Flavius Maximus private Roman eye

November 2, 1944. An American infantry division attacks into the Hürtgen Forest toward a village called Schmidt, and over the next two weeks it is very nearly destroyed. The ordeal of the 28th Division at Schmidt is one of the costliest and most futile actions the US Army fought in the whole war, the sharpest point of the meat-grinder battle I described in that dark forest. I told you about the Hürtgen on the 27th of October, the dense, dripping forest on the German border where the Americans kept feeding divisions into terrain that negated every advantage they had, taking terrible losses for ground of little value. Now it was the turn of the 28th Infantry Division, a Pennsylvania National Guard outfit whose red keystone shoulder patch earned it the grim nickname, after the Hürtgen, of the "Bloody Bucket." On the 2nd, the 28th launched its attack with the objective of taking the village of Schmidt, deep in the forest. At first there was a flicker of success. The infantry fought their way forward through the trees and actually took Schmidt. But the position was a trap. The approach ran along a single, terrible track through the forest and across a deep gorge, the Kall trail, over which it was nearly impossible to get tanks and supplies forward to support the infantry who had pushed into the village. The men in Schmidt were out on a limb, exposed, with little armor or artillery support able to reach them. The Germans counterattacked hard, with tanks and infantry, and the isolated Americans in Schmidt, unable to be reinforced or properly supported across that impossible trail, were overwhelmed and thrown out of the village in a rout. The fighting collapsed into a nightmare around Schmidt and the nearby village of Kommerscheidt and along the Kall gorge, the Americans fighting desperately to hold on and then to extract their surrounded units, under constant shellfire in the freezing, muddy forest, their tanks slipping off the narrow track into the ravine. The division was shattered. In roughly two weeks of this, the 28th suffered something on the order of six thousand casualties, killed, wounded, missing, captured, and broken by the conditions, one of the heaviest tolls any American division paid in such a short span, for essentially nothing. The attack failed. Schmidt was not held. The ground gained was negligible, and the whole bloody effort accomplished nothing of strategic value, part of the larger futility of the Hürtgen campaign that historians have condemned ever since. There is a famous, poignant moment from the fighting that captures its horror: in the chaos of the Kall trail, American and German medics, amid the carnage, worked out an informal local truce to tend and evacuate the wounded of both sides, a flicker of shared humanity in a battle otherwise defined by pointless slaughter. The destruction of the 28th at Schmidt, begun on the 2nd, is remembered as one of the US Army's most painful episodes, a division wrecked in a forest fight that should perhaps never have been pressed, the Bloody Bucket living up to its terrible name. And the Hürtgen was not done. It would go on swallowing American divisions for weeks more, even as, just to the south, the Germans were secretly massing for the surprise blow in the Ardennes that the obsession with the forest helped the Americans miss.