Word: rhine
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...units of the Third Army's 87th Division crossed the Moselle in as sault boats. Weak enemy, mortar and machine-gun fire soon died out, and later that day Coblenz was in U.S. hands. The Nazis began shelling the city from the Ehrenbreitstein fortress across the Rhine. Some 500 prisoners rounded up in Coblenz were tatterdemalion survivors of 15 or 20 different outfits. They were angry at SS troops who had scuttled for safety across the Rhine and blown up the bridges...
...shot south into the Hunsrück plateau. Resistance was almost nil. At the narrow Simmer River, the tankmen found the bridges intact, pressed on to Bad Kreuz-nach, junction of three rail lines and four highways. The goth tagged along on Gaffey's left, taking mellow old Rhine towns -Boppard, St. Goar, Bingen-like buttons from a ripped-open shirt...
...slammed into the face of the German salient. Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch's Seventh Army, with French units on the right, hit the south flank from Saarbrikken to Haguenau. Thus assaulted on three sides, the German First and Seventh Armies began a scramble to get across the Rhine. Allied tactical airplanes swarmed down on the crowded roads and resumed their familiar, pleasant pastime of smashing enemy transport. Some Germans clung to Siegfried Line defenses on the south flank; the longer they fought there, the more they were menaced from the rear...
...precarious was the enemy situation south of the Moselle that front correspondents foresaw Eisenhower's armies coming up to the Rhine from Bingen to Strasbourg without much delay. German industrial towns of the west bank (Mainz, Worms, Ludwigshafen) would be put out of action, and some on or near the east bank (Wiesbaden, Mannheim, Karlsruhe) would be brought under artillery fire. And the Nazis would go cross-eyed watching the whole 800-mile stretch of the Rhine from Switzerland to The Netherlands...
...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...