WAR IS NEVER EASY, and sometimes victory requires a lucky break. Think about that moment in March 1945 when the U.S. Army managed to seize a bridge over the Rhine—a major river and an operational obstacle of the first order. No one on the Allied side thought getting across was going to be easy.
And then suddenly they did just that! As elements of General John W. Leonard’s 9th Armored Division approached the river on March 7, they saw to their astonishment that the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen still stood. Hardly pausing for breath, they rushed toward it. The Germans set off explosives, and eyewitnesses actually saw the bridge lift off its foundations—then settle back down again, intact. Soon the U.S. Army was pushing everything it could across the bridge, establishing a powerful bridgehead on the Rhine’s eastern bank, and preparing for a thrust into the heart of Germany.
That quickly, a terrain barrier that might have held up the Allies for weeks had been overcome. General Courtney Hodges, commander of the U.S. First Army, wasn’t the ebullient type, but he couldn’t contain himself: “Brad,” he shouted over the phone to his commanding officer, “we’ve got a bridge!” General Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. 12th Army Group, responded with one of the war’s great comebacks: “Hot dog, Courtney—this will bust him wide open.”
What a stroke of luck! A bit of German wiring goes amiss and everything changes.
But let’s look more carefully at that lucky break. By March 1945, a worn-out German army was fighting west of the Rhine, getting hammered by the Allies all along the front. The Germans were putting up a tough fight, sure, but they were low on manpower, supplies, and fuel, and their air force had disappeared from the skies. Virtually every German field commander wanted to pull back over the Rhine. They saw its far east bank as a natural refuge, a place where their threadbare formations could take a knee, rest, and recover. The German high command—Hitler and his staff alike—disagreed. Now was the time to hang tough, they ordered. Defend every inch of ground and prove to the Allies how much time, treasure, and blood it was going to cost them to get to Berlin.
So instead of sheltering behind the Rhine, the German armies in the west were fighting well in front of it, defending themselves along smaller rivers like the Roer and the Ahr. Even the smallest tactical retreat required permission from the top, which was rarely forthcoming, and no one was allowed to make defensive preparations along the Rhine. And, unfortunately for the Germans, a general retreat of all their armies across the Rhine—millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of vehicles, and a limited number of bridges—required just as much planning as an assault across the river. It was a strategic redeployment of the first order, not a tactical maneuver to be improvised in a day or two.
Therein lay the problem. Forced to defend every last village west of the Rhine, the German army was dug in, flatfooted, and no longer capable of maneuver. Once one of those highly mobile Allied armies cracked open a seam, it would be full speed ahead to the Rhine. And once the Allies got there, they would find not a prepared defensive position, but merely…a river, as well as a great deal of confusion on the far side as the surprised Germans frantically tried to improvise their defenses. They would find a big bridge rigged with an insufficient explosive charge, and electrical wiring that probably could have used a few more days for installation and testing.
Did the Allies get lucky? I’m not so sure. If a bridge hadn’t been lost at Remagen, a similar disaster would have hit the Germans somewhere else.
Originally published in the February 2014 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
