobody who signed that order was confused about what it would cost. Two armies wrote down the same half hour of fighting and filed the results in two countries and two languages.

Neither set meant for any reader outside the unit that produced it. Setting the halves beside each other is the slow unglamorous part of making one of these. Hit subscribe if you want the slow part [music] to keep going. By December, the order had hardened. The commander of the German First Army, General von Obstfelder, issued a directive for the conduct of the fighting in the Westwall.

A copy sits in the federal archives under RH 3018’s. It opened by stating that the line had to be held at all costs and that only dying is possible there. Anyone [music] abandoning his fighting position under attack was to be shot at once without trial. Commanders of individual works were to be put under written obligation to hold to the last, and each army was to report back that the paperwork had been done by a stated date.

The Americans noticed the effect without knowing the cause. One company commander advised getting prisoners to the rear fast and not bunching up around them on the flat observation that the enemy was willing to shoot his own men rather than let them be taken. Gross’s summary of what all this produced is the plainest sentence in the German literature on the subject.

Crews shut inside behind their own steel could not fight outward at all. And where they refused to surrender, the attacker destroyed the work with the garrison in it. What the American report does not record about Lammersdorf is nearly everything a historian would want. There is no Westwall number for the bunker, no unit named for the men inside, and no casualty figure for Company K across those two days, though the same document counts the engineers lost at the dragon’s teeth 10 days earlier to the individual man. On

the morning of the 23rd of September, 3 months before that directive was written, the company called on the bunker again and got machine gun fire back. A Teller mine and a beehive charge on the ventilator head blew the pipe away. 12 Teller mines went into the opening where the pipe had been. Then, 24 more on top of them, and the roof held.

A charge stripped the earth off the concrete. Six to eight beehive charges went in one after another at the same spot, each cutting a little deeper, and three more into the hollow the others had made for a total penetration of 2 and 1/2 ft through a ceiling 6 ft thick. Bazookas and flamethrowers worked the apertures between attempts and did nothing.

Then, about 300 lb of TNT went into the hole on top, tamped down, and fired. The occupants came out and surrendered, 30 of them, and told their captors that smoke had reached them through the firing apertures, but not through the vents or the doors, that no gas came under the door, that they had smelled burning phosphorus, and that the candles inside had dimmed and gone out several times.