K company's first offensive was Operation Clipper. The 84th's mission was to seize the high ground east of Geilenkirchen along the Siegfried, in conjunction with a British offensive to the left (north). For Clipper the 84th was under the command of British general Brian Horrocks. To K Company what that meant, mostly, was a daily rum ration, about half a canteen cup.

For the first three days of Clipper, K Company did the mopping up in Geilenkirchen, taking 100 prisoners with no casualties. The company congratulated itself and relaxed. "Someone was playing a piano," Private Jim Sterner remembered. He looked into a house and found a half-dozen men and his CO, Captain George Gieszl, playing the piano with a British lieutenant. The song was "Lili Marlene," and "our guys were laughing and singing along with him. What I remember most is a feeling of total exhilaration. Boy, this is really great the way a war ought to be."

On November 21 it was K Company's turn to lead the attack. Sherman tanks with British crews showed up to support the GIs. The company advanced. It took possession of a chateau the Germans had been using as an observation post but had not tried to defend. It moved forward again but was soon held up by artillery fire. Sergeant Keith Lance led his mortar squad forward to provide support, but as he approached, "we started taking machine-gun and rifle fire from a stone farm building off to our right." A British officer in a tank gave the farmhouse three quick rounds. Thirty to forty Germans poured out, waving white flags.

The rifle platoons, meanwhile, were taking a pounding. The company autobiography describes it: "The concentration of German firepower was absolutely overwhelming with its violence, surprise, and intensity. Artillery fire, 88s and 75s from hidden tanks, and 120 mortars with apparently limitless supplies of ammunition hit us. Machine-gun fire whipping in from pillboxes seemed almost an afterthought. The noise, the shock, the sensation of total helplessness and bewilderment, the loss of control, the sudden loss of every familiar assumption nothing in civilian life or training offered an experience remotely comparable. Our new-boy illusions of the past two days dissolved in a moment."

It was K Company's welcome to the Western Front. Every rifle company coming on the line that November had a similar experience and drew the same conclusion: there was no way training could prepare a man for combat. Combat could only be experienced, not played at. Training was critical to getting the men into physical condition, to obey orders, to use their weapons effectively. It could not teach men how to lie helpless under a shower of shrapnel in a field crisscrossed by machine-gun fire. They just had to do it, and in doing it, they joined a unique group of men who have experienced what the rest of us cannot imagine.

AT METZ, Patton remained steadfast for advance. The plan was to have the 5th Division attack to the northeast of Metz, while the 90th Division would break through the German lines to the south of the city. The two divisions would link up east of Metz, isolating it. Meanwhile, the 95th Division would push into the city itself, supported by the 10th Armoured Division.

Torrential rains and stiff German resistance held up the 5th and 90th divisions for a week, but by November 15 the encirclement was almost complete. Metz was finally within Patton's grasp.

It fell to Colonel Robert Bacon to take the city. On November 16 he began advancing in two columns, with tanks at the head. By dusk the next day the columns were near Fort St. Julien, four kilometres from the city centre. The old Vauban-designed fort had a garrison of 362 Germans. They had no heavy weapons, but with their machine guns and rifles they could prevent American movement on the roads. St. Julien was the one fort that had to be taken.

The assault began at dawn, November 18, in the fog. By noon the 95th had fought its way to the moat. At 1300 the infantry began to dash across the causeway and two Shermans moved forward to spray enemy firing slits with their machine guns. But the GIs ran into an iron door that blocked access to St. Julien's interior. The Shermans fired point-blank at it, but the 75-mm shells just bounced off. A tank destroyer with a 90-mm gun fired six rounds at 50 yards. They had no effect. With the fire from the Shermans keeping the Germans back from the firing slits, a 155-mm howitzer was wheeled into place. The big gun slammed twenty rounds into the door's mounts. Finally the door collapsed inwards with a mighty crash. Infantry moved through the opening, bayonets fixed. They were met by Germans with their hands up.

The 155-mm had taken the place of the battering ram. This was an altogether new use of self-propelled artillery. It was part of what was becoming the essence of American tactics in ETO-whenever possible, use high explosives.

With the fall of St. Julien the 95th Division began to move to the centre of Metz. On November 22 Metz was secured-except that six forts around the city were still defiant. Soon enough they began to surrender. The last to give up was Fort Driant, which finally capitulated on December 8. Patton had taken Metz.

In August, Third Army had advanced almost 600 kilometres, from Normandy to the Moselle River. From September 1 to mid-December it advanced thirty-five kilometres east of the Moselle. The Siegfried Line was still a dozen or so kilometres to the east. Third Army had suffered 47,039 battle casualties.

UP NORTH of Aachen, K Company continued to attack, side by side with the British. Just south of Aachen lay the Hurtgen Forest. Roughly 50 square miles, it sat along the German-Belgian border. It was densely wooded, with fir trees twenty to thirty metres tall. They blocked the sun, so the forest floor was dark, damp, devoid of underbrush. The firs interlocked their lower limbs at less than two metres, so everyone had to stoop all the time. It was like a green cave, always dripping water-low-roofed and forbidding. The terrain was rugged, a series of ridges and deep gorges.

The Rur River ran along the eastern edge of the Hurtgen. Beyond it was the Rhine. First Army wanted to close to the Rhine, which General Hodges decided required driving the Germans out of the forest. Neither he nor his staff noted the obvious point that the Germans controlled the dams upstream on the Rur. If the Americans got down into the river valley, the Germans could release the dammed-up water and flood the valley. The forest could have been bypassed to the south, with the dams as the objective, but the generals went for the forest. The Battle of Hurtgen was fought under conditions as bad as American soldiers ever had to face. Sergeant George Morgan of the 4th Division described it:

"The forest was a helluva eerie place to fight. You can't get protection. You can't see. You can't get fields of fire. Artillery slashes the trees like a scythe. Everything is tangled. You can scarcely walk. Everybody is cold and wet, and the mixture of cold rain and sleet keeps falling."

The 3rd Armoured Division and the 9th Infantry Division began the attack on September 19. The lieutenants and captains quickly learned that control of formations larger than platoons was nearly impossible. Troops more than a few feet apart couldn't see each other. There were no clearings, only narrow firebreaks and trails. Maps were almost useless. When the Germans, secure in their bunkers, saw the GIs coming forward, they called down pre-sited artillery fire, using shells with fuses designed to explode on contact with the treetops. When men dived to the ground for cover, they exposed themselves to a rain of hot metal and wood splinters. They learned that to survive a shelling in the Hurtgen, hug a tree. That way they exposed only their steel helmet.