Carl Heintze: "I entered the Huertgen Forest on Oct. 13 (a Friday, as it turned out) as a replacement rifleman in Company L, 39th Infantry Battalion, 9th Infantry Division. I was a sergeant, 21, having finished three years of college before being drafted into the army.
The day before I arrived the company had been ambushed near Germeter and there were only two platoons left, of four. Only one officer remained. We were taken to the front and lodged overnight in the basement of an old house, being shelled most of the time. There were 29 of us. By the time the war ended all but two had been wounded or killed. Next day six of us went down to plug a hole in the line. Two were immediately wounded. That night we were withdrawn and reorganized into a new company with 80 new replacements and then additional men. We went back up to Schmidt and stayed for a week in a kind of trench and then the whole division was withdrawn and reorganized.

After various other battles, including the Battle of the Bulge, we went back to Schmidt in February and eventually into the Rhineland. In the meantime I had been wounded Jan. 1, 1945, was in the hospital for a month and was then sent back to the front where I stayed until the war ended in May.

I can't possibly convey what the forest was like, except to say it was the epitome of war: dark, foreboding, wet, muddy, gloomy and terrible. Anyone who was there never forgot it, but not many people remember it. Otherwise it was a pretty "normal" infantry kind of war for me, scared, dirty and tired and cold most of the time, glad to have been a part of it, glad when it was over. The Huertgen Forest, however, was unforgettable."