Word: wesell
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...Toughest Fight. When he got back to London last week and lunched with George VI, the Prime Minister was able to tell his King with pride that British and Canadian troops were beating down the bitterest German resistance of the entire western front. This action was in the Wesel area, where German paratroops, under victory-or-death orders from Hitler himself, were holding a shrinking bridgehead on the Rhine's west bank...
...paratroopers were covering the last withdrawals of Nazi armor and infantry across the river. Germans poured across the two bridges at Wesel, and some took to ferries, barges, even rowboats. Canadian and British troops fighting with Henry Crerar's Canadian First Army slowly pressed the bridgehead back. At its northwest corner, they captured the town of Xanten, whose name comes from the Latin ad sanctos ("to the holy ones"), and which all good Germans believe is the birthplace of Siegfried of the Nibelungen legend...
...Sacred River. The wiping out of the Wesel bridgehead brought Eisenhower's armies up to a practically unbroken 150-mile front on the Rhine, from Nijmegen to Coblenz. The amazing U.S. crossing at Remagen was a great credit, not only to the local heroes, but to the Supreme Commander himself, who had passed word down the chain of command to be alert for any opportunity and aggressive to seize...
Confusion or Collapse? The Nazi fumble at Remagen was a sign of German confusion, but it was not necessarily a mark of collapse. The Remagen "accident," as Berlin angrily called it, was in sharp contrast with the well-handled withdrawal at Wesel. Resurgent Allied optimists who now predicted the war's end in a few weeks might possibly be right-but in the meantime it was well to remember that the Wehrmacht had been routed and broken last summer in White Russia and in France. It had recovered from both routs...
After these demolitions, the Nazis had only two bridges at Wesel and one or two ferries or temporary bridges near by. The Germans still west of the river were getting across as fast as possible. The enemy was certain to blow any bridge the Allies threatened to cross. A possible Allied countermove was a series of air borne operations launched at the eastern bridgeheads - but it seemed unlikely "that Allied paratroopers, in that thickly set tled territory, could achieve sufficient sur prise to stay the Nazi hand...