ON JANUARY 1, 1945, with the Ardennes counterattack effectively over but the Germans still in possession of the bulge created by it, Feldmarschall Model drew up an order for his men. It was pure bravado:
Beneath the thunder of the fierce winter battle in the West, we march over the threshold into the new year.
A year of the most difficult trials lies behind us. The German people withstood them all [as] you all stood guard on the Rhine.
Soldiers of the Eifel and Aachen! As the year turned, the Führer gave the order to attack. Your proven [bewährte] bravery and your incomparable worth as soldiers for Greater Germany have, despite all the difficulties of terrain, weather, and the enemy’s material superiority [Feindüberlegenheit], achieved great success under the most trying of conditions….
In 1945, you must once again, with boldness and steadfastness, seize the … sword of vengeance and raise it in our defence [in der Abwehr erfolgreich führen], and strike the enemy wherever you face him.
For the New Year, then, a new call:
The Front for the homeland!
The Homeland for the Front!
Adolf Hitler’s Germany shall fight until victory!1
Neither Bradley nor Eisenhower drew up a similar memorandum, and not only because American communiqués throughout the war were distinguished by uninspiring rhetoric. The Ardennes counterattack had caught them off guard, and, combined with stiffening resistance on the borders of the Reich, had seriously shaken Eisenhower’s nerves. He wrote to Marshall on January 7:
Due to the comparatively low scale of effort that the enemy is compelled to make on other fronts, an extremely high proportion of his personnel and material is pouring into the Western Front. Enemy units that have been badly cut up … are persistently and quickly built up. Replacements in tanks and men reach the front in a matter of days…. There is a noticeable and fanatical zeal on the part of nearly all his fighting men as well as the whole nation of 85,000,000 people, successfully unified by terror from within and fear of consequences from without. The Germans are convinced they are fighting for their very existence and their battle action reflects their spirit.2
All of this weighed heavily on Eisenhower as he considered the Allies’ strategy for a counterattack.
In organizing it, they faced four challenges. First, they had to push the Germans back to the lines of December 1944 and thus flatten the bulge created by the Germans’ unsuccessful drive for Antwerp. Second, they had to eliminate the Colmar pocket in Alsace. Third, they had to push through the dense fortifications of the West Wall, itself situated in a web of twisting rivers. Finally, they had to cross the Rhine River.
The question was where, at how many points, and what to do afterwards. Montgomery wanted a single northward thrust, a crossing of the Rhine north of Cologne, followed by a dash toward Berlin. Allied troops, led of course by Montgomery himself while the Americans did the dirty work of tying the Germans down in western Germany, would march triumphantly into the capital of the Third Reich. Bradley, by contrast, argued for a thrust through the Saarland, across the Rhine, and east toward Frankfurt.3 Several calculations informed Bradley’s position. Montgomery’s proposal would involve crossing soggy ground and multiple waterways, the bridges over which the Germans would surely blow up. Advancing directly eastward would carry the Allies over friendlier terrain, allow them to seize both the Ruhr as well as the industrially important area around Leipzig, and cut off any German effort to withdraw forces southward and create an Alpine fortress—a very real, if unwarranted, fear at the time. Finally, the fact that Montgomery authored the Berlin plan was itself an argument against it. The Americans had long found grating the British tendency to combine imperiousness with a begging hand, and by early 1945, they were disinclined to indulge it. As Eisenhower put it after the war, “Montgomery had become so personal in his effort to make sure that the Americans … got no credit, that, in fact, we hardly had anything to do with the war, that I finally stopped talking to him.”4 Eisenhower, who had originally backed Montgomery, switched to a broad-front strategy. By pushing into Germany along a line stretching from Bonn in the north to Mannheim in the south, the Allies would prevent the Germans from concentrating their full force on a devastating counterstrike.5 Two US corps would support Montgomery’s advance north, but the bulk of the American forces moved east toward Frankfurt.
Montgomery fought the Americans every step of the way, and at points he would win small tactical victories (the vetoing of a bridgeless Rhine crossing, for instance) that would intensely annoy Patton, Hodges, and Bradley. But in the end, his resistance was as futile as that of the Germans. From the Normandy landings, the Americans, backed up by immense wealth and firepower, were to determine the course of the war on the western front. The British were becoming ever more marginalized. Churchill was a master at covering British weakness in a thick blanket of inspirational oratory, but neither he nor anyone else in his bankrupt nation could reverse or even limit that decline. The British century had given way to the American, and it was the American politicians and American generals who would determine military strategy in the western theatre.
The die was cast. A combination of British and Canadian armies would move northeast toward Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, while other Canadian forces were to cut directly north in order to liberate Holland. The massive American Twelfth Army Group would move directly east into central Germany, where it would encircle, isolate, and capture the Ruhr, and then move onward to the Elbe. Meanwhile, Patton’s Third Army would move to the south through Metz and over the Moselle before heading to Jena and then cutting south into Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The restoration of the pre-December Allied position took until the last week of January. By the end of the month, the Allies were on Germany’s western edge, right up against the West Wall. Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group was the farthest north, with the Canadian First Army on top and the British Second below it. Just south of the British Second was the US Ninth Army, which was temporarily under Montgomery’s command. He held an area running from Arnhem in the north, across the Waal and Maas (Meuse) Rivers, and along the Roer River to the dams near Jülich. The First US Army was in the middle section, in an area running from Liège in the north down past Bastogne in the south. Finally, Patton’s Third Army was in Lorraine, while Devers’s Sixth Army Group was in Alsace. In front of the Allies lay the Moselle and the small, twisting rivers of the Eifel; the great Roer dams; the dense Hürtgen Forest; and, running north–south, the belt of concrete pillboxes, minefields, entrenchments, and antitank obstacles that made up the West Wall.6 And of course the bulk of the Reich lay behind that great natural and psychological barrier: the Rhine River.7
In late January, in three well-orchestrated operations, the Allies attacked. General Devers’s Sixth Army Group, made up of French and American troops, launched a series of assaults on the German front in Alsace. Devers’s forces were on the edge of Colmar itself by February 2, when the 109th Infantry Regiment, which could have easily taken the town, stood aside to let the French Fifth Armoured roll in and enjoy the local population’s ecstatic welcome. De Lattre then ordered his men to cut southwest toward Rouffach; US General Allen’s Twelfth Armored took the town while the French I Corps troops met other tasks. The Colmar pocket was cut in two, and German forces surrounded the Vosges Mountains. The US Third Division’s Thirtieth Infantry Regiment, meanwhile, moved on Neuf-Brisach. A French civilian guided the Americans through a “secret” tunnel into the town. There, seventy-six German soldiers calmly awaited captivity. Their officers, shortly before fleeing, had ordered them to the resist to the last man.8 Finally, de Lattre attempted a second encirclement, trapping the Germans between Neuf-Brisach and the Rhine. He just missed. The 708th Volksgrenadier Division led a desperate evacuation across the Rhine against orders; it escaped intact, and remnants of other units followed. By February 9, American and French troops had, after bitter, sometimes hand-to-hand fighting, destroyed German resistance in the Colmar pocket. Alsace was liberated, and Allied troops had reached the upper Rhine, the gateway to southern Germany and Austria.
The day before, at the northern end of the front, Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group had launched a coordinated operation from positions around Nijmegen. In the early hours of February 8, 769 aircraft of Bomber and Fighter Command launched devastating tactical raids on German towns southeast of Nijmegen. Then, over a thousand guns opened fire in a massive artillery assault. “The concentration of fire,” concluded the official Canadian history of the war, “which fell on the German 84th Division that day was probably not equalled on a similar front during the entire war in the west.”9 The results for the division, hardly one of Germany’s best, were severe: collapsed communications, dazed gun crews unable to offer any resistance, and everywhere “an impression of the overwhelming force opposed to them.”10 In what must have been a stunning contrast, the battlefield suddenly fell silent as the Canadians laid out a smokescreen across the entire front. Under the thick cover, four divisions emerged slowly from the woods behind Groesbeek (south of Nijmegen) and pulled up to their start lines. The First Canadian Army was preparing its advance into Germany.
These forces faced the West Wall fortifications, roads blocked with concrete and steel, strongpoints at every farm and village, and the forest itself.11 They would soon face a further obstacle: rising water. On February 9, the Germans set off charges on the Roer dams, flooding the surrounding area.12
Patton, meanwhile, made a plunge from the south toward Trier while his men cleared the Germans out of the “Orscholz switch,” the area created by the confluence of the Moselle and the Saar. After persuading Bradley to allow him to retain Eleventh Armored Division longer than SHAEF instructions allowed, Patton drove triumphantly into Trier along Caesar’s road, smelling “the sweat of the legions.”13 The quick capture of the city may have spared its utilities: German soldiers, dressed in civilian clothing, had placed naval limpet bombs and plastic explosives in a generator bearing house (supplying electricity to the city) and two hundred pounds of explosives in the city’s waterworks generator house.14 Not everyone was obeying Speer.
On February 23, one week before Patton entered Trier, US General William Simpson’s Ninth Army launched Operation Grenade, designed to bring the Americans then in the area near Aachen to the northeast in order to meet the Canadians, who were moving southeast. They faced a similar set of obstacles: two forests, the flooded Roer, the Erft River connecting the Roer and Rhine, and German fortifications.15 The greatest challenge was jumping the flooded Roer; Simpson was able to get his men across in boats, but the Germans proved adept at wrecking the Americans’ efforts to establish bridges over which armour could cross. The strong current also certainly did not help. The result was often that infantry on the eastern side had to face the Germans without tanks.
After the tough Roer crossing, the Americans met pockets of determined resistance, but the advance was rapid. American forces reached the Rhine but still had to cross it. And to cross it, they needed bridges. At multiple points—in Düsseldorf, Krefeld-Uerdingen, Rheinhausen (not far south of Duisburg), and Wesel—the Americans came close to and sometimes within a hair’s breadth of intact bridges only to see them collapse under the force of German explosives. Other units heard the distant sound of exploding bridges up and down the Rhine. In the face of repeated disasters, Simpson proposed crossing the Rhine without a bridge between Düsseldorf and Uerdingen, turning right down the bank of the river to secure other crossings, making for open country on the northern edge of the Ruhr, and moving east to capture Hamm.16 Montgomery vetoed the operation on the ostensible grounds that the crossing would make the industrial Ruhr into a battleground (it would not have), but in truth, he wished to deny the Americans a crossing and claim maximum glory for his own set-piece Rhine crossing.17 Montgomery’s vanity possibly denied the Allies an early Rhine crossing and Ruhr envelopment, but fortune conspired to deny him the fame associated with the first Rhine crossing.
As the Ninth Army moved northeast across the Roer in late February, and while Patton’s Third Army launched the southward “probes” that would eventually take Trier, Hodges’s First Army moved toward Cologne.18 By March 5, Collins’s VII Corps reported that the city was almost within his grasp, and by March 7, General Hodges visited Cologne’s imposing cathedral, rising relatively unscathed over the smouldering shell that remained of the ravaged city.19 Rhinelanders almost immediately began approaching American soldiers, calling them “liberators,” and taverns offered GIs free beer and wine. A few civilians nervously asked, “They’re not coming back, are they?”20
As Collins approached Cologne and the Rhine, disintegrating German units staggered backward, retreating over the river in boats and over temporary bridges. Up and down the river, they continued to destroy bridges, which fell into the water like dominoes. As they did, one of Speer’s men vented his frustration in writing. “It is madness,” he wrote on March 7, “to sink our towboats [Schlepper] and most essential bridges, which we need most urgently. This amounts to abandoning voluntarily the entire territory west of the Rhine. These actions … must be prevented in the future.”21
One bridge, a traditionally not very important one, remained. As the US VII Corps eliminated the last pockets of opposition around Cologne, US First Army’s III Corps under Major General John Millikin moved toward the Ahr River, which flows perpendicularly into the Rhine on the latter’s west side. On March 7, the Corps’s Ninth Armored Division ordered one column from its Combat Command B—its primary fighting units—to jump the Ahr near its confluence with the Rhine while the other moved toward Remagen.22
The Thirty-Ninth Infantry Regiment, meanwhile, moved on Bad Godesberg, just south of Bonn. When the Second Battalion approached the city, Colonel Lunn, the battalion commander, and a Major Carrier reached a Roman Catholic orphanage on the Godeshöhe.23 There, a Sister Elisabethine offered to help Major Carrier, who wanted to give Bad Godesberg the opportunity to surrender. Undeterred by several failed attempts, he reached a professor of medicine, Hans Schulten. Schulten, in turn, reported the surrender offer to Bad Godesberg’s acting mayor, Heinrich Ditz. (The town’s actual mayor had fled across the Rhine.) Ditz was already on side. The person who mattered was the local army commander (Stadtkommandant), but he had already packed up and left town. On the same day, however, a Generalleutnant Richard Schimpf had led his Third Parachute Division—about six thousand men—into the vicinity of Bad Godesberg.
Fortunately for Bad Godesberg, Schimpf had little intention of keeping them there. Ignoring Model’s order to defend the city, he started withdrawing his entire division to the right side of the Rhine, denuding Bad Godesberg of Wehrmacht soldiers. He then went to the Swiss consul general, Dr. Franz-Rudolph von Weiss, hoping to place himself under the neutral state’s protection. He had come to the right place. Weiss could not offer him protection, but he could offer assistance. The consul general had befriended another local doctor, Paul Pies, and Pies had urged him to negotiate with the Americans. Weiss declined, saying he had no authority to do so.
On March 8, these disconnected efforts converged. Pies repeatedly called city hall, where someone finally told him, “Do whatever you want!” Meanwhile, Heinrich Ditz was already driving out to meet Colonel Lunn at the orphanage; he was harassed by scornful German soldiers shouting “traitor!” at him along the way. Ditz told Lunn that the city’s commander, Schimpf, had not authorized his visit but that the commander was prepared to hand the city over without a fight. Ditz had derived this conclusion from the sort of conversation typical among resisters: nothing was said directly, but hints, meaningful silences, and coded language had made it clear that the commander would not do anything to endanger a peaceful surrender. Weiss, who had arrived in the meantime, tried his best to support Ditz’s efforts and intervened enthusiastically in French, which Lunn did not understand and found more grating than helpful. The American asked an interpreter to tell Weiss to shut up, which she did with sufficient diplomacy to keep the conversation intact.
Although his diplomatic skills at the orphanage left something to be desired, Weiss helped arrange the crucial meeting between Schimpf and Lunn in a city hall bunker. Oddly, chemistry developed between them: the two officers learned that their divisions had met on the battlefield at Normandy, a fact that engendered mutual respect rather than hostility. Major Carrier even requested a souvenir; Schimpf retrieved and handed over his battle knife. In the middle of the discussions, General Manteuffel called from Bonn for a report on the defence measures in Bad Godesberg. Weiss, without giving his name and without handing the phone to Schimpf, replied, “The city is surrendering.” Manteuffel assured Weiss that he, Manteuffel, would “hang on” (that is, hold the front). Bad Godesberg would not: Schimpf had already officially capitulated around noon that day, March 8, 1945. Not a shot had been fired, and—unusually for a Rhine city—it emerged from the war (almost) intact. Military personnel on both sides played the decisive roles: Lunn and Carrier did not tire in their efforts to offer the surrender of the city, and Schimpf withdrew his forces. With civilians, keen as almost ever to surrender, and Weiss playing an important mediating role, all cylinders were firing. Had more German commanders been of Schimpf’s ilk, the war in western Germany might have had a very different outcome. As it was, most fought on, leading to terrible loss of life and the utter ruination of a once beautiful country they were ostensibly protecting.
*
AS THE WAR DREW to a relatively happy close for Bad Godesberg, US Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Engeman’s task force, containing an infantry and a tank platoon, was en route to Remagen. At 13:00 on March 7, the infantry platoon emerged from the woods overlooking the town. Second Lieutenant Emmet J. Burrows looked down at the spectacular view over the Rhine and Remagen—and at an intact bridge.
Burrows reported immediately to his company commander, who in turn reported to Engeman. The Combat Command B operations officer radioed the news to the commander, General William M. Hoge. Hoge rushed to Remagen, turning the risks and benefits over in his mind. The benefit: an intact bridge over the Rhine. The risks: an entire platoon blown into the air while crossing the bridge, or an entire battalion destroyed by the Germans waiting on the other side.24 By 15:00, he had made up his mind. Hoge ordered Engeman to take the bridge immediately. As he did, a report arrived: a German, likely an unknown civilian from Remagen seeking to save a lifeline to his city, swore to the Americans that the bridge was to be blown up at 16:00.25 Remagen lies on the west bank of the Rhine, so the Americans would first have to fight their way through the town in order to reach it. First Lieutenant Karl H. Timmerman pushed his infantry and tanks through Remagen against scattered resistance, reaching the bridge just before 16:00.26 His infantrymen opened fire as they dashed for the bridge, trying to prevent the Germans from setting off charges.27 The Germans returned fire from the towers, and the ground exploded in front of the Americans’ feet: the Germans were trying to create a tank obstacle.28 As Timmerman’s men reached the bridge, Hauptmann Karl Friesenhahn, the bridge engineer officer, dashed across it under American fire, igniting reserve charges at the bridge’s supports.29 The air cracked with the sound of an explosion, the great bridge rose from its supports, and smoke filled the air. As the smoke and dust settled, the Americans strained their eyes to survey the damage. The bridge remained intact. Why it did so remains unclear to this day: the Germans attributed it to a lucky American shot that severed the main cable needed for the demolitions, but a German soldier or foreign labourer might well have sabotaged the explosives.30 Whatever the reason, the bridge stood, and Timmerman ordered his men forward. Under machine-gun fire, they dashed from cover to cover under the girders, cutting every wire they saw as they went. From the banks, American tanks took out German infantry firing from a river barge and returned enough fire against other German machine-gun positions to make the crossing possible. The bridge was theirs.
Omar Bradley was with Major General Harold R. Bull, the head of operations at shaef, when Hodges called in the news. “Brad,” Hodges breathed into the phone, “Brad, we’ve gotten a bridge.”
“A bridge?” Bradley replied. “You mean you’ve got one intact on the Rhine?”
“Yep,” Hodges replied. “Leonard nabbed the one at Remagen before they blew it up.”31
Bradley was elated. He ordered Hodges to keep pushing men across and to secure the bridgehead.
General Harold Bull was not. He informed Bradley that there were no plans for a crossing at Remagen. Furious, Bradley replied, “What in the hell do you want us to do, pull back and blow it up?”32 Bull’s position was not quite as absurd as Bradley suggests in his memoirs. It reflected both a pedant’s conviction that the original plan for a first crossing in Montgomery’s sector had to be respected and the more reasonable argument that a Cologne-to-Koblenz crossing would run into less friendly terrain than either a northern or a Mainz-to-Karlsruhe one.33 But his argument of course missed the larger picture. The point, insisted Bradley’s chief of staff, was that the only bridge the Allies controlled just happened to be between Cologne and Koblenz: “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”34
The Germans certainly feared the Americans would see it that way. They were incandescent at the loss of the bridge. Rundstedt ordered its immediate destruction, and he launched an official investigation into dereliction of duty. He then ordered that the bridge be attacked at once through a coordinated assault by all elements of the Eleventh Panzer Division, backed up by transfers from Army Group G and the Luftwaffe.35 It had little effect, either in stopping the Americans or in saving his job: Hitler sacked him on March 8 and replaced him with Kesselring.
As German artillery and bombs pelted the area around the bridge, Major General John Millikin ordered two new ones built, and reinforcements streamed across the three bridges, continually expanding the bridgehead on the east bank.36 By March 9, Bradley had placed huge concentrations of new troops along the entire west bank of the Rhine, with a particularly heavy concentration between Krefeld and Cologne. By the tenth, German troops on the other side faced a wall of American foot soldiers and American firepower stretching from Cologne in the north to Koblenz in the south, and the Remagen bridgehead itself was some twelve kilometres wide.37
The Germans did everything they could to destroy it. They wrecked every craft that reached the east side of the river, and they ordered every possible means of destroying the bridge itself: swimming saboteurs and torpedoes, floating mines, conventional air attacks, and, increasingly desperate, even suicide attacks.38 The bridge eventually fell, though nothing it seems was owed to German efforts: their forces were nowhere near the bridge at the time. On March 17, some two hundred American engineers were working on the bridge. They heard one sharp, short crack. Then another. The deck of the bridge trembled, and dust rose from the shaking planks. “It was,” remarks the US Army’s official historian, “every man for himself”: the men scrambled for the edges, and “with a grinding roar of tearing steel,” the Remagen bridge “slipped, sagged, and with a convulsive twist plunged into the Rhine.”39 The bridge collapsed too soon for the twenty-eight Americans consumed by the Rhine but too late for the Germans: sufficient American forces had already crossed to hold the bridgehead, including the First Division of Collins’s VIII Corps, which absorbed on its arrival the Seventy-Eighth Division. The Americans opened a second bridge the day the bridge at Remagen collapsed, and three more quickly followed.
*
AS THE AMERICANS SECURED the bridgehead, the National Socialist regime and the Wehrmacht radicalized further. Within the army, there were signs of disintegration. Trains across the Reich were overflowing with deserters hiding among the legions of refugees fleeing the east.40 Both groups were fleeing not only Soviet but also German brutality: the SS regularly shot soldiers and civilians trying to flee and massacred concentration camp victims wholesale. Throughout the country, stragglers became separated or, increasingly often, slipped away from their units. In many if not most cases, they were deserters. The regime’s response to this flight was predictably brutal. On March 6, Rundstedt signed an order commanding all stragglers to attach themselves immediately to the nearest unit on the fighting front. From the fifteenth, the order continued, all unwounded soldiers found away from their units on roads, in villages, in civilian houses, on trains, or in civilian clothes were to be tried by a regimental court martial.41 A guilty verdict meant death.
On the day the order took effect, Kesselring, who had assumed command in the West on March 10, ordered the execution of five officers for failing to destroy the Remagen bridge. Casually reproducing Nazi bombast, Kesselring added the following pearl of wisdom: “he who will not live in honour shall die in shame.”42 He ordered that the decision be made known to all the troops.43 Dönitz, for the navy, sent out an equally zealous appeal to commanders in chief in all services: “[C]apitulation means suicide … Let us fanaticise our troops. Let us show hatred against our enemies…. Let us trust blindly … the leadership of Adolf Hitler…. However the situation may develop, we must stand four-square, embattled, unbowed. We shall never bend our backs to the enemy yoke.”44
Once German High Command accepted that they were not going to push the Americans back over the Rhine, they launched efforts to contain the Remagen bridgehead. It ordered the under-strength 198th Infantry and 559th Grenadier Divisions to move immediately toward the American bridgehead.45 The same day, the Germans ordered on their own cities the sort of area “terror attacks” that their propaganda had denounced for three years. Using a mix of one-third high explosive, one-third incendiary, and one-third fragmentation bombs, Army Group B’s Fifteenth Airborne Division (Fliegerdivision) was to wipe out a clutch of towns around the Remagen bridgehead: Bad Honnef, Unkel, Erpel, and Linz am Rhein.46 No mention was made of the civilian population in these towns, or the fact that fragmentation bombs in particular would have led to extensive casualties. The attacks either were not launched or were aborted not because of any humanitarian concerns but because the headquarters of Fifteenth Fliegerdivision in Flammersfeld, forty kilometres to the east of Remagen, had disintegrated a week earlier. Its men abandoned their equipment and fled eastward.47
These increasingly frantic efforts had no effect on the bridgehead and, if anything, served the Americans well by keeping German attention focused on what was to be a limited affair, the symbolism of the crossing notwithstanding. Hodges expressed great frustration with the steady but slow expansion of the bridgehead, and he sacked Millikin on March 17. In the end, however, American forces barely advanced beyond lines envisaged by Millikin. Collins’s men launched a strong thrust north, reaching the southern outskirts of Königswinter.48 On the eighteenth, patrols from the III Corps’s Ninety-Ninth Division reached the Wied River due east of Remagen, while other contingents of the same division moved south to a point across Andernach. An enraged Hitler ordered the transfer of artillery from Army Group B.49 As the army group was staring destruction in the face, such a transfer was hardly possible. Model, a human being whose manifest failings did not include an unwillingness to speak truth to power, had said as much on March 14.50 What Hitler could not have known was that Eisenhower had by then decided to limit his forces to the goal of holding the bridgehead; it would not be the basis for a great thrust south and east toward Frankfurt. Bull had persistently resisted Bradley’s efforts to see the transfer of a large number of Allied forces in order to exploit the Rhine crossing to the fullest, and, like a slow drip on hard stone, these arguments may have worn Eisenhower down. The ghosts of the Ardennes were also looking over his shoulders: conscious of limited Allied reserves, he was highly reluctant to concentrate his forces on any one crossing, be it British or American, lest the Germans launch another great counterattack. And, finally, Eisenhower had committed the necessary divisions to Montgomery’s great set-piece crossing in the north, a crossing that the imperious field marshal was about to launch.
German positions in front of the Allies were beginning to disintegrate. Hitler, for a time, stuck as ever to his orders against withdrawal. Overwhelmed by a new-found American aggression in attack, combined with a mastery of mobile warfare, dazed units from the German First and Seventh Armies were captured, surrendered, or staggered back toward the Rhine, awaiting their destruction as they organized a hopeless last defence.51 Then, on March 23, the withdrawal order came through. Scattered forces held perimeters at ferry sites, and those forces that could made a dash for the last remaining bridge across the Rhine—one at Germersheim, south of Speyer.52 “The order,” noted a US Nineteenth Infantry Division combat report, “that every village [be] a fortress, every house a pillbox had been replaced by ‘every man for himself.’”53 On March 24, the Germans, mindful of another Remagen, blew up this bridge too, leaving large numbers of forces trapped on the other side. In approximately ten days, Patton had enveloped the German Seventh Army, while he and Patch together enveloped the German First Army. Together, they captured over ninety thousand prisoners.54 Importantly, they were on the Rhine.
On the morning of March 23, as the Fifth Division faced stiff resistance, Patton called Bradley: “I’m across.” After a delay requested by Patton to avoid alerting the Germans, Bradley took great pleasure in giving the Third Army report at the army group briefing that morning: “without benefit of aerial bombing, ground smoke, artillery preparation, and airborne assistance, the Third Army at 2200 hours, Thursday evening, March 22, crossed the Rhine River.”55 It was a swipe at Montgomery over timing and over the British field marshal’s dramatically staged assault on the river.
Patton’s Rhine crossing must have been thrilling, but beating Montgomery to it mattered little. The most important point was that four armies had crossed the Rhine up the length of the front. The Western Allies were ready to pour into the heart of Germany. There, inside its homeland, the Wehrmacht—driven by fear, loyalty, and in some quarters, committed National Socialist sentiment and/or a genuine belief that the Allies’ goal was not a victory over the Nazi regime but the total obliteration of the German nation—prepared to meet them. On March 30, Jodl issued a call for uncompromising resistance. “The enemy must be taught over the next days that he has stumbled into a country with a fanatical will to fight. He must suffer great material losses…. The Führer expects every commander and officer [Oberbefehlshaber und Befehlshaber] to throw every ounce of themselves into this task … and that they inspire a fanaticism against the swiftly moving [in Bewegung geratenen] enemy. Concern for the [civilian] population can play no role here.”56
Notes
1. Tagesbefehl für Neujahr 1945, BArch RH 20-7-146, fol. 2.
2. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 4:2408–9.
3. Bradley, Soldier’s Story, 398–9.
4. Quotation and review of strategic considerations from Stephen G. Fritz, Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 19–20.
5. Bradley, Soldier’s Story, 420, 436.
6. On the defensive value of the West Wall, see Manfred Groß, Westwallkämpfe: Die Angriffe der Amerikaner 1944/45 zwischen Ormont (Rheinland-Pfalz) und Geilenkirchen (Nordrhein-Westfalen). Eine Dokumentation (Aachen: Helios, 2008).
7. This description draws on MacDonald, Last Offensive, 58–9.
8. Story of O’Daniel and Neuf-Brisach from Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 599.
9. C. P. Stacey, Official History of the Canadian Army, vol. 3, The Victory Campaign: The Operations in North-West Europe, 1944–1945 (Ottawa: Department of National Defence, 1960), 467; Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., German Order of Battle (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007), 1:142.
10. Stacey, Official History of the Canadian Army, 3:468.
11. Ken Ford, The Rhineland 1945: The Last Killing Ground in the West (Oxford: Osprey, 2000), 29; “The Winter Crossing of 1944/45 on the Western Front,” n.d., LH, Pyman Papers.
12. “Boniface” report, February 10, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3516.
13. Quoted in Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 595.
14. G-2 Period Report, March 26, 1945, NACP, RG 407, 101-2.1.
15. For the details, see MacDonald, Last Offensive, 138–9.
16. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 614.
17. Ibid., 615.
18. “Ground Situation, 7pm/22/2,” February 22, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3539.
19. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 626. Myth has it that British bombers spared the cathedral because it provided a marker guiding them to the city. This is nonsense. British radar was more than capable of identifying cities by 1942, but British bombing was not precise enough to destroy a city while sparing a church. Furthermore, the British had no interest in doing so. The cathedral owes its survival to its size, solidity, shape—the long, thin steeples meant that many bombs would have bounced off of them—and to that great saviour of cultural sites in the bombing war: pure chance.
20. “First Impressions of Cologne,” Annex No. 2 to First U.S. Army G-2 Period Report No. 275, March 1945, NACP, RG 407, 101-2.1.
21. Aktennotiz “Speer,” March 7, 1945, BArch R 3/1623a, fol. 19.
22. Details from MacDonald, Last Offensive, 212–3. Combat Commands were armed task forces roughly the size of brigade or regiment (3,000 to 5,000 troops); Combat Commands A and B contained the primary fighting elements in a division, and Combat Command R was the reserve, though the last was often actively engaged in operations. See Don M. Fox, Patton’s Vanguard: The United States Fourth Armored Division (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003), 26.
23. This section on Bad Godesberg draws on Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1995), 357–61.
24. MacDonald, Last Offensive, 215.
25. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 627.
26. Ibid.
27. Hermann Janowski, “Army Group B, Engineer Staff 113 (March 1945),” n.d., USAMHI, D793.F6713, B 072.
28. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 627.
29. Janowski, “Army Group B, Engineer Staff 113 (March 1945),” n.d., USAMHI, D793.F6713, B 072.
30. MacDonald, Last Offensive, 230. For a review of the possibilities, see Ken Hechler, The Bridge at Remagen: The Amazing Story of March 7, 1945—The Day the Rhine River Was Crossed, rev. ed. (1957; repr. Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 1995), chapter 21, “Facts and Fiction.”
31. Quotations from Bradley, Soldier’s Story, 510.
32. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 628.
33. Ibid., 628–9.
34. Ibid., 629.
35. West Europe, March 7, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3580, CX/MSS/T482/75.
36. West Europe, March 11, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3591, TOO 2100. It was thanks, once again, to American air superiority that the Luftwaffe was only able to attack with two to three airplanes at a time and lacked any fighters for horizontal attacks. With them, the Germans might have destroyed the bridgehead. Albert Kesselring, “Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen,” 1954, USAMHI, D 739.F6713.
37. West Europe, March 11, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3591, TOO 2100.
38. Naval Headlines 1349, March 14, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3601; UKNA, HW 1/3616, TOO 1800, March 16, 1945; West Europe, March 19, 1945, UKNA HW 1/3586, TOO 0100. The Americans report dive-bomb attacks but no suicide attacks. G-2 Periodic Report, March 10, 1945, NACP, RG 407, 101-2.1. On the Germans’ anticipation of American moves after Remagen, see West Europe, March 9, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3583, TOO 0030.
39. MacDonald, Last Offensive, 229–30. I owe the imagery of rising dust and the trembling bridge to MacDonald.
40. “Conduct of the War in the West,” Annex No. 2 to G-2 Periodic Report No. 265, March 1945, NACP, RG 407, 101-2.1.
41. West Europe, March 7, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3580, CX/MSS/T482/22. One captain was sentenced in absentia. Kesselring showed no contrition for the action after the war: USAMHI, D 739.F6713, Kesselring, “Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen,” 1954.
42. West: Military, March 15, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3611.
43. Ibid.
44. Naval Headlines 1344, March 9, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3583. “Unbowed” was “undismayed” in the original translation, but “unbowed” captures Dönitz’s meaning more accurately.
45. West Europe, March 15, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3614, TOO 2000. On the divisions at this point, see Mitcham, German Order of Battle, 1:247 and 2:156 for the 198th Infantry Division and the 559th Grenadier Division, respectively.
46. West Europe, March 16, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3611, TOO 1400.
47. West Europe, March 19, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3603, TOO 0930.
48. West Europe, March 16, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3617, TOO 1400.
49. Ops Orders for the night of 20–21/3, March 20, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3624, TOO 1230/20/3/45.
50. West Europe, March 14, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3614, TOO 1400.
51. For the details, see MacDonald, Last Offensive, 262–4.
52. Ibid., 264.
53. 94th Infantry Division G-2 After Action Reports, 1 March 1945 to 31 March 1945, NACP, RG 407, 394–2.
54. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, 639.
55. These quotations from ibid., 643.
56. Order from Jodl transmitted by Bormann to all Gauleiter, Reichsleiter, and Reichsjugendführer, March 30, 1945, BArch R 3/1623a, fol. 72.