Word: bridgehead
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Advancing in the Remagen bridgehead, Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges' First Army men brought the highway under artillery fire, then inched forward to machine-gun range. Thus they cut an important Nazi lateral communication line ori the east bank of the Rhine. Finally a 78th Division platoon, led by a staff sergeant, crossed the road in what one correspondent called "a gallant, old-fashioned infantry charge across 250 yards of coverless, fire-swept ground." At week's end the Yanks were astride the road along a six-mile stretch and had pushed a mile beyond...
...Prime Minister was able to tell his King with pride that British and Canadian troops were beating down the bitterest German resistance of the entire western front. This action was in the Wesel area, where German paratroops, under victory-or-death orders from Hitler himself, were holding a shrinking bridgehead on the Rhine's west bank...
...paratroopers were covering the last withdrawals of Nazi armor and infantry across the river. Germans poured across the two bridges at Wesel, and some took to ferries, barges, even rowboats. Canadian and British troops fighting with Henry Crerar's Canadian First Army slowly pressed the bridgehead back. At its northwest corner, they captured the town of Xanten, whose name comes from the Latin ad sanctos ("to the holy ones"), and which all good Germans believe is the birthplace of Siegfried of the Nibelungen legend...
...Sacred River. The wiping out of the Wesel bridgehead brought Eisenhower's armies up to a practically unbroken 150-mile front on the Rhine, from Nijmegen to Coblenz. The amazing U.S. crossing at Remagen was a great credit, not only to the local heroes, but to the Supreme Commander himself, who had passed word down the chain of command to be alert for any opportunity and aggressive to seize...
...Rhine had been crossed must have been a shattering blow to the remnants of German morale. The Rhine, the sacred river that winds through German song & story, had not been crossed by hostile armies since Napoleon passed over it at Strasbourg in 1805. * As a military factor, the Remagen bridgehead offered the chance of a drive to the northeast, outflanking the Ruhr; or a push to the southeast, forcing a German withdrawal from the Saar and the rest of the Rhineland south of the Moselle...