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By Root 1144 0

turn, and writhe as they might, there was no way the Germans could withstand the weight and ferocity of the Allied attack. Eisenhower’s “broad front” plan did not have initially a great deal of strategic finesse, but at the tactical level, the Allies were now far superior to their enemies. The stereotyped gum-chewing American or Canadian farmboy had become a careful, cool professional aware of his matériel predominance, calculating in his use of it. Not since the days of Napoleon and Robert E. Lee, not even in 1940, had there been such sophisticated and successful application of all arms of war. Tanks, artillery, air support, the indispensable infantry, the endless logistical train—all combined harmoniously. The Allied war machine worked like a great orchestra under the hands of a master conductor, playing a majestic and terrible symphony of war. By the first week of March they were closed up to the Rhine as far south as Coblenz.

The main axis of the advance was to have been north of the Ruhr, into Germany across the Hanoverian Plain. On March 7, however, after heavy fighting in the Huertgen Forest, tanks of the 9th Armored Division in Hodges’ 1st Army dashed forward to the Rhine and took the great bridge at Remagen before the Germans could blow it up. Suddenly, the Allies were over the Rhine, and the great river barrier was breached. As American units poured across, the Germans mounted shaky and piecemeal counterattacks. Meanwhile, all the way back to Eisenhower in Paris the cry went out that the Allies had a bridge, then a bridgehead. Plans and movement orders were quickly shuffled about, and the long columns of trucks and tanks turned in their tracks and headed for Remagen. By the time the Germans did succeed in blowing the bridge the Allies were on the other side to stay. At the same time, Patton’s infantry fought its way across the Moselle, working hand in hand with Devers’ troops on the right. Within a couple of days Patton shook loose his armor, which tore great swaths through the disintegrating Germans facing them, and on the 21st, 3rd Army too was over the great river, at Oppenheim. By the time the smoke cleared west of the Rhine, more than a quarter of a million Germans had been taken prisoner, and another 50,000 to 60,000 killed, for about 10,000 Allied casualties. The German Army in the west had ceased to exist; the heart of Hitler’s Germany lay open before the Allied armies.

Now at last the long trail that had begun years ago, when many of the British or American soldiers were still playing rugger or football in school, neared its end. In places the Germans held hard; but they could muster only about twenty-five real divisions against more than eighty Allied. As in 1918, more and more Americans were arriving, and behind them was an immense and ever-growing weight of armor and air power. The air forces were finally running out of targets, as Germany lay in ruins beneath the black wings of the Lancasters and the silver B-17s. Hitler issued the usual standfast orders, but there were fewer and fewer troops to obey him. Again he played musical generals, recalling Kesselring from Italy to take over the west; even Smiling Albert could find little to lift his spirits as the Allied advance picked up momentum. Within a week of its crossing, Patton’s armor was seventy-five miles into Germany and Hodges had come the same distance from Remagen. Now Montgomery leaped the wider lower Rhine, and his troops too took off to the east. Within another week they had closed up to the Weser; even more important, they and the Americans to the south had closed a great ring around Model’s Army Group B, trapped in the industrial area between the Rhine and the Ruhr. Model kept on fighting long after any hope of relief or breakout was gone. Not until the middle of April was the Ruhr Pocket finally overrun, after Model had committed suicide; more than 300,000 German troops surrendered, the largest single surrender in the war.

By then the Canadians had cleared Holland, where they were so enthusiastically welcomed by the population that