THE RHINE was by far the most formidable of the rivers the GIs had to cross. It rises in the Alps and flows generally north to Arnhem, where it makes a sharp turn to the west. It was between 200 and 500 meters wide, swift and turbulent, with great whirlpools and eddies, two to three meters deep. The Germans on the far bank were disorganized and demoralized, dismayed by their losses in the insanity of trying to fight it out on the Cologne Plain, but still determined and capable of utilizing the natural advantages the Rhine gave them to defend their country.
Those advantages included the scarcity of suitable crossing sites. There were only two or three places from Cologne south that were even possible. Worse, along that stretch there were no major objectives on the east bank or inland for some fifty kilometers and the hinterland was unsuitable for offensive warfare. The terrain was heavily wooded, undulating and broken in many places by narrow valleys.1 The roads twisted and turned, rose and fell, as in the Ardennes.
North of Cologne, Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group had many suitable crossing sites, good terrain for a mobile offensive, and major objectives just across the Rhine in the Ruhr Valley. Beyond the Ruhr the north German plain led straight to Berlin. So while Eisenhower’s heart was with Bradley, Hodges, and Patton, his mind was up north, with Monty. Gen. Harold “Pinky” Bull, SHAEF G-3, and his planners had decided that up north was the right place for the main crossing. Eisenhower agreed, but warned that “the possibility of failure cannot be overlooked. I am, therefore, making logistic preparations which will enable me to switch my main effort from the north to the south should this be forced upon me.”2
To the north, Montgomery’s armies were closing to the river. As they did, he began to build his supply base for the assault crossing and exploitation that would follow. Altogether he required 250,000 tons of supplies, for the British and Canadian forces and the U.S. Ninth Army and 17th Airborne Division. Ninth Army had been part of Twenty-first Army Group since the preceding fall; the 17th Airborne Division had arrived in Europe in December and had been thrown immediately into the Battle of the Bulge. It had combat experience, but had not made a combat jump and was currently making practice jumps in Belgium.
Montgomery’s staff had begun planning for the Rhine crossing back in October 1944, as soon as it was evident that Market-Garden had failed. The final plan was almost as elaborate as for Overlord, the scope almost as big. Eighty thousand men, slightly less than half the number of men who went into France on June 6, 1944, would cross the Rhine by boat or transport airplane on the first day for Operations Plunder (the crossing by boat) and Varsity (the airborne phase), with an immediate follow-up force of 250,000 and an ultimate force of one million.
As usual, Montgomery proceeded with what Weigley has characterized as the majestic deliberation of a pachyderm. He set D-Day for March 24. For the two weeks preceding the assault, he laid down a massive smoke screen that concealed the buildup—and gave the Germans ample warning about where he was going to cross. He gathered 600 rounds of ammunition per artillery piece. Beginning March 11, the air forces pounded the Germans on the east bank, hitting them with 50,000 tons of bombs. Monty invited Churchill and many other dignitaries to join him to watch the big show.
Beginning February 28, Ninth Army had been pushing east toward the Rhine. Progress was slow and costly. Company K, 333rd Regiment, received orders to advance on and take the village of Hardt, between the Roer and the Rhine. After an all-day march through mud and cold, followed by a few hours’ rest, the company formed up an hour before dawn. More than half the company were replacements. Everyone was groggy, exhausted even before the day began. And wary, since they knew their flank was open yet they were pressing on deeper into the German lines.
Sgt. George Pope got delayed in getting his squad to jump off. “And here comes [Capt. George] Gieszl and the battalion commander, right? And the battalion CO says, ‘For Christ’s sakes, Pope, it’s after eight and you haven’t . . .’ And I stopped the colonel right there and said, ‘What’s the big fucking rush? Where the fuck you think you are at, Louisiana on maneuvers? This ain’t maneuvers, this is real shit, and I’m going out there, not you.’ That’s what I told the colonel, right? I didn’t give a crap about nothing.”3
The company moved out, got to Hardt, attacked, and got stopped by machine-gun fire and a shower of 88s. Two men were killed. The others hit the ground. Pvt. Mel Cline called on skills he’d not used since basic training. “We were flat, prone on our bellies. This German machine gunner was directly to our front. That was the only time in combat that I fired aimed shots like we did on the range in training. We could see this German come up from his hole, fire, and duck down again. I adjusted my sights, got the range, and squeezed off several clips before I finally hit his gun and put him out of action. When we reached his hole, I found the bullet had glanced off his machine gun and mangled his arm.”4
Pvt. Leonard Bowditch was in a turnip patch when he was hit with shrapnel in the knee. “They were getting ready to evacuate me, and Lieutenant Leinbaugh was talking to several of us who had been wounded. I told him I wanted him to have my scarf as a good-luck piece, so I gave it to him and he wrapped it around his neck. He told me it couldn’t have been too lucky, since I had just been hit. I said it worked just fine for me since I had a million-dollar wound and was going home.”5
Pope’s squad got caught in the open. “We were all pinned down,” he remembered, “and I see guys turning their heads, I felt like doing that myself. It was flat as a floor. There wasn’t a blade of grass you could hide under. I’m yelling, ‘Shoot, you sons of bitches!’ That was a tough time.”
Lt. Bill Masters took charge. He was in the edge of a wood with half of his platoon. The remainder of his men and the other platoons were getting pounded out in the open flat field. Masters recalled, “The fire was awfully heavy and the casualties were increasing. I decided I had to get these guys moving or a lot more were going to get killed.” He ran forward, swearing at the men to get them going as he passed them. “I got up as far as a sugar-beet mound that gave some cover, close enough to toss a grenade at the German machine gunner right in front of me. But I couldn’t get the grenade out of my pocket—it was stuck.” A German tossed a potato masher at Masters. “It landed right next to me but didn’t explode.”
The enemies commenced firing at each other. Both missed. Both ran out of ammunition at precisely the same time. Masters knelt on one knee, reloaded, as did the German. Again the enemies looked up at the same time, and fired simultaneously. Masters put a bullet between the machine gunner’s eyes. When Masters took off his helmet to wipe his brow, he found a bullet hole through the top.
Masters ran to the first building on the outskirts of town, where he had some cover. “I had this dead-end kid from Chicago I’d made my bodyguard [Pvt. Ray Bocarski]. He came in close behind me, and then a number of men pulled up and we went from building to building cleaning out the place and captured a sizable batch of German paratroopers in those houses.” Lt. Paul Leimkuehler gave a more vivid description of Masters’s action: “He killed a machine gunner and opened the way into that little town. He was leading, running down the main street like a madman, shooting up everything in his way.”6
The Germans had two 75s and two 88s presighted on the village. Armor-piercing shells crumbled the walls. Captain Gieszl and the FO called for a counterbarrage. Within minutes, the German guns were out of action. Over the next few days the company advanced toward the Rhine. Sometimes there was resistance, sometimes not. Just before the leading platoon got to the Rhine a German platoon barged into the middle of the company column. A point-blank exchange of rifle fire and grenades lasted several minutes. Four men were wounded, including Masters. Several Germans were killed, the rest surrendered.
By March 7, the company was in Krefeld, on the banks of the Rhine. By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment in which everything worked—electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. They had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles of cognac. Private Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week.7
That was not to be. Having reached the river, K Company along with the rest of Ninth Army would stay in place until Montgomery had everything ready for Operation Plunder. The troops badly needed the rest. The night after taking Hardt, Pvt. J. A. “Strawberry” Craft was so totally exhausted that after getting into his foxhole he told the sergeant he was going to sleep that night. The sergeant warned him, “You might wake up dead.” Craft replied, “I’ll just have to wake up dead.” Decades later he still remembered the exchange, and explained, “I needed the sleep, and I got it, too.”8
Sergeant Pope’s reply to his colonel had a counterpart in the 103rd Division. Sgt. Joe Skocz was out on a night patrol. His lead scout was a veteran of sixty-five days of combat and had always done his duty. Suddenly the patrol stopped. Skocz went forward to see what was up. The scout, crouching behind a tree, pointed ahead and said, “There’s people out there. They’re waiting to nail us.”
“They’re not moving,” Skocz pointed out.
“Neither are we.”
Skocz ordered the scout to go forward and see what he could see. And as Skocz remembered it, “He leans up real close to my head and he says, ‘Fuck you, Sergeant. You wanta find out, go up yourself.’ ” Skocz did and discovered there was nothing out there. “When we got back, I told him I never wanted to see him on the front lines again.”9
Sgt. William Faust of the 1st Division had been in combat in two continents and six countries. By March 1945, he said, “Those of us still remaining of the ‘Big Red One’ of 1942 had lost the desire to pursue, the enthusiasm we had for this sort of thing in Africa, Sicily, France, Luxembourg and Belgium was no longer with us.”10
On March 15, former ASTP student Pvt. Martin Duus of the 103rd Division, who had been in combat since the previous December, got hit in the neck. The bullet exited through his right shoulder. “My whole right arm was dead. I couldn’t move it. I thought I’d lost it. I couldn’t look.” He never used it again; it was paralyzed. But his reaction belied the seriousness of the wound, while it spoke eloquently of the state of the old hands: “I was damn glad I was hit and could get out of there. Absolutely. My fear was I’d get well enough to go back.”11
On March 7, Patton’s forces were still fighting west of the Rhine, trying to close to the river from Koblenz south to Mainz and in the process trap further German forces facing the U.S. Seventh Army. Patton was having divisions stolen from him, to dispatch south to help Seventh Army get through the Siegfried Line east of Saarbrücken. That made him furious, but he calmed down when Bradley agreed to move the boundary between Third and Seventh Armies some twenty kilometers south of Mainz. That put the best stretch of river for crossing south of Cologne in his sector. He was thinking of crossing on the run, and hoping he could do it before Montgomery’s elephantine operation even got started, and before Hodges, too, if possible.
But his men were exhausted. “Signs of the prolonged strain had begun to appear,” one regimental history explained. “Slower reactions in the individual; a marked increase in cases of battle fatigue, and a lower standard of battle efficiency—all showed quite clearly that the limit was fast approaching.”12 Company G, 328th Infantry Regiment, was typical. It consisted of veterans whose bone-weariness was so deep they were indifferent, or on the edge of battle fatigue, plus raw recruits. Still it had the necessary handful of leaders, and superb communications with the artillery, as demonstrated by Lieutenant Otts in the second week in March, during Third Army’s drive toward the Rhine. Sgt. G. I. described it in a 1988 letter to Otts: “My last memory of you—and it is a vivid one—is of you standing in a fierce mortar and artillery barrage, totally without protection, calling in enemy coordinates. I know what guts it took to do that. I can still hear those damn things exploding in the trees. I lost one foxhole buddy to shrapnel in that barrage, and then his replacement. I don’t know who was looking after me.”13
Otts established a platoon CP, took off his equipment and both field jackets, and started to dig a hole. “Mortar shells started falling almost as thick as rain drops and we all hit the ground fast,” he remembered. “Instead of covering my head, I, like a fool, propped up on my right elbow with my chin resting on my hand, looking around to see what was going on. All of a sudden something hit me on the left side of my jaw that felt like a blow from Jack Dempsey’s right. . . . I stuck my hand up to feel the wound and it felt as though half my face was missing.” One of his men crawled over to try to put a bandage in place. He looked at Otts and cried, “Oh God, Lieutenant, this is all for me.” He had to be evacuated. The company commander came limping over to Otts. He had been hit in the foot and intended to turn the company over to Otts, but he took one look at Otts’s face and cried, “My God, no, not you too,” turned, and limped back to his foxhole.
Otts got up to start walking back to the aid station when a sniper got him in the shoulder, the bullet exiting from his back without hitting any bone. He was on his way home. For the others, the pounding continued. Lt. Jack Hargrove recalled, “All day men were cracking mentally and I kept dashing around to them but it didn’t help. I had to send approximately fifteen back to the rear, crying. Then two squad leaders cracked, one of them badly.”14
First Army was moving east, all along its front. Hodges had divisions making fifteen kilometers per day, sometimes more. They were taking big bags of prisoners. They were looking forward to getting to the river, where they anticipated good billets in warm, dry cellars and a few days to rest and refit. There was even a chance they could stay longer, as there were no plans for crossing in their sector, where all the bridges were down or soon would be. First Army was, in essence, SHAEF’s reserve. Eisenhower counted on it to give him the flexibility to send a number of divisions either north to reinforce Monty or south to reinforce Patton, depending on developments. To free up those divisions, First Army had to close to the river along its whole sector. There would then be no danger of a German counterattack, and large numbers of Americans could be pulled back and put in reserve.
The Germans, meanwhile, were in near full retreat. Although their orders were that no unit could cross to the east bank of the river without authorization from Hitler, individuals were taking matters into their own hands. Maj. Rolf Pauls, who had lost an arm in Russia but continued to serve (he later became West Germany’s first ambassador to both Israel and China, and ambassador to the United States), found himself fighting with the river immediately at his back. He ordered his 88s and the few remaining tanks over the last standing bridge in his sector. The high command threatened to court-martial Pauls and called him a coward. He pointed out that he needed his artillery behind the front lines and that the tanks were almost out of fuel, and got away with it.15
Seventeen-year-old Pvt. Siegfried Kugler recalled hiding in a wood and watching the Americans marching toward the Rhine. “When we saw everything that was going past, all the artillery, tanks, and trucks, well I’ve got to say I just flipped. I thought: how can you declare war on such a country?”16
On the morning of March 7, Gen. John Millikin, commanding III Corps on First Army’s right flank, sent his 9th Armored Division to close to the west bank of the Rhine. The mission of Combat Command B (CCB) of the 9th, commanded by Gen. William Hoge, was to occupy the west bank town of Remagen, where a great railroad bridge spanned the Rhine. It had been built in the midst of World War I, to facilitate the movement of supplies to the Western Front, and named for Gen. Erich Ludendorff. On the east bank, there was an escarpment, the Erpeler Ley. Virtually sheer, rising some 170 meters, it dominated the river valley. The train tracks followed a tunnel through the Erpeler Ley. (A touch of irony: in December 1918, III Corps, First Army, had crossed the Rhine at Remagen as part of the Allied occupation forces. My grandfather, Col. Harry M. Trippe, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was one of the men to cross the Ludendorff Bridge.)
It was dank, cold, with clouds down almost to the treetops. That kept the American fighters and bombers on the ground, but not the little Piper Cubs. As CCB moved toward the Rhine, Lt. Harold Larsen of the 9th Division artillery flew ahead in a Piper Cub looking for targets of opportunity. At around 1030 he was approaching Remagen, when to his astonishment he saw the Ludendorff Bridge, its massive superstructure looming out in the fog and mists of the river valley. Larsen radioed the news to General Hoge, who immediately sent orders to the units nearest Remagen to take the bridge. They were the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion and the 14th Tank Battalion. Hoge formed them into a task force under Lt. Col. Leonard Engeman, who put Lt. Emmet “Jim” Burrows’s infantry platoon of Company A in the lead. Brushing aside light opposition, Task Force Engeman reached a wood just west of Remagen a little before noon. Burrows emerged from the wood onto a cliff overlooking the Rhine. There was the Ludendorff Bridge, intact. German soldiers were retreating across it.
Burrows called back to Lt. Karl Timmermann, twenty-two years old, who had just assumed command of Company A the previous day. Another irony: Timmermann had been born in Frankfurt am Main, less than 160 kilometers from Remagen. His father had been in the American occupation forces in 1919, had married a German girl, and stayed in the country until 1923, when he returned to his native Nebraska with his wife and son. Timmermann had joined the Army in 1940 and earned his bars at OCS at Fort Benning.
Timmermann took one look and got on the radio to Colonel Engeman, who told him to get into the town with his infantry and tanks. As Timmermann set out, Engeman called Hoge, who set off cross-country in a jeep to get to the scene, weighing as he did the prospects of losing a battalion when the bridge blew up against the possibility of capturing it. In addition, he had just received an order to proceed south on the west bank until he linked up with the left flank of Third Army. To go for the bridge he would have to disobey direct orders, risking a court-martial and disgrace.
At 1500 Hoge arrived, looked, and ordered Engeman to seize the bridge. He figured he would lose only one platoon if the Germans blew it when it came under assault. Timmermann, meanwhile, had fought through scattered resistance and by 1600 was approaching the bridge. Germans on the east bank were firing machine guns and anti-aircraft guns at his company. His battalion commander, Maj. Murray Deevers, joined Timmermann. “Do you think you can get your company across that bridge,” he asked.
“Well, we can try it, sir,” Timmermann replied.
“Go ahead.”
“What if the bridge blows up in my face?” Timmermann asked. Deevers turned and walked away without a word. Timmermann called to his squad leaders, “All right, we’re going across.”
He could see German engineers working with plungers. There was a huge explosion. It shook Remagen and sent a volcano of stone and earth erupting from the west end of the bridge. The Germans had detonated a cratering charge that gouged a deep hole in the earthen causeway joining the main road and the bridge platform. The crater that resulted made it impossible for vehicles to get onto the bridge—but not infantry.17
Timmermann turned to a squad leader: “Now, we’re going to cross this bridge before—” At that instant, there was another deafening rumble and roar. The Germans had set off an emergency demolition two-thirds of the way across the bridge. Awestruck, the men of A Company watched as the huge structure lifted up, and steel, timbers, dust, and thick black smoke mixed in the air. Many of the men threw themselves on the ground.
Ken Hechler, in The Bridge at Remagen, one of the best of all accounts of the U.S. Army in action in World War II, and a model for all oral history, described what happened next: “Everybody waited for Timmermann’s reaction. ‘Thank God, now we won’t have to cross that damned thing,’ Sgt. Mike Chinchar said fervently, trying to reassure himself.
“Pvt. Johnny Ayres fingered the two grenades hooked onto the rings of his pack suspenders, and nodded his head: ‘We wouldn’t have had a chance.’
“But Timmermann, who had been trying to make out what was left of the bridge through the thick haze, yelled:
“ ‘Look— she’s still standing.’
“Most of the smoke and dust had cleared away, and the men followed their commander’s gaze. The sight of the bridge still spanning the Rhine brought no cheers from the men. It was like an unwelcome specter. The suicide mission was on again.”18
Timmermann could see German engineers at the east end of the bridge working frantically to try again to blow the bridge. He waved his arm overhead in the “Follow me” gesture. Machine-gun fire from one of the bridge towers made him duck. One of A Company’s tanks pulled up to the edge of the crater and blasted the tower. The German fire let up.
“Get going,” Timmermann yelled. Major Deevers called out, “I’ll see you on the other side and we’ll all have a chicken dinner.”
“Chicken dinner, my foot, I’m all chicken right now,” one of the men of the first platoon protested. Deevers flushed. “Move on across,” he ordered.
“I tell you, I’m not going out there and get blown up,” the GI answered. “No sir, major, you can court-martial and shoot me, but I ain’t going out there on that bridge.”
Timmermann was shouting, “Get going, you guys, get going.” He set the example, moving onto the bridge himself. That did it. The lead platoon followed, crouching, running, dodging, watching for holes in the bridge planking that covered the railroad tracks (put down by the Germans so their vehicles could retreat over the bridge) but always moving in the direction of the Germans on the far shore.
Sgt. Joe DeLisio led the first squad. Sgts. Joe Petrencsik and Alex Drabik led the second. In the face of more machine-gun and 20mm anti-aircraft fire they dashed forward. “Get going,” Timmermann yelled. The men took up the cry. “Get going,” they shouted at one another. “Get going.” Engineers were right behind them, searching for demolitions and tearing out electrical wires. The names were Chinchar, Samele, Massie, Wegener, Jensen. They were Italian, Czech, Norwegian, German, Russian. They were children of European immigrants, come back to the old country to liberate and redeem it.
On the far side, at the entrance to the tunnel, they could see a German engineer pushing on a plunger. There was nothing for it but to keep going. And nothing happened—apparently a stray bullet or shell had cut the wire leading to the demolition charges. Halfway across the bridge, three men found four packages of TNT weighing thirty pounds each, tied to I-beams under the decking. Using wire cutters, they worked on the demolitions until they splashed into the river. DeLisio got to the towers, ran up the circular staircase of the one to his right, where the firing was coming from, and on the fourth level found three German machine gunners, firing at the bridge.
“Hände hoch!” DeLisio commanded. They gave up; he picked up the gun they had been using and hurled it out the aperture. Men on the bridge saw it and were greatly encouraged. Drabik came running on at top speed. He passed the towers and got to the east bank. He was the first GI to cross the Rhine. Others were on his heels. They quickly made the German engineers in the tunnel prisoners. Timmermann sent Lieutenant Burrows and his platoon up the Erpeler Ley, saying, “You know, Jim, the old Fort Benning stuff; take the high ground and hold it.” Burrows later said, “Taking Remagen and crossing the bridge were a breeze compared with climbing that hill.” He took casualties, but he got to the top, where he saw far too many German men and vehicles spread out before him to even contemplate attacking them. He hung on at the edge of the summit. But he had the high ground, and the Americans were over the Rhine.19
Sixteen-year-old Pvt. Heinz Schwarz, who came from a village only a short distance upstream on the east bank of the Rhine from Remagen, was in the tunnel. “We were all still kids,” he recalled. “The older soldiers in our unit stayed in the tunnel, but the rest of us were curious and went up to the bridge tower to get a better look.” He heard the order ring out: “Everybody down! We’re blowing the bridge!” He heard the explosion and saw the bridge rise up. “We thought it had been destroyed, and we were saved.” But as the smoke cleared, he saw Timmermann and his men coming on. He ran down the circular stairs and got to the entrance to the tunnel just as DeLisio got to the tower. “I knew I had to somehow get myself out through the rear entrance of the tunnel and run home to my mother as fast as I could.” He did. Fifteen years later he was a member of the Bundestag. At a ceremony on March 7, 1960, he met DeLisio. They swapped stories.20
As the word of Timmermann’s toehold spread up the chain of command, to regiment, division, corps, and army, each general responded by ordering men on the scene to get over the bridge, for engineers to repair it, for units in the area to change direction and head for Remagen. Bradley was the most enthusiastic of all. He had been fearful of a secondary role in the final campaign, but with Hodges over the river he decided immediately to get First Army so fully involved that Eisenhower would have to support the bridgehead.
First, however, Bradley had to get by General Bull. The SHAEF G-3 was with Bradley when the word arrived. When Bradley outlined his plan, he related, Bull “looked at me as though I were a heretic. He scoffed: ‘You’re not going anywhere down there at Remagen. You’ve got a bridge, but it’s in the wrong place. It just doesn’t fit the plan.’
“I demanded, ‘What in hell do you want us to do, pull back and blow it up?’ ”
Bradley got on the phone to Eisenhower. When he heard the news, Eisenhower was ecstatic. He said, “Brad, that’s wonderful.” Bradley said he wanted to push everything across he could. “Sure,” Eisenhower responded, “get right on across with everything you’ve got. It’s the best break we’ve had.” Bradley felt it necessary to point out that Bull disagreed. “To hell with the planners,” Eisenhower snapped. “Sure, go on, Brad, and I’ll give you everything we got to hold that bridgehead. We’ll make good use of it even if the terrain isn’t too good.”21
The Germans agreed with Eisenhower and Bradley that the Ludendorff Bridge was suddenly the most critical strategic spot in Europe. So like the Americans, they began rushing troops and vehicles to the site, to constrict and then eliminate the bridgehead, and made the last great commitment of the Luftwaffe to destroy it. Major Pauls, who had almost been court-martialed for sending his tanks and artillery over the bridge at Bonn on the morning of March 7, in the afternoon heard praise from the high command “for having been alert enough to get across when you could.” He was ordered to march south immediately, to Remagen, that night, March 7–8.22
In the morning, the Luftwaffe attacked. Sgt. Waldemar Führing, one of Major Pauls’s men, arrived in time to see the strike: “I lay a half mile from the bridge in some bushes. I could see how our Stukas tried to blow up the bridge. They were brave. They got close. But not a single bomb hit the bridge.”23
Two great masses of men and weapons were on the move, heading toward Remagen. For the Germans, it was a hellish march through mud, traffic jams, abandoned vehicles, dead horses, dead men. Piper Cubs would spot them and bring down a tremendous shelling from American artillery on the west bank.
For the Americans, it was a hellish march over the bridge. Captain Roland of the 99th Division recalled the sign on one of the west bank towers: “Cross the Rhine with dry feet, courtesy of the 9th Armored Division.” As he crossed, the night of March 7–8, “my mind flickered back to the historic episode in which Caesar crossed the same stream at almost the same location to fight the same enemy two thousand years before. My reverie was cut short by the whistle and crash of hostile shells. How exposed and vulnerable I felt on that strip of metal high above the black, swirling waters. Walking forward became extremely difficult. I had the feeling that each projectile was headed directly at my chest. Actually, we who had gained the bridge were relatively safe. The shells were hitting in the approaches to the bridge amid the marching troops who suffered many casualties.” On the bridge, one shell hit on or near it every five minutes.24
Col. William Westmoreland (USMA 1936), chief of staff of the 9th Infantry, crossed that night lying on his belly on the hood of a jeep, spotting ahead for the driver for holes in the planking. In the morning he set up an anti-aircraft battery on top of the Erpeler Ley. He saw his first jet aircraft that day.25
Hitler ordered courts-martial for those responsible for failing to blow the bridge. The American crossing at Remagen cost Field Marshal von Rundstedt his job as commander in the West; on March 8, Hitler relieved him and put Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in his place. Hitler dismissed four other generals and ordered an all-out assault to destroy the bridge, including those jets Westmoreland saw, plus V-2s, plus frogmen to place explosives in the pilings, plus constant artillery bombardment. The Americans hurried anti-aircraft into the area. One observer of a German air strike recalled that when the planes appeared “there was so much firing from our guys that the ground shuddered; it was awesome. The entire valley around Remagen became cloaked in smoke and dust before the Germans left—only three minutes after they first appeared.”26
The struggle for the bridgehead continued. The Americans poured in the artillery, depending on the Piper Cub FOs to direct the shells to a prime target. Sgt. Oswald Filla, a panzer commander, recalled “the impossible amount of artillery. Their artillery observers in the air were very good. Whenever we went anywhere around the bridgehead to see what could be done, we had, at most, a half hour before the first shells arrived.”27
As the infantry and armor gradually forced the Germans back, hundreds of engineers worked to repair the bridge even as it was getting pounded, while thousands of other engineers labored to get pontoon bridges across into the bridgehead. The 291st Engineer Combat Battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. David Pergrin, worked with grim resolve despite air and artillery assaults. The engineers also built a series of log and net booms upstream to intercept German explosives carried to the bridge by the current.28
Capt. John Barnes (USMA 1942) of the 51st ECB was involved in building a twenty-five-ton heavy pontoon bridge. His description of how it was done illustrates how good the American engineers had become at this business. Construction began at 1600 hours, March 10, with the building of approach ramps on both shores two kilometers upstream (south) of the bridge. Smoke pots hid the engineers from German snipers, but “unobserved enemy artillery fire harassed the bridge site. Several engineers were wounded and six were killed. The Germans even fired several V-2 rockets from launchers in Holland, the only time they ever fired on German soil.”
Construction continued through the night. “The bridge was built in parts, with four groups working simultaneously on 4-boat rafts, mostly by feel in the dark. By 0400 the next morning, fourteen 4-boat rafts had been completed and were ready to be assembled together as a bridge. When the rafts were in place they were reinforced with pneumatic floats between the steel pontoons so the bridge could take the weight of 36-ton Sherman tanks.”
The engineers used triple anchors to hold the rafts in place, but as the bridge extended out to midstream the anchors couldn’t hold, despite help from the motorboats. “At about this time we discovered that the Navy had some LCVPs in the area and we requested their assistance. Ten came to the rescue. They were able to hold the bridge against the current until we could install a 1" steel cable across the Rhine immediately upstream of the bridge, to which the anchors for each pontoon were attached. This solved the problem of holding the bridge against the current. The remaining 4-boat rafts were connected to the anchor cable, eased into position and connected to the ever extending bridge until the far shore was reached.
“Finally [sic!], at 1900 March 11, 27 hours after starting construction, the 969-ft heavy pontoon bridge was completed. It was the longest floating bridge ever constructed by the Corps of Engineers under fire. Traffic started at 2300, with one vehicle crossing every two minutes. During the first seven days, 2,500 vehicles, including tanks, crossed the bridge.”29
On March 17 the great structure of the Ludendorff, pounded unmercifully by first the Americans and then the Germans, finally sagged abruptly and then fell apart with a roar, killing twenty-eight and injuring ninety-three of the engineers working on it. But by then the Americans had six pontoon bridges over the river, and nine divisions on the far side. They were in a position to head east, then north to meet Ninth Army, which would be crossing the Rhine north of Düsseldorf. When First and Ninth Armies met, they would have the German Fifteenth Army in the Ruhr Valley encircled. It took First Army ten days of fighting through deep gullies and dense woods against fierce opposition to reach the autobahn, only eleven kilometers east of Remagen. But once there, it had good roads leading north.
Michael Doubler rightly judges that everything came together at Remagen. All that General Marshall had worked for and hoped for and built for in creating this citizen-army, happened. It was one of the great victories in the Army’s history. The credit goes to the men—Timmermann, DeLisio, Drabik, through to Hoge, Bradley, and Ike—and to the system the U.S. Army had developed in Europe, which bound these men together into a team that featured initiative at the bottom and a cold-blooded determination and competency at the top.30
Up north, Montgomery’s preparations continued. Down south, Patton’s Third Army cleared the Saarland and the Palatinate in a spectacular campaign. As his divisions approached the Rhine, Patton had 500 assault boats, plus LCVPs and DUKWs, brought forward, along with 7,500 engineers, but with no fanfare, no fuss, no publicity, in deliberate contrast to Montgomery and so as to not alert the Germans. On the night of March 22–23, the 5th Division began to cross the river at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. The Germans were unprepared; by midnight the entire 11th Regiment had crossed by boat with only twenty casualties. Well before dawn the whole of the 5th and a part of the 90th Divisions were across. The Germans launched a counterattack against the 5th Division, using students from an officer candidate school at nearby Wiesbaden. They were good soldiers, and managed to infiltrate the American positions, but after a busy night and part of the next morning they were dead or prisoners.
At dawn, German artillery began to fire, and the Luftwaffe sent twelve planes to bomb and strafe. The Americans pushed east anyway. By the afternoon the whole of the 90th Division was on the far side, along with the 4th Armored. Patton called Bradley: “Brad, don’t tell anyone but I’m across.”
“Well, I’ll be damned—you mean across the Rhine?”
“Sure am, I sneaked a division over last night.”
A little later, at the Twelfth Army Group morning briefing, the Third Army reported: “Without benefit of aerial bombing, ground smoke, artillery preparation, and airborne assistance, the Third Army at 2200 hours, March 22, crossed the Rhine River.”31
The following day Patton walked across a pontoon bridge built by his engineers. He stopped in the middle. While every GI in the immediate area who had a camera took his picture, he urinated into the Rhine—a long, high, steady stream. As he buttoned up, Patton said, “I’ve waited a long time to do that. I didn’t even piss this morning when I got up so I would have a really full load. Yes, sir, the pause that refreshes.” When he reached the east bank, he faked a fall, rose with two hands of German soil and remarked, “Thus William the Conqueror.”32
That night, March 23–24, Montgomery put his operation in motion. Generals Eisenhower and Simpson climbed to a church tower to watch Ninth Army do its part. More than 2,000 American guns opened fire at 0100, March 24. For an hour, more than a thousand American shells a minute ranged across the Rhine, 65,261 rounds in all. Meanwhile 1,406 B-17s unloaded on Luftwaffe bases just east of the river. At 0200 the assault boats, powered by fifty-five-horsepower motors and carrying seven men with a crew of two, pushed off. Not until the first boats were almost touching the far shore did the American artillery lift its fire and begin plastering targets farther to the east. The enemy was so battered that only a few mortar shells landed among the first wave. Things went so well that before daylight, the 79th and 30th Divisions were fully across the river, at a cost of only thirty-one casualties. They set off, headed east.
At airfields in Britain, France, and Belgium, meanwhile, the paratroopers and gliderborne troops from the British 6th and the American 17th Airborne Divisions began to load up in their C-47s, C-46s, or gliders. This was an airborne operation on a scale comparable with D-Day; on June 6, 1944, 21,000 British and American airborne troops had gone in, while on March 24,1945, it was 21,680 British and American. Altogether there were 1,696 transport planes and 1,348 gliders involved (British Horsa and Hamicar gliders, and American Wacos; all of them made of canvas and wood). They would be guarded on the way to the drop zone and landing zone (DZ and LZ) by more than 900 fighter escorts, with another 900 fighters providing cover and patrol over the DZ. To the east, 1,250 additional P-47s would guard against German movement to the DZ, while 240 B-24s would drop supplies to the men in the DZ. Counting the B-17s that saturated the DZ with bombs, there were some 9,503 Allied planes involved.33
The airborne troopers’ objectives were wooded high ground affording observation of the river crossing sites, exits from Wesel, and crossings of nearby streams. Churchill, Eisenhower, Brooke, and many other dignitaries, plus the press, were present to watch. A couple of B-17s were loaded with cameramen and assigned to fly around the DZ to take pictures. What concerned them was the flak; the Ruhr Valley and environs, Germany’s industrial heartland, was the most heavily defended in the country. German artillery and anti-aircraft gunners had years of experience in fighting off the air raids over the Ruhr, and the transports and gliders would be coming in low and slow (500 feet at 120 knots per hour), beginning just after 1000 hours. The tow planes had two gliders each, instead of one as on D-Day and in Market-Garden, a hazardous undertaking even on an exercise.
The DZ was just north and east of Wesel. It took the air armada two and a half hours to cross the Rhine. Lt. Ellis Scripture was the navigator on the lead plane, a B-17. It was a new experience for him to fly in a B-17 at 500 feet and 120 knots—that was perilously close to stall-out speed. Still, he recalled, “It was a beautiful spring morning and it was a tremendous thrill for us as we led the C-47s to the middle of the Rhine. Hundreds and hundreds of aircraft came flying over. . . . The thrill was the climax of the entire war as we poured tens of thousands of troops across the final barrier to the Fatherland.”34
Reporter Richard C. Hottelet was on one of the B-17s carrying cameras to record the event. “The sky above was pale blue,” he wrote. “Below us, golden soil and bright green meadows were cut by long morning shadows. Flying at a few hundred feet, banking steeply to let the cameramen get their shots, we saw the solid phalanxes of olive-green troop carriers and tow planes and gliders nose to tail. . . . It was a mighty olive-green river that surged steadily and inevitably over Germany.”
Once across the river, on the edge of the DZ where the big bombers and fighters had just dropped their bombs, the scene changed: “Here there was no sunlight; here in the center of green and fertile land was a clearly marked area of death. The smoke seemed a shroud.” The German anti-aircraft guns sprang to life. Hottelet’s plane was hit; he had to bail out, but fortunately not until the plane had crossed back to the west bank of the river, where he landed safely among friends.35
Earlier that morning, before the flights took off, over the radio “Axis Sally” had told the men of the 17th Airborne to leave their parachutes home, because they would be able to walk down on the flak. She had not lied. The flak and ground fire were the most intense of any airborne operation of the war. One American officer, a veteran from the Normandy drop, said there “was no comparison,” while an equally experienced British officer said that “this drop made Arnhem look like a Sunday picnic.”36
Sgt. Valentin Klopsch, in command of a platoon of German engineers in a cow stable about ten kilometers north of Wesel, described the action from his point of view. First there was the air bombardment, then the artillery, all of which put the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in his platoon into panic. When the shooting stopped, they were amazed to find themselves still alive, even though badly shaken. They got up, began looking around, and started congratulating each other for surviving. Klopsch and a couple of other old hands told them to get down, because the enemy was coming.
“And now, listen,” Klopsch said. “Coming from across the Rhine there was a roaring and booming in the air. In waves aircraft were approaching at different heights. And then the paratroopers were jumping, the chutes were opening like mushrooms. It looked like lines of pearls loosening from the planes.” The Luftwaffe flak gunners, who had thought their day was over when the bombers passed by, went back to work. The flak was heavy, “but what a superiority of the enemy in weapons, in men, in equipment. The sky was full of paratroopers, and then new waves came in. And always the terrible roaring of the low flying planes. All around us was turning like a whirl.” The Americans formed into squads and platoons, set up their mortars, and went to work themselves. They attacked Klopsch’s cowshed. His platoon fired until out of ammunition, when Klopsch put up a white flag. “And then the Americans approached, chewing gum, hair dressed like Cherokees, but Colts at the belt.” He and the surviving members of his platoon were marched to a POW cage on a farm and ordered to sit and not move. Decades later, he recalled “What a wonderful rest after all the bombardments and the terrible barrage.”37
The C-46s took a pounding from the flak. This was the first time they had been used to carry paratroopers. The plane had a door on each side of the fuselage, which permitted a faster exit for the troopers, a big advantage over the single door on the C-47s. But what was not known until too late was that the C-46’s fuel system was highly vulnerable to enemy fire. Fourteen of the seventy-two C-46s burst into flames as soon as they were hit. Eight others went down; in each case the paratroopers got out, but the crews did not.
For the gliders, it was terrifying. The sky was full of air bursts and tracers. Machine-gun bullets ripped through the canvas. The pilots—all lieutenants, most of them not yet eligible to vote—could not take evasive action. They fixed their eyes on the spot they had chosen to land and tried to block out everything else. Over half the gliders were badly hit and nearly all made crash landings amid heavy small-arms fire.
Pvt. Wallace Thompson, a medic in the paratroopers, was assigned a jeep and rode in the driver’s seat behind the pilots of a Waco. He was very unhappy about this. Through the flight he kept telling the pilots, Lts. John Heffner and Bruce Merryman, that he would much prefer to jump into combat. They ignored his complaints. As they crossed the river, the pilots told Thompson to start his engine, so that as soon as they landed they could release the nose latches and he could drive out.
Over the target, just a few meters above the ground, an 88 shell burst just behind Thompson’s jeep. The concussion broke the latches of the nose section, which flipped up and locked, throwing the pilots out. The blast cut the ropes that held the jeep, which leaped out ahead of the glider, engine running, flying through the air at high speed, Thompson gripping the steering wheel with all his might. He made a perfect four-wheel landing and beat the glider to the ground, thus becoming the first man in history to solo in a jeep.
The glider crashed and tipped, ending up in a vertical position, rear end up. Lieutenants Merryman and Heffner somehow survived their flying exit, but were immediately hit by machine-gun bullets, Heffner by one in the hand and Merryman by two in the leg. They crawled into a ditch. Thompson drove over to them.
“What the hell happened?” he demanded, but just then a bullet creased his helmet. He scrambled out of the jeep and into the ditch, where he berated the pilots and the entire glider program. “His last word,” Merryman recalled, “was that he had just taken his last glider ride, they could shoot him and put him in one, but that would be the only way.” Then Thompson treated their wounds and after treating other wounded in the area, drove Merryman and Heffner to an aid station.38
Varsity featured not only a flying jeep; it also provided a unique event in U.S. Army Air Force history. The glider pilots bringing in the 194th Glider Infantry were told two weeks before the operation that one more infantry company was necessary to the 194th’s mission, and that they would be it. There were nearly 200 of them. They had received a quick briefing in infantry tactics and weapons. They landed under heavy ground fire and took substantial casualties among the infantry and pilots, but despite continuing machine-gun fire and exploding mortars, they got organized and did their job. Later that day they were attacked by 200 German infantrymen, a tank, and two flak guns, but managed to drive them off. Lt. Elbert Jella damaged the tank with his bazooka. The retreating tank ran over one of the flak guns; the other was captured by the glider pilots. Overall the Air Force officers fighting as an infantry company suffered thirty-one casualties. They got written up in Stars and Stripes.39
At the aid station, Lieutenants Merryman and Heffner met the crew of a B-24 that had been shot down and successfully crash-landed. The Air Force guys told their story: when they started to dash out of their burning plane, the first man was shot, so the rest came out with hands up. The Germans took them to the cellar of a farmhouse, gave them some cognac, and held them “while the Germans decided who was winning. A little later the Germans realized they were losing and surrendered their weapons and selves to the bomber crew. The Germans were turned over to the airborne and the bomber crew went to the aid station.” This was perhaps the only time a bomber crew took German infantry prisoners.40
The German gunners, all in the Luftwaffe, wanted no part of ground fighting. When the airborne troops began to form up and move to their objectives, the Germans tended to give up. It helped the men of the 17th Airborne considerably that they had just been issued the new 57mm recoilless rifle, which weighed only forty-five pounds, was fired from the shoulder, and was more deadly than the bazooka.41 Before the end of the day the airborne troops had all their objectives, and over the next couple of days the linkup with the infantry was complete. Twenty-first Army Group was over the Rhine and headed east.
By the first week of spring 1945 Eisenhower’s armies had done what he had been planning for since the beginning of the year— close to the Rhine along its length, with a major crossing north of Düsseldorf—and what he had dared to hope for and was prepared to support, additional crossings by First Army in the center and Third Army to the south. The time for exploitation had arrived. Some of the Allied infantry and armored divisions faced stiff resistance, others only sporadic resistance, others none at all. Whatever was in front of them—rough terrain, enemy strong points, more rivers to cross—their generals were as one in taking up the phrase Lieutenant Timmermann had used at the Remagen bridge—“Get going!”
The 90th Division, on Patton’s left flank, headed east toward Hanau on the Main River. It crossed in assault boats on the night of March 28. Maj. John Cochran’s battalion ran into a battalion of Hitler Youth officer candidates, teenage Germans who were eager to fight. They set up a roadblock in a village. As Cochran’s men advanced toward it, the German boys let go with their machine gun, killing one American. Cochran put some artillery fire on the roadblock and destroyed it, killing three. “One youth, perhaps aged 16, held up his hands,” Cochran recalled. “I was very emotional over the loss of a good soldier and I grabbed the kid and took off my cartridge belt.
“I asked him if there were more like him in the town. He gave me a stare and said, ‘I’d rather die than tell you anything.’ I told him to pray, because he was going to die. I hit him across the face with my thick, heavy belt. I was about to strike him again when I was grabbed from behind by Chaplain Kerns. He said, ‘Don’t!’ Then he took that crying child away. The Chaplain had intervened not only to save a life but to prevent me from committing a murder. Had it not been for the Chaplain, I would have.”42
From the crossing of the Rhine to the end of the war, every man who died, died needlessly. It was that feeling that almost turned Major Cochran into a murderer. On the last day of March, Sergeant Schlemmer of the 82nd had a particularly gruesome experience that almost broke him. His squad was advancing, supported by a tank. Six troopers were riding on the tank, while he and five others were following in its tracks, which freed them from worry about mines. A hidden 88 fired. The shell hit the gun turret, blowing off the troopers, killing two and wounding the other four. “The force of the blast blew them to the rear of the tank near me,” Schlemmer recalled. “They lay as they fell. A second round then came screaming in, this time to ricochet off the front of the tank. The tank reversed gears and backed up over three of our wounded, crushing them to death. I could only sit down and bawl, whether out of frustration of being unable to help them, whether from the futility of the whole damn war, or whether from hatred of the Germans for causing it all, I’ve never been able to understand.”43
That same day, Corp. James Pemberton, a 1942 high school graduate who went into ASTP and then to the 103rd Division as a replacement, was also following a tank. “My guys started wandering and drifting a bit, and I yelled at them to get in the tank tracks to avoid the mines. They did and we followed. The tank was rolling over Schu mines like crazy. I could see them popping left and right like popcorn.” Pemberton had an eighteen-year-old replacement in the squad; he told him to hop up and ride on the tank, thinking he would be out of the way up there. An 88 fired. The replacement fell off. The tank went into reverse and backed over him, crushing him from the waist down. “There was one scream, and some mortars hit the Kraut 88 and our tank went forward again. To me, it was one of the worst things I went through. This poor bastard had graduated from high school in June, was drafted, took basic training, shipped overseas, had thirty seconds of combat, and was killed.”
Pemberton’s unit kept advancing. “The Krauts always shot up all their ammo and then surrendered,” he remembered. Hoping to avoid such nonsense, in one village the CO sent a Jewish private who spoke German forward with a white flag, calling out to the German boys to surrender. “They shot him up so bad that after it was over the medics had to slide a blanket under his body to take him away.” Then the Germans started waving their own white flag. Single file, eight of them emerged from a building, hands up. “They were very cocky. They were about 20 feet from me when I saw the leader suddenly realize he still had a pistol in his shoulder holster. He reached into his jacket with two fingers to pull it out and throw it away.
“One of our guys yelled, ‘Watch it! He’s got a gun!’ and came running up shooting and there were eight Krauts on the ground shot up but not dead. They wanted water but no one gave them any. I never felt bad about it although I’m sure civilians would be horrified. But these guys asked for it. If we had not been so tired and frustrated and keyed up and mad about our boys they shot up, it never would have happened. But a lot of things happen in war and both sides know the penalties.”44
Hitler and the Nazis had poisoned the minds of the boys Germany was throwing into the battle. Capt. F. W. Norris of the 90th Division ran into a roadblock. His company took some casualties, then blasted away, wounding many. “The most seriously wounded was a young SS sergeant who looked just like one of Hitler’s supermen. He had led the attack. He was bleeding copiously and badly needed some plasma.” One of Norris’s medics started giving him a transfusion. The wounded German, who spoke excellent English, demanded to know if there was any Jewish blood in the plasma. The medic said damned if he knew, in the United States people didn’t make such a distinction. The German said if he couldn’t have a guarantee that there was no Jewish blood he would refuse treatment.
“I had been listening and had heard enough,” Norris remembered. “I turned to this SS guy and in very positive terms I told him I really didn’t care whether he lived or not, but if he did not take the plasma he would certainly die. He looked at me calmly and said, ‘I would rather die than have any Jewish blood in me.’
“So he died.”45
By March 28, First Army had broken out of the Remagen bridgehead. General Rose’s 3rd Armored Division led the way, headed for Paderborn and the linkup with Ninth Army to complete the encirclement of the German army in the Ruhr. That day, Rose raced ahead, covering 150 kilometers, the longest gain on any single day of the war for any American unit. By March 31, he was attacking a German tank training center outside Paderborn. Rose was at the head of a column in his jeep. Turning a corner, his driver ran smack into the rear of a Tiger tank. The German tank commander, about eighteen years old, opened his turret hatch and leveled his burp gun at Rose, yelling at him to surrender.
Rose, his driver, and his aide got out of the jeep and put their hands up. For some reason, the tank commander became extremely agitated—later, it was rumored in the American army that the German knew Rose was Jewish, but that almost certainly was not true—and kept pointing to Rose and hollering at him while gesturing toward Rose’s pistol. Rose lowered his right arm to release his web belt and thus drop his hip holster to the ground. Apparently, the German boy thought he was going to draw his pistol; in a screaming rage, he fired his machine pistol straight into Rose’s head, killing him instantly. The driver and the aide managed to flee and lived to tell the story. Maurice Rose was the first and only division commander killed in ETO.46
The tank school at Paderborn had brand-new Tigers. They could be deadly. Ten of them caught a column of Shermans in the open. The Tigers destroyed seventeen Shermans and a dozen halftracks, but they paid a price of their own. One advantage of the Sherman was that it could traverse its turret much faster than the Tiger. In the right circumstances, an American tank commander could get in the first shot. In this action, one 3rd Armored tanker used that advantage well. Knowing that the Sherman’s 75mm cannon could not penetrate the Tiger’s armor, he had his gunner load a white phosphorus round. As a Tiger turned on him, he fired. The shell struck the glaces plate of the Tiger right above the driver’s compartment with a blazing crescendo of flames and smoke. Captain Cooper, who saw the fight, reported that “the whole face plate in front of the turret was covered with burning particles of white phosphorous which stuck to the sides of the Tiger. The smoke engulfed the tank and the fan in the engine compartment sucked the smoke inside the fighting compartment. The German crew thought the tank was on fire and immediately abandoned it even though the tank actually suffered very little damage.”
The American tanker turned his turret and fired another white phosphorus shell at a second Tiger, again hitting the front glaces plate with similar results. Cooper commented, “Thus the brave ingenious tank commander knocked out two Tigers without ever getting a penetration.”47
Such resistance was rare. In most cases the retreating Germans did not stop to fight. Generally they passed right through the villages, rather than use them as roadblocks or strong points. This was fortunate for the villages, because the American practice was to demolish any buildings that were defended, but if white flags were waving from the windows and no German troops were in sight, they let it be.
First and Third Armies were advancing in mostly rural areas, untouched by the war. The GIs were spending their nights in houses. They would give the inhabitants five minutes or so to clear out. The German families were indignant. The GIs were insistent. As Lt. Max Lale put it in a March 30 letter home, “None of us have any sympathy for them, because we all have been taught to accept the consequences of our actions—these people apparently feel they are the victims of something they had no hand in planning, and they seem to feel they are being mistreated.” The stock joke had it that every German had a cousin in Milwaukee.48
The rural German homes had creature comforts—electricity, hot water, flush toilets, soft white toilet paper—such as most people thought existed in 1945 only in America. On his first night in a house, Pvt. Joe Burns spent five minutes in a hot shower. Fifty-one years later he declared it to be “the most exquisite five minutes in my life. Never before or since have I had such pure pleasure.”49 Pvt. David Webster recalled washing his hands at the sink and deciding “This was where we belonged. A small, sociable group, a clean, well-lighted house [behind blackout curtains], a cup of coffee—paradise.”50
Things were looking up, even though there was still a lot of Germany to overrun.