The capture of Mainz

Late in the afternoon of 20 March 1945 units of the US 90th Infantry Division, part of General Manton Eddy’s XII Corps, came out onto the hills above Mainz and saw the Rhine below them for the first time. At almost the same moment tanks of the 4th Armored Division were bursting into Worms, forty kilometres to the south. For General George Patton’s Third Army this was the climax of a pursuit lasting less than a week through the Hunsrück hills and the Palatinate; for the Germans it was the end of the fight for the left bank of the Rhine.

Some chronologies state under this date that Patton’s troops “captured Mainz”. In fact on 20 March the Americans had only reached the outskirts. According to the US Army official history (Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive) and the city’s chronicle, the 90th Division entered the Hechtsheim district on 21 March, and fighting in Mainz itself ended on 22 March.

The Saar and the Palatinate

After the capture of the bridge at Remagen on 7 March, one large area on the west bank of the Rhine remained in German hands: the triangle between the Moselle, the Rhine and the French border – that is, the Palatinate, with the industrial Saar basin. It was defended by SS-Oberstgruppenführer Paul Hausser, commander of Army Group G, with two badly depleted armies: General Hermann Foertsch’s 1st Army, which still manned the bunkers of the Siegfried Line opposite Lorraine, and General Hans Felber’s 7th Army, strung out along the Moselle. After the Ruhr, the Saar was the Reich’s second industrial region, and the Palatinate screened the most convenient crossing places on the Rhine – the stretch between Mainz and Mannheim.

The Allied plan envisaged that the main blow would be delivered by General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army of General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group – Operation Undertone – while the Third Army confined itself to supporting attacks across the Moselle. The Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, approved this division of tasks on 8 March. That same day, however, Patton obtained from General Omar Bradley permission for an operation of his own, far more ambitious. He told his corps commanders bluntly that the objective was bridgeheads over the Rhine at Mainz, Oppenheim and Worms – even though all three places lay in the Seventh Army’s zone.

Devers’s forces were by now free of commitments in the south: in February the French and Americans had eliminated the Colmar Pocket and cleared the Germans from the whole left bank of the Rhine in Alsace. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, had nothing with which to hold the Palatinate. Hitler had forbidden any retreat across the Rhine, and the new Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had replaced Gerd von Rundstedt on 10 March, could only repeat that order.

The pursuit through the Hunsrück

The Third Army’s offensive began on 12–14 March. In the north General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps crossed the lower Moselle; its 87th Infantry Division crossed above Koblenz on 16 March and by the morning of 19 March had taken the city, from which only a few dozen defenders escaped across the Rhine. From the Moselle bridgeheads Eddy’s XII Corps set off south-eastwards across the wooded hills of the Hunsrück, while General Walton Walker’s XX Corps attacked from the Trier area straight into the rear of the German 1st Army. On 15 March Patch’s Seventh Army went over to the attack, but it had to gnaw its way through the fortifications of the Siegfried Line.

The front of the German 7th Army broke almost at once. In two days the spearheads of the 4th Armored Division covered several dozen kilometres through the forests of the Soonwald, reached the Nahe at Bad Kreuznach, seized an intact railway bridge and established a bridgehead. Behind them came the infantry of the 5th, 89th and 90th Divisions. Chaos reigned on the roads of the Palatinate: columns of German vehicles, horses and infantry were falling back towards the Rhine crossings, and American fighter-bombers destroyed them unhindered. On the evening of 19 March General Felber could still draw on the map a new line of defence south-west of Mainz, in front of Alzey and Kaiserslautern, but – as MacDonald writes – it was more a patchwork of improvisations than a front line.

Mainz, 20–22 March

The events of 20 March confirmed that the campaign had been decided. In the afternoon the 90th Division took the hills above Mainz, the 4th Armored Division entered Worms, and XX Corps’ 10th Armored Division reached Kaiserslautern. Late in the evening the German command at last agreed to the 7th Army’s withdrawal across the Rhine. During the night Felber’s staff and the headquarters of XIII Corps crossed to the right bank on ferries, rafts and boats, leaving on the west bank only LXXX Corps, which was handed over to the 1st Army.

By then Mainz was no longer a city capable of being defended. On 27 February 1945, between 4.30 and 4.45 p.m., RAF bombers had dropped on it several hundred thousand incendiaries, several hundred high-explosive bombs and several hundred aerial mines. According to the city’s chronicle, about 1,200 people were killed, and the old town was turned into a sea of fire. On 17 March the retreating Wehrmacht blew up all the Rhine bridges in Mainz, cutting off the escape route for those still left on the left bank of the river. The Gestapo had got as far as preparing the arrest of Bishop Albert Stohr, but a warning foiled it.

On 21 March men of the 90th Division entered the southern district of Hechtsheim, and the next day, 22 March, resistance in the city centre ceased. The defence of the city was limited to isolated pockets of resistance on the outskirts; the Americans occupied the rubble block by block without meeting any organised forces. According to municipal figures, of the 154,000 inhabitants of 1939 about 76,000 remained in Mainz. Sixty-one per cent of the buildings had been destroyed, and as much as 80 per cent in the centre; in all, about 2,800 people had been killed in air raids. Of the Jewish community, which before 1933 had numbered about 3,000 – one of the oldest in Germany, linked to the medieval community of Speyer, Worms and Mainz – only 59 Jews were living in the city in 1945.

For Patton the resistance on the outskirts of Mainz had another meaning. He took it as a sign that the Germans expected the Rhine to be crossed precisely here, where a crossing below the mouth of the Main would spare the Americans another river. He therefore decided to exploit that expectation. The 90th Division was ordered to feign a crossing at Mainz behind a smokescreen, while the 5th Infantry Division was to cross at night, without an artillery preparation, fifteen kilometres to the south – at Oppenheim.

The end of the fighting on the left bank

Over the following days the Third and Seventh Armies closed in on what was left of the German forces in the Palatinate. XX Corps’ armoured columns cut the roads through the Palatinate Forest along which the divisions of the German 1st Army were retreating from Saarbrücken and Zweibrücken. The Germans blew up the Rhine bridge at Germersheim on 24 March and on the night of 24–25 March evacuated their last units from the left bank. According to Seventh Army staff estimates, the two German armies lost 75–80 per cent of their infantry in the campaign. More than 68,000 soldiers were taken prisoner by the Third Army and about 22,000 by the Seventh Army and French units; Patton’s staff put total enemy losses at about 113,000 men. According to MacDonald, the Third Army’s losses amounted to 5,220 men, including 681 killed, and those of the Seventh Army, which had to storm the fortifications of the Siegfried Line, to about 12,000, including nearly a thousand killed.

MacDonald calls the Saar–Palatinate campaign an outstanding example of manoeuvre, especially on the part of the Third Army, and of cooperation between ground and air forces. He points out, however, that the enemy was by then only a shadow of the Wehrmacht of old, and that Hitler’s order forbidding a withdrawal across the Rhine meant that the German divisions let themselves be destroyed where they stood instead of crossing to the right bank, where they could have defended themselves.

The race to the Rhine

The fall of Mainz coincided with a decisive moment in the campaign in the west. In the north Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group was completing its preparations for a large, carefully planned crossing at Wesel. At Remagen General Courtney Hodges’s First Army was enlarging its bridgehead but was still waiting for permission to break out of it. Patton wanted to beat them both. When on 19 March Bradley told him to “take the Rhine on the run”, the Third Army already had on the left bank all the forces it needed for a crossing.

Two days after the capture of Mainz, on the night of 22–23 March, the 5th Infantry Division crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim – a day ahead of Montgomery. The feint crossing at Mainz did its job: the German counter-attack was directed the wrong way. On the night of 27–28 March XX Corps’ 80th Infantry Division also forced the Rhine at Mainz, and engineers began building permanent rail and road bridges in the city to supply the army as it advanced into Germany. From then on the fighting took place on the right bank of the Rhine, in Hesse and Franconia. After the war Mainz found itself in the French zone of occupation, and in 1950 it became the capital of the new federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate.