How the British Broke Through a Forest the Germans Had Fortified for Years

On the morning of February 8th, 1945, at exactly 5:00, a young Cameroonian private named Tom Renouf lay flat in a slit trench near Nijmegen, watching the sky above the Reichswald turn the color of a blast furnace. He had joined the 51st Highland Division only weeks earlier, a replacement fed into a unit that had fought since El Alamein, and nothing in his short war had prepared him for this.

Over a thousand guns fired at once. Men who had survived years of combat said afterward that they had never heard anything like it, that the noise did not arrive in waves the way artillery normally did, but simply existed, all at once, everywhere, a wall of sound with no gaps in it. Renouf would remember the ground moving beneath his body like something alive.

Ahead of him, past the flooded fields and the shattered farm villages, sat 10 square miles of pine and oak that the German army had spent the better part of five years turning into the hardest natural position left on the Western Front. It was called the Reichswald, and by the time British soldiers finished walking out the other side of it more than five weeks later, they would have paid for every acre of it in a currency that had nothing to do with maps.

This is the story of how they did it, and if stories like this are worth your time, a like or a subscribe genuinely helps them reach the people who care about this history. To understand what was waiting inside that forest, you have to understand what the Siegfried Line actually was by early 1945, because it was not what most people picture.

The Germans called it the Westwall, and the Allies called it the Siegfried Line, and it ran for more than 600 km from the Dutch border down to Switzerland. Over 18,000 bunkers, tunnels, and tank obstacles poured into the earth between 1936 and 1940. When the Wehrmacht rolled into France in the summer of 1940, the line’s guns had been stripped out and shipped west to a war that seemed already won.

For 4 years, the bunkers sat empty, concrete boxes slowly disappearing under moss and bramble, useful for nothing but storing hay. Then, in the autumn of 1944, the war came back to Germany’s own doorstep, and Hitler ordered the Westwall reactivated. The Reichswald sector fell under the command of General Oberst Alfred Schlemm, commanding the 1st Parachute Army, a veteran of Crete and Anzio, and the brutal retreats of the Eastern Front, one of the most capable defensive commanders the German army had left. And here is the detail that would

shape everything that followed. Schlemm’s superiors at Army Group H were convinced the main Allied blow would fall further south, across the Roer River. Schlemm disagreed. He believed it would come here, through the forest, and while his commanders looked in the wrong direction, he quietly built a defense in depth that would turn 10 square miles of trees into a machine built for killing infantry.

He layered it three lines deep. The first line ran along the forest’s western edge, the old pre-war Siegfried positions, held by the 84th Infantry Division, a scratch formation of older reservists and recently conscripted teenagers. Their job was never to hold. Their job was to bleed the attack, to slow it down long enough for the real defense to arrive.

Behind them sat a second line anchored on the towns of Cleve and Goch, medieval river towns turned into strong points. And behind that, a third position, the Schlieffenstellung, a fortified ridge running between two more forests that would become, weeks later, one of the worst killing grounds of the entire campaign.

Schlemm reinforced what he had with 2,000 elite paratroopers pushed forward to stiffen the conscripts, 36 self-propelled guns dug into the tree line, and four battalions of heavy artillery. And on the night before the assault began, his engineers opened the sluice gates along the Rhine and flooded the low ground north of the Nijmegen-Cleve Road, turning the entire left flank of the advance into a chain of shallow lakes that swallowed roads and tracks whole.

The plan, which called for the American Ninth Army to cross the Roer simultaneously from the south and close a giant pincer near Wesel, collapsed before it began because the Germans had blown the Roer dams, too. The river flooded. The Americans could not cross, which meant that for the next 2 weeks every reserve division Germany still had in the west was free to concentrate against one target, the British and Canadian troops walking into the Reichswald alone.

Hold that fact because everything that follows, every yard of mud, every burned-out tank, every man carried out of that forest on a stretcher, has to be understood against it. There was no help coming from the south. There was only the forest, the flood, and the men who had to go through it regardless. The first day went better than anyone had reason to expect.

The barrage had done savage work on the 84th Division, and by nightfall six of its battalions had effectively ceased to exist. 3,000 casualties and 1,200 prisoners marched into cages soaked to the knee in mud. British and Highland troops pushed into the Reichswald itself along a front of several miles, and for a few hours it looked as though the forest might fall quickly.

It did not because inside the tree line the character of the war changed uh completely. The Reichswald was not open woodland with tracks and clearings. It was young, dense pine planted in tight rows, trunks standing 4 to 7 ft apart, with the only paths running north to south, perpendicular to the direction the attack needed to go. There were almost no roads running east to west at all.

Tanks could barely squeeze between the trunks, and the handful of tracks that did exist were chewed into bottomless mud within hours by the weight of everything trying to funnel through them at once. Tanks and carriers and ambulances and guns all fighting for the same narrow corridor. Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, commanding the core responsible for the advance, would later describe the fighting in the Reichswald as a soldier’s battle fought under the most ghastly conditions he had encountered in the entire war, and he did not say that

lightly. Horrocks had commanded through the desert and through Normandy. He knew what bad ground looked like. This was worse. The 51st Highland Division and the 53rd Welsh Division carried the weight of clearing the forest itself, moving through those narrow firebreaks in driving rain, fighting German paratroopers who had dug spider holes at the base of nearly every third tree, so that a platoon could walk past a position and be shot in the back before anyone realized the ground behind them was not clear. Visibility in places

dropped to 20 yd. Artillery shells detonating in the treetops sprayed splinters and shrapnel downward in a pattern gunners called a airburst effect, and it made shelter almost meaningless because the danger came from directly overhead rather than from the horizon. A man could survive a shell landing 10 yd away in open country.

In the Reichswald, the same shell killed nearly everyone within 30 yd because the blast had nowhere to go but down onto the men sheltering beneath the canopy. Companies of the Gordon Highlanders and the Royal Welch Fusiliers cleared bunker after bunker the same way. A section working forward under covering fire until it was close enough to put a grenade through a firing slit, then moving to the next one and the next through mud that in places had swallowed men to their thighs.

By the end of the second day, the guts of the western Reichswald had been cleared and roughly 2,700 German prisoners were in the bag, but Schlemm was not panicking. The 84th Division had done exactly what it was built to do. It had absorbed the blow and bought time, and now his real defenders were arriving. The 7th Parachute Division was feeding into the line company by company.

The 6th Parachute Division was moving down from Arnhem, and Army Group H had finally released the 47th Panzer Corps to Schlemm’s command. Two armored formations with the weapons to make the Reichswald second wall considerably harder than its first. Cleve fell, or what was left of it fell, on February the 12th.

On the night before the assault, more than 700 RAF heavy bombers had turned the old market town into a moonscape of broken stone, and the bombing was meant to help the advance. Instead, it created a new problem entirely. The rubble buried every road through the town so completely that tanks and supply columns simply could not get through, and the single corridor that was supposed to carry the advance eastward choked on its own wreckage, while engineers worked around the clock to bulldoze a path.

Every hour that stalled the advance was an hour Schlemm used to move his reinforcements into position, and by the time the 15th Scottish Division fought its way through the ruins street by street, cellar by cellar, the German second line east of the town was already fully manned by paratroopers who knew exactly what direction the attack was coming from.

The fighting in Cleve itself became a house-clearing operation of the worst kind. Scottish infantry moving through rubble in the dark, unable to use tanks in streets blocked by fallen buildings, taking each strong point with rifles and grenades because there was no other way to take it.

South of Cleve, the town of Goch became the next wall, and it was here that Lieutenant General Horrocks would later say the entire Reichswald campaign turned. The 43rd Wessex Division fought an advance of roughly 8,000 yd through flooded ground and fortified villages to reach it. Each position, a small concrete fortress of its own, wired and mined and defended by men who had nowhere left to fall back to except the town itself.

Goch was a walled medieval town. Its old defenses reinforced with modern concrete, and the fighting for it in the final days of February became close and brutal. Infantry working from house to house while engineers cleared lanes through minefields under fire. When Goch finally fell, the second wall of Schlem’s defense had been broken, but the cost had been steep, and ahead of the exhausted divisions lay the third and hardest line of all, the fortified ridge the Germans called the Schlieffenstellung, running between two

dense forests with barely 2 mi of open, overlooked ground in between. That final position, and the battle to force it, would fall largely to Canadian troops fighting alongside the British in the days that followed. A 5-day struggle through a killing ground the Germans had spent 2 weeks preparing while the British and Highland divisions bled for Cleve and Goch.

But British units did not stop fighting once the gap was forced. As the front pushed east toward the Rhine in the first weeks of March, mopping up the last scattered German positions west of the river, the war had not finished asking for names. By the third week of March, the fighting had moved to villages most people have never heard of, places like Kevelaer, a small farming settlement sitting in the path of the 49th West Riding Division as it pushed toward the last German positions before the Rhine.

It was here, on March 23rd, that Acting Major John Henry Cound Brunt of the 9th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, did something that would earn him the Victoria Cross and cost him his life within hours of earning it. Brunt’s company had been ordered to clear a line of German positions dug in around the village, and the advance ran immediately into heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from well-prepared positions that had been sighted to cover every approach.

Rather than wait for the fire to be suppressed from a distance, Brunt led his men forward personally, moving from position to position under direct fire, clearing machine gun nests with grenades and small arms at close range, reorganizing his company as casualties mounted, and continuing the advance himself when the attack threatened to stall completely.

He was wounded during the fighting and refused to leave his men, staying forward to direct the assault as it pushed through the German line. Later that same day, as he moved to consolidate the position his company had taken, a German mortar round found him, and he was killed almost instantly. He was 31 years old, a school teacher from Nottinghamshire before the war, a Territorial Army officer who had spent years training other men for a fight he would not live to see the end of.

His Victoria Cross citation would later describe his actions in the clipped, understated language the British Army reserves for its highest honor. But what it could not fully capture was the arithmetic behind it. A single officer refusing to stop, closing a gap in his own company’s line with his own body’s proximity to danger, buying the ground his men needed with a currency that had nothing to do with maps or timetables.

He was not the only British soldier that sprang to do something extraordinary with no one watching. He was simply one of the ones whose actions were witnessed clearly enough, and whose death was final enough for the citation to be written. To understand why men like Brunt were still fighting and dying in March, weeks after the Reichswald itself had technically been cleared, you have to understand the man commanding the British and Canadian advance as a whole.

Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks was, by early 1945, one of the most experienced core commanders in the entire British Army, a man who had been and wounded twice in his career, captured once in the First World War, and had fought through the desert campaigns under Montgomery before commanding XXX Corps through Normandy and the disastrous reach for Arnhem the previous September.

Horrocks had a reputation, earned honestly, for pushing his formations hard and for an almost restless refusal to accept that ground could not be taken. He was known among his own staff for visiting forward positions personally, further forward than most core commanders ever went because he believed a commander who had not seen the mud his men were fighting through had no business ordering them through more of it.

That instinct shaped the entire Reichswald operation. Horrocks understood, the same way Schlemm understood on the other side of the line, that this campaign would not be won by maneuver. There was no room to maneuver. There was only a narrow strip of flooded forested ground between two rivers and the only way through it was directly through whatever the Germans had built to stop him.

His plan, in its bones, was simple almost to the point of brutality. Overwhelming artillery to crack the first line, dogged infantry to clear the forest tree by tree, and a refusal to stop feeding fresh formations into the advance, no matter how slow the ground gave way. It was not an elegant plan. It did not need to be.

The Reichswald was not a problem that elegance could solve. By the time the last German rearguards pulled back across the Rhine in the second week of March, the campaign that had begun with a thousand guns opening fire on a February morning had cost the First Canadian Army and the British formations serving under its command more than 15,000 casualties in barely a month of fighting.

A number that included well over 5,000 British and Canadian soldiers among the dead and wounded, alongside more than 22,000 German prisoners taken and an estimated equal number killed or seriously wounded on the German side. To put that cost in perspective, it had taken 30 days of fighting to advance roughly 20 mi. In the weeks that followed, once the Rhine itself had been crossed and the German army in the west had effectively broken, Allied forces would cover 200 mi in the same span of time.

The distance was never really the point. The point was what stood between the start line and the finish, three defensive walls each harder than the last, held by some of the most experienced troops the German army had left in terrain that erased almost every advantage the Allies possessed in tanks, aircraft, and sheer weight of numbers. The Reichswald reduced the war to its rawest form, infantry against fortification, willpower against 5 years of poured concrete, and it did not care how the war had gone everywhere else.

Alfred Schlemm survived the campaign, though barely. He got the surviving remnant of his first parachute army back across the Rhine in reasonable order, a genuine professional achievement given how thoroughly his four divisions had been ground down, but he was wounded by an Allied air attack on his command post just days before the Rhine crossing itself, and the force he commanded afterward was a shadow of what had held the Schlieffenstellung for five brutal days.

Brian Horrocks continued in command through the Rhine crossing and the final advance into Germany, and after the war his reputation as one of the most capable and most personally engaged core commanders of the campaign in northwest Europe only grew. His memoirs later becoming standard reading for a generation of British officers trying to understand what command under those conditions actually demanded of a man.

Major John Brunt is buried in Reichswald Forest War Cemetery near Cleve among more than 7,000 Commonwealth soldiers who did not come home from this campaign. A cemetery that sits with a kind of grim symmetry almost within sight of the forest that gave the operation its name. His Victoria Cross is held today by the Sherwood Foresters Regimental Museum in Nottingham, a short walk from the school where he once taught.

The Reichs Wald itself still stands. The pines that were shredded to matchwood by shellfire in February 1945 have grown back, thick and green. And if you walk through the forest today, you can still find the bunkers, half collapsed and swallowed by bramble, concrete gone soft and gray with 80 years of weather. The firebreaks the Highlanders and the Welsh fought through foot by foot are quiet now, walking trails for people who have no idea what the ground beneath them once held.

It does not look like a place where 15,000 men were killed or wounded in the space of a month. It does not look like a fortress that took 5 years to build and barely 5 weeks to break. But it was, and the men who broke it, the Highlanders wading through flooded fields toward Cleve, the Welsh clearing bunkers tree by tree in the rain, the Wessex infantry grinding forward 8,000 yards toward under fire the whole way, a school teacher from Nottinghamshire who would not stop moving forward even after he had been wounded. None of them broke

it because they had better equipment or a cleverer plan or unusual luck. They broke it because the forest, the flood, and the finest paratroopers Germany had left all said stop and they did not. That is how the British broke through a forest the Germans had spent 5 years fortifying.

Not with a single brilliant stroke, not with overwhelming force arriving all at once, but yard by yard, wall by wall, day after day, until there was nothing left standing in the way. Thank you for staying with this story all the way through. It genuinely means a great deal. If it moved you, a like helps more than you’d think.

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