Citizen Soldiers [Condensed]

by Stephen Ambrose

  Once over the Rur there was open, relatively flat ground between the Americans and the Rhine. It was the most elementary military logic for the Germans to fall back. Why defend a plain that had no fortifications when Germany's biggest river was at your back? Yet that is what everyone knew Hitler would do-and Hitler did. He ordered his army to stand and fight. As it had neither fixed positions nor a river line for defensive purposes, the men should utilize the villages as strongpoints. These were villages inhabited by loyal Germans. When the 5th Division got into one of them, there were signs painted on the walls which said: SEE GERMANY AND DIE, ONWARD SLAVES OF MOSCOW, and DEATH WILL GIVE YOU PEACE.

  Those signs didn't stay up long, because the walls came tumbling down. The GIs used the techniques of street fighting that they had learned in the fall of 1944. The most important things were to stay off the streets and "keep dispersed, move fast, and keep on moving whatever happens," one veteran explained. "Keep your head up and your eyes open and your legs moving."

  THROUGH February, Patton attacked, whatever the conditions. He was at his zenith. His energy, his drive, his sense of history, his concentration on details while never losing sight of the larger picture combined to make him the preeminent American army commander of the war. He was constantly looking for ways to improve. For example, he ordered all Sherman tanks in his army to have two and a half inches of armour plate, salvaged from wrecked tanks, put on the forward hull of the tanks-and was delighted with the results; for the first time, a Sherman could take a direct hit from an 88 and survive. He also had flamethrowers mounted on the tanks, using the machine-gun aperture-and again was delighted with the results. They were highly effective against pillboxes.

  Patton's worst enemy was the weather and what it did to the roads. The nightly freezes, the daily thaws, and the heavy traffic combined to make them impassable. Patton at one point in early February was forced to turn to packhorses to supply the front line. Still he said attack.

  On February 26 elements of Third Army captured Bitburg. Patton entered the town from the south while the fighting was still going on at the northern edge of town. About this time Patton was spending six hours a day in an open jeep inspecting, urging, prodding, demanding. He crossed the Sauer River on a partly submerged footbridge, under a smoke screen (from which emerged another Patton legend, that he had swum the river).

  History was very much on his mind. In the evenings he was reading Caesar's Gallic Wars. He was especially interested in Trier, at the apex of the Saar Moselle triangle, on his northern flank. The historic city of the Treveri, according to Caesar, had contained the best cavalry in Gaul. Patton wanted Trier. He inveigled the 10th Armoured out of Bradley and sent it to take the city.

  Lieutenant Colonel Jack Richardson (LJSMA, 1935) of 10th Armoured led a task force in the successful attack into Trier. Driving into the city along Caesar's road, Patton "could smell the sweat of the Legions," imagining them marching before him into the still surviving amphitheatre where the emperor Constantine the Great had thrown his captives to the beasts. He could not rest. Third Army had started the February campaign further from the Rhine than any other army on the Western Front. He still had so far to go that he feared his would be the last army to cross. "We are in a horse race with Courtney [Hodges]," Patton wrote his wife. "If he beats me [across the Rhine], I shall be ashamed."

  BY THE MIDDLE of the first week in March, Ninth and First armies were closing to the Rhine, threatening to encircle entire divisions. Hitler ordered counterattacks. As a consequence, thousands of German troops were trapped on the west bank, where they either surrendered or were killed. First Army intelligence declared: "Perhaps it is too early to be optimistic but everyone feels that resistance is on the point of crumbling."

  Cologne was a magnet for First Army. The famous cathedral city was the biggest on the Rhine. The Germans had never imagined invaders from the west would get that far, so Cologne was defended only by a weak outer ring of defences, manned by bits and pieces of a hodgepodge of divisions, and a weaker inner ring, manned by police, firemen, and Volkssturm troops. Such forces could not long hold up an American army at the peak of its power.

  Americans were pouring through the Siegfried Line. The columns were advancing fifteen kilometres a day and more. Meanwhile, the artillery was pounding the cities and bridges. Major Max Lale wrote his wife on March 2: "Tonight, just at dusk, I stood from a long distance away and watched the plumes of smoke, the flashes of flames, and listened to the long, low rumble that marked the death of one of the oldest cities in Europe."

  On March 5 General Maurice Rose's 3rd Armoured Division entered Cologne, followed by General Terry Alien's 104th Division. The next day Rose's tanks reached the Hohenzollern Bridge, but most of the structure was resting in the water, as were the other Cologne bridges over the Rhine. In Cologne only the great cathedral stood, damaged but majestic. Like St Paul's in London, it had been used as an aiming point but was never knocked down.

  It was carnival time. Mardis Gras came on March 7. In Cologne, one of the most Catholic of German cities, the inhabitants did their best to celebrate. Lieutenant Gunter Materne, a German artillery officer, recalled that his men investigated a ship tied to a wharf, and found it filled with Champagne and still wines. They proceeded to have a party. People emerged from cellars to join in. "And so we had a great time," Materne said. "We got drunk. People came up to me and said. Take off your uniform. I'll give you some civilian clothes. The war is already lost.'" But Materne spurned the temptation and the next day managed to get across the Rhine in a rowboat.

  He was one of the last Germans to escape. The Americans had taken 250,000 prisoners and killed or wounded almost as many. More than twenty divisions had been effectively destroyed. The Allied air forces were taking full advantage of lengthening days and better weather, blasting every German who moved during daylight hours, flying as many as 11,000 sorties in one day.

  On the first day of World War II, then Colonel Eisenhower had written to his brother Milton: "Hitler should beware the fury of an aroused democracy." Now that fury was making itself manifest on the west bank of the Rhine. The Allies had brought the war home to Germany.

  Chapter Eleven

  Crossing the Rhine: March 7-31, 1945

  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 is between 200 and 500 metres wide, swift and turbulent, with great whirlpools and eddies. The Germans on the far bank were disorganized and demoralized but still determined and capable of utilizing the natural advantages the Rhine gave them to defend their country. There were only two or three places from Cologne south that were possible crossing sites. Worse, along that stretch there were no major objectives on the east bank inland for some 50 kilometres, and the hinterland was heavily wooded, undulating, and broken by narrow valleys.

  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 plain led straight to Berlin. So while Elsenhower's heart was with Bradley, Hodges, and Patton, his mind was with Monty. SHAEF G-3 had decided that north was the 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."

  As MONTGOMERY'S armies were closing to the river, he began to build his supply base for the assault crossing. Altogether he required 250,000 tons of supplies for the British and Canadian forces and the US 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.

  Montgomery's planning for the Rhine crossing was almost as elaborate as for Overlord. 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 aeroplane 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 1 million.

  Montgomery 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. The air forces pounded the Germans on the east bank with 50,000 tons of bombs. Monty invited Churchill and other dignitaries to join him to watch the big show.

  Beginning February 28, Ninth Army had been pushing east. Company K, 333rd Regiment, received orders to take the village of Hardt, between the Rur 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. Everyone was groggy, exhausted and wary, since they knew their flank was open, yet they were pressing on deeper into the German lines.

  The company moved out to Hardt, attacked, and got stopped by machine-gun fire and a shower of 88s. Two men were killed. The others hit the ground. Sergeant George Pope's squad got caught in the open. "We were all pinned down," he remembered. "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."

  Lieutenant Bill Masters was in the edge of a wood with half of his platoon. The remainder of his men and other platoons were getting pounded out in the open flat field. Masters recalled: "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. "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. 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. "I had this dead-end kid from Chicago I'd made my bodyguard. 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." Lieutenant Paul Leimkuehler gave a more vivid description of Masters's action: "He was leading, running down the main street like a madman, shooting up everything in his way."

  The company advanced and by March 7 was in Krefeld, on the banks of the Rhine. By some miracle the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked-electricity, hot water, flush toilets, telephones. 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.

  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.

  ON MARCH 7 Patton's forces were still fighting west of the Rhine, trying to close to the river from Koblenz south to Mainz. The best stretch of river for crossing south of Cologne was in his sector. He was thinking of crossing on the run and hoping he could do it before Montgomery's operation even got started-and before Hodges's First Army. 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." Company G, 328th Infantry Regiment, was typical. It consisted of veterans whose bone weariness was so deep they were indifferent, plus raw recruits. Still, it had the necessary handful of leaders, as demonstrated by Lieutenant Lee Otts in the second week in March, during Third Army's drive towards the Rhine. Private George Idelson 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."

  Otts established a platoon CP and started to dig a foxhole. "Mortar shells started falling almost as thick as rain drops," 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." The company commander came limping over. 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," 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. Lieutenant 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."

  FIRST Army was moving east all along its front, making ten miles 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. 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.

  Early on March 7, on First Army's right flank, 9th Armoured Division was sent to close to the west bank of the Rhine. The mission of Combat Command B (CCB) of the 9th, commanded by General William Hoge, was to occupy the west bank town of Remagen, where a great railroad bridge spanned the Rhine. It had been built in World War I and named after General Eric Ludendorff. On the east bank there was an escarpment, the Erpeler Ley. Virtually sheer, rising some 170 metres, it dominated the river valley. The train tracks followed a tunnel through the Erpeler Ley.

  As CCB moved towards the Rhine, Lieutenant Harold Larsen flew ahead in a Piper Cub, looking for targets of opportunity. At around 1030 he was approaching Remagen, when he saw the Ludendorff Bridge, its massive superstructure intact, looming out in the fog and mists. Larsen radioed General Hoge, who immediately sent orders to the units nearest Remagen to take the bridge. They were the 27th Armoured Infantry Battalion and the 14th Tank Battalion. Hoge formed them into a task force under Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Engeman, who put Lieutenant Emmet "Jim" Burrows's infantry platoon 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. German soldiers were retreating across the Ludendorff Bridge.

  Burrows called back to Lieutenant Karl Timmermann, 22 years old, who had just assumed command of Company A the previous day. A touch of irony: Timmermann had been born in Frankfurt am Main, less than 160 kilometres from Remagen. His father had been in the American occupation forces in 1919, had married a German girl, 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 officer candidate school at Fort Benning.

  Timmermann was told to get into the town with
his infantry and tanks. As Timmermann set out, Hoge set off cross-country in a jeep to get to the scene, weighing the prospects of capturing the bridge. 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. Timmermann, meanwhile, had fought through scattered resistance and by 1600 was approaching the bridge. Germans on the east bank were firing machine guns and antiaircraft guns at his company. His battalion commander. Major 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. A huge explosion sent a volcano of stone and earth erupting from the west end of the bridge. The Germans had detonated a charge that gouged a deep hole in the earthen causeway joining the road and the bridge platform. The crater made it impossible for vehicles to get onto the bridge-but not infantry.

  Timmermann turned to a squad leader: "Now, we're going to cross this bridge before-" At that instant there was another deafening roar. The Germans had set off a 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, described what happened next: "Everybody waited for Timmermann's reaction. 'Thank God, now we won't have to cross that damned thing,' Sergeant Mike Chinchar said fervently, trying to reassure himself.