Drive To The Siegfried Line - Germany West of The Rhine

Germany West of The Rhine

The pincer movement of the Canadian 1st Army in Operation Veritable advancing from Nijmegen area of the Netherlands and the U.S. 9th Army crossing the Ruhr in Operation Grenade was planned to start on 8 February 1945, but it was delayed by two weeks when the Germans flooded the river valley by destroying the dam gates upstream. During the two weeks that the river was flooded, Hitler would not allow Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt to withdraw East behind the Rhine arguing that it would only delay the inevitable fight. Hitler ordered him to fight where his forces stood.

By the time the water had subsided and the U.S. 9th Army was able to cross the Rur on 23 February, other Allied forces were also close to the Rhine′s west bank. Von Rundstedt′s divisions which had remained on the west bank of the Rhine were cut to pieces and 280,000 men were taken prisoners. With a large number of men captured, the stubborn German resistance during the Allied campaign to reach the Rhine in February–March 1945 had been costly. Total losses reached an estimated 400,000 men.

The crossing of the Rhine was achieved at four points: One was an opportunity taken by U.S. forces when the Germans failed to blow up the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, one crossing was a hasty assault, and two crossings were planned.

• General Omar Bradley′s U.S. forces aggressive pursuit of the disintegrating German troops resulted in the capture of the Ludendorff Bridge across the Rhine River at Remagen by the U.S. 1st Army. Bradley and his subordinates quickly exploited the crossing made on 7 March and expanded the bridgehead into a full scale crossing.
• Bradley told General George S. Patton—whose U.S. 3rd Army had been fighting through the Palatinate—to "take the Rhine on the run". The 3rd Army did just that on the night of 22/23 March crossing the river with a hasty assault south of Mainz at Oppenheim.
• In the North, Operation Plunder was the crossing of the Rhine river at Rees and Wesel by the British 21st Army Group on the night of 23/24 March. It included the largest airborne operation in history codenamed Operation Varsity. At the point the British crossed the Rhine, it is twice as wide, with a far higher volume of water, than the points where the Americans crossed and Montgomery decided it could only be crossed safely with a carefully planned operation.
• In the Allied 6th Army Group area, the U.S. 7th Army assaulted across the Rhine in the area between Mannheim and Worms on 26 March. A fifth crossing on a smaller scale was later achieved by the French First Army at Speyer.

After crossing the Rhine the Allies fanned out over West Germany (see Western Allied invasion of Germany).