ABSTRACT
Allied frustration increased in the late fall of 1944 as German resistance stiffened all along the Western Front. The failure of Operation Market-Garden had stymied British progress in the Netherlands, and American forces also encountered problems. Hodges’s 1st Army came up against the “dragon’s teeth” concrete antitank obstacles and pillboxes of the West Wall and the difficult terrain of Germany’s Hürtgen Forest south of Aachen. The battle to take this dense and dismal forest became the bloodiest and most protracted since the hedgerow fighting in Normandy. To the south, Patton’s 3rd Army had to struggle through the hilly country of Lorraine before reaching the West Wall in the coal-mining region of the Saar. Still farther south, General Jacob Devers’ recently formed 6th Army Group, consisting of Patch’s 7th and de Lattre’s 1st French Army, contended with the Vosges Mountains, a long, low range along the western border of Alsace. But even though dreams of a quick triumph had vanished, certainty of ultimate victory remained high. Eisenhower and his commanders continued to prepare for the thrust to the Rhine and beyond.
