The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (44 page)

Timmermann called out, “Now, we’re going to cross this bridge before-“ At that instant, there was another deafening rumble and roar. The Germans had set off an emergency 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, inThe Bridge at Remagen, one of the best of all accounts of the U.S. Army in action in World War II, and a model for all oral history, describes what happened next: “Everybody waited for Timmermann’s reaction. ‘Thank God, now we won’t have to cross that damned thing,’ Sgt. Mike Chinchar said fervently, trying to reassure himself.

“Pvt. Johnny Ayres fingered the two grenades hooked onto the rings of his pack suspenders, and nodded his head: ‘We wouldn’t have had a chance.’ “But Timmermann, who had been trying to make out what was left of the bridge through the thick haze, yelled:

“ ‘Look-she’s still standing.’

“Most of the smoke and dust had cleared away, and the men followed their commander’s gaze. The sight of the bridge still spanning the Rhine brought no cheers from the men. It was like an unwelcome specter. The suicide mission was on again.”

Timmermann could see German engineers at the east end of the bridge working frantically to try again to blow the bridge. He waved his arm overhead in the “Follow me” gesture. Machine-gun fire from one of the bridge towers made him duck. One of A Company’s tanks pulled up to the edge of the crater and blasted the tower. The German fire let up.

“Get going,” Timmermann yelled. Maj. Murray Deevers called out, “I’ll see you on the other side and we’ll all have a chicken dinner.” “Chicken dinner, my foot, I’m all chicken right now,” one of the men in the first platoon protested. Deevers flushed. “Move on across,” he ordered.  “I tell you, I’m not going out there and get blown up,” the GI answered. “No sir, Major, you can court-martial and shoot me, but I ain’t going out there on that bridge.”

Timmerman was shouting, “Get going, you guys, get going.” He set the example, moving onto the bridge himself. That did it. The lead platoon followed, crouching, running, dodging, watching for holes in the bridge planking that covered the railroad tracks (put down by the Germans so that their vehicles could retreat over the bridge) but always moving in the direction of the Germans on the far shore.

Sgt. Joe DeLisio led the first squad. Sgts. Joe Petrencsik and Alex Drabik led the second. In the face of more machine-gun and 20mm anti-aircraft fire they dashed forward. “Get going,” Timmermann yelled. The men took up the cry. “Get going,” they shouted at one another. “Get going.” Engineers were right behind them, searching for demolitions and tearing out electrical wires. The names were Chinchar, Samele, Massie, Wegener, Jensen. They were Italian, Czech, Norwegian, German, Russian. They were children of European immigrants, come back to the old country to liberate and redeem it.

On the far side, at the entrance to the tunnel, they could see a German engineer pushing on a plunger. There was nothing for it but to keep going. And nothing happened-apparently a stray bullet or shell had cut the wire leading to the demolition charges. Halfway across the bridge, three men found four packages of TNT weighing thirty pounds each, tied to I-beams under the decking. Using wire cutters, they worked on the demolitions until they splashed into the river.  DeLisio got to the towers, ran up the circular staircase of the one to his right, where the firing was coming from, and on the fourth level found three German machine gunners, firing at the bridge.

“Hande hoch!”DeLisio commanded. They gave up; he picked up the gun they had been using and hurled it out the aperture. Men on the bridge saw it and were greatly encouraged. Drabik came running on at top speed. He passed the towers and got to the east bank. He was the first GI to cross the Rhine. Others were on his heels.  They quickly made the German engineers in the tunnel prisoners. Timmermann sent Lt. Emmet “Jim” Burrows and his platoon up the Erpeler Ley, saying, “You know, Jim, the old Fort Benning stuff; take the high ground and hold it.” Burrows later said, “Taking Remagen and crossing the bridge were a breeze compared with climbing that hill.” He took casualties, but he got to the top, where he saw far too many German men and vehicles spread out before him to even contemplate attacking them. He hung on at the edge of the summit. But he had the high ground, and the Americans were over the Rhine.

Sixteen-year-old Pvt. Heinz Schwarz, who came from a village only a short distance upstream on the east bank of the Rhine from Remagen, was in the tunnel.  “We were all still kids,” he recalled. “The older soldiers in our unit stayed in the tunnel, but the rest of us were curious and went up to the bridge tower to get a better look.” He heard the order ring out: “Everybody down! We’re blowing the bridge!” He heard the explosion and saw the bridge rise up. “We thought it had been destroyed, and we were saved.” But as the smoke cleared, he saw Timmermann and his men coming on. He ran down the circular stairs and got to the entrance to the tunnel just as DeLisio got to the tower. “I knew I had to somehow get myself out through the rear entrance of the tunnel and run home to my mother as fast as I could.” He did. Fifteen years later he was a member of the Bundestag. At a ceremony on March 7, 1960, he met DeLisio. They swapped stories.

As the word of Timmermann’s toehold spread up the chain of command, to regiment, division, corps, and army, each general responded by ordering men on the scene to get over the bridge, for engineers to repair it, for units in the area to change direction and head for Remagen. Bradley was the most enthusiastic of all.  He had been fearful of a secondary role in the final campaign, but with Hodges over the river he decided immediately to get First Army so fully involved that Eisenhower would have to support the bridge-head.  First, however, Bradley had to get by Gen. Harold “Pinky” Bull, operations officer at SHAEF. The SHAEF G-3 was with Bradley when the word arrived. When Bradley outlined his plan, he related, Bull “looked at me as though I were a heretic. He scoffed: ‘You’re not going anywhere down there at Remagen. You’ve got a bridge, but it’s in the wrong place. It just doesn’t fit the plan.’ “I demanded, ‘What in the hell do you want us to do, pull back and blow it up?’

“

Bradley got on the phone to Eisenhower. When he heard the news, Eisenhower was ecstatic. He said, “Brad, that’s wonderful.” Bradley said he wanted to push everything across he could. “Sure,” Eisenhower responded, “get right on across with everything you’ve got. It’s the best break we’ve had.” Bradley felt it necessary to point out that Bull disagreed. “To hell with the planners,” Eisenhower said. “Sure, go on, Brad, and I’ll give you everything we got to hold that bridgehead. We’ll make good use of it even if the terrain isn’t too good.” The next morning Eisenhower informed the CCS that he was rushing troops to Remagen “with the idea that this will constitute greatest possible threat” to the Germans. Because he had insisted on closing to the Rhine, SHAEF had sufficient divisions in reserve for Eisenhower to exercise flexibility and exploit the opportunity. Over the following two weeks he sent troops to Hodges, who used them to extend the bridgehead. The Germans made determined efforts to wreck the bridge, using air attacks, constant artillery fire, V-2 missiles, floating mines, and frogmen, but Hodges’s defenses thwarted their efforts. By the time the big railroad bridge finally collapsed, the bridgehead was twenty miles long and eight miles deep, with six pontoon bridges across the river. It constituted a threat to the entire German defense of the Rhine. To the north, meanwhile, Montgomery was preparing his crossing, as was Patton to the south.  Ike told Mamie, “Our attacks have been going well . . . The enemy becomes more and more stretched . . .” Unfortunately, “he shows no signs of quitting. He is fighting hard. . . . I never count my Germans until they’re in our cages, or are buried!”

Eisenhower spent the evening of March 16 with Patton and his staff. Patton was in a fine mood and set out to kid and flatter Eisenhower. He said that some of the Third Army units were disappointed because they had not had an opportunity to see the Supreme Commander. “Hell, George,” Eisenhower replied, “I didn’t think the American GI would give a damn even if the Lord Himself came to inspect them.”

Patton smiled. “Well,” he said, “I hesitate to say which of you would rank, sir!” The banter went on through the evening. Patton noted in his diary, “General E stated that not only was I a good general but also a lucky general, and Napoleon preferred luck to greatness. I told him this was the first time he had ever complimented me in 2 ½ years we had served together.” Historian Michael Doubler rightly judges that everything came together at Remagen. All that General Marshall had worked for and hoped for and built for in creating this citizen army, happened. It was one of the great victories in the army’s history. The credit goes to the men-Timmermann, DeLisio, Drabik, through Hoge, Bradley, and Ike-and to the system the U.S. Army had developed in Europe, which bound these men together into a team that featured intiative at the bottom and a cold-blooded determination and competency at the top.  Up north, Montgomery’s preparations for Operation Plunder continued. Down south, Patton’s Third Army cleared the Saarland and the Palatinate in a spectacular campaign. As his divisions approached the Rhine, Patton had 500 assault boats, plus LCVPs and DUKWs, brought forward, along with 7,500 engineers, but with no fanfare, no fuss, no publicity, in deliberate contrast to Montgomery and so as to not alert the Germans. On the night of March 22-23 the 5th Division began to cross the river at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. The Germans were unprepared; by midnight the entire 11th Regiment had crossed by boat with only twenty casualties. Well before dawn the whole of the 5th and a part of the 90th Divisions were across. The Germans launched a counterattack against the 5th Division, using students from an officer candidate school at nearby Wiesbaden.  They were good soldiers, and managed to infiltrate the American positions, but after a busy night and part of the next morning they were dead or prisoners.  At dawn German artillery began to fire, and the Luftwaffe sent twelve planes to bomb and strafe. The Americans pushed east anyway. By the afternooon the whole of the 90th Division was on the far side, along with the 4th Armored. Patton called Bradley: “Brad, don’t tell anyone but I’m across.” “Well, I’ll be damned-you mean across the Rhine?”

“Sure am, I sneaked a division over last night.” A little later, at the Twelfth Army Group morning briefing, the Third Army reported: “Without benefit of aerial bombing, ground smoke, artillery preparation, and airborne assistance, the Third Army at 2200 hours, March 22, crossed the Rhine River.”

The following day Patton walked across a pontoon bridge built by his engineers.  He stopped in the middle. While every GI in the immediate area who had a camera took his picture, he urinated into the Rhine-a long, high, steady stream. As he buttoned up, Patton said, “I’ve waited a long time to do that. I didn’t even piss this morning when I got up so I would have a really full load. Yes, sir, the pause that refreshes.”

By the first week of spring 1945, Eisenhower’s armies had done what he had been planning for since the beginning of the year. Montgomery’s elaborate crossing of the Rhine in Operation Plunder, featuring the largest airdrop in the history of war, had been successful. To the south, First and Third Armies were across. The time for exploitation had arrived. Some of the Allied infantry and armored divisions faced stiff resistance, others only sporadic resistance, others none at all. Whatever was in front of them-rough terrain, enemy strong points, more rivers to cross-their generals were as one in taking up the phrase Lieutenant Timmermann had used at the Remagen bridge-“Get going!” The 90th Division, on Patton’s left flank, headed east toward Hanau on the Main River. It crossed in assault boats on the night of March 28. Maj. John Cochran’s battalion ran into a battalion of Hitler Youth officer candidates, teenage Germans who were eager to fight. They set up a roadblock in a village. As Cochran’s men advanced toward it, the German boys let go with their machine gun, killing one American. Cochran put some artillery fire on the roadblock and destroyed it, killing three. “One youth, perhaps aged 16, held up his hands,” Cochran recalled. “I was very emotional over the loss of a good soldier and I grabbed the kid and took off my cartridge belt.  “I asked him if there were more like him in the town. He gave me a stare and said, ‘I’d rather die than tell you anything.’ I told him to pray, because he was going to die. I hit him across the face with my thick, heavy belt. I was about to strike him again when I was grabbed from behind by Chaplain Kerns. He said, ‘Don’t!’ Then he took that crying child away. The Chaplain had intervened not only to save a life but to prevent me from committing a murder. Had it not been for the Chaplain, I would have.”

From the crossing of the Rhine to the end of the war, every man who died, died needlessly. It was that feeling that almost turned Major Cochran into a murderer. On the last day of March, Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd had a particularly gruesome experience that almost broke him. His squad was advancing, supported by a tank. Six troopers were riding on the tank, while he and five others were following in its tracks, which freed them from worry about mines. A hidden 88 fired. The shell hit the gun turret, blowing off the troopers, killing two and wounding the other four. “The force of the blast blew them to the rear of the tank near me,” Schlemmer recalled. “They lay as they fell. A second round then came screaming in, this time to ricochet off the front of the tank. The tank reversed gears and backed up over three of our wounded, crushing them to death. I could only sit down and bawl, whether out of frustration of being unable to help them, whether from the futility of the whole damn war, or whether from hatred of the Germans for causing it all, I’ve never been able to understand.”

That same day Cpl. James Pemberton, a 1942 high school graduate who went into ASTP and then to the 103rd Division as a replacement, was also following a tank.  “My guys started wandering and drifting a bit, and I yelled at them to get in the tank tracks to avoid the mines. They did and we followed. The tank was rolling over Schu [anti-personnel] mines like crazy. I could see them popping left and right like popcorn.” Pemberton had an eighteen-year-old replacement in the squad; he told him to hop up and ride on the tank, thinking he would be out of the way up there. An 88 fired. The replacement fell off. The tank went into reverse and backed over him, crushing him from the waist down. “There was one scream, and some mortars hit the Kraut 88 and our tank went forward again. To me, it was one of the worst things I went through. This poor bastard had graduated from high school in June, was drafted, took basic training, shipped overseas, had thirty seconds of combat, and was killed.” Pemberton’s unit kept advancing. “The Krauts always shot up all their ammo and then surrendered,” he remembered. Hoping to avoid such nonsense, in one village the CO sent a Jewish private who spoke German forward with a white flag, calling out to the German boys to surrender. “They shot him up so bad that after it was over the medics had to slide a blanket under his body to take him away.” Then the Germans started waving their own white flag. Single file, eight of them emerged from a building, hands up. “They were very cocky. They were about 20 feet from me when I saw the leader suddenly realize he still had a pistol in his shoulder holster. He reached into his jacket with two fingers to pull it out and throw it away.