Word: remagen
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Advancing in the Remagen bridgehead, Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges' First Army men brought the highway under artillery fire, then inched forward to machine-gun range. Thus they cut an important Nazi lateral communication line ori the east bank of the Rhine. Finally a 78th Division platoon, led by a staff sergeant, crossed the road in what one correspondent called "a gallant, old-fashioned infantry charge across 250 yards of coverless, fire-swept ground." At week's end the Yanks were astride the road along a six-mile stretch and had pushed a mile beyond...
...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...
...that it was attached to Bradley's Twelfth Army Group; 2) that it was commanded by Lieut. General Leonard T. Gerow, brilliant former commander of the V Corps. The Germans were left to guess the rest. They might plausibly guess that the Fifteenth would be poured over the Remagen crossing, as soon as the defenders were pushed beyond artillery range...
Watch the Second. Now was the time to rain blows without mercy on Germany's bleeding western flank. The Remagen bridge led into rugged country without any close objective of strategic importance. To realize Remagen's fullest value, ten or even 20 more crossings of the Rhine were needed, crossings by every means possible: assault boats, amphibious armor and carriers, motor-driven rafts, pontoon bridges, pneumatic-float bridges, even perhaps by multiple-span Bailey bridges longer than any yet thrown together. In the north, the Rhine is wide...