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By Root 846 0

A Sherman fired at them and missed. Its next shell did better, hitting one of the German armoured vehicles at the junction of its gun and shield, jamming the recoil mechanism. The German tried to retire, but lost a track to another shell. The panzerjäger collided with its mate, wedging it against a wall. Both German armoured crews bailed out and fled, except one driver who remained in his seat, concussed by the first hit. As the Shermans engaged the infantry with their machine-guns, the commander of the leading American tank collapsed in his turret, shot by a rifleman. His tank pulled aside, allowing its successor to overtake and drive on. This little firefight had lasted only four minutes. The Americans now drove on into Speyer in thick fog which reduced visibility to a hundred yards. They suffered a steady trickle of casualties for some hours before the town was secured.

Such small encounters, repeated again and again every day along the front, made hard pounding for the men of the Allied vanguard. Yet it was plain that organised resistance was collapsing. Patton’s spearheads were moving fifteen to twenty-five miles a day. Third Army collected 68,000 prisoners and Seventh Army 22,000 in the Saarland–Palatinate operation. Patton’s men suffered 5,000 casualties, Patch’s some 12,000. This was a small price to pay for rolling up a major part of the surviving defences of central Germany.

THERE WERE FEW jokes in the north-west Europe campaign, and indeed it was never easy to be funny about events which were matters of life and death. But the U.S. Army relished to the utmost the spectacle of Montgomery’s forces preparing to stage a huge, formal military pageant on the Rhine, more than two weeks after its own soldiers had crossed seventy miles further south. It was true that the bridgehead at Remagen did not diminish the need for Allied forces to secure big crossings north of the Ruhr. Montgomery’s Operation Plunder had not become redundant. But the Americans’ spectacular achievement robbed Plunder of glamour and glory.

Patton twisted Montgomery’s tail by staging another assault crossing of his own, on the middle Rhine at Nierstein and Oppenheim, just south-west of Frankfurt, on the night of 22 March, twenty-four hours before Montgomery’s big moment. Third Army’s 5th Division met negligible resistance. On the morning of 23 March, Patton triumphantly telephoned 12th Army Group and announced: “Brad—don’t tell anyone, but I’m across . . . I sneaked a division over last night. But there are so few Krauts around that they don’t know it yet. So don’t make any announcement.” Patton’s bulletin to 12th Army Group further taunted the British, by describing how his forces had crossed “without benefit of aerial bombing, ground smoke, artillery preparation and airborne assistance,” all of which 21st Army Group was employing on a prodigious scale.

For ten days before Montgomery’s forces crossed, a smokescreen shrouded the Allied bank of the river at Wesel, to conceal troop and vehicle movements from German artillery observers. A massive bombardment preceded H-Hour. At 2100 on the evening of 23 March, 51st (Highland) Division staged a diversionary crossing near Rees. The Scots traversed the great river in seven minutes and were soon secure on the eastern bank, having met slight resistance. At 0200 on the 24th, the main crossing began north-west of Xanten, led by 15th (Scottish) Division, even as the first wave of 120,000 men of Simpson’s Ninth Army launched their own American landing craft. Tracer flew overhead, to guide the course of the assault vessels amid the fierce current. The U.S. 30th and 79th Divisions suffered just thirty casualties in crossing the great river which had been the focus of so many Allied hopes and fears for so long. The Germans had abandoned the attempt to defend the Rhine shore against overwhelming firepower, and dispatched many of the Wesel defenders to the Remagen perimeter.

Yet an easy success for Montgomery was now succeeded by an equally spectacular shambles. The 21st Army Group’s commander had determined