Word: rundstedts
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Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had twice been at the top of the Wehrmacht command ladder in the west, went down again last week-and this time probably out. His successor: bulldog-faced Field Marshal Albert Kesselring...
...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...
...Hague. It might mean that the Germans were afraid of being cut off in the western Netherlands by an Allied push to the Zuider Zee. More probably, it meant that they needed the Dutch garrison to help man the Rhine. As against 70 or 80 divisions in December, Rundstedt was now estimated to have no more than 40 or 50 in the west. Since Dday, the Germans had lost over a million prisoners, plus a probable 500,000 in dead and permanently disabled, in the west...
Southwest of Cologne, Rundstedt still had a salient with its tip in the Roerdam area, where presumably a few Germans still lingered. But the Roer, which had caused the Allies so much trouble, had passed into bloody history. The Rhine was ahead...