| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hell in Hürtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment. By Robert Sterling Rush. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. xx, 403 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1128-2.)

Historians agree that the senior commanders who led the U.S. Army to victory in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) blundered in the closing months of 1944 when they tried to clear Germany's Hürtgen Forest with a series of frontal assaults. That decision doomed several American divisions to a prolonged battle of attrition in an area whose thick timber, deep gorges, and narrow logging trails negated their superior numbers, firepower, and armor support. The U.S. Fourth Division's Twenty-second Infantry Regiment entered that grueling slugfest on November 16, and it suffered 2,085 casualties out of an authorized strength of 3,253 officers and men to advance six thousand yards in eighteen days.

At first glance, Robert Sterling Rush's Hell in Hürtgen Forest is simply a micro-history of that costly battle focusing on the Twenty-second Infantry's ordeal. In reality, Rush successfully marries combat analysis with social history to provide a new assessment of the American infantry units that battled the Wehrmacht from the beaches of Normandy to the Elbe River. In an exhibition of brilliantly imaginative and thorough research, Rush examines the training, leadership, tactics, and replacement policies that permitted American infantry regiments to remain cohesive enough to keep gaining ground despite personnel losses that totaled 64 percent by the war's end.

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