The Blitzkrieg Defense: The Battle of Mook
Part 2 - The Kiekberg Drama
The Blitzkrieg Defense follows the men of a glider regiment in the 82nd Airborne Division during the Allied liberation of the Netherlands. It is a series of four-parts, each of which are an 8-10 minute read. If you haven’t checked out the previous segments, we have you covered:
Attack into the Kiekberg was scheduled for the morning of September 27. A couple squads from E Company would hit the west side of the Kiekberg Woods from Finger Ridge as a diversion, while the main effort came from two companies on the northeast side of the Kiekberg. “We mounted a limited attack of two squads… I was given the bazooka for this attack even though I had never held a bazooka, let alone fired one,” Lewis Wilson of E Company wrote, describing their diversionary action. “An artillery barrage was laid on the Germans and scheduled to cease at 10 a.m. when we would make our attack. As our advance progressed, I saw a building that could have concealed a machine gun. A soldier… loaded my bazooka, I pointed it toward the building and pulled the trigger. Now here is where things get confused. It so happened that between me and the building was a small tree. The bazooka shell hit this small tree and exploded making a terrific noise. The lieutenant who was leading this attack called it off right then because he had no idea what made that terrible exposition right in front of his face. I can truthfully say, ‘Single-handed, I stopped an attack!’ Of course I won’t say whose attack I stopped!”
The other two companies of the 2nd Battalion - Companies F and G - progressed well in the northeast side of the Kiekberg. They took many prisoners. But after a few hundred yards, the sharp, rugged terrain, the jungle-like density of the trees and the thick undergrowth swallowed the companies like a black hole. Combined with the increasing amount of German fire, they became too spread out to maintain contact and pulled back to the northeast edge of the wood.
That evening, the Germans conducted an attack of their own, again attempting to dislodge 2nd Battalion’s E Company from Finger Ridge. Lewis Wilson remembered the tragic epic:
There were three privates, all mortar men on the [.30 caliber machine] gun, Robert Mullens from Kentucky, Ray Dowd from Indiana and me. We were in a slit trench about 10 feet long, Mullens to my right and Dowd to my left. I was just about to lay down and try to sleep when they threw a full scale attack right at the position we had left [after the attack on the 25th]. I started firing the machine gun and heard a ‘thunk, AAHHH’ on my left, then I heard the same noise on my right. I was too busy with that gun to look and see what happened. When I did look, both of my buddies were dead with a bullet in the head.
When things let up, I called for a medic but he was too late. After that fight we retired that gun because of the burnt-out barrel.
The next day, September 28, F Company tried to clear out the woods to their right, but a German machine gun and mortars retarded their progress.
The 325th… took over the right sector, which included the Kiekberg Woods. Its initiation into combat consisted of sending two companies in to clean up these woods. They were preceded by very heavy artillery concentration. The attack caught the 90th Bn of the German 190th Division in the process of relieving the Landeschuetzen battalion that had managed to work up into the woods. Heavy fighting resulted, with the Germans getting unquestionably the worst of it. They reinforced the 90th Battalion… After two days and two nights of very stiff fighting at close quarters, five companies of the 325th were involved.
Brig. Gen. James Gavin—Situation report to Ridgway, October 3, 1944
The Kiekberg Wood showed that it would require a more significant commitment in manpower. The 325th was forced to begin cannibalizing the rest of their defensive line. Manpower on the defensive ring was a zero-sum game. Troops needed in one area - Kiekberg - left other sectors to flex and take outsized shares of the defensive perimeter. Despite these challenges, the 325th was committed. They began concentrating all their combat power from the defensive line to the Kiekberg. Of the nine rifle companies forming the fighting backbone of the 325th Glider Infantry, merely two became responsible for about half of the total frontal distance of the defensive ring assigned to the regiment - one on the flood plain at Mook and another screening the line to the north. The 325th Glider Infantry Regiment was massed for action in the Kiekberg Wood - in total, five rifle companies were committed in a semi-circle around the wood, with one more company in reserve.
The northeast flank of the companies committed to the Kiekberg Wood was “pretty poorly, that is none at all, protected,” remembered Max Bach, a member of the 2nd Battalion’s Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon. The gap between the companies committed in the semi-circle around the Kiekberg and the rest of the defensive ring was so great there was no contact, likely not even by patrols. A few men from Bach’s Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon were placed to cover the 1,000-yard gap in the 325th’s line between the Kiekberg and 3rd Battalion’s Company E, which was screening the entire line to the north. “Once,” Bach writes, “we are to cover a gap between two [battalions] 1,000(!) yards long - it is an open hill and we are four men. A whole German [battalion] had been seen to move up on ‘Knappheide’ - that was the name of the hill. Up there is an OP in an old farmhouse, the cellar of which is full with parachutes. However, the house is under mortar fire. I remember also the patrol behind the German lines near the border to observe doings in the Reichwald. The Germans came pretty close to us there, and we spent thirty anxious minutes hiding in a cabbage field.”
The renewed push to clear out the Kiekberg Wood was scheduled for early morning of September 30. F and G Companies of the 3rd Battalion, just shifted the night before from positions on the defensive ring, entered the wood on the northern tip and attacked astride each other in a south-southeast direction. They immediately found the terrain and the jungle-like density of the trees swallowing them up, and came under withering mortar fire. The 2nd Platoon of F Company under 1st Lieutenant Harry Ready, leading the attack, sliced through the Germans but the rest of the company could not keep up with their fast pace owing to the thick trees. The Germans enveloped Lt. Ready’s platoon and cut them off. The rest of the company began being pinned by artillery and mortar fire, which was bursting the trees in violent explosions causing significant casualties. G Company was fairing little better. Due to the tree density, where coordination was impossible, the battle was a series of small pockets of violent epics. Lieutenant Joseph Myers was holding closely five men when they were surprised by a German grenade. Thankfully, it was thrown off the mark. But then a second landed amongst them. “Grenade, duck!” exclaimed Lieutenant Myers, who threw his entire body on top of the grenade. Lieutenant Myers’ absorbed the entire blast, sparing his men at the cost of his own life. It was a sacrificial act. Lieutenant Myers’ remains have never been recovered. He was 25-years-old.
There was a rumor that for an hour fighting stopped, as the rival German and American battalion commanders argued on the field of battle attempting to talk the other into surrendering. There was no resolution, and orders came to hold what the Americans had taken and dig in. Two patrols were launched to try and reach Lt. Ready’s cut-off platoon; both attempts were repulsed by the Germans.
Stay tuned for these upcoming installments of Ridgway’s Notebook:
“The Blitzkrieg Defense: The Battle of Mook Part 3—Bracing for Impact”
“Sharpening the Talon: Part 1”
The matter of fact way military people describe what they do (or, as described here, did) never fails to amaze me.