Would You Have Survived the Kall Trail in 1944?

In November 1944 the 28th Infantry Division was sent to take a village called Schmidt. Everything — supply, armour, antitank guns, the wounded coming back — had to cross the Kall gorge on one track. On the map it was a line. On the ground it was a shelf cut into the hillside: an earth bank studded with rock on one side, a sheer drop on the other, and nine feet between them. Parts of it did not show up on aerial photographs. The first ground reconnaissance anyone recorded happened on the second day of the attack. Eight Shermans were committed. Three got across. Four of the five that did not slid off the left-hand edge and blocked the road for everyone behind them. At dawn on 4 November the German counterattack came into Schmidt along hard-surfaced roads, driving round the antitank mines the Americans had laid in the open. The battalion holding the village met tanks with bazookas, because no antitank gun had crossed the gorge. Schmidt was lost by late morning. The engineers opened the trail at four the next morning, by hand, with no machinery forward — sixty-six hours after the attack began. And two miles downhill from Schmidt stood the Schwammenauel dam. A First US Army engineer had described exactly what the Germans could do with it — in writing, seven weeks before the attack. First Army's own intelligence section put the flood at five days. When the Germans finally opened the valves in February 1945, it cost the Ninth Army thirteen. CHAPTERS 00:00 First light, one tank 01:18 The forest 02:44 What was actually down there 04:12 The plan 05:29 The road 06:45 Three tanks 08:26 Hand tools 10:15 What it cost 12:30 February Archival photographs from the US Army Signal Corps via the National Archives, public domain. Map: Blatt 5304 Nideggen, Library of Congress. "Study of Dams of the Roer River and its Tributaries", Headquarters First U.S. Army, Office of the Engineer, 10 September 1944 — National Archives, public domain. Figures from MacDonald and Mathews, *Three Battles: Arnaville, Altuzzo, and Schmidt*, and MacDonald, *The Siegfried Line Campaign*, US Army Center of Military History. Subscribe to War By Inches — every episode is one battle, measured in the distances the men who fought it actually had to cross. #Hurtgen #KallTrail #WW2 #MilitaryHistory #History