Hitler's Last Days (16 page)

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Hitler then ordered the great commando Otto Skorzeny to assemble a team of swimmers to float down the Rhine and attach explosives to the Remagen Bridge. The mission failed when all of Skorzeny's amphibious commandos were discovered by sharp-eyed American sentries along the shore and were either killed or captured.

Troops of the U.S. 9th Armored Division head for the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, Germany. They were some of the first soldiers to cross the Rhine River.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

So the Allies still hold the bridge but are unable to advance farther without the assistance of a greater fighting force.

CHAPTER 19

TRIER, GERMANY

MARCH 13, 1945
MORNING

G
EORGE
S. P
ATTON UNDERSTANDS THE SIGNIFICANCE
of Remagen. “Ninth Armored Division of the Third Corps,” he wrote in his journal on March 7, “got a bridge intact over the Rhine at Remagen. This may have a fine influence on our future movements. I hope we get one also.”

But even if he can't find an intact bridge, Patton is determined to beat Montgomery across the Rhine.

Patton has just ten days.

Now he is on the move. Finally.

Sergeant John Mims drives Patton in his open-air jeep, with its three-star flags over the wheel wells. The snows of the cruel subzero winter are finally melting. Patton and Mims pass frozen, legs-up carcasses of dead cattle as the road winds from Luxembourg into Germany. Hulks of destroyed Sherman M4s litter the countryside—so many tanks, in fact, that Patton makes a mental note to investigate which type of enemy round defeated each of them. This is Patton's way of helping the U.S. Army build better armor for fighting the next war.

Third Army is advancing into Germany. Patton has sensed a weakness in the German lines and is eager to press his advantage.

He has convinced Eisenhower to let him attack two hundred miles to the south. The plan to invade southern Germany's Palatinate region, an area west of the Rhine, came to Patton in a dream. It was fully formed, down to the last logistical detail. “Whether ideas like this are inspiration or insomnia, I don't know,” he writes in his journal. “I do things by sixth sense.” Patton's plan to invade the Palatinate is approved by Eisenhower. However, Patton is not given permission to cross the Rhine should the opportunity arise.

Then again, following the old adage that it is easier to seek forgiveness than to ask permission, Patton doesn't plan on asking for permission to ford the mighty river.

*   *   *

Patton's military ambitions for the assault are many, among them the devastation of all German forces guarding the heavily fortified Siegfried Line, a four-hundred-mile defensive array of eighteen thousand bunkers and interlocking rows of pyramid-shaped concrete antitank obstacles nicknamed “dragon's teeth.” Hitler built the barrier between 1936 and 1938, anticipating by almost a decade the day that some great army—in this case, that of the Allies—would attempt to invade the Fatherland.

Privately, however, Patton admits that not all his goals are tactical. The war is now personal. The man who lives for battle wants to be judged by his actions, not his words. The war will end soon. Patton would love nothing more than for the spotlight to shine on his amazing generalship at least one more time.

So it is that the Third Army romps through the Palatinate on what Colonel Abe Abrams of the Fourth Armored Division calls the Rhine Rat Race. It travels with ample supplies of metal decking and pontoons. Patton hopes to build temporary bridges across the Rhine, well ahead of Montgomery and his Twenty-First Army Group.

*   *   *

As the days tick down to Montgomery's Operation Plunder, Patton's army overwhelms the German army in southern Germany, capturing sixty-eight thousand prisoners and three thousand square miles of German countryside. The Siegfried Line proves no match for the Third Army. Patton's forces seem to be everywhere. Even the hilliest terrain sports hundreds of U.S. tanks and infantry units rolling down roads long considered “impassable to armor.”

“The enemy,” notes one American soldier, is “a beaten mass of men, women, and children, interspersed with diehard Nazis.”

Patton writes candidly to Beatrice about the condition of the German people. “I saw one woman with a perambulator full of her worldly goods sitting by it on a hill, crying. An old man with a wheelbarrow and three little children wringing his hands. A woman with five children and a tin cup crying. In hundreds of villages there is not a living thing, not even a chicken. Most of the houses are heaps and stones. They brought it on themselves, but these poor peasants are not responsible.

Hitler admires a model of the Siegfried Line while staffers look on, 1939.
[Bridgeman Art Library]

“I am getting soft?” Patton asks Beatrice rhetorically.

*   *   *

Montgomery is still waiting. The British commander is assembling the largest amphibious operation since D-day. His staff checks and rechecks every detail, from the perceived numerical superiority of Allied forces to the number of assault boats required to cross the Rhine, to even the tonnage of munitions that British bombers will drop to root out any concealed German resistance.

Meanwhile, Patton attacks. His Palatinate campaign will go down in history as one of the great strategies of the war. Even the Germans will say so. And their praise for Patton will be their biggest show of respect. “The greatest threat,” captured German Lieutenant Colonel Konrad Freiherr von Wangenheim reveals during his interrogation, “was the whereabouts of the feared U.S. Army. General Patton is always the topic of military discussion. Where is he? When will he attack? Where? How? With what?”

Advancing American troops pass captured German soldiers (center) near Giessen, Germany, in 1945.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Von Wangenheim goes on to add: “General Patton is the most feared general on all fronts.… The tactics of General Patton are daring and unpredictable.… He is the most modern general and the best commander of armored and infantry troops combined.”

U.S. troops cross a pontoon bridge over the Rhine River. The soldiers in the engineer divisions who built the bridge left a sign.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Patton's tanks are riding roughshod over the rugged countryside. Patton was nothing short of brilliant at Bastogne, and now he is the same in the Palatinate.

“We are the eighth wonder of the world,” Patton says of the Third Army on March 19, congratulating himself on yet another success. “And I had to beg, lie, and steal to get started.”

Patton's forces capture the pivotal city of Koblenz, at the meeting of the Rhine and Moselle Rivers. He now has eight full divisions lined up along the western shore of the Rhine, the tank barrels aimed directly at the eastern bank.

Now all Patton needs to do is find a place to cross.

*   *   *

The date is March 22, 1945. Two hours before midnight, under cover of darkness, a Third Army patrol paddles across the Rhine at Nierstein in flimsy canvas assault boats. The slap of their paddles stroking the swift waters goes unheard. They report back that no enemy troops are in the vicinity. When Patton receives the news, he immediately orders that bridging material be sent forward. By late afternoon March 23, hastily built pontoon bridges span the river. Consisting of several floating barrels topped with steel tread, these bridges can be built in hours. They are highly effective in moving men and material across a river—but also highly unstable. Despite that, an entire division of Patton's army is soon across.

Patton calls General Bradley, but instead of making the sort of bold pronouncement that would inform the Germans of his precise location, he sets aside his pride in a moment of caution.

“Don't tell anyone, but I'm across,” Patton informs Bradley.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Bradley responds. “You mean across the Rhine?”

“Sure I am. Sneaked a division over last night. But there are so few Krauts around here they don't know it yet. So don't make any announcement. We'll keep it a secret until we see how it goes.”

It goes well—but only for a short time.

The sight of thousands of men marching across temporary pontoon bridges is hard to conceal. The German air force discovers Third Army's encroachment at dawn. Disregarding Allied air superiority, Luftwaffe fighters patrol low above the Rhine, searching for signs of soldiers, vehicles, and supplies that betray the Allied buildup. The pilots radio back what they see, then strafe the intruders with rounds of machine gun and cannon fire.

But the German pilots are
too
bold, and in their determination to throw back Patton's invaders, thirty-three Luftwaffe planes are blasted out of the sky by precision firing from Third Army's antiaircraft guns. The German pilots are so low that bailing out and parachuting to safety is not an option. The American soldiers continue their march across the swift blue waters of the Rhine, cheered throughout the day by the sight of enemy planes exploding all across the horizon and falling into the river with mighty splashes.