Word: remagen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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General Hoge's outfit was to come up to the Rhine near Remagen. In that area he hoped to find favorable points for future bridging. There had been no information for two weeks about Remagen's double-tracked railroad bridge, which air reconnaissance had last reported damaged, but still...
...first General Hoge's men met spotty opposition, then almost none. They picked up speed, rumbling through the Eifel hills. 'By late afternoon they sighted Remagen through a break in the hills, the four towers of its Apollinariskirche glistening in the drizzle. Beyond the church was Remagen's 400-yard-long, three-span bridge. The bridge still stood, but that was hardly worth remarking: the Germans usually waited until the last moment...
...realized that they had forced a fantastic break in the fortunes of war. They had seized a Rhine bridge intact. It was a moment for history. German prisoners ruefully reported that the deadline for blowing the bridge had been 4 p.m.-ten minutes after the Americans burst into Remagen...
...also a moment of historic ironies. Remagen's bridge had spanned the years between World Wars I and II. Completed in 1918, it had been named for General Erich von Ludendorff, later to be Adolf Hitler's sponsor. Its seizure occurred nine years to the day after Hitler had brazenly violated the Versailles and Locarno Treaties by sending German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland...
...dash and aggressiveness that enabled one American outfit to cash in on the Remagen bridge paid other dividends along the Rhine front last week...