Word: remagen
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...across France. Patton's grey-haired, hard-as-nails chief of staff, Major General Hugh S. Gaffey, took it over in December. Soon after the Rhine crossings, Gaffey was made a corps commander. Now the 4th is run by dark, handsome Brigadier General William Hoge, who seized the Remagen bridge intact while he was with the First Army, then captured whole the Main River bridge at Aschaffenburg in his first east-of-the-river task for Patton...
...Remagen the Navy had steamed up in trucks 48 hours after the bridge seizure, and helped mightily in getting the heavy stuff across. At the Third Army's crossings, about 250 miles from the nearest ocean, the Navy carried most of the freight, most of the passengers. There crewmen dubbed their operation: "U.S.S. Blood & Guts." Lieut. General George S. Patton beamed his approval...
...units ran into 24 German tanks, including three Mark VI Tigers. Nevertheless, the enemy seemed to be pulling his nondescript infantry back, leaving a shell of armor and self-propelled guns. Berlin claimed that Lieut. General Leonard T. Gerow's new Fifteenth Army had been sent over the Remagen crossing, that Fifteenth and First Army men in the bridgehead totaled 100,000. Apparently Berlin was not hopeful of throwing any such force as that back into the Rhine. Even the collapse of the Remagen bridge (see below) was only a minor inconvenience for the Americans...
This week the Remagen bridgehead area had grown to 144 square miles. As the beachhead at Anzio had been, Remagen was a pistol jabbed into the Nazi flank. Also like Anzio, the breakout would probably be timed with attacks elsewhere...
...hours and 20 minutes the triple-span Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagen had served its American captors well. But it had taken a terrible beating for most of that time. First there had been the charges set off by the Germans when the Americans came to grab the bridge. Then, for three or four days of terrible urgency, it bore the quaking weight of tanks, big guns, heavy trucks, the tread of thousands of men as they hurried across the Rhine. Hour after hour shells had screamed through its beams; several had gouged big chunks...