Word: remagen
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...Mistake. World War II came to an end for Konrad Adenauer on a quiet Sunday morning. The U.S. 9th Armored Division broke into Rhöndorf in its drive for the Remagen bridgehead. The lead tank fired three shells in the general direction of a 69-year-old gentleman who was quietly tilling his garden in overalls and straw hat. Adenauer threw himself down and escaped with nothing worse than bruises...
Major General William M. Hoge, 57, commander of IX Corps: West Point, 1916, M.I.T., 1922; with U.S. Army engineers in France during World War I; organized construction of Alcan (Alaska-Canada) highway, 1942; commander 9th Armored Division unit which captured Remagen Bridge, 1945; this week took the post made vacant by the death of Major General Bryant Moore (see above) whom he had succeeded in 1948 as U.S. commander at Trieste...
...such windfall as the Remagen bridgehead fell into Walker's lap, but he crossed the Rhine at Mainz without fanfare, in assault boats. After that, the XX Corps' hardest fighting was at Kassel, where the Germans fought wildly and vainly to prevent Allied encirclement of the Ruhr. The Reich's back was broken and the rest of the XX Corps' progress, though not bloodless, was relatively easy. After Weimar, Jena, Nurnberg, Regensburg, Walker in early May reached Linz, in Austria, the farthest point of the Third Army's advance...
Here, four years ago, the 9th Armored Division of the U.S. First Army crossed the Rhine. The U.S. Army left few marks on Remagen. It left the name "Texas Roy," splashed in green paint across a wall by the Rhine, and a tiny "USA" scratched into the cement of an apartment building. It left the bodies of several American soldiers, which were recovered from beneath the collapsed Ludendorff bridge a few weeks ago. I could not find anything else the U.S. had left behind. Certainly it did not leave democracy...
Frau Karin Loef, the city government's handy woman who has been aide to nine Remagen mayors since the war, told me: "Democracy, well it is rather like a fairy tale to most people here...