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battery of nebelwerfers was supposed to delay |
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The 385th Infantry's 2d Battalion crossed the Nims River at Niederweis, successfully taking the town while the 1st Battalion attacked south between the Nims and the Prüm toward Irrel. At the same time the 304th Infantry sent its 3d Battalion through Kaschenbach against Gilzem, and its 2d to the east and southeast to capture Meckel. Gilzem was taken the following morning at 0400 against sporadic resistance. By that time the 1st Battalion, which had followed the 2d from Holsthum to Meckel, had combined forces with the 2d to cut the Bitburg-Trier highway, and they were already attacking astride that nazi lifeline. The fate of Irrel was not long in doubt either; that same morning the 385th's 1st Battalion successfully established its command post there, as shall be shown presently. The ONAWAY power-drive, viewed on a situation map, formed a large inverted U. The division had attacked north from Echternach, turned east to cross the Prüm and Nims toward the Kyll, and then swung south for its second attack through the Siegfried wall, but this time taking it from the rear. The troops now discovered how thoroughly they had smashed the German defenses in the original Sauer crossing: only remnants, replacements, and miscellaneous units were encountered in the southern mop-up drive. Captured German soldiers readily revealed they had nicknamed Maj Gen Bader's 560th Volksgrenadier Division the "Tango Division" because for every step it took forward the 76th compelled it to take two steps backward. After the 25th of February it never made the one step forward. Of the, by now, almost thoroughly depleted 212th German Division, only the 2d Company of the 106th Fortress Staff Battalion, an attached unit, had manned one of the most formidable defenses of the "impregnable" Siegfried Line, -- the Katzenkopf. Situated in high ground 1000 yards north of Irrel on the west side of the highway which extends five kilometers north of Echternach to cross the Prüm at Irrel, Katzenkopf was known in captured German documents as Panzerwerk Seeckt No. 1520. Whoever commanded this monstrous underground fort commanded Irrel. |
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view from one of the observation turrets of the Katzenkopf . . . |
Katzenkopf, or Cat's Head, does not suggest something particularly lethal. Yet this now helpless kitten, claws clipped by the men of the 385th Infantry, was the chief structure in an ingenious set of mutually supporting and interlocking machine gun nests and bunkers strategically commanding all avenues of approach from the surrounding Irrel valleys. Cat's Head was not designed to be a pushover. The only parts of Seeckt No. 1520 visible from the Irrel highway were the tops of two turrets which, along with a third, |
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housed five machine guns, an automatic machine mortar and a disappearing-type flame thrower. The two machine gun turrets, projecting three feet four inches above the earth, had steel walls twelve inches thick. Hit by 90 MM high explosive projectiles fired from M 36 tank destroyers, these walls had been penetrated to a depth of no more than six inches. The range of the flame thrower was fifty-three yards with a traverse of 360 degrees. It could shoot almost thirty-two gallons of flaming oil in any amount of traverse up to three full revolutions of the shaft. Construction of entrance passages from two outer steel, gas-tight doors was such as to render entry by an assault party into the three-story fort almost impossible even against reduced defenders. |
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Interior features included a diesel operated power plant, air circulating system with facilities for protection against vesicant gas attack, sewage system, kitchen, cold storage room, tile latrine, shower baths with chromium fixtures, a thirty-circuit inter-communication switchboard, medical dispensary, and sleeping accommodations for a fort complement of eighty. Drinking water, for which chromium taps over porcelain sinks were provided, came from a well below the fort. There apparently was no shortage of wine. Observers later found, in some of the fort's many rooms, articles of feminine apparel, children's toys, women's fashion magazines. There were some radios, although the aryanized airplanes served Goebbels gab more than Jerry jive. |
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room in the nazi pillar of strength . . . . |
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This, then, was one of the nazi pillars of strength, -- a cunning conception of concrete, comfort and steel overlooking terrain made even more formidable by breastworks and firing positions connected by zigzagging communication trenches; by dragon's teeth implanted at the foot of the ridge; by concertina wire sprawled in all directions around the fortified heights. In sharp contrast to the ferocious armament and bristling terrain was the appearance of the rooms in which the German soldiers lived. There were dirty dishes on tables; a deck of playing cards laid out in an interrupted two-handed game; a cheap pulp magazine open in the middle of a tale; tattered gray wool socks and threadbare uniforms, now dry, hanging for lornly on improvised lines; shoes of generally small sizes, as if worn by adolescents, under bare navy-like beds. The clothing and equipment were old, shabby, like cast off hand-me-downs. Boxes of Christmas tree ornaments were tucked away in dust-covered cardboard boxes in many of the rooms; St. Nick had had no trouble in crashing the nazi party line or the Katzenkopf defenses. |
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