On the night of March 22, 1945, along the western bank of the Rhine near a small wine town called Nierstein, 500 assault boats sat ready in the darkness. Behind them stood 13 artillery battalions, loaded and aimed across the water. Their orders came from General George S. Patton: do not fire. No shell, no flare, not even a single gun to warn the opposite bank that the United States Third Army was about to cross the Rhine.
The Rhine had been promised to Montgomery. If the man they called "Blood and Guts" had obeyed the plan that spring, the river would have been crossed 24 hours later by another army, under another general, with a prime minister watching from the bank. The newspapers would have printed the story London wanted printed. German commanders would have gone to their graves believing Americans could not cross a river unless the British taught them how.
But what did "Blood and Guts" do when the last great river of the war was handed to the one man he could not stand? What he did in the dark that night would stun anyone who heard it.
They called him "Blood and Guts," a name earned over years of leading from the front, charging into battles while other generals commanded from the safety of rear headquarters. He wore ivory-handled pistols, and his jaw was set like iron. In the first week of March 1945, he was the angriest general in Europe. Not because he was losing, but because he was winning.
His Third Army had smashed the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes, broken through the Eifel, and reached the Rhine at Koblenz. In seven months since landing in France, it had crossed the Seine, the Meuse, the Moselle, the Saar, and the Kyll. It had taken Trier, Germany's oldest city, with two divisions when planners told him it would take four. The story goes that when headquarters ordered him to bypass the city, he sent back one line: "I took Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do? Give it back?"
Since August 1, the Third Army had liberated tens of thousands of square miles of France, Luxembourg, and Germany and captured more than 100,000 soldiers. In the Ardennes, it turned 90 degrees in three days and cut 100 miles through the snow to reach Bastogne. In the first ten days of March, it crossed the Kyll and advanced 60 miles toward the Rhine at Koblenz, where the German Seventh Army simply collapsed in front of it.
No American army had a record like that. No army on either side had a record like that. That was the man.
And that spring, the men running the war decided the only river that mattered would not be his. The Rhine, 300 yards of gray water, was the last natural wall between the Allied armies and the heart of Germany. No enemy army had crossed it by force since Napoleon. Every German officer had grown up believing the Rhine was not just a river but the border of the nation itself. An army crossing it meant the war was ending. And the supreme commander had already decided who would do it.
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Montgomery's crossing had a name, Operation Plunder. It had a fixed date, the night of March 23. It had a scale no river crossing in history had ever seen. Weeks of preparation, tens of thousands of engineers, artillery lined along the bank by the thousands waiting for a bombardment that would last for hours. Two airborne divisions would drop on the far bank. Smoke screens stretching for miles would stay up for days so the Germans grew used to not seeing the river. Winston Churchill himself was coming from London to stand on the western bank and watch.
The crossing front alone was 20 miles wide. Under Montgomery's command were 30 divisions for the mission, more than a million men, including the entire U.S. Ninth Army, pulled from Bradley and given to him after the Ardennes. Engineers brought thousands of boats and bridges enough to span the river twelve times. It was supposed to be the crossing of the river, and it was supposed to be his alone.
That was the plan. The main Rhine crossing would be British, in the north, on schedule, with the whole world invited.
And what about Patton's Third Army? That same week there was talk of pulling 10 of Bradley's American divisions from the south and sending them north to support Montgomery's operation. Ten divisions. The Third Army's war was being dismantled and handed to the field marshal as reinforcements.
Now put yourself in a stone headquarters in Luxembourg in the first days of March, and imagine a man who had spent seven months proving his army moved faster than any army on earth being told that when the moment came, the moment the whole war had been building toward, his job would be to guard a flank and watch.
Then on March 7, something happened that made it worse. At Remagen, 40 miles north of Koblenz, a company of the 9th Armored Division came down a hill toward the river and found a railway bridge still standing. The Germans had rigged it with charges to blow it. The charges went off, the bridge rose, then settled back onto its supports and held. Within an hour, American infantry were running across it under fire, and by nightfall the First Army had the first Allied bridgehead on the east bank of the Rhine.
It was the luckiest event of the entire European campaign. It was not planned. It was not Montgomery's doing, and it was not Patton's. Understand what that did to him. The First Army, Courtney Hodges's army, the cautious army, the army that had fought in the Hürtgen Forest all winter, crossed the Rhine because a bridge happened not to fall. The Third Army, which had spent the war finding a way when there was no bridge, stood on the western bank with nothing.
So this is the question the whole story turns on. What does the most aggressive general in the U.S. Army do when the river of the war is given to a man he despises, and the first crossing is handed by accident to a man he does not respect?
He does not argue with Eisenhower. He does not write letters to Washington. He does not make a speech. He finds a mission no one else wants, and he reads a different word in the order.
The mission was called the Saar-Palatinate. Three thousand square miles of German territory west of the Rhine between the Moselle and the French border, still held by two German armies dug into the old fortifications of the West Wall. Eisenhower's plan to clear it was straightforward and slow. General Patch's Seventh Army would attack the fortifications from the front, and the Third Army would help from the side.
Omar Bradley, Patton's commander and oldest friend in the army, proposed something else. Let the Third Army jump the Moselle near Koblenz and drive south along the western bank of the Rhine behind the German fortifications, cutting the roads the Germans needed to survive. A knife from behind instead of a hammer from the front.
Eisenhower approved it without hesitation. And both men, Bradley and Patton, understood exactly what that approval meant. An army in the middle of a major operation cannot be dismantled and sent north. And as long as the Third Army was fighting in the Palatinate, the Third Army remained the Third Army. Eisenhower even told Montgomery in writing that if 10 American divisions went north, Bradley's entire headquarters would go with them to command the First and Ninth Armies. The talk ended there. The divisions stayed put.
Bradley had bought Patton time. And Patton did with time what he always did. Look at what he told his corps commanders in those first days before a single tank moved. The written order said: clear the Palatinate, take the fortifications from behind, destroy the German Seventh Army west of the river. The verbal instructions were different. He named three cities on the Rhine to the men who had to get there. Mainz, Oppenheim, Worms. Each was a crossing site. All were on the Rhine, and all lay inside the Seventh Army's sector, not his.
He had been given the job of cleaning a room, and he was already telling his officers where the door was. No one in Third Army high command had authorized a Rhine crossing. No one had planned it. The crossing belonged to Montgomery on the 23rd, with guns and airborne troops and a prime minister. That was settled. George Smith Patton read the order and found the one word that was not there.
March 13, 1945. Four in the morning. Along the Saar River, the artillery of General Walton Walker's XX Corps opens fire, and the Third Army's last campaign west of the Rhine begins. On paper, it was a clearing operation. Three thousand square miles, two German armies, the First and the Seventh, dug into the Siegfried Line, the concrete belt Hitler had built before the war and swore no enemy would ever cross.
The plan gave the Third Army a supporting role from the north while Patch's Seventh Army punched through the fortifications from the south. Patton had no intention of supporting anyone. The next night, March 14, his XII Corps crossed the Moselle with two infantry divisions in assault boats at the bend where the river turns toward Koblenz. There were few Germans on the other bank. They were exhausted and looking the wrong way. By morning the bridgehead was secure, and Patton did what he had done the entire war. He pushed his armor through the gap.
The 4th Armored Division, the same division that had broken through to Bastogne in December, crossed the Moselle on the 15th and drove south. Combat Command B covered 16 miles in a little more than five hours. Sixteen miles through what was supposed to be a fortified German rear area, in the time it takes to eat lunch and drive home. By evening they reached Zimmern on the edge of the Soonwald forest with nothing arranged in front of them. The next day, March 16, they reached the Nahe River.
At midday, a column of tanks reached the Bad Münster bridge, a railway bridge the Germans intended to blow, and found it still standing. They took it intact. Two miles from the Bad Kreuznach springs, the last river line between the Moselle and the Rhine was open. And the Third Army had been fighting for three days.
Now understand what was happening on the other side, because this is the point where the campaign stopped being a battle and became a chase. The German Seventh Army was under General Hans Felber. On March 16, Felber and his chief of staff were driving through their own rear area trying to find out where the Americans were. When American fighter-bombers found them first, the two senior officers of the German Seventh Army spent the afternoon lying in a ditch hiding from aircraft. While they lay there, tanks of the 4th Armored Division passed on the road nearby. The American tank crews had no idea who was hiding in the bushes a few hundred yards away. They kept going. The commanding general of the army they were destroying watched them pass. A commander who could not find his front line because the front was moving faster than his car.
And where was Patton? Not in Luxembourg, not behind a desk. He was in a jeep visiting three division command posts a day, and he was not satisfied. Imagine the roads of the Palatinate in the third week of March. Mud from the spring thaw. Columns of tanks heading east on one side, columns of German prisoners walking west on the other. Thousands of them unguarded because there was no one to spare for guarding them. Broken trucks in ditches, dead horses in their harness, white sheets hanging from the windows of every village.
And in the middle of all of it, an open command car with three stars on its plate, and a general standing in the back, helmet polished, riding crop in hand, looking at his watch. Here is a detail that tells you everything about this man. His army was the German Seventh Army, which was collapsing at a speed no one had planned for. And what he saw, moving from one command post to another, was that the advance was too slow.
The official history records his mood in those days in one dry sentence. He was annoyed by the slow pace. Why? Because on the morning of the 15th, Patch's Seventh Army had begun its own attack from the south. Two American armies were now driving toward the same river from different directions. And the Rhine in that sector lay inside Patch's sector, not Patton's. If the Seventh Army got there first, the boundary would hold, the glory would go south, and the Third Army would have cleared the way for someone else to cross.
So the race Patton ran in the third week of March was not against the Germans. The Germans were already beaten. He was racing another American general to a river that officially belonged to neither of them, so he could reach its bank before anyone in high command found time to say the word no.
On March 17, Eisenhower came to Lunéville to meet him. Things went well. Eisenhower approved the Third Army's deeper thrust into the Seventh Army's territory, toward the river. Patton came out of that meeting and took it out on his corps commander. He asked General Eddy sharply why the 11th Armored Division had not advanced through the Moselle bridgehead on the 17th. Why was it still sitting there? Then he said the sentence his officers would remember well: "The pressure is on."
"The pressure is on," from a man whose army had covered in four days more distance than most armies cover in a month. Put yourself in Eddy's place for a moment. Manton Eddy commanded XII Corps. He was a good, careful, capable general who had been fighting since North Africa. His corps had just crossed a major river, taken a second one intact, and forced the enemy army commander into a ditch. And here was his boss standing in front of him asking why it was taking so long.
The Third Army was not under pressure from the enemy that week. It was under pressure from the top. On the 18th and 19th, the armor kept moving. The 4th Armored Division turned east toward the Rhine. The 10th and 12th Armored Divisions drove south and east through the Palatinate toward the river, each on its own route. Behind them, the German First Army, still holding the West Wall against Patch, discovered there was nothing behind it anymore. The fortifications were facing the wrong way. The Americans were coming from the inside.
Berlin refused to let the two armies retreat. The commander of Army Group G asked permission to withdraw across the Rhine while there was still room, and was refused. When permission finally came on the 20th, the roads to the bridges were under American fire. The bridges themselves were being blown one after another. Entire regiments walked into captivity because the order to leave arrived after the exit had closed.
Look at it from the other bank for a moment. A German staff officer on the east bank, watching the remains of his army cross on ferries and temporary bridges, would have written the same word in his report that every German officer wrote that week: catastrophe.
On March 20, the 4th Armored Division fought its way into the city of Worms. Worms sits on the Rhine. Behind Worms there was nothing but the river, and beyond the river was Germany.
Look at the tally after the dust settled. In 10 days, the Third Army took more than 68,000 prisoners. Its estimate of enemy dead, wounded, and captured was 113,000 men. German staff officers wrote in their own reports of devastating losses in men and equipment. American intelligence estimated the two German armies had lost three-quarters of their infantry. The Third Army's casualties for the entire campaign were 5,220 soldiers, of whom 681 were killed. Six hundred eighty-one dead against the destruction of two German armies and the control of 3,000 square miles of Germany.
General Eddy, the man who was told the pressure was on, later described the operation in a single image. Four corps, each of six divisions, was like driving six horses abreast while standing on the middle pair. The official history calls it a brilliant example of offensive maneuver. Patton was not interested in brilliant examples. He was interested in the far bank.
Here is what no one outside his headquarters knew. On March 19, while the 4th Armored Division was one day from Worms and the German Seventh Army was collapsing, Omar Bradley came to see him. And Bradley, that cautious man who had spent the war holding Patton's reins, said the thing Patton had been waiting to hear since September. Cross the Rhine on the move, do not cling to the west bank, do not wait for the plan. Cross it fast, near Mainz if you can.
Bradley meant it as permission. Patton took it as the starting gun, because he had already told his corps commanders two weeks earlier where the crossing would be. Mainz, Oppenheim, Worms. The names had been chosen before the first tank crossed the Moselle. The only question that mattered at all was whether his army would get there before time ran out.
The calendar said the 23rd. Montgomery's guns were already in position in the north. Churchill was already on his way. Patton had four days.
March 20, 1945, Third Army headquarters. The 4th Armored Division at Worms. The 90th Division approaching Mainz. Somewhere behind Patton, a staff officer was already drafting the report that would go to high command. The Third Army has reached the Rhine on a broad front. The Palatinate has been cleared. The mission is accomplished.
Patton did not read that report. He looked at the map of the river, looked at the calendar, and did some arithmetic. Montgomery would cross on the night of the 23rd. Today was the 20th. Three nights. What can an army do in three nights?
Well, there is a way to cross a river like the Rhine, and every general in Europe knew it because Montgomery had spent a month teaching them. You bring your bridges and boats, you spend days registering your artillery on the opposite bank, you put up smoke, you call in bombers, you drop paratroopers. Then when everything is in place and everyone is rested, you go in at night behind a wall of fire while the whole world watches.
Patton was going to do the exact opposite of every one of those things. And he was going to do it on purpose.
The plan was this. The 90th Division at Mainz would make noise. Reconnaissance on the bank, engineers measuring the river openly, movement the Germans could see. Mainz was the obvious place. Mainz was where the Germans would expect the Third Army to cross. And Mainz was where they would mass whatever troops they had left.
The real crossing would be 10 miles away at a wine town called Oppenheim, and a smaller town next to it called Nierstein, where the river runs wide and slow between low banks, and where neither side had any reason to look.
The division that would cross was the 5th Infantry Division, not armor, infantry in boats at night. On March 21, the commander of the 5th Division, General Leroy Irwin, received his orders. And here you have to understand what a river crossing means to the man who has to do it. It is the most dangerous thing an infantry division can be asked to do. Your men are in open boats in the water with nowhere to take cover, and if the far bank is defended, you lose the first wave and maybe the second.
Irwin said the crossing properly needed more preparation than he had been given. Then he said the sentence that settled it. He could secure some kind of bridgehead. Some kind of bridgehead. Patton told him that some kind of bridgehead was all he wanted.
Eddy, the corps commander, felt the same as Irwin. It was too fast. The 5th Division had been fighting for a week without rest. The boats were still on trucks somewhere on the roads behind them. But Eddy had been told the pressure was on, and Eddy did not argue twice.
So look at what Patton had by the evening of March 22. Not a plan rehearsed for a month. A tired infantry division, a corps commander who thought it was too early, a division commander who thought the same, and a calendar that said tomorrow night belonged to Montgomery. And he had one thing no one in the north had: surprise.
The decision that made the whole thing work was the decision not to fire. Behind the 5th Division, 13 artillery battalions were massed and pointed at the opposite bank. More than 150 guns, enough to tear the east bank apart for an hour before the first boat touched the water. Every instinct in every gunner demanded they be used. But Patton ordered them silent. Ready and aimed at their targets, but silent.
Why? Because the moment the guns opened, every German headquarters from the Rhine to Berlin would know this was the main crossing. The bombardment that protects your first wave is also the announcement that tells the enemy where to send his reserves. Montgomery could afford that announcement because he had 30 divisions behind him. Patton had one tired division and 300 yards of open water. The only thing that might get that division across alive was for the Germans not to know it was coming until it was on the bank.
No artillery, no smoke, no aircraft, no airborne troops. Just boats in the dark and men ordered to stay quiet.
And who was waiting on the other side? Understand this part well, because the legend skips it. The German Seventh Army, what was left of it, was commanded by General Felber, the same man who had spent March 16 in a ditch. He theoretically had four organized divisions for his entire front. And on the stretch of river opposite Oppenheim, he had no division at all.
The official history uses a phrase that tells you everything. Rear-area security detachments. Clerks, supply troops, old men and boys pulled from depots and handed rifles, and improvised corps headquarters trying to form a defensive line out of anything across the river in the last week. Behind them, Felber had only one reserve, the 159th Volksgrenadier Division. Two weak infantry regiments, each of two battalions, and two batteries of light artillery. That was the entire German reserve for the sector the American Third Army was about to cross the Rhine from.
Patton did not know all of that. But he knew enough. He had spent ten days watching the Seventh Army collapse in front of him, and he had formed a judgment about what it could still do. The men in the north, preparing to cross behind 3,000 guns, were preparing to face the German army as it had been in 1940. Patton was betting on the German army as it was in March 1945.
While all this was happening on the middle Rhine, look north for a moment. At Montgomery's headquarters, the rehearsals were done. The artillery was in position, thousands of guns along 20 miles of river. The smoke screens had been burning for days. Two airborne divisions, one British and one American, were sealed in their camps waiting for the morning of the 24th. Engineers had brought enough bridging equipment to cross the river twelve times. And on the 23rd, Winston Churchill arrived. The prime minister of Great Britain had flown from London to be on the bank when his field commander took the British army across the Rhine.
That was supposed to be the great decisive battle of the war in the west. The date had been chosen weeks earlier. Everyone who mattered had been invited. No one invited the Third Army.
So this is the scene on the evening of March 22. In the north, a million men, a prime minister, and a bombardment scheduled for tomorrow night. On the middle Rhine, 500 assault boats being unloaded from trucks in the dark, an engineer battalion, the 204th, that would handle the rowing, and two battalions of the 11th Infantry Regiment being led to the water in silence. The 3rd Battalion at Nierstein, the 1st Battalion at Oppenheim, both at the same hour.
It is ten at night. The river at Nierstein is black and fast, wider than it looks from the bank. The boats go into the water one by one, and there is no sound but the engineers' oars and the water against the hulls. On the far bank, nothing. No light, no signal lamp, no sign that anyone is there at all.
The first boat to touch the east bank of the Rhine carries a platoon leader, eight infantrymen, and the commander of Company K, a first lieutenant named Irvin Jacobs. They get out and climb onto German soil. They wait for the machine guns. The machine guns do not fire. Where are the Germans?
Instead, out of the darkness, seven German soldiers walk toward them with their hands up. Seven. They surrender to the first nine Americans across the Rhine. And they do it without a shot being fired. The official history records what happened at Nierstein in one line. No resistance of any kind developed from the opposite bank. Not even a token one.
The American Third Army crossed the Rhine at Nierstein, and the only Germans there surrendered to a lieutenant. Boat after boat arrived behind Jacobs. The 3rd Battalion spread along the bank and began moving toward the villages. It was working. The gamble Eddy thought too fast and Irwin thought too early was working. And the artillery behind them stayed silent because it was not needed.
Then, a mile downstream at Oppenheim, the 1st Battalion went in. Their boats were midriver at the widest part, the far bank still 150 yards away and the near bank 150 yards behind them, when German machine gunners on the east side opened fire. The boats could not turn back. They could not. A boat in the middle of the Rhine has only one direction to go, and the engineers of the 204th knew it, so they rowed hard for the bank. Tracer rounds skipped low and fast across the water. Men crouched below the gunwales. One boat took hits and kept going.
The first wave reached the east bank at Oppenheim under fire, got out, and attacked the machine guns in the dark. It was not a long fight. But it was savage, at close range, in the streets and gardens at the water's edge, and it lasted until the last German gunner surrendered. The official history uses these exact words: until the last German gunner surrendered.
Then comes the number. When the 11th Infantry Regiment counted its men on the far bank of the Rhine, the entire regiment, both battalions, had crossed the last great river of the war at a cost of 20 casualties. Twenty. Dead and wounded together, 20 men for the Rhine.
By midnight, the entire regiment was across. Only then did German artillery somewhere in the dark wake up and begin feeling for the crossing site. It fired about 50 shells before daylight, 50 shells at a regiment that was already ashore and moving inland. On the western bank, 13 American artillery battalions were still silent because there was nothing worth shelling. The American Third Army had crossed the Rhine and almost no one on earth knew it.
Now, in the early hours of the 23rd, comes the phone call. Patton picked up the phone to call his army group commander, Omar Bradley, and this is what he said, as Bradley remembered it for the rest of his life. "Brad, don't tell anyone, but I'm across."
Bradley did not understand him at first. Across? Across what? He said, "Damn, I didn't expect that. Do you mean across the Rhine?" Patton confirmed it. Of course. He had sneaked a division across the night before. Sneaked a division across the Rhine like a boy telling his brother he climbed out the window after dark.
Consider the first four words. Everything that made this man a genius and impossible at the same time is in them. "Brad, don't tell anyone." George Patton, the general who could not bear to see another man's name in a headline. The general who had spent seven months believing the world undervalued his army, had just done the thing that would put him on the front page of every newspaper in the United States. And the first thing he asked for was silence.
Why? Two reasons, and both were sound. The first was the enemy. With the dawn of the 23rd, one regiment was across on a bridgehead a mile or two deep, with no bridge behind it and no armor. If the Germans realized this was the main crossing, and if they had anything to send, this was the hour to send it. Every hour the Germans did not realize it was a chance for another regiment to cross, for engineers to build a bridge, for tanks to arrive. Silence was armor.
The second reason was the calendar. Montgomery's guns were scheduled to open that evening. Churchill was at Montgomery's headquarters. The world's newspapers had been told the Rhine would be crossed on the night of the 23rd. And who had been told? Patton understood exactly what a headline was worth and when it was worth the most. And that time was not this morning.
And understand why Bradley, the most patient man in the U.S. Army, agreed to the request without objection. Because Bradley had his own account to settle. In January, at the end of the Battle of the Bulge, Montgomery held a press conference. He had been given temporary command of two American armies during the crisis. And he stood in front of reporters describing how he had, in his words, tidied up the battlefield. And how the American soldier becomes a first-rate fighter when he receives proper leadership. Bradley's headquarters had fought that battle for three weeks before Montgomery was given any role in it. American officers read the text of the conference and did not speak to their British counterparts for days. Bradley told Eisenhower that if Montgomery was ever placed over him again, he would ask to be relieved. Eisenhower was on the verge of sending Montgomery home over it. That was two months earlier.
Montgomery was about to cross the Rhine in front of the world press with the Ninth Army, an American army taken from Bradley to cross under his command. And Patton was on the phone telling him he had sneaked a division across in the night. So Bradley asked for silence, and Bradley gave it. Gladly. Not entirely, of course, because the matter concerned Patton's own headquarters. And in the morning briefing on the 23rd, a staff officer read the situation aloud to those present from the staff. And the way he read those words has been preserved to this day.
The Third Army crossed the Rhine at ten o'clock last night without air bombardment, without smoke screens, without artillery preparation, and without air support. Every man in that room knew who those four sentences were aimed at. None of them had anything to do with the Germans.
Through the day of the 23rd, the bridgehead grew exactly as Patton had gambled it would. With the first light, the second regiment of the 5th Division crossed in boats. By early afternoon, the third regiment crossed. The engineers who had rowed all night built a floating steel bridge, a Class 40, strong enough to carry a Sherman tank, and completed it in one day to open for traffic late on the afternoon of the 23rd. Less than 20 hours after Lieutenant Jacobs's boat touched the bank, there was a road across the Rhine. By evening, the bridgehead was more than 5 miles deep. The town of Gross-Gerau, on the main road east, was only a mile away.
And late in the afternoon, General Eddy, the corps commander who two days earlier had thought this was too soon, issued the order that turned the bridgehead into a breakout. The 4th Armored Division would begin crossing the bridge early on the 24th, the same division, the Bastogne division. The division that had sent Felber diving into a ditch. It was crossing the Rhine over a bridge toward the open country of Hesse, and there was nothing in front of it.
Now look at the clock. On the evening of March 23 in the north, on a 20-mile front opposite Wesel, Field Marshal Montgomery's artillery opened fire. Thousands of guns. The bombardment planned for weeks, the largest artillery preparation of the war in the west, hammered the east bank back and forth while the British prime minister watched from a hill. Behind him, the assault battalions of the British Second Army moved toward the water. Operation Plunder had begun exactly on schedule.
And at that hour, 150 miles to the south, the American Third Army had been across the Rhine for 20 hours. Three regiments, a bridge, and tanks lined up to cross at dawn. The world did not know. Bradley had kept his promise.
The Germans, at least, had finally realized it. In the middle of the night of the 23rd came the only counterattack the German Seventh Army managed against the bridgehead. It was not the 159th Volksgrenadier Division. It was much weaker than that, officer candidates, students from a training school thrown into trucks and sent against the Americans because there was no one else. They attacked three villages along the northern edge of the bridgehead in the dark with everything they had. In each of the three villages, two battalions of American infantry were waiting for them.
The official history does not dwell on it much. The presence of two American infantry battalions in each village made the outcome in the three villages inevitable. The students attacked. The students were stopped. By morning, the German Seventh Army had no counterattack left and never would again.
And at that hour, just before midnight on the 23rd, while the students were dying in the villages and Montgomery's guns were lighting the sky in the north, Patton picked up the phone to call Bradley a second time. The first call was: don't tell anyone. The second call was the exact opposite. Tell the world.
That is what Bradley did. He released the news to the press and radio, and he chose his words the way a careful man chooses them when he wants them to be cruel. He announced that American troops could cross the Rhine at almost any point without air bombardment and without airborne troops. He said the Third Army had crossed without even an artillery preparation, without air bombardment, without airborne troops, and without any artillery preparation. Every word was true, and every word reached, that same night, the desk of a field marshal who had used them all.
The next morning, George Smith Patton came down to the river to see it for himself. March 24, 1945. Morning. The Theodore Roosevelt bridge at Oppenheim, the 4th Armored Division crossing. Tank after tank, half-track after half-track, rolling over the floating steel roadway and across the gray water. The engines were loud, and the whole bridge flexed and settled under the weight.
On the far bank, the road ran east toward Hesse, and there was nothing on it but Germans with their hands up. Into this column came an open command car with three stars on its plate. It drove onto the bridge. It reached the middle. And there, in the middle of the Rhine, in the middle of a division on the move, it stopped.
George Smith Patton got out of the car. He walked to the edge of the bridge. A military photographer, waiting for exactly this moment, raised his camera. And as the commanding general of the American Third Army stood with his polished helmet in front of his soldiers, the men driving the trucks, and the engineers who had built the bridge, he unbuttoned his trousers and urinated into the Rhine. He took his time about it because he was being photographed.
That photograph survives to this day. It shows Patton standing at the edge of the floating bridge, soldiers beside a truck behind him, and a second man with a camera because one photographer was not enough for this scene. His own diary for that day records it in the simplest possible language. He drove to the river, crossed the pontoon bridge, and stopped in the middle to pee in the Rhine.
The story his staff told was that he said he had waited a long time to do that, and that he had deliberately not gone to the latrine that morning so he would have enough. Did he say it exactly that way? No one can prove it. But the fact that he did it in daylight in front of his army with a camera documenting it is written in his own hand.
Then he got back in the car and crossed to the east bank. And when his feet touched German soil, he bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. He was imitating William the Conqueror, who is said to have stumbled when he landed on the shores of England in 1066, caught the soil in both hands, and turned his fall into a claim. Look, I have grasped England in my hands.
Patton, who had read everything written about war and believed quite seriously that he had fought in other centuries, took a handful of German earth and spoke the name aloud. William the Conqueror. Two gestures, five minutes apart, one for the soldiers and one for the history books.
Now put the two crossings side by side, because that is what the newspapers did, and that is what he wanted. In the north, the Rhine was crossed the way empires cross a river. Weeks of preparation, thousands of guns, two airborne divisions in the air on the morning of the 24th, the largest single-day airborne operation of the war, with the prime minister watching the aircraft pass. It worked. It was always going to work. Montgomery put an army across the Rhine in front of the world, exactly as advertised.
And on the middle Rhine, a tired infantry regiment in 500 boats. No bombardment, no smoke, no airborne troops. Twenty casualties, a bridge in 20 hours, and an armored division on the far bank in 36 hours. And the day after Patton stood on his bridge, his VIII Corps crossed the river again at Boppard and St. Goar in the Rhine gorge, that stretch of cliffs and castles where every textbook said a crossing was impossible. It was harder, but it was done.
Patton said afterward, seriously, that the gorge helped because the Germans believed no one would try to cross there. And he put it in one sentence in which he meant every word. American troops could cross the Rhine whenever they wanted. Whenever they wanted. The river that had been a nation's border for two thousand years, the river the supreme commander had reserved for a spectacle with a prime minister present, could be crossed by American infantry wherever and whenever they chose.
Look at what followed, because the crossing was not the end of anything. It was a door. The 4th Armored Division crossed on the 24th and did not stop. Within a week, it had driven 100 miles into Germany. Within a month, the Third Army was on the border of Czechoslovakia. The German Seventh Army, Felber's army in its ditch, the officer candidates in the villages, ceased to exist as an organization. Prisoners came by the tens of thousands, then by the hundreds of thousands, walking west on the roads without guards, passing columns going east.
And the man who was told in the first week of March that his job was to guard a flank and watch had his army deeper into Germany than any other army in the west.
What did others say about it? Bradley, the man who answered the phone, recorded the crossing in the official records in the words you have already heard. Without air bombardment, without airborne troops, without even an artillery preparation. He never walked those words back. He chose them for a reason.
The Germans said less because there were few of them left to say anything. What remains in their staff records from that week is one word repeated in different handwriting. Catastrophe. Not defeat, catastrophe. An army group destroyed west of the river it was supposed to defend, and then the river behind it taken in the dark by a single regiment.
As for Montgomery, he crossed the Rhine on schedule on the night of the 23rd with Churchill watching, and two days later the prime minister himself crossed in a boat and stood on the east bank. The photographs of that are famous. They are in every book. What the books do not always mention is the date on the photographs, and the fact that a tank division of the Third Army had already reached the opposite bank a day earlier.
So here is the question. And it is not an easy one. Was Oppenheim a great military achievement or a race with one Englishman? Twenty casualties at a Rhine crossing suggests one thing. A full bladder held since morning for a photographer suggests another. A press statement from Bradley worded to cut suggests a third. The honest answer is that with George Smith Patton, the three could never be separated. And the men who served under him understood that and crossed the river anyway. And they would have followed him across the next river too.
That is what General George Smith Patton, "Blood and Guts" himself, did when the last great river of the war was handed to the one man he could not stand. He crossed it first in the dark at a cost of 20 casualties. He kept it secret for a day. Then he stood in the middle of the Rhine in front of his army and did the one thing no field marshal would ever have done.