Good account of the campaign from the GIs point of view

books:

	• The Bloody Forest: Battle for the Hurtgen: September 1944-January 1945 Gerald Astor Presidio Press, 2000 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good Oral History, Old Arguments.

The strength of Gerald Astor's book lies in his oral history narrative. As a work of history, however, Astor breaks no new ground. The standard arguments: the Roer River Dams should have been the American's prime objective; the Hurtgen Forest should have been avoided; the American numerical advantage, armor and air supremacy were nullified in the confines of the forest, are repeated once again in Astor's work. Astor tries to represent as many units that took part in the fighting as possible. Good oral history, no new analysis.

Good...but misses the mark.

This book certainly provides the reader with an understanding of the front-line soldier during the Battle for the Huertgen. However, Mr. Astor fails to provide a larger context in which this struggle can be understood. I had difficulty understanding how the local village battles related to one another or to the Corps or Army level for example.

The oral history is good but the "big picture" is missing.

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Battle for the Huertgen Florest.

I don't believe Mr. Astor's account of the Huertgen Forest campaign flows as well as his Blood Dimmed Tide book about the Battle of the Bulge. I have read and also written about this campaign and find Mr. Astor's book authentic and reliable in its facts. It can be used as a source book to other writers.

Good account of the campaign from the GIs point of view

"The dead man, nameless to us, was one of the thousands of callow replacements...who were fed into the maws of the Huertgen and became dead meat almost immediately". This quote, from medic Paul Treatman (p. 198), aptly sums up what was possibly the most brutal and costly fight waged by the US Army in the Western Front of WW2.

Not many Americans know about the Battle for the Huertgen forest; most accounts of American military operations in western Europe prefer to give it much less attention than D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, or the crossing of the Rhine.

"The Bloody Forest" is a good addition to the literature on this campaign. Gerald Astor is an experienced historian and writer, and he chooses to let the GIs who were involved in the battle do the storytelling in this oral history.

The book covers the entire Huertgen campaign, from the beginning of September 1944, to early February 1945, and concludes with a `post mortem' chapter in which Astor muses on the reasons why the American commanders continued to order assaults on such a well-defended redoubt. Astor is quite a bit less caustic in his views about the senior US Army command than Charles Whiting is in his book "The Battle of the Huertgen Forest", but reaches much the same conclusion: the battle was the result of some of the most atrocious decision-making by rear-echelon operators in the entire European theatre.

The book includes several maps and a section of photographs. The inclusion of some more maps, particularly ones dealing with the latter months of the battle, would have been helpful. Overall, however, this is a good history of the Huertgen campaign and should be of interest to readers looking for the GI's point of view of the war in western Europe.

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reviews: page 1, 2

For nearly five months, starting in mid-September 1944, American GIs battled for the Hurtgen Forest, a 50-square mile tract of extremely inhospitable terrain.

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