Operation Queen

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Queen began on the 16th of November 1944 with one of the heaviest Allied tactical bombing raids of the entire war. More than 4,500 aircraft filled the skies over the German Siegfried Line, and yet the ground soldiers below barely moved. What followed was not the swift breakthrough Allied commanders had hoped for, but a grinding month of brutal combat through one of the most inhospitable landscapes on the Western Front: the Hürtgen Forest. The questions the story raises are sharp ones. Why did an operation backed by such overwhelming air power stall so badly? What were the Germans hiding behind their exhausted divisions? And what did the Americans not yet understand about a chain of dams sitting quietly on the River Roer?

• 2. A Line in the West

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  Allied fortunes in the summer of 1944 had moved with startling speed. Following the breakout from Normandy, the German Wehrmacht suffered a string of catastrophic defeats in July and August, most dramatically the collapse at the Falaise pocket. The Allied high command drew a dangerous conclusion from this: that the Wehrmacht was near total collapse and that victory could be achieved by Christmas 1944. That belief drove a high-risk gamble called Operation Market Garden, a direct thrust through the Netherlands into Germany. Market Garden failed. The Wehrmacht regrouped, and by mid-September a logistics crisis had halted the entire Allied advance. Supply lines had been outrun. The Germans now had time to man the fortifications of the Westwall, what the Allies called the Siegfried Line, though the old bunkers there were described as more symbolic than a real obstacle. The pause nonetheless gave Germany's planners the room they desperately needed to prepare something far larger and far more dangerous than anyone on the Allied side suspected.

• 3. The Forest Before the River

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  Before the main assault of Operation Queen could even begin, a preliminary offensive had to be fought. The Hürtgen Forest sat between the Allied lines and their objective, the Roer River, and it posed a threat of German counterattack out of the trees that the Allied command could not ignore. The 9th Infantry Division had already been engaged there since September, so planners expected only moderate resistance. That expectation was wrong. On the 2nd of November, the 28th Division attacked the town of Schmidt, held by the German 275th Division. The Americans took Schmidt, but the Germans reacted with forces from the 89th Infantry Division and mobile reserves drawn from the 116th Panzer Division, driving the Allies back out and turning the fight into a bloody stalemate. The 28th Division was badly mauled, and the shape of things to come was already visible. The Hürtgen Forest, dense and muddy and mine-strewn, was going to extract a terrible price from whoever fought through it.

• 4. Two Armies, Two Plans

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  Allied planning for Operation Queen was built around the U.S. First and Ninth Armies, under Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group, pushing toward the Roer to establish bridgeheads at Linnich, Jülich and Düren. The longer-term vision was to cross the Rhine and secure bridgeheads at Krefeld and Düsseldorf. First Army's strength had grown from roughly 250,000 men in September to about 320,000 before the offensive, though only around 120,000 would participate in the main effort. Tank strength stood at approximately 700 armored vehicles. The starting date slipped from the 5th of November, then to the 10th, and finally to the 16th due to persistent bad weather. German planning ran on an entirely different logic. Field commanders were ordered to hold the Roer river line with the minimum possible force, not to defeat the Allies outright, but to buy time. In October 1944, planners had secretly completed the first draft of a plan called Wacht am Rhein, an all-out counteroffensive aimed at the Ardennes, deliberately mirroring the successful German push through that same ground against France in 1940. The best divisions were being held back, quietly rebuilt out of Allied sight. Holding the Roer line was the load-bearing condition for that plan's survival. The Allies, running their own operation above ground, had no idea.

• 5. Bombing, Mud, and Blood

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  Between 11:13 and 12:48 on the 16th of November, 1,204 heavy bombers of the U.S. 8th Air Force dropped 4,120 bombs on Eschweiler, Weisweiler and Langerwehe. Simultaneously, 467 Handley Page Halifax and Avro Lancaster bombers struck Düren and Jülich, while 180 British aircraft hit Heinsberg. The German towns suffered severe destruction. Communications behind the German lines were badly disrupted, and the morale of younger, less experienced units was shaken. But Allied air commanders admitted after the fact that the bombing had not met expectations. Damage to frontline German troops was low and casualties were few. About 12 aircraft were lost to antiaircraft fire. On the ground, Collins' VII Corps plunged into the Hürtgen Forest. The 1st Infantry Division fought for days to take the town of Hamich and a nearby rise called Hill 232, suffering more than 1,000 casualties in the process to advance just about 3.2 kilometers. An armored thrust by Combat Command B of the 3rd Armored Division through a narrow corridor between the 1st and 104th Divisions fared somewhat better, but at ruinous cost: CCB lost 49 out of 69 tanks to the mud and the German defenders. The Hürtgen Forest was reducing American armor to wreckage at a rate the planners had not foreseen.

• 6. The Plains and the Panzers

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  North of the forest, the Ninth Army advanced through the Roer plains, terrain entirely unlike the dense woodland to the south: flat farmland, small villages, open ground. The Germans had expected the main Allied thrust to come through this sector, not through the forest, and they had positioned their defenses accordingly. Ninth Army's XIX Corps, under General Gillem, drove toward Jülich with three divisions. The 30th Infantry Division took Würselen after four days of slow fighting. The 29th Division's initial plan to bypass fortified strongpoints and encircle them broke down, and the division stalled. With help from the 2nd Armored Division, the advance was renewed and by the 21st of November the Americans were just 2 kilometers from the Roer. In the north, the 2nd Armored Division's advance toward Linnich triggered a sharp German response. Field Marshal Rundstedt released the 9th Panzer Division with about 36 King Tiger tanks from the 506th Heavy Panzer Battalion attached. At Puffendorf, the Americans were caught in the open when roughly 30 German tanks closed on them; they were pushed back into the town with heavy losses. American armor suffered the loss of about 57 tanks that day, against 11 German tanks destroyed. Combined artillery and air support eventually tipped the balance, and by the 20th and the 21st of November Gereonsweiler was in American hands. By the 28th of November, XIX Corps had reached the Roer on a broad front. Ninth Army's total casualties for the operation stood at 1,133 killed, 6,864 wounded and 2,059 missing.

• 7. The Dams Nobody Noticed

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  Sitting above the Roer valley were a series of dams whose strategic significance the Allied high command had been slow to grasp. If the Germans released the water held behind them, the Roer valley and everything downstream as far as the Meuse and into the Netherlands would flood. Allied bridges would be destroyed. Any troops east of the river would be isolated and trapped. The Germans had understood this all along; control of the dams was built into their strategy for holding the Roer line. Allied planners only made their first specific moves toward the dams in the final days of the offensive. The RAF was tasked with breaching them from the air, launching continuous bombing waves in early December, but the damage was described as negligible. On the 13th of December, V Corps was ordered to seize the dams from multiple directions including through the Ardennes sector. The offensive caught the Germans by surprise initially, but resistance stiffened quickly. The attack came just as German forces were nearly ready for Wacht am Rhein. Three days later, on the 16th of December, the Germans launched the Ardennes Offensive, and all Allied offensive effort in the sector came to an immediate stop. The dams remained in German hands.

• 8. What Was Left Behind

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  At the close of Operation Queen, the Americans had fought for one month through some of the worst conditions on the Western Front and had barely reached the Roer. No bridgehead over the river had been established. The Germans still held portions of the western bank, and the Roer dams were intact. Even before the Battle of the Bulge intervened, Allied planners estimated that a large thrust into Germany could not begin before mid-January at the earliest. The cost in American lives was staggering. Fighting in the Hürtgen Forest since September had cost roughly 32,000 men. VII Corps alone had suffered approximately 27,000 casualties in a single month. The Roer triangle was not cleared until Operation Blackcock, which ran from the 14th to the 26th of January 1945. Allied forces did not cross the Roer until February 1945. By then the Ardennes Offensive had already spent itself, and the road to the Rhine, for which Operation Queen had been the intended gateway, finally lay open.