The crossing at Oppenheim

Late in the evening of 22 March 1945, under a bright moon, soldiers of the American 5th Infantry Division pushed folding assault boats into the water and began to paddle across the Rhine between Nierstein and Oppenheim, a dozen or so kilometres south of Mainz. They were preceded by no artillery preparation, no air raid and no parachute drop. By midnight several battalions were fighting on the east bank, and by the following afternoon the whole division. This was the first planned assault crossing of the Rhine in the war – the bridge at Remagen had fallen into American hands by chance two weeks earlier.

The crossing at Oppenheim was the work of General George Patton’s Third Army and was an entirely American affair. War chronologies sometimes state that “American and British forces” crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim – a simplification. The British, together with the US Ninth Army, forced the river some 250 kilometres further north, at Rees and Wesel, a day later, on the night of 23–24 March, as part of Operation Plunder. Patton did everything he could to get across before them.

The race to the Rhine

In the first half of March 1945 the Western Allies reached the Rhine along almost its entire length from the Netherlands to Alsace. In the north, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group had concluded the battle of the Rhineland between the Meuse and the Rhine in February and early March. In the centre, on 7 March, the spearhead of the US First Army unexpectedly captured the undamaged Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen and established the first bridgehead on the east bank – the bridge at Remagen episode. Hitler responded on 10 March by dismissing Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt as Commander-in-Chief West; he was replaced by Albert Kesselring, brought in from Italy.

The plan of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, was for Montgomery to deliver the main blow across the Rhine on the lower reaches of the river, north of the Ruhr. Preparations for this operation, with enormous stocks of ammunition and bridging equipment and the participation of two airborne divisions, had been under way for weeks, and it was scheduled for the night of 23–24 March. General Omar Bradley’s US 12th Army Group was meanwhile chiefly to clear the west bank of the Rhine and tie down the Germans.

Bradley and Patton, resentful that the leading role had gone to the British, and remembering in particular Montgomery’s press conference of 7 January, at which – as they saw it – he had claimed the credit for halting the Ardennes offensive, decided that here was an opportunity to show what the American armies could do. In mid-March the Third Army, working with General Alexander Patch’s US Seventh Army, conducted a lightning campaign in the Saar and the Palatinate. An advance south-eastwards from the Moselle came out in the rear of the German First Army, which was holding the Siegfried Line, and smashed it together with the remnants of the Seventh Army. According to the US Army’s official history, in the period 18–22 March alone Patton’s troops took more than 68,000 Germans prisoner. In those same days the 90th Infantry Division reached and captured Mainz, and almost no organised German unit was left on the west bank of the Rhine between Koblenz and Ludwigshafen.

Patton’s decision

Patton had long dreamed of crossing the Rhine “on the run”, before the Germans could establish themselves on the far bank. As early as the autumn of 1944 his staff had assembled assault boats, pontoons and bridge sections in Lorraine, kept in store for precisely this occasion. When he received permission to cross on 19 March, he had this equipment sent to the front; the soldiers, seeing the lorries loaded with boats, knew without being told what was coming. On 21 March he ordered General Manton Eddy’s XII Corps to prepare an assault for the following night – a day before the date set for Montgomery’s operation. There was a military case for haste: the Germans were in disarray and every day’s delay gave them time to organise a defence. But it was no secret that Patton was also keen to beat the British.

The site was chosen with care. The most obvious crossing point was Mainz or the stretch just below it: south of the city, an advance would have had to force the Main as well after crossing the Rhine, since the Main flows into the Rhine at Mainz. Patton assumed that the Germans were expecting him there, so he planned only a feint at Mainz and directed the main blow 15 kilometres further south, at Nierstein and Oppenheim. The ground favoured the attackers: the high west bank, covered with vineyards, provided good observation and artillery positions, while the east bank was flat and weakly defended. That same flatness, however, meant that the bridgehead could not be held on the bank itself – it had to be expanded quickly at least as far as Groß-Gerau, where a decent road network began.

A silent crossing

The task was given to General Stafford LeRoy Irwin’s 5th Infantry Division, veterans of the fighting since Normandy, which already had several river crossings behind it, including those of the Moselle and the Saar. The first boats of the 11th Infantry Regiment pushed off from the bank at Nierstein at around 10.30 p.m. There were no artillery salvoes, no flares and no smoke screen: the commanders were counting on surprise. At Nierstein it worked – when the first boats reached the far bank, seven startled Germans surrendered at once and then paddled themselves over to the west bank to give themselves up there. At Oppenheim things were less calm. The first wave of boats was in mid-stream when the defenders opened up with machine guns. The exchange of fire lasted about half an hour; further boats kept coming nevertheless, and those who had already landed attacked the scattered pockets of resistance until the Germans surrendered.

By midnight the American units had widened the bridgeheads on the flanks and were attacking the first villages beyond the river. German resistance was sporadic, and hastily organised counter-attacks soon petered out. The Germans lacked men and heavy weapons: this sector was held by the remnants of units smashed in the Palatinate, training battalions, Volkssturm detachments and anti-aircraft gun crews. According to the US Army’s official history (Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive), the 5th Division lost only 8 killed and 20 wounded in the assault, while taking several hundred prisoners. Compared with the bloody crossings of the Moselle and the Saar in the autumn of 1944, this was an extraordinary result.

Bridges and the bridgehead

By the morning of 23 March tanks and tank destroyers were being ferried across. LCVP landing craft manned by US Navy sailors also joined in – brought by lorry all the way from the coast, as though the army were preparing a seaborne landing in the heart of Germany. The XII Corps engineers began building bridges: on the evening of 23 March the first treadway bridge, with metal tracks laid on inflatable floats, was opened to traffic, and in the following days others, including a heavy pontoon bridge capable of carrying the heaviest vehicles. By the middle of 23 March all three regiments of the 5th Division and a regiment of the 90th Infantry Division were in the bridgehead; by midnight it extended more than 8 kilometres deep.

The Luftwaffe, which had little strength left, threw what it could muster against the bridges at Oppenheim, mainly fighter-bombers. The attacks went on for several days but failed to interrupt the crossing, and the American anti-aircraft artillery, brought up to the river in great numbers, claimed dozens of aircraft shot down. The German command had nothing with which to eliminate the bridgehead. General Paul Hausser’s Army Group G was in disarray after its defeat in the Palatinate, and the only reserves Kesselring could move were tied down by the Remagen bridgehead, from which the US First Army was preparing to break out.

Further divisions followed the 5th. As early as 24 March the 4th Armored Division – the same one that had broken through to Bastogne in December – was entering the bridgehead, and on 25 March Patton’s tanks reached the Main and seized the first crossings over it. In the following days the Third Army forced the Rhine in two more places in the river’s gorge: at Boppard on 25 March and a day later at St. Goar, near the Lorelei rock. On 26 March, south of Mainz at Worms, Patch’s Seventh Army also crossed the river.

“Tell the world we’re across”

The crossing at Oppenheim went down in history not only as a slick military operation but also as an episode in the rivalry between American and British commanders. According to Bradley’s memoirs, on the morning of 23 March Patton telephoned him with the news: “Brad, don’t tell anyone but I’m across.” He asked at the time for the matter to be kept quiet for now, but by the evening he had changed his mind: “Brad, for God’s sake tell the world we’re across (…). I want the world to know Third Army made it before Monty starts across.”

Bradley granted the request. At a press conference he announced that American troops could cross the Rhine anywhere they liked, without aerial bombardment and without airborne troops – which was taken as a pointed dig at Montgomery, whose forces were just completing their preparations for a large, meticulously planned operation involving strategic bombers, thousands of guns and two parachute divisions. Historians point out that the comparison was unfair: at Oppenheim the Americans had come up against a broken, disorganised enemy, whereas on the lower Rhine Montgomery faced the best army the Germans still had in the West – the 1st Parachute Army.

Patton also attended to the symbolism. On 24 March, crossing the Rhine on the pontoon bridge at Oppenheim, he had his vehicle stop in the middle of the river and – as he himself recorded, and a photographer captured – urinated into the Rhine. On stepping onto the east bank he deliberately stumbled and scooped up handfuls of German soil, imitating – so he claimed – William the Conqueror, who in 1066, falling on the beach in England, was said to have thereby “taken possession” of the country he was conquering. The anecdote quickly went round the army and became one of the most often repeated episodes of his legend.

Significance

The crossing at Oppenheim opened the way into the heart of Germany for the Third Army. From the bridgehead between the Rhine and the Main, Patton’s divisions struck north-east towards Frankfurt am Main and on through Hesse towards Thuringia, and at the end of March they joined up with units of the First Army that had broken out of the Remagen bridgehead. Within a few days the whole middle stretch of the Rhine had ceased to be an obstacle. The German defence in the West, already gravely weakened, lost the last natural line on which it could rest.

The operation also mattered for Allied planning. The rapid successes of the American armies on the middle Rhine – at Remagen and Oppenheim – convinced Eisenhower that there was no need to wait for Montgomery’s offensive in the north to develop. In the following weeks the main weight of operations shifted to Bradley’s 12th Army Group, which together with the Ninth Army encircled the Ruhr and drove deep into Germany towards the Elbe. The quarrel over who had crossed the Rhine first was at bottom a matter of prestige – but it reflected a real shift in the balance of the coalition, in which by 1945 the Americans were providing the great majority of the troops on the Western Front.

Patton himself regarded the crossing as one of his finest achievements. Carried out quickly, without elaborate preparation and at the cost of minimal losses, it was the opposite of Montgomery’s style – and that is precisely why it was so readily contrasted with Operation Plunder, which began on the lower Rhine at Rees and Wesel on the evening of the following day.