“Knock ’em all down.”
Those words, uttered by Lieutenant Colonel Derrill Daniel in October 1944, became the slogan of the US Army unit he commanded during the urban Battle of Aachen fought that month. For 2nd Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, the words were testimony to the challenge of dislodging stubborn German forces from a city characterized by heavily constructed buildings, fortified defensive positions, and subterranean spaces—all of which must be overcome while also contending with the presence of thousands of German civilians.
It was also a fight that, according to battlefield logic, neither side should have wanted. The city held little tactical or operational value. And yet, for a variety of reasons, it became symbolically, politically, and therefore strategically important. And so German forces were ordered to “hold this venerable German city to the last man,” and US forces tasked with capturing it.
The tenth installment of the Urban Warfare Project Case Study Series examines the battle. Despite little tactical or operational reason for fighting it, its conduct offers several key lessons at all three levels of war—tactical, operational, and strategic. This case study extracts those lessons. You can read it here, and be sure to follow the Urban Warfare Project for future case studies and regular exploration of the challenges faced by military forces operating in cities.
Liam Collins, PhD was the founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and a Fellow at New America. He is a retired Special Forces colonel with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and South America, with multiple combat operations in Fallujah in 2004. He is coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.
Major Jayson Geroux is an infantry officer with The Royal Canadian Regiment and is currently with the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre. He has been a fervent student of and has been involved in urban operations training for over two decades. He is an equally passionate military historian and has participated in, planned, executed, and intensively instructed on urban operations and urban warfare history for the past ten years. He has served twenty-eight years in the Canadian Armed Forces, which included operational tours to the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Afghanistan.
John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization with which the authors are affiliated, including the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Department of National Defence.