The 28th Infantry Division in the Hürtgen Forest: Forgotten Sacrifice

The five-month Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, fought from September 1944 to February 1945, cost the U.S. Army more than 34,000 casualties yet has often been overshadowed by Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge. The 28th Infantry Division suffered especially heavily, losing thousands of men killed, wounded, or missing during brutal fighting in dense forests, fortified villages, and difficult terrain close to the German frontier.

This account examines the division’s role in the campaign and places its sacrifice within the broader Allied effort to break German resistance in the region. Drawing on numerous first-hand accounts, Walter S. Zapotoczny Jr. reconstructs one of the U.S. Army’s bloodiest and most difficult campaigns of the Second World War and explains why the fighting in the Hürtgen Forest came to be remembered as a forgotten sacrifice.