   Colonel Alois Weber surveyed the wretched lines of men retreating down the little country road. What a sorry lot his division had become! He remembered when the 79th Infantry Division had been one of the top infantry divisions in the Wehrmacht. It had a long and proud history spanning the war in Europe: Poland 1939, France 1940, and Russia 1941. The Russian campaign had been a meatgrinder, culminating for the 79th Division in the disaster at Stalingrad, where the entire division had been lost. The command staff had been flown out and then broken up, reassigned to other divisions. But Hitler refused to accept the total destruction of any of his divisions, at least in name. So it was that, in August of 1944, Weber as the highest-ranking survivor of the original 79th had been assigned to rebuild the division using new recruits.
   But the new 79th Volksgrenadier had gotten the dregs of everything. The recruits were all "stomach soldiers", older men who had been passed over in earlier drafts for physical ailments. There were no assault guns or self-propelled artillery. Even the horse-drawn artillery was old and worn-out.
   On the morning of the 24th they had launched their first assault. The men showed surprising elan in this their first fight. But soon the Americans counterattacked with a tornado of artillery fire, and Weber's men had been slaughtered. Now they were retreating to regroup. Weber looked hard at the men shambling down the road. There was no fight left in these men. On paper, the 79th Volksgrenadier Division was strong and ready. In reality, it was a collection of tired and beaten refugees.
/Volksgrenadier Divisions
   In the summer of 1944 the German Army suffered twin disasters that broke its back. In Normandy, the Sixth Panzer Army was annihilated in the Falaise-Argentan pocket. On the Eastern Front, the Russian summer offensive had fallen on Army Group Center like a sledge hammer, and the entire army group simply dissolved. In just three weeks, Army Group Center alone lost 25 divisions, 30 generals, and 200,000 men.
   These calamities consumed not just men, but also the divisional structures that organized the soldiers. The Wehrmacht needed completely new divisions. So in August of 1944, a new type of division was created: the Volksgrenadier ("People's Grenadier") Division. The name was cruel puffery. Grenadiers were the elite soldiers of 18th-century European armies, the strongest and tallest men hand-picked for the most dangerous work. The closest translation into American idiom would be "Neighborhood Green Berets".
   Each Volksgrenadier division was built around the remnants of a regular infantry division. To this nucleus was added a motley collection of boy soldiers, 60-year-olds, wounded returning from the hospitals, men previously rejected as physically unfit, and transfers from the Navy and the Luftwaffe. Because there wasn't enough time to train them properly, they were armed with the simplest of weapons: rifles, machine pistols, and Panzerfausts. After just three months of training, they were thrown into the battle.
   The Volksgrenadier divisions made their big debut at the Battle of the Bulge. They were a bloody failure. After that, they were used solely for defensive operations./