American infantrymen of the 5th Infantry Division crossed the Rhine River at Oppenheim, Germany, in the pre-dawn darkness of March 23, 1945, executing the first planned assault crossing of the war’s most formidable natural barrier more than 24 hours ahead of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s massive Operation Plunder — and without informing Supreme Headquarters in advance.
The crossing, ordered quietly by Lt. Gen. George S.
Patton Jr. and informally authorized by Gen. Omar Bradley, caught the German high command completely by surprise and stunned Allied leadership in Reims, where Gen.
Dwight D. Eisenhower learned of the operation only after American troops were already dug in on the east bank.
The operation began at 10 p. m. on March 22, when soldiers of the 11th Infantry Regiment carried plywood assault boats by hand through muddy vineyard rows on the western bank near this small German wine town, moving in absolute silence.
There was no artillery preparation. No smoke screen. No air cover.
No engines running. Every order for the previous four hours had been passed man to man in a whisper.
On the opposite bank, the German defense of that stretch of river consisted of approximately 350 Volkssturm militia — elderly men, factory workers, and boys under 16 — scattered across 15 kilometers of riverbank. They had no observation posts, no illumination, and no warning. Postwar interrogations confirmed that most were asleep or warming themselves at small fires when the first American boats touched shore.
The first wave crossed in roughly 30 minutes. The Rhine at Oppenheim runs approximately 300 meters wide, less than a thousand feet, with a current of about three knots. The paddlers were experienced.
The lead assault companies of the 3rd Battalion, 11th Infantry, reached the east bank around 10:30 p. m. and encountered almost no resistance.
Within two hours, three American infantry battalions had crossed against effectively no opposition. By 2 a. m.
on March 23, the entire 11th Infantry Regiment was across. The 10th Infantry Regiment followed. By 6 a.
m. , six full battalions of American infantry were dug in on the east bank, waiting for a counterattack that would not materialize for another 24 hours.
Total American casualties for the assault crossing, according to Bradley’s own postwar accounting, were 34 men killed and wounded combined.
While the infantry crossed, the 249th Engineer Combat Battalion began constructing a floating pontoon bridge across the Rhine at Nierstein, directly opposite Oppenheim. The bridge was to be 366 meters long — about 1,200 feet — built in darkness, in silence, under intermittent German artillery fire, with enemy positions less than 400 yards away in some places.
The 249th completed the bridge in 18 hours. By the manual of the U. S.
Army Corps of Engineers in 1945, the job was supposed to take between two and three days. The engineers did it in three-quarters of a day, while under fire that fell in the vineyards and in the water around them but never scored a direct hit on the bridge itself.
By late afternoon on March 23, American tanks were rolling across the span. The bridgehead expanded east. The German response, when it came, was too small and too late to matter.
At approximately 8 a. m. on March 23, Patton picked up a field telephone at his headquarters in Idar-Oberstein and called Bradley at 12th Army Group headquarters in Namur, Belgium.
According to Bradley’s memoir, “A Soldier’s Story,” Patton’s voice was deliberately low-key, almost conversational.
“Brad, don’t tell anyone, but I’m across,” Patton said.
Bradley took a moment to process what he had heard. “Well, I’ll be damned. You mean across the Rhine?”
“Sure am. I sneaked a division over last night. But there are so few Germans around there, they don’t know it yet, so don’t make any announcement.
We’ll see how it goes.”
Bradley agreed. The call ended. According to his own memoir, Bradley walked out of his office, closed the door, stood in the corridor for a moment, then walked back inside and sat down at his desk and did nothing for a full minute.
He had just been told that the American Third Army had, without permission from Supreme Headquarters, made the first planned assault crossing of the Rhine by any Allied army in the Second World War — more than 24 hours before Montgomery’s Operation Plunder was scheduled to jump off.
The news reached Eisenhower at Supreme Headquarters in Reims in the middle of the afternoon on March 23. According to the diary of his personal aide, Kay Summersby, and the recollections of staff officers present, Eisenhower’s outward reaction was calm. He put down his cigarette.
He picked it back up. He asked Bradley a question or two about the size of the bridgehead. He asked whether Montgomery had been informed.
He was told that Montgomery had not at that point been officially notified.
That, according to Summersby, was when Ike swore.
Eisenhower understood immediately that the political consequences of a Patton crossing at Oppenheim before Montgomery was ready to jump off in the north would be substantial. Montgomery would take it personally. Churchill would notice.
The British press would notice. Every fragile political thread Eisenhower had spent two and a half years weaving into a functioning coalition was about to be tested.
Eisenhower did not publicly criticize Patton. He sent a formal congratulatory message to the Third Army praising the operation. He never publicly or privately suggested Patton had exceeded his authority, though he had almost certainly done exactly that.
What he said behind closed doors has never been reliably reconstructed. He was too disciplined a commander to leave a documentary trail.
Instead, Eisenhower spent much of the afternoon and evening of March 23 writing letters. One went to Patton, warm and congratulatory. One went to Bradley, warmer still.
One went to Montgomery, careful and reassuring, reminding him that his own operation in the north was the main effort. One went to General George C. Marshall in Washington, factual and understated.
One went to Winston Churchill in London, striking a tone of measured Allied unity.
Five letters, five audiences, five different framings of the same 12-hour period. Every one designed to hold the coalition together for the last six weeks of the European war.
By the evening of March 23, Patton judged that secrecy no longer served any purpose. He called Bradley back. “Brad, for God’s sake, tell the world we’re across.
I want the world to know Third Army made it before Monty starts across.”
Bradley released the news to the press pool that evening. The next morning’s American newspapers carried headlines about the Third Army’s crossing of the Rhine at Oppenheim.
Twenty-four hours later, on the night of March 23 into the morning of March 24, Montgomery opened 4,000 guns on the east bank of the Rhine at Wesel and Rees and launched Operation Plunder — the largest planned river assault of the Second World War. By the time Montgomery’s infantry hit the east bank, the American Third Army had been across the Rhine at Oppenheim for a full day and a half.
Operation Plunder went in essentially according to plan. The four-hour artillery barrage was one of the largest concentrations of Allied artillery fire of the entire European war. Under its cover, assault battalions of the British 51st Highland Division, the British 15th Scottish Division, the British 1st Commando Brigade, the Canadian 3rd Division, and the American 30th and 79th Infantry Divisions crossed the Rhine at Rees, Wesel, and Ghent.
At 9 a. m. on March 24, Operation Varsity went in — at that moment the largest single-day airborne operation in the history of warfare.
Fourteen thousand American and British paratroopers dropped from more than 1,600 transport aircraft and gliders onto drop zones east of the Rhine. German anti-aircraft fire was heavy. Nearly one in four American C-46 transports was lost.
Casualties among airborne troops on March 24 alone ran to more than a thousand men — the single worst day for Allied airborne troops of the entire war.
But the operation succeeded. By nightfall on March 24, the paratroopers had linked up with ground forces coming across the river. The bridgehead was expanded.
The road to the Ruhr was open.
Total Allied casualties for Operation Plunder ran to approximately 6,781 killed, wounded, and missing across the whole operation. Compared to Patton’s 34 at Oppenheim, both crossings had succeeded. But the contrast between them — in men lost and in what those men had bought — would define the way military historians talked about the two commanders for the rest of the century.
Churchill flew to the front to see Montgomery’s crossing personally. On March 25, in one of the most famous photographs of the war, the British Prime Minister crossed the Rhine at Wesel in a small American army landing craft, accompanied by Montgomery, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, and Eisenhower. He posed for cameras on the east bank.
He shook hands with soldiers. He lit a cigar.
He did not go to Oppenheim. Nobody from the Allied high command made the trip south to visit Patton’s bridgehead.
Patton was already ahead of the story. His forces were already 20 miles east of the Rhine. On March 26, elements of the Third Army entered the outskirts of Frankfurt.
On March 29, Frankfurt fell. By the first week of April, the Third Army was in Bavaria.
Patton himself crossed the pontoon bridge at Nierstein on the afternoon of March 24 in an open jeep with his aide, Colonel Charles Codman. According to Codman’s memoir, “Drive,” published posthumously in 1957, Patton asked the driver to stop at the halfway point. He climbed out, walked to the downstream side of the bridge, looked down at the water for a moment, then unbuttoned his trousers and relieved himself into the Rhine.
“I have been looking forward to this for a very long time,” he said aloud.
On the east bank at Nierstein, Patton got out of the jeep again, walked 10 feet inland, bent down, and scooped up two handfuls of German soil. He held it up in front of Codman.
“Thus, William the Conqueror,” he said.
The reference was to William, Duke of Normandy, who in the autumn of 1066, stepping ashore at Pevensey, stumbled and fell forward onto his hands. William scooped up two handfuls of English earth and declared he had already taken possession of the country. Patton knew that story.
He was making the same claim.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in the west, had almost nothing left to slow the American advance. The German 11th Panzer Division, the last serious armored formation in the central sector, was reduced within a week of the Oppenheim crossing to 60 operational tanks and enough fuel for perhaps one significant engagement. German artillery was down to a handful of mixed calibers.
The Luftwaffe could put perhaps 15 fighter aircraft over the American bridgehead on any given day and could not sustain that effort for more than a few hours.
When Kesselring sent a report to Hitler recommending an orderly withdrawal to prepared positions east of the Ruhr, Hitler replied with a four-word order: hold at all costs. There was nothing left to hold with. Kesselring passed the order down anyway.
His subordinate commanders ignored it quietly.
Between the last week of March and the last week of April 1945, the American Third Army drove roughly 300 miles east and south from the Rhine at Oppenheim. It took Frankfurt on March 29. It crossed the Main River.
It drove into Franconia. It took Nuremberg, the historical heart of the Nazi party rallies. In the middle of April, it reached the Danube.
By the first week of May, its lead elements were on the border of Austria and had entered Czechoslovakia.
The distance the Third Army covered in the six weeks after the Oppenheim crossing was roughly the distance it had taken the Allied armies eight months to cover from Normandy to the Rhine. That is what Patton had bought on the night of March 22 for the price of a few dozen American casualties.
The German war effort collapsed in the second and third weeks of April. On April 16, Soviet armies opened the final offensive against Berlin. On April 25, American troops of the First Army met Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian Front on the Elbe River at Torgau, cutting Germany in half.
On April 30, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. On May 7, at Reims, General Alfred Jodl signed the instrument of Germany’s unconditional surrender. The next day, May 8, 1945, was declared Victory in Europe Day.
The war in the west, which had begun with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, was over. It had been six weeks and three days since the Third Army had crossed the Rhine in silence at Oppenheim.
George S. Patton Jr. did not live to see the end of 1945.
On December 9 of that year, on a road outside Mannheim in the American occupation zone, his Cadillac staff car collided at low speed with an American army truck. The impact broke his neck. He was moved to the U.
S. Military Hospital at Heidelberg, where he lay paralyzed from the neck down for 12 days. He asked at one point whether he was going to walk again.
He was told honestly that he was not.
“This is a hell of a way to die,” he said quietly.
He died of a pulmonary embolism on December 21, 1945. He had turned 60 the previous month. He was buried at his own request in the American military cemetery at Hamm, Luxembourg, alongside the men of the Third Army who had died in the Battle of the Bulge.
His grave marker is a plain white cross, identical in shape to the thousands around it, placed at the head of the cemetery where a general officer might symbolically still command the men buried behind him.
Dwight D. Eisenhower went on to command the postwar American occupation of Germany. He served as Army Chief of Staff, president of Columbia University, and the first Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.
In 1952, he was elected president of the United States in a landslide. He served two terms, presiding over the end of the Korean War, the construction of the interstate highway system, and the middle years of the Cold War. He left office in January 1961, warning in his farewell address about the growing influence of what he called the military-industrial complex.
He died on March 28, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Hospital at the age of 78.
Omar Bradley outlived them all. He became Chief of Staff of the Army, then the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in 1950 was promoted to General of the Army — five stars — the last American officer ever to hold that rank. He died on April 8, 1981, at the age of 88.
Bernard Law Montgomery returned to Britain as a national hero. He was created Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. He served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and in a series of NATO appointments.
In retirement, he wrote memoirs that gave Operation Plunder substantial space. His account of the Rhine crossings mentioned the American crossing at Oppenheim in a single sentence, characterizing it as a crossing of minor tactical significance. Military historians have disagreed with that characterization ever since.
He died in Hampshire, England, on March 24, 1976 — exactly 31 years to the day after the American crossing at Oppenheim.
Maj. Gen. S.
Leroy Irwin, who commanded the 5th Infantry Division across the Rhine, remained in the army after the war. He retired as a lieutenant general in 1951. He died in Washington, D.
C. , in 1955 at the age of 62. He is not today a widely remembered figure.
He was there. He gave the orders. He got the men across.
The Rhine still runs past Oppenheim today. The vineyards still climb the low hills on the western bank. The village of Nierstein on the east bank is still there.
There is no longer a pontoon bridge across the river — the 249th Engineer Combat Battalion took it down in the second week of April 1945, once permanent bridges further north had been built.
But in 2017, on the site where the first American assault boat touched the east bank in the darkness of March 23, 1945, a memorial was dedicated. It is a small monument, granite and bronze, with the flags of the United States and Germany flanking it. The plaque names the 249th Engineer Combat Battalion by unit.
It gives the date.
At the dedication ceremony, the granddaughter of General George Patton, Helen Patton, attended alongside the granddaughter of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Catherine Rommel. The two women stood together at the memorial and spoke quietly. The photographs from that day are worth looking at, because there is something in the composition between the two women standing together on that piece of ground that says more about what the war had in the end meant than most of the speeches given about it since.
The last surviving American veteran of the Oppenheim crossing, Robert Sheladia, who had been a 19-year-old private in the 249th Engineer Combat Battalion on the night of March 22, 1945, attended that ceremony. He gave a short speech about his experiences on that bridge in the spring of 1945. He died a few years later.
There is no longer, so far as anyone knows, any living American who was on that bridge that night.
The plaque at the memorial reads, in part: “This remarkable engineering accomplishment undoubtedly contributed to the shortening of the war, thus saving countless lives on both sides of the conflict.”
It is a simple sentence. It names correctly what actually mattered about the night of March 22, 1945. Not the personalities.
Not the rivalry. Not the phone call. Not the field marshal in the north with his 4,000 guns and his 14,000 paratroopers.
Not the American general in the south with his ivory-handled revolvers and his talent for headlines. The engineers, the infantry, the bridge, the river, the men who did the work.
An army that got itself across a river that had held for 140 years, in the dark, in silence, at almost no cost, because the men who did the work knew how to do it. That was enough.