Dearest Letty: The World War II Love Letters of Sgt. Leland Duvall

FIVE - Christmas in a Snowy Woods

F I V E Christmasina SnowyWoods The snowfall that inspired rhapsodies in Leland Duvall’s letters from the American West and New York turned into a curse on Germany’s western frontier in the winter of –. Snow would fall almost ceaselessly from early November through February in the coldest winter on record. Frostbite and trench foot—so named because men typically got the necrosis from freezing snow and mud in trenches and foxholes—were about as lethal as German shells. After nearly a month of probing and rebuilding, Fifth Armored units during the last week of November joined a massive Allied assault on the German defenses in the Hürtgen Forest, a dense evergreen woods between Aachen and the Roer River. The Americans would see the fiercest fighting of the European war. They were at a terrible disadvantage in the canopied woods because armored vehicles could not maneuver, the Germans were solidly entrenched, and the Americans were unaccustomed to hand-to-hand fighting in the woods. Progress through the forbidding forest was impeded by minefields, barbed wire, blockhouses, and booby traps hidden by the snow. Artillery shells exploded in the treetops, mortar shells fell randomly, and the Germans, embittered by their retreats across France and Belgium, fought savagely in what they believed was their last stand. While the Americans 3-DUVALL_final_pages:Layout 1 9/16/11 10:33 AM Page 183 fought heroically, Hürtgen would prove a disaster, the greatest blunder in the European theater.The Allies eventually retreated. In the long slugfest, all the Allied units would suffer heavy casualties. “We lost a few good men here,” Duvall scribbled in the margin of a book on the Fifth Armored many years later. His close friend, Lt. Ed Sherman, with whom he always shared passes, was gravely wounded in the woods. Duvall took shrapnel in his buttocks, which were unprotected by a tree that he thought shielded him from mortar shells. He had taken grenade fragments earlier in the day. He told Letty Jones months later that they were only scratches, but the mortar shrapnel gave him considerable discomfort as an old man. Altogether, American casualties totaled twenty-three thousand from battle and another nine thousand from trench foot, pneumonia, and other causes. No sooner had the Americans given up on chasing the Germans from the forest than Adolf Hitler ordered the final desperate campaign to stave off defeat.The Russians were advancing from the east, the Italian peninsula had been lost to the Allies, and his soldiers and equipment were badly depleted by the massive assault from Normandy and air attacks. Hitler figured the Allies expected a sort of Christmas respite in the deep snow, and he ordered a blitzkrieg through the middle of American and British lines in the vicinity of the densely forested Ardennes Mountains. He intended to split the Allied defenses at the unlikeliest place and plunge all the way to the vital supply port of Antwerp on the North Sea. Then, he thought, the British and Americans would sue for an armistice and he could turn his attention to the Russians. It would be highly successful for the first weeks of December, but the offensive collapsed, speeding the war’s end. It would be known as the Battle of the Bulge but officially as the Ardennes Offensive. Duvall’s cavalry was on the extreme northern edge of the German offensive, but for him those would be the most harrowing days of the war. For Duvall, the Battle of the Bulge began on November  with orders for his combat team to take the heavily fortified “Hill ” near Kleinhau, Germany, and to clear an area from Kleinhau to the Roer River of Germans. The Americans would take heavy casualties for the next week. Fifty  Dearest Letty h 3-DUVALL_final_pages:Layout 1 9/16/11 10:33 AM Page 184 percent of the Eighty-Fifth Cavalry would be killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or sidelined by trench foot or other illnesses by the third week of December. Down to  men from its full strength of , Duvall’sTroop A held a hill overlooking the Roer River gorge for four days against heavy German artillery and then was dispatched during the night of December  along the west bank of the river to a bridge on the northern outskirts of Untermaubach, a pivotal town held by the Germans. The men were to plant themselves inside the pocket of German...