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September 30th 1944 Background info and arrival in St. Vith



This is taken from a letter Lu wrote to Alfred Blaauw from Holland who had contacted him to get some insight to his experiences in the Battle of the Bulge. 

I was a corporal in the Headquarters Battery of the 16th Field Artillery Battalion. The 16th was attached to 1st Army, 8th Corps which covered most of the eastern part of Belgium and Luxembourg at the time of the Bulge. Our job was to provide Corps Artillery with accurate, on the ground survey information, so that gun battalions could coordinate their firing missions most effectively.  Our A and B batteries used "Sound and Flash Ranging" to locate enemy gun positions and provided that information to Corps Artillery.

I was a Topographic Surveyor. The survey team I was assigned to worked as close to the enemy lines as we could, and before the Bulge started, we had 'on the ground' surveys established from Butgenbach, Auw and the Schnee Eifel Ridge in the north to Echternach, and Luxemboug in the south. We also worked the 'rear' areas from St. Vith to Trois Vierges, Houffalize, Bastogne and many points in between. Our efforts before the Bulge started proved very valuable during the battle.

We Arrived in the area near St. Vith on September 30th, 1944, and set up in the wet, dark Ardennes forest. I remember that it was so dark at night that we marked our trails from the two man tents we slept in ("Pup Tents"), to our guard outposts, with bark from the roots of the trees. This bark had a green phosphorescent glow that you could see when you literally couldn't see your hand in front of your face. Those were frightening nights. The front lines in this area were so thin that German patrols and American patrols often walked the same woods roads. Sound in the black of night took on larger than life proportions.

Cliff Hope gives some background about this time in his book: From the Siegfried Line Campaign by Charles B McDonald: The VII Corps front in the Ardennes was at once the nursery and the old folks' home of the American command. To this sector came new divisions to acquire their first taste of combat under relatively favorable conditions. Here too came old divisions licking their wounds from costly fighting like the Brittany peninsula and the Huertgen Forest. The front ran from Losheim, between Camp d'Elsenborn and the northern end of the Schnee Eifel, southward generally along the Belgian and Luxembourgian borders with Germany. Eventually it stretched all the way in the southeastern corner of Luxembourg. It extended into Germany at two points: along the Schnee Eifel, where the 4th division in September had pierced a thin sector of the West Wall, and near Uettfeld, where the 28th Division had driven a salient into the West Wall. The mission of the VIII Corps was to defend the long front in place, deceive the enemy by active patrolling, and make general plans ans preparations for attacking to the Rhine.

From the Battalion History: Here's a once-over-lightly on the general situation on the Belgium-Luxembourg front when the 16th moved in. The enemy, believed to be massing for a do-or-die stand along the Siegfried, was using convalescents and their version of 4-F's to work on fixed fortifications, while first class fighting men were held in reserve for a possible American attack.

VIII Corps moved into the sector to relieve the V Corps, and the 16th Observation replaced the 17th, a battery taking over a base just across the line in Germany and B Battery moving to Northern Luxembourg. The front was held by a screen of armor until VIII Corps began moving in artillery and infantry.
("Where is the front line?" asked an officer on recon. An anonymous character from the 16th alleged to have replied, "I'm standin' on it, sir, and when I move IT moves, because there ain't no one here but me!")
It says in the record: "Enemy activity continued  to be light in the VIII Corps sector."

Enemy patrols scared hell out of everyone at night. Every wire crew in the battalion had to duck for cover at some time in these first few days when the Germans popped over a few artillery rounds now and then. Special Service put on some shows in St. Vith. Someone found a shower unit. B Battery went shopping for souvenirs in Bastogne. The term "phony war" began to crop up in bull sessions again.
The lull continued on the VIII Corps front. Scattered artillery fire and a few patrols were only events of importance."


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