Operation Plunder

At 9 p.m. on the evening of 23 March 1945, on the lower Rhine near Rees, the first amphibious vehicles carrying soldiers of the 51st (Highland) Infantry Division entered the water. Operation Plunder had begun – the great crossing of the Rhine by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, weeks in the preparation. That night and in the early hours of 24 March the British Second Army and the US Ninth Army crossed the river along a front of several dozen kilometres, and on the following morning two airborne divisions landed on the east bank. Within a few days the Western Allies had built a bridgehead beyond the Rhine from which they struck out towards the Ruhr and deep into northern Germany.

Montgomery, for whom Plunder was the culmination of the campaign that had begun in Normandy, issued a message to his troops that day. In it he reminded them that the Germans had lost the battle of the Rhineland, and he closed with the words: “Over the Rhine, then, let us go. And good hunting to you all on the other side.” That night the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was at the Field Marshal’s command post, having come to see with his own eyes the crossing of the last great obstacle on the road into Germany.

Operation Plunder was also emblematic of the position in which the Reich found itself in the last ten days of March 1945. At Remagen and at Oppenheim the Americans were already across the Rhine, the Red Army stood on the Oder a few dozen kilometres from Berlin, and in Hungary and Italy the Allies were preparing their final offensives. War chronologies record under this date that Germany was being attacked from all sides – in the sense that there was no longer any front on which the Wehrmacht could count on a respite.

The plan

Montgomery had been preparing to cross the Rhine ever since his forces – the First Canadian Army, General Miles Dempsey’s British Second Army and General William Simpson’s US Ninth Army, placed under his command – had driven the Germans from the west bank of the lower Rhine in February and early March in hard fighting in the Reichswald and on the Roer. Eisenhower’s strategy, approved at Malta at the turn of January and February, provided for the Allies to deliver their main blow across the Rhine in the north, in the 21st Army Group’s sector, outflanking the Ruhr from the north and opening the way across the North German Plain.

The operation was on a scale comparable to the Normandy landings. The 21st Army Group numbered about 30 divisions – 11 each in the British and American armies and 8 in the Canadian – and, according to the US Army’s official history, more than 1.25 million men. Hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies and ammunition were brought up to the riverbank, along with thousands of assault boats, pontoons and bridge sections, and even Royal Navy landing craft, transported overland on heavy trailers. Tracked Buffalo amphibians of General Percy Hobart’s 79th Armoured Division, a special formation equipped with vehicles for unusual tasks, lined up near the bank. From mid-March all this movement was hidden behind a smoke screen several dozen kilometres long, maintained day and night by special smoke-generator units.

Since February Allied aircraft had been destroying the railway lines, bridges and junctions linking the Ruhr with the rest of Germany. In the three days before the crossing, bombers and fighter-bombers flew some 11,000 sorties over the assault area and the Ruhr, cutting the battlefield off from its hinterland.

The plan provided for three main crossing sites. In the north, General Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps was to attack at Rees (Operation Turnscrew); in the centre, XII Corps between Xanten and Wesel (Operations Widgeon and Torchlight); and in the south, below the mouth of the Lippe, XVI Corps of the US Ninth Army in the area of Rheinberg (Operation Flashpoint). Montgomery had at first wanted to use only two American divisions, subordinated to the British; after objections from Simpson and Dempsey he agreed that the Ninth Army would cross under its own command and, once the bridgehead was secure, take over the bridges at Wesel. On the morning of 24 March, when the infantry was already on the far bank, the British 6th and US 17th Airborne Divisions of General Matthew Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps were to land beyond the river – in Operation Varsity, which completed the plan.

The enemy

Facing the 21st Army Group was General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group H, and in the sector of the assault General Alfred Schlemm’s 1st Parachute Army. It was one of the best formations the Germans still had in the West, but the fighting in the Rhineland had bled it white. The parachute divisions numbered a few thousand men each; there was a shortage of tanks, artillery ammunition and fuel, and the only reserve was in practice XLVII Panzer Corps with the weakened 15th Panzergrenadier Division and 116th Panzer Division. Schlemm himself was wounded in an air raid in these days, though he did not hand over command for several more days.

The German command knew that the attack would come precisely here – preparations on such a scale could not be concealed – but had nothing with which to repel it. The new Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had replaced Gerd von Rundstedt on 10 March, had at the same time to patch up the front at Remagen and on the middle Rhine. Hitler forbade any withdrawal and threatened courts martial for anyone who allowed a bridge or a position to be lost. On 19 March he also issued the so-called Nero Decree, ordering the destruction, ahead of the enemy’s arrival, of all industrial, transport and supply installations on the territory of the Reich – an order whose execution was sabotaged by the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, and many local officials.

The night of 23–24 March

On the evening of 23 March the artillery preparation began, one of the largest on the Western Front in the whole war. The number of guns varies from one account to another – from about 3,500 to more than 5,000, depending on whether only field artillery is counted or anti-aircraft guns and tanks firing from fixed positions as well. At 9 p.m. at Rees the men of the 7th Battalion, Black Watch, of the 51st Division set off in Buffalo amphibians; the first waves crossed quickly against light opposition, although over the following hours and days the Scots met fierce resistance from paratroops in the town and the surrounding villages.

At around 10 p.m., a few kilometres west of Wesel, Brigadier Derek Mills-Roberts’s 1st Commando Brigade crossed the river. The commandos halted on the edge of the town and waited for the bombs to fall on Wesel. This road and rail junction on the Rhine, already ruined by raids in February, was bombed twice that day by RAF Bomber Command – in the afternoon and again at around 10.30 p.m. – with a total of some thousand tons of bombs. The town was almost entirely destroyed (according to German figures, some 97 per cent of it). Immediately after the raid the commandos moved into the ruins. The fighting in Wesel went on until 25 March; the German commandant of the town, General Friedrich Deutsch, was killed in it.

At 2 a.m. on 24 March the main forces went into the attack. The 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division crossed between Xanten and Wesel, and south of Wesel the US 30th Infantry Division crossed after an hour-long, exceptionally intense bombardment. According to the US Army’s official history, more than 2,000 guns of the Ninth Army fired over 65,000 shells in that hour. The fire was so effective that the first battalions crossed the river in motor boats almost unopposed. An hour later, at 3 a.m., the 79th Infantry Division crossed further south near Rheinberg with similar results. Eisenhower himself, who spent that night with Simpson, watched the bombardment and the first waves from the bank. American losses on the first day were minimal.

Churchill, who had come to Montgomery’s headquarters near Venlo together with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, watched the flashes of the guns during the night and, the next day, the transport aircraft and gliders flying over with the airborne troops. On 25 March, against the pleas of those around him, he crossed with Montgomery and a group of American officers to the east bank in a landing craft and spent about half an hour there. He then went to the wrecked railway bridge at Wesel, leaving only when German shells began to fall nearby. The episode, later described in his memoirs, captures the mood of those days well: the end of the war seemed within reach.

The bridgehead

On the morning of 24 March thousands of transport aircraft and gliders carrying the two airborne divisions flew over the battlefield. The paratroops and glider-borne troops landed a few kilometres from the Rhine, within range of their own artillery, and linked up with the infantry of the 15th Division that same day. In the north the fighting was harder. At Rees and in the surrounding villages the German paratroops resisted fiercely; on 24 March the commander of the 51st Division, General Thomas Rennie, was killed by mortar fire, and the 9th Infantry Brigade of the Canadian 3rd Division had to be brought over to help the Scots. In the American sector the 30th Division, which had found a gap in the defences, tried from 25 March to break through into the depth, but in the woods and on the waterlogged roads it was held up by reserves, above all the 116th Panzer Division.

The Germans could not, however, push the enemy back into the river. Engineers built bridges at a pace that would have seemed impossible only a year earlier; the American pontoon bridge at Wesel was ready within a few hours, and the Ninth Army had a vehicle crossing by the evening of 24 March. By 27 March the 21st Army Group’s bridgehead was about 55 kilometres wide and more than 30 deep. Within a week of the start of the operation some 30,000 prisoners had been taken north of the Ruhr. On 27 March General Günther Blumentritt took over command of the 1st Parachute Army from the wounded Schlemm; both he and Blaskowitz regarded the situation as lost.

In Berlin there were no illusions. On 24 March the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary that the situation in the West had entered an “extraordinarily critical, seemingly almost fatal phase”, and predicted that the Allies would try to encircle the Ruhr.

The Reich under attack from all sides

The day on which Montgomery began his crossing is a good moment to look at the map of the whole war in Europe. In the West, by 23 March the Germans had lost the entire west bank of the Rhine. By American estimates, in the fighting in the Rhineland, the Palatinate and on the Rhine in February and March they had lost some 400,000 men, around 280,000 of them taken prisoner. At Remagen there had been an American bridgehead for two weeks, from which the First Army was preparing to break out, although the bridge itself had collapsed on 17 March. At Oppenheim Patton’s Third Army had been across the Rhine since the previous night, and the 90th Infantry Division had taken Mainz.

In the east the Red Army stood on the Oder. Since the end of January it had held bridgeheads on the west bank at Kienitz and south of Kostrzyn (Küstrin), about 70 kilometres from Berlin; the besieged fortress of Küstrin was to fall a week later. In Pomerania the troops of the 2nd and 1st Belorussian Fronts had reached the Baltic in the East Pomeranian offensive, and on 18 March soldiers of the Polish 1st Army had taken Kołobrzeg (Kolberg); in the days of the Rhine crossing the assault on Gdynia and Gdańsk was under way. In East Prussia (the East Prussian offensive) the German force on the Vistula Lagoon was being finished off, Königsberg, cut off from the Reich, awaited the assault, and in Breslau an encircled garrison had been holding out since mid-February. Since 20 March responsibility for the defence of the Oder had rested with General Gotthard Heinrici, who had replaced Himmler at the head of Army Group Vistula.

In the south-east the last German offensive of the war had collapsed. The attack at Lake Balaton had broken down in mid-March, and on 16 March the 3rd and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts had launched the Vienna offensive; by the end of the month the Soviet spearheads would stand on the Austrian border. In Italy the front ran along the River Senio and through the Apennines, on the remnants of the Gothic Line; the Allies were preparing their spring offensive, while in Switzerland SS General Karl Wolff had since early March been holding secret talks with Allen Dulles on the surrender of the German forces in Italy. Allied aircraft ruled the skies over the whole territory of the Reich, and its industry, deprived of Silesia and the Saar and being cut off from the Ruhr, was in its death throes.

The phrase that Germany was “attacked from all sides” needs only one qualification: in the north, in Denmark, Norway and the western Netherlands, and also in Courland, German troops were still holding positions that nobody was any longer attacking on a large scale. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers remained idle there while the fate of the Reich was being decided on the Rhine and the Oder.

Significance

Operation Plunder was the last great combined operation on the Western Front and Montgomery’s last triumph. At the same time its course showed how the balance of forces had changed. Vast preparations, compared with those for Normandy, came up against an enemy no longer capable of prolonged resistance, while the Americans at Remagen and Oppenheim had crossed the Rhine with almost no preparation at all. Bradley and Patton did not fail to point this out, and Eisenhower drew his conclusions: in the following days he shifted the weight of the offensive to the 12th Army Group and decided that the objective would be not Berlin but the destruction of the German forces in central Germany and a link-up with the Red Army on the Elbe.

From the bridgehead on the lower Rhine the Ninth Army struck east, and at the beginning of April, together with the First Army, it closed the ring around the Ruhr, trapping Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B. The British and Canadians turned north and north-east – towards Bremen, Hamburg and the western Netherlands. The crossing of the Rhine in March 1945 meant that the Western armies had only a few more weeks of fighting ahead of them: Germany had neither the forces nor a natural obstacle with which to stop them.