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At 0330 the first assault waves shoved their boats into the river. In the 84th, assault companies had several boats overturn, but most of the men swam to the enemy banks, many without weapons (there were only thirty rifles in one 130-man company). The troops moved inland. Behind them engineers worked feverishly to build footbridges and to get a cable ferry anchored on the far bank. By 0830 the job was done, and ammunition, supporting weapons, and communication wire were ferried across. By 1030 elements of the assault companies had entered the town of Dtiren.

By the end of February 24 the engineers had treadway bridges over the Rur, allowing tanks and artillery to join the infantry on the east bank. K Company crossed on a narrow swaying footbridge that night. It beat swimming, but it wasn't easy. The men had 30 or 40 pounds of gear. Half the duckboards were under water, and there was a single strand of cable for a handhold. The Germans were pumping in artillery, close enough to be disconcerting. Sergeant George Lucht recalled his dash across the bridge:

"The Germans had regrouped and their artillery was falling on both sides of the river, and I was thinking. Boy, this is just like Hollywood."

Once over the Rur there was open, relatively flat ground between the Americans and the Rhine. It was the most elementary military logic for the Germans to fall back. Why defend a plain that had no fortifications when Germany's biggest river was at your back? Yet that is what everyone knew Hitler would do-and Hitler did. He ordered his army to stand and fight. As it had neither fixed positions nor a river line for defensive purposes, the men should utilize the villages as strongpoints. These were villages inhabited by loyal Germans. When the 5th Division got into one of them, there were signs painted on the walls which said: SEE GERMANY AND DIE, ONWARD SLAVES OF

MOSCOW, and DEATH WILL GIVE YOU PEACE.

Those signs didn't stay up long, because the walls came tumbling down. The GIs used the techniques of street fighting that they had learned in the fall of 1944. The most important things were to stay off the streets and "keep dispersed, move fast, and keep on moving whatever happens," one veteran explained. "Keep your head up and your eyes open and your legs moving."

THROUGH February, Patton attacked, whatever the conditions. He was at his zenith. His energy, his drive, his sense of history, his concentration on details while never losing sight of the larger picture combined to make him the preeminent American army commander of the war. He was constantly looking for ways to improve. For example, he ordered all Sherman tanks in his army to have two and a half inches of armour plate, salvaged from wrecked tanks, put on the forward hull of the tanks-and was delighted with the results; for the first time, a Sherman could take a direct hit from an 88 and survive. He also had flamethrowers mounted on the tanks, using the machine-gun aperture-and again was delighted with the results. They were highly effective against pillboxes.

Patton's worst enemy was the weather and what it did to the roads. The nightly freezes, the daily thaws, and the heavy traffic combined to make them impassable. Patton at one point in early February was forced to turn to packhorses to supply the front line. Still he said attack.

On February 26 elements of Third Army captured Bitburg. Patton entered the town from the south while the fighting was still going on at the northern edge of town. About this time Patton was spending six hours a day in an open jeep inspecting, urging, prodding, demanding. He crossed the Sauer River on a partly submerged footbridge, under a smoke screen (from which emerged another Patton legend, that he had swum the river).

History was very much on his mind. In the evenings he was reading Caesar's Gallic Wars. He was especially interested in Trier, at the apex of the Saar Moselle triangle, on his northern flank. The historic city of the Treveri,