On 7 March 1945 soldiers of the US 9th Armored Division captured the Ludendorff railroad bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, after German demolition charges failed to bring it down. Almost 8,000 men crossed within a day. Also on this day: the Battle of Pea Ridge, 1862, and the German march into the Rhineland, 1936.
Battle of Remagen
7 March 1945 · 81 years ago
A bridge nobody planned for
Charles B. MacDonald writes in the official US Army history that the main Rhine crossing was to be Montgomery’s, north of the Ruhr, and he counts the Remagen area among "the most objectionable crossing sites of all". Edward G. Lengel of the National WWII Museum writes that the Germans "had either destroyed or were prepared to destroy every significant bridge" and that planners, expecting an amphibious crossing, gave only slight consideration to Remagen, about fifteen miles south of Bonn.1
The Ludendorff Bridge, named after World War I general Erich Ludendorff, ran into a railroad tunnel through the Erpeler Ley, a cliff on the east bank. Captain Willi Bratge was combat commander of the Remagen area and Captain Karl Friesenhahn, an engineer, commanded the bridge. At 1115 (11.15 in Bratge’s account) Major Hans Scheller arrived from LXVII Corps to take over. Bratge’s account was published by Manfred Michler in 1955.2
Forty-five minutes
On 7 March a task force of the 9th Armored Division’s Combat Command B, built around the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion and the 14th Tank Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Engeman, reached the heights above Remagen and saw the bridge still standing. Engeman sent Company A and a platoon of new Pershing tanks down through the town; the division’s 1945 booklet ends his order: "Let’s make it snappy".3
The First Army engineer report records that at 071515A March 1945 a captured German said the bridge was to be blown at 071600A. The booklet has the CCB commander, Brigadier General William M. Hoge, signaling Engeman at 1515: "You’ve got 45 minutes to take the bridge". MacDonald traces the warning to a civilian at Sinzig and adds that "the Germans in fact had no specific time schedule".4
Three turns of the key
As the Americans came through the town, Friesenhahn blew the charge meant to stop tanks at the west approach; Bratge’s account times it at 14.35. When the order to destroy the bridge came, MacDonald writes, Friesenhahn turned the key: "Nothing happened. He turned it again. Still nothing happened". A sergeant volunteered, ran onto the bridge and lit the emergency charge by hand; Bratge’s account names him as Unterfeldwebel Faust. The blast lifted the bridge, which settled back and stood.5
In Michler’s account, Friesenhahn reports: "Sprengung versagte. Unterfeldwebel Faust meldete sich sofort freiwillig, um die Schnellsprengung zu zünden. … Schnellsprengung war zu schwach. Brücke hob sich nur und fiel in ihr altes Lager zurück" ("The demolition failed. Unterfeldwebel Faust at once volunteered to fire the emergency charge. … The emergency charge was too weak. The bridge only lifted and fell back onto its bearings"; our translation).6
Why the main charge failed is still argued. Bratge’s account has Friesenhahn later find the cable cut by a tank shell, and the booklet says a cable to the main charge had been severed, "possibly by artillery". MacDonald does not rule out sabotage. The First Army engineer report, on an unexploded charge in the west pier whose cap had blown, believed "the TNT was defective". Lengel writes that a detonator had been placed improperly.7
The first man across
Lieutenant Karl Timmermann’s Company A ran onto the bridge under machine-gun fire from the towers. Close behind went two sergeants and a lieutenant of the engineers, who cut every wire they found and shot apart heavy cables with their carbines. The booklet names them as Lieutenant Hugh Mott, Sergeant Eugene Dorland and Staff Sergeant John Reynolds, and says Dorland fired three shots into the main cable. Sergeant Alexander Drabik was the first man across the Rhine at Remagen.8
Bratge’s account puts the detonation at 15.40 and the first Americans across "kurz vor 16.00 Uhr" (shortly before 16.00; our translation). The engineer report logs an explosion at 1535A as an engineer platoon commander and two sergeants started across. The booklet says "It was 1550" when Timmermann briefed his men, Lengel has them approaching the bridge at 3:15 p.m., and MacDonald has them nearing it "around 1600".9
Timmermann’s Distinguished Service Cross citation ranks him a second lieutenant and says he "contributed materially to the establishment of the first bridgehead across the Rhine River". MacDonald spells him Timmerman.10
Hot dog, Courtney
When the news reached First Army, MacDonald writes, General Courtney Hodges "ordered engineers and boats to Remagen even before calling General Bradley at 12th Army Group for approval". Omar Bradley later recalled his reaction: "Hot dog, Courtney" and "Shove everything you can across it". Eisenhower told Bradley to "shove over at least five divisions instantly", MacDonald writes, quoting Eisenhower’s memoirs. MacDonald counts almost 8,000 men across in the first twenty-four hours.11
Ten days later
The National Park Service writes that the Germans attacked the bridge with aircraft, artillery and floating mines; MacDonald adds eleven V-2 rockets fired from 12 to 17 March. A treadway bridge from Remagen to Erpel opened on 11 March. MacDonald has the railroad bridge closed for repairs on 13 March, the III Corps engineer’s report on 12 March. On 17 March it fell into the Rhine. The III Corps engineer’s report of 19 March puts the collapse at "about 1500 hours" and calls the broken lower chord of the upstream truss, cut by the German demolition, the "basic reason".12
MacDonald counts 28 killed and 93 injured among the men working on the bridge. The Bundesarchiv gives 32 American engineers dead, and the Remagen peace museum at least 30 American soldiers.13
Scapegoats
MacDonald writes that Hitler, "determined to find scapegoats", convened "a special 3-man military tribunal that acted with little regard for legal niceties". According to the Bundesarchiv it was the Fliegendes Standgericht West (flying court-martial West) under Generalleutnant Rudolf Huebner, and the charges were dereliction of duty and cowardice before the enemy. It sentenced to death Majors Scheller, Herbert Strobel and August Kraft, Oberleutnant Karl Heinz Peters and, in his absence, Bratge, already an American prisoner. The Bundesarchiv writes that the four were shot near Rimbach on 13 and 14 March. Friesenhahn, also a prisoner, was acquitted, MacDonald writes. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s decree announcing the sentences told the troops: "Wer nicht in Ehren lebt, stirbt in Schande" ("He who does not live in honor dies in shame"; our translation).14
From 7 to 24 March the bridgehead fighting cost III Corps approximately 5,500 casualties, including almost 700 killed, MacDonald writes. The National Park Service calls the capture pivotal. MacDonald is more guarded: the bridgehead "dealt a serious blow to German morale", he writes, but "the German Army clearly would have been beaten without it, perhaps just as quickly". Since 7 March 1980 the bridge’s surviving towers on the west bank have housed a peace museum. The rival Allied drives to the Rhine are covered in our article on Patton and Montgomery.15
The Aragon Offensive, 1938: Franco's drive to the sea
7 March 1938 · 88 years ago
After the Battle of Teruel, Franco's Nationalists launched a major offensive through Aragon against the exhausted Republican army in the Spanish Civil War. Over six weeks they broke the Republican forces, took all of Aragon and pushed into Catalonia and the Levante.
Read the full story of The Aragon Offensive, 1938: Franco's drive to the sea ›Also on this day
1862: At Pea Ridge, Arkansas, Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis’s Union army fought Major General Earl Van Dorn’s Confederates on 7 and 8 March. Curtis reported the attack on his right "at 11 a. m."; Van Dorn’s first report has the first day’s battle running "from 10 a. m. until after dark". Generals McCulloch and McIntosh were killed. Curtis listed General Slack as killed, Van Dorn as badly wounded; Van Dorn first reported Colonel Hébert killed, later captured. On the 8th Van Dorn withdrew; on 18 March he wrote: "I was not defeated, but only foiled in my intentions". The Union return gives 1,384 killed, wounded and captured or missing. Van Dorn put his loss at no more than 800 or 1,000 killed and wounded and 200 to 300 prisoners; the Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives about 2,000 Confederate casualties and the American Battlefield Trust 2,500.16
1936: German troops marched into the demilitarized Rhineland. That morning, the US ambassador in Berlin reported, the Foreign Office’s Dieckhoff spoke of "the symbolical act of the entry into the demilitarized zone this noon of several battalions of the regular army" and said that this action was "devoid of any military significance". Claudia Prinz of the German Historical Museum writes that 30,000 Wehrmacht soldiers in all crossed the Rhine bridges that day. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the Commons on 9 March that he had told the German ambassador this "amounted to the unilateral repudiation of a treaty freely negotiated and freely signed".17
