Word: duisburg
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Duisburg, Ninth Army patrols and German patrols were trying to feel out the opposite banks. Ninth Army guns shelled German workers who still came & went from the Duisburg factories, and eight-inch guns reached twelve miles to the Krupp works in air-battered Essen...
Battle of Bridges. First to reach the Rhine, the Ninth Army's 83rd Division seized Neuss, opposite Düsseldorf. The 2nd Armored Division took Urdingen, four miles from Krefeld, and the 84th Division grabbed Homberg, across from Duisburg. Soon the Yanks had a 20-mile stretch of the river's west bank...
Three bridges were still standing at Düsseldorf. When the Yanks captured their western ends, the Germans promptly set off the long-prepared demolition charges - huge quantities of dynamite -and blew them up. At Duisburg they blew up the three bridges still standing. Under cover of darkness at Ürdingen, 19 U.S. volunteers ventured out on the Adolf Hitler Autobahn bridge - fully aware that the Germans might blow it at any moment - to find and cut the demolition wires. They were silhouetted in the light of burning tar and chased back off the bridge by enemy gunfire; minutes later...
Thus for the immediate future the attackers faced the prospect of crossing a bridgeless river. The deep, swift-running Rhine was 380 yards wide at Cologne, 450 at Duisburg. Months ago Eisenhower had said that for the Germans to retreat across a bridgeless Rhine would be almost a "naval operation." It would be no less so for the Allies to advance across it. Time would be needed to bring up huge quantities of assault boats, pontoons, bridging materials - not to mention the artillery necessary to cover a crossing in real force. In the midst of ebullient talk about crossing immediately...
Meanwhile the R.A.F. was meat-axing Cologne, Duisburg, Essen, Freiburg, Neuss and other rail centers feeding the West Wall. Some 270 Lancasters unloaded six-ton "factory-busters" on Munich, first German city to feel their blast...