The evening briefing was over and the clatter of typewriters filled the Portugal Hotel lobby. That was First Army press headquarters early in March, 1945, in Spa, Belgium.
“Now you can’t say anything about the Ninth Armored Division being anywhere near Rheinbach,” interrupts Major Nute, the chief censor, in his apologetic drawl.
The prohibition didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. Cologne and Bonn—they were the story. We’d just captured them and reached the Rhine. The typewriters resumed their clatter.
After we finished a few of us walked over to the big map to see why it was so important we shouldn’t write about Rheinbach.
“It’s about fifteen miles from the Rhine,” said the fellow with the measure. “About fifteen miles from a bridge. A railroad bridge and a little town.”
He removed the thumbtack hiding the name and we all looked.
It was Remagen.
The Portugal served breakfast at 4 a.m. the next morning so we could get an early start. Not for Cologne or Bonn. The rumor had come late at night. The Ninth Armored Division had captured the bridge at Remagen. Tanks and doughs were battling Germans on the other side of the Rhine.
It was snowing. Big, fluffy flakes splashed against the windshield like ripe tomatoes. Swirling out of the darkness they made you dizzy watching them in the bright headlight beams.
“I guess we’re first,” the jeep driver said. “No tracks.” I looked at the smooth snow ahead and nodded.
The Remagen marathon was on. At least we had a head start. Every newsman in that part of Europe was hell bent for Remagen to see if the Ninth really had captured a bridge, how they got it and—most important of all—if they still had it.
It didn’t take long to pick up the Ninth Armored’s trail. Euskirchen was still burning. White sheets and towels flapped from shattered windows. The rubble-terraced streets were packed with our tanks, artillery pieces, jeeps, truckloads of gasoline and ammo.
Rheinbach was another bottleneck. And Stadt Meckelheim. And Bad Neunahr. Traffic now was snarled with ambulances, couriers and six-by-six loads of prisoners threading their way back.
“Have we still got a bridge?” I asked an ambulance driver.
“Where you think this is comin’ from?” he said sourly and nodded toward his load of wounded. “Hell yes, we got one. And it’s plenty hot.”
Four miles short of Remagen traffic no longer met us on the road. The MP said it was one-way on in.
The parade moved slowly, warily over the winding road, bumper to bumper. It was raining steadily now.
The trucks halted and men began piling out. They were doughs, draped in grenades, cartridge belts and first aid packs.
The shoulder patch—a white streak of lightning on a red semicircle—belonged to the 78th Infantry Division. Elsewhere on the road we’d seen the markings of the veteran Ninth Infantry Division, the 99th, even the big red one of the First Division. You couldn’t keep track of the artillery outfits moving up. What a mess of stuff they were piling in that bridgehead!
“Column of two’s and keep your distance,” someone bellowed up front. “Get the lead out. Let’s go.”
It wasn’t for me but I got out anyway. We could move no farther in the jeep.
“Drive on down when you can,” I told the driver. “Wait in Remagen. I’m going to try to get on across. I won’t stay long. We’ve still got to get back to camp.”
I trailed along, in neither column for a while, then fell in on the right and started the long trek down into Remagen. Every two or three minutes you could hear a shell crashing in the town.
The river was below us. The grey unruffled water flowed smoothly through a deep valley. On “our side” the sloping hills were etched with vineyards. On the other side, rocky cliffs jutted up perpendicular to the railroad and highway paralleling the river bank.
Four black stone towers supported the bridge, two at each end. It appeared intact. Occasionally you’d hear the crash of a shell and see a mushroom of dust rise from the flooring. Other shells were kicking up geysers of water near the bridge.
Remagen was tumbling into its own streets and cellars under the weight of exploding steel, swishing in from the German side of the river. A half dozen Ninth Armored tanks, spaced several hundred feet apart, were impudently firing back from their unconcealed positions, almost on the water’s edge.
Other tanks were twisting and jerking along the approaches to the bridge. Jeeps were darting around them at a surprising rate of speed and bolting across. Two columns of men in single file, ran crouching across the span.
Soon we were swallowed up in the streets of Remagen. The route was littered with dead and wounded. Most of them were ours. There were a few black booted Germans and some civilians.
I backed into a doorway to catch my breath. Seconds later a shell spattered into the pavement at the corner. When the splinters and rooftiles quit falling I looked. Two men were down. One lay flat and still on his face, his arms crumpled awkwardly beneath him. The other writhed in pain, clasping a torn trouser leg with both hands.
A man knelt beside him and shouted for medics. Standing in another doorway, a German woman, fat and perhaps fifty, looked on.
“Mein Gott, Mein Gott,” she moaned over and over, biting her lip; wringing her hands.
The MP—nervy guy standing there in the midst of all that hell playing traffic cop—stopped the next jeep and asked the driver if he was going across the bridge.
“Yes, why?”
The MP gave me a shove.
“Get in.”
And we were off.
The seat was awful lumpy but it was no time to ask questions. The driver swerved to the left side of the bridge to avoid an ugly hole.
This time yesterday, the Germans were evacuating the last straggling volkswagons and charcoal burning vehicles out of Remagen. Today, a good portion of the First Army was pouring over the same bridge, crossing the Rhine.
Crossing the Rhine! On a bridge! It was almost unbelievable. For weeks now roads back in Belgium and western Germany had been cluttered with naval landing craft. It wasn’t uncommon to see an Admiral coming or going around Army headquarters. Crossing the Rhine was acknowledged to be a navy job.
“I’m going on down here,” the driver said. I was already dislodging myself, noticing uncomfortably that my seat had been a pile of bazooka ammunition.
He tarried long enough to tell me he was John Getz from Strasbourg, N. D., then splashed on up the road. I made for the railroad tunnel just across the road. That swishing noise had started again and you could hear chunks of hot steel whanging through the bridge girders.
Business was rushing. The tunnel was being used as a shelter, first aid station, morgue and PW cage.
“More prisoners than we can handle over here,” explained the lieutenant at the entrance.
“C’mon you. Take hold, here!” He motioned a German prisoner to the side of a litter. On it lay a German corporal. His hair was grey and he must have been 45 or 50 years old.
“Won’t even carry their own wounded. Git goin’,” the lieutenant growled.
Cowering with fear, four prisoners picked up their wounded comrade and joined a thin line of Germans crossing to the west side of the river.
“They don’t need a guard,” the lieutenant said. “My men just meet ’em on the other side.”
I found Lt. Col. Leonard Engeman of Redwood Falls, Minn., in a cellar in Erpel with a handful of his officers. He was leader of the task force Brig. Gen. (now Maj. Gen.) William Hoge had assigned to take Remagen. Just the town. Not the bridge, or Erpel, the little village on the east bank of the Rhine.
“It was a little after 1 o’clock in the afternoon when we came out of the woods about 200 yards above Remagen,” he began. “We could see everything.”
“There were two trains on the other side of the river. One had steam up. I asked the artillery to put some time fire—air bursts, you know—on the bridge. I sent Timmerman’s company of infantry into the town (Lt. Karl Timmerman, West Point, Neb.) and let Grimball (Lt. John Grimball, Columbia, S. C.) take his platoon of tanks on in. I told him to get to the bridge and cover it with fire.
“General Hoge came up a little before 3 o’clock and we looked at the bridge. I remember him saying something about it sure would be nice if we could get that bridge. But we still didn’t have any idea—I kept thinking it would blow up right in our faces.
“A little past 3 things started popping. Our artillery started plastering the east bank with smoke shells. The tanks pulled up to the west and shot up the Krauts on the bridge. An explosion went off—on the bridge. The infantry had started going over, but came back. I grabbed my glasses and saw the bridge still standing. We radioed the engineers: ‘Rush all available men.’
“It was 3:17. Three minutes later we got prisoners who said the bridge was to go at 4 p.m. It wasn’t a couple minutes more until a second blast went off.
“Lieutenant Mott (Hugh Mott, Nashville, Tenn.)—he’s with the engineers—was yanking wires loose and kicking dynamite in the river, right and left, so there wouldn’t be any more explosions. I guess you know we took several hundred pounds of TNT out of those towers. It didn’t go off.
“The bridge still was standing and the infantry was crossing.
“Ack-ack, small arms and machine guns opened up now all around—behind us, ahead and on top from that bluff. Our tanks were firing into the tunnel and Grimball got a hit on the firebox of a locomotive that knocked it out.
“I told Mott to check the bridge and let me know how long it would take his engineers to get ready for the tanks. Most of the 27th Infantry was across by now.
“I reported back to General Hoge: Bridge intact. Am pushing doughs to other side. What are plans? Advise soon as possible.
“The answer came back: ‘Get demolitions off bridge and secure high ground. We will protect your rear and support you with additional troops. Dig in well and establish road blocks. Mine well on east side of river.’
“Well, we had already been doing that.”
There was no ride to the other side of the river. Traffic was moving only one way—and that was east. I ran to the first tower, rested for a moment, raced to the other tower, rested, and sprinted on to the west bank.
A jeep with a red and white “Press” bag draped across the radiator was waiting in Remagen. We bucked a heavy stream of tanks, guns, trucks, every kind of vehicle and weapon, all the way back to Spa.
My hands hadn’t thawed and I was just beginning to try to hit the typewriter keys when Major Nute interrupted in that apologetic drawl.
“Now you can say we’re across the Rhine,” he said. “But you can’t say where. And you can’t say how.”
And we didn’t. Not until the next day.
★★★
On Pearl Harbor night, Howard Cowan wrote a fervent appeal to New York for a foreign assignment… got it two years later… born in 1914 at Shawnee, Okla., he joined the AP at Kansas City in 1940… went to London in January, 1944… on Normandy invasion staff… assigned to Paris… covered Rhine crossing… rode glider into Germany… now assigned to Canada.