We cross the Rhine

Photo: General George S. Patton's first pontoon bridge over the Rhine River near Worms. Earlier in the war we had guarded this bridge while it was still on trucks in Normandy. The night that the engineers installed the bridge, our outfit was part of a diversion several miles south of the site where we pretended to set up for a river crossing in the dark.

While mop up operations along the Rhine were continuing, we heard that the actual Rhine crossing was supposed to be made by General Montgomery's British Army, the Canadian Army and the U.S. Ninth Army somewhere in the north. The British were planning it almost like another D-Day with thousands of troops boats, paratroops and pontoons involved. However, this became somewhat academic on March 7th when elements of the 9th Armored Division of the First Army discovered a railroad bridge still standing at Remagan and established a bridgehead on the other side of the Rhine. 

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The Third Army continued to push southward on the west side of the Rhine and on March 22 its 10th Armored Division made contact with the Seventh Army just south of Worms. That night, our Battery was one of those sent down to the banks of the Rhine to make a lot of noise and show enough lights and activity to make the Germans think we were attempting to cross the river near the city of Germersheim.

Actually, the crossing was being made very quietly further up the river at Oppenheim by the 5th Division of the Third Army, who established the first pontoon bridge over the Rhine. Patton's troops put two more bridges across in the next few days. Our turn to go across came on Easter Sunday when we went over the pontoon bridge at Worms. It was quite a spectacular sight to see the tanks and half-tracks move across the wide river on steel gratings attached to dozens of floating pontoons. In fact, it may have been the bridge we had guarded for a few days when it was on trucks back in Normandy.

After making the crossing, we turned northeast up the east bank of the Rhine and went through Darmstadt, Aschaffenburg, Lohr, Bruckenau, Neustadt and Schweindorf.

On April 12th we received via BBC radio the sad and disquieting news that President Franklin Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia. We did not think that the change to President Truman would affect our war effort as we believed that the damned war was nearly over anyway. However, (he lead tanks of the 5th Armored were less than 60 miles from Berlin and we were sorry that Roosevelt had not lived to witness Hitler's surrender or demise.