War In Western Europe: 1944-45

American soldiers in France

The bridge at Remagen

THE HISTORY OF THE REMAGEN BRIDGE

The Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen—the last standing on the Rhine—was captured by soldiers of the U.S. 9th Armored Division on 7 March 1945, during Operation Lumberjack. Although German engineers had mined the bridge before the American approach, the fuses had been cut by two Polish engineers forcibly conscripted to the Wehrmacht in Silesia.

On 7 March 1945, soldiers of the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion, led by Lieutenant Karl H. Timmermann, from West Point, Nebraska, approached the bridge, and found it standing. The first American soldier across the bridge was Sergeant Alex Drabik; Lt. Timmermann was the first officer across.

Although the bridge's capture is sometimes regarded as the "Miracle of Remagen" in U.S. histories, historians debate the strategic importance of the capture of the bridge at Remagen. General Eisenhower said that "the bridge is worth its weight in gold". However, few U.S. units were able to operate east of the Rhine ahead of the main crossings in the south, under Generals Patton and Bradley, and in the north, under Field Marshal Montgomery (Operation Plunder). Ultimately, only a limited number of troops were able to cross the Rhine before the bridge's collapse. However, the psychological advantage of having crossed the Rhine in force and in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht improved Allied morale while communicating disaster to the retreating Germans.

In the immediate days after the bridge's capture, the German Army Command desperately attempted to destroy the bridge by bombing it and having divers mine it. Hitler ordered a flying courts-martial that condemned five officers to death. Captain Bratge, who was in American hands, was sentenced in absentia while the other four (Majors Scheller, Kraft and Strobel, and Lieutenant Peters) were executed in the Westerwald Forest.

Soldiers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers worked long hours to stabilize and repair the bridge (with American combat troops stationed to guard the bridge sometimes shooting out their worklights to minimize visibility of their position to the enemy). To increase traffic capacity, the engineers also laid pontoon bridges upstream and downstream of the Ludendorff Bridge. However, despite the best U.S. efforts, on 17 March 1945, ten days after its capture, the Bridge at Remagen succumbed to the cumulative damage from German bombing and collapsed, killing twenty-eight soldiers of the Army Corps of Engineers. However, because the pontoon bridges and other secured crossing points had supplanted the bridge, its loss was neither tactically nor strategically significant. Still, the Ludendorff Bridge remained important as the first point at which Allies crossed the Rhine.

 American soldiers fight on the streets of a German city

 American soldiers in Netherlands

 Fighting in Normandy. 1944

 A Canadian soldier with a captured German. Were the Canadians as bad as the Russians in the way they treated German soldiers?

 Street fighting in Aachen, Germany

 American soldiers in Italy

 An American soldier uses a bazooka to blast a German tank. Normandy

 An American soldier uses German grenades


Related: Germans March Into Western Europe: 1940

------------------------------------------------------- 

GREAT DVDS

The Last Days of World War II is actually three separate and outstanding History Channel documentaries about the horrifying, surreal violence that marked the decisive months of the war in Europe. The first film begins with Hitler's declaration that the Third Reich would last 1,000 years, yet by 1945 Germany was losing on every major battlefront. Still, tens of thousands of civilian and military lives would be lost before fighting ceased: in the Battle of the Bulge, pitting 600,000 Allied troops against a Nazi surge in Belgium; in Dresden, where Allied bombers spent days fire-bombing women and children; in the subway tunnels of Berlin, where refugees were drowned when a paranoid, sleepless Hitler ordered them flooded to stave off Russian soldiers. Plentiful interviews with former officers on all sides of the war, commentary by historians, and remarkable footage of battles, concentration camps, and the Nuremberg trials make this a compelling narrative rich with enlightening details.

A second disc includes a superb piece about the destruction of a U.S. Navy submarine-chaser off the coast of Maine, and a strategic cover-up that denied, for more than 60 years, that the ship was torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Finally, the story of the German-Japanese alliance, and the role of a geography professor named Karl Haushofer (who coined the phrase "geopolitics") in a number of key wartime events, make a fascinating subject for the final production.

Buy at AMAZON

Buy at BARNES & NOBLE

------------------------------------------------------