On the night of March 22, 1945, under a thin moon, men of the United States Fifth Infantry Division climbed into assault boats on the west bank of the Rhine at Oppenheim, ten miles south of Mainz. There was no artillery bombardment. No smoke screen. The only smoke rose thirty miles north at Mainz, laid deliberately to convince the Germans the crossing would come there.
It would not. By dawn, three American battalions were across. Total casualties: eight men. George S.
Patton had ordered the crossing and had beaten Bernard Montgomery to the far bank. At 8:00 a. m. the next morning, Patton called Omar Bradley, his superior, and told him, “Brad, don’t tell anyone, but I’m across.
I sneaked a division over last night, but there are so few Krauts around there, they don’t know it yet. ” Bradley was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I’ll be damned. You mean across the Rhine?
” Patton said, “Sure am. ”
For most of the war, the Rhine had been the last natural barrier against Allied forces advancing into Germany. No army had forced it from the west. On March 7, American troops had seized the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen after German demolition charges misfired, the first Allied crossing, though an accidental one.
The bridge collapsed on March 17 under German fire, but by then the Americans had pontoon bridges in place. Patton, however, wanted a deliberate assault crossing, made in boats, not over a captured bridge. On March 19, Bradley, Patton, and First Army commander Courtney Hodges met in Luxembourg City. Bradley had learned that Eisenhower, under British pressure, might transfer up to ten American divisions to Montgomery’s command for the major northern crossing.
Bradley told Patton to cross the Rhine on the run, before the decision could be made. The crossing at Oppenheim was not a rogue commander’s gamble; it was a coordinated plan with the approval of Patton’s direct superior. Patton originally wanted quiet, time to consolidate his bridgehead before the Germans reacted. The crossing was not announced on March 23.
But on the morning of March 24, Bradley called a press briefing in Luxembourg, on his own initiative, and announced what Patton had done. His statement was carefully worded: the Third Army had crossed the Rhine without aerial bombardment, without ground smoke, without artillery preparation, and without an airborne drop. Every phrase was aimed at Montgomery, whose massive crossing operation, Plunder, was still underway two hundred miles north. The American press erupted within hours.
Headlines read “Patton Beats Monty Across the Rhine. ” The crossing, and the photograph of Patton urinating into the river days later, would dominate the headlines for weeks. Montgomery’s operation was, by any professional standard, a masterpiece. Code-named Plunder, it involved 1,284,712 men from British, American, and Canadian armies, 5,481 artillery pieces, three months of preparation, the largest smoke screen ever laid in warfare, and a 1,700-man airborne operation called Varsity.
The preliminary bombardment lasted four hours, from 5:00 to 9:00 p. m. on March 23. Approximately 4,000 guns fired simultaneously into German positions on the east bank.
At 9:00 p. m. , the first commando brigade crossed in stormboats, followed by the 51st Highland Division at Rees. Later that night, the 15th Scottish Division landed between Rees and Wesel.
American forces of the Ninth Army crossed further south. At dawn on March 24, 17,000 paratroopers of the American 17th and British 6th Airborne Divisions dropped east of the river in Operation Varsity, in which 2,378 became casualties in a single day. The costliest airborne operation of the war. Ridgway was wounded in the shoulder.
Major General Thomas Rennie of the 51st Highland Division, whose troops crossed with him at Rees, was killed by mortar fire the same morning, the highest-ranking Allied officer lost in the crossing. By the fifth day, a bridgehead nearly thirty miles wide and twenty deep was secured. Plunder cost 9,159 Allied casualties. At Oppenheim, Patton’s crossing had cost eight.
Montgomery read the American press coverage on March 25. His staff expected an outburst. There was none. He assembled his corps commanders and told them the operation had achieved every objective and would not be diminished by concerns about publicity.
But his chief of staff, Freddie de Guingand, watching closely, later told friends that Montgomery was shattered. That afternoon, Montgomery wrote in his journal that he had won the battle and lost the war; Britain’s role, he concluded, was no longer to lead but to follow. On Palm Sunday, March 25, Winston Churchill arrived at the Rhine. He flew from London with Alan Brooke, his physician Lord Moran, and a small party.
Montgomery met him near Xanten. Churchill praised Plunder and the American Ninth Army’s contribution. He was driven by boat across the river to the east bank, the first Western Allied head of government to set foot in Germany. His statement to reporters was brief: the German was “whipped.
” There was no confrontation about Patton in the records, no demand for his relief, no dramatic admission. What is recorded is that Churchill never again pushed British operational preferences onto American commanders or demanded that Eisenhower reallocate divisions to give Montgomery a leading role. He accepted the shift quietly. On March 27, Eisenhower summoned Patton to his headquarters at Reims for a private conversation.
Eisenhower praised the crossing, then told Patton it had created the biggest inter-allied crisis since the Battle of the Bulge press conference in January. He ordered Patton, not asked him, to stop granting interviews about the crossing and to make no public comparisons with Montgomery for the rest of the campaign. Patton was furious, but he obeyed. Six weeks later, on May 7, 1945, Colonel General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims.
The war in Europe was over. Patton did not live to see the aftermath of his own reputation. On December 9, 1945, his staff car collided with an American Army truck near Mannheim. His neck was broken.
He was paralyzed. On December 21, he died of a pulmonary embolism at sixty years old. He is buried in the Luxembourg American Cemetery, among the soldiers he commanded. Montgomery served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and later as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
He died on March 24, 1976, exactly thirty-one years after Varsity, and never revised his account of the crossings. Churchill lost the 1945 election, later returned to office, and died on January 24, 1965. Eisenhower became president; Bradley served as the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Marshall, as Secretary of State, designed the Marshall Plan and received the Nobel Peace Prize. Britain took its seat as a founding member of NATO in 1949, in a smaller chair than it had held in 1940.
The Rhine had held for two thousand years. It was crossed in eight nights. Britain did not lose control of the war gradually, in a single conversation or a single day, as American manpower and industry and operational tempo scaled past what Britain could match. The crossings did not cause the shift; they demonstrated it.
Patton, Montgomery, Bradley, and the men of the Fifth Infantry Division, the 17th Airborne, the Highland Division at Rees, the commandos, the Canadians, and the engineers who built the bridges all crossed one river in one week in the last spring of the most consequential war in modern history. That is what the archives record. That is the story.