Word: remagen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
Confusion or Collapse? The Nazi fumble at Remagen was a sign of German confusion, but it was not necessarily a mark of collapse. The Remagen "accident," as Berlin angrily called it, was in sharp contrast with the well-handled withdrawal at Wesel. Resurgent Allied optimists who now predicted the war's end in a few weeks might possibly be right-but in the meantime it was well to remember that the Wehrmacht had been routed and broken last summer in White Russia and in France. It had recovered from both routs...
...slowness and weakness of the first Nazi counterattacks at Remagen probably reflected a shortage of transport and fuel -and certainly they reflected the massive Allied air campaign against the German rail net which last week roared into its fourth week without a single day's interruption. Field Marshal von Rundstedt must have been thrown badly off balance. He had no doubt counted on plenty of time to regroup his forces, while Eisenhower prepared for the "naval operation" of crossing a bridgeless Rhine...
...Rundstedt had to pull men and arms from the north to meet the Remagen threat, yet he still had to man 150 miles of the Rhine and be ready to fight a crossing anywhere. It was this harsh stretching of Rundstedt's already paper-thin manpower that led some experts in Washington to say that Remagen had shortened the war by six to eight weeks...