The bridge that widened the doors of the third Reich to the allies

The order of Adolf Hitler to destroy all the bridges that crossed the Rhine River was implicitly an admission that the German army was unable to stop the advance of the allies. The failure of the counter -offensive of the Ardenne which he himself had conceived and his generals had opposed because it was unrealizable, had been the coup de grace to the estate and combativeness of the Wehrmacht, strongly penalized in men and means and already in retreat on the eastern front under the pressure of the red army.

On March 1, 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower had started the Lumberjack operation, which was part of the strategic plan of annihilating the German divisions on the western side of the Rhine River. The Heersgruppe B was under the orders of the Feldmarescallo Walter Model that it was not by chance that it had been defined “Hitler’s fireman” since they can solve extremely complicated or desperate situations. But this time his widely incomplete ranks and the lack of reserves, total aerial superiority and the overwhelmingness in armored vehicles and artillery of the Anglo -American ones, made his mission impossible.

Eisenhower’s pincer maneuver to annihilate the Wehrmacht

Three army bodies under the orders of Bernard Law Montgomery, Omar Bradley and Jacob Devars pressed the whole front in a pincer maneuver, when Hitler released the order of 7 March Melt all road and railway bridges. The confusion in the German lines in folding was large, since it was to be prevented as far as possible that bags were created, thus leaving a way out of the soldiers. In that week, on the 47 existing only three bridges were still standing and the last to be skipped by the German genieri had been that of Cologne, thus blocking the 3rd US armored division.

The Remagen bridge was one of the three and represented on the one hand the retreat of 75,000 soldiers at risk of bottling, on the other an open door on the Reich. The structure bore the name of General Erich Lutwon, Hitler’s First World War I Hero in the Fallied Putsch of Monaco of 1923. The first construction works had been carried out by exploiting the work of the Russian prisoners of war and had been completed in 1919. Now the explorers of the avant -garde of the 1st American army of General Courtney Hodges were majestic and in front of him in front of the Eyes: capturing it meant reuniting with the 3rd army of General George Patton and being able to pour the allied army in the heart of Germany through the two railway lines that the Germans already used for rolling and pedestrian transit.

Scarce forces to garrison and great confusions in the German commands

Il Ponte Lorendorff was defended by guard towers and shooting pitches, And even if the forces for garrison had scarce (approximately a company) if well assisted they could have barred the pace, and at any time blowing the mined pylons. In the tunnel, moreover, they had found numerous civilizations. The taking of the bridge would have changed the goal of the Lumberjack operation, creating a spearhead to penetrate deeply in the third Reich, instead of destroying its residual army, and isolating the 15th Army of General Gustav von Zangen from the 5th battleship of Hasso von Manteuffel.

Orders to the German departments were often contradictory, because either the skills on units due to fluidity on the battlefield were overlapped, or those of the generals were not in line with those of Hitler. For the same bridge, it was not clear whether the commander was the captain Willi Bratge Operational Manager or that of the Karl Friesenhahn genius, and moreover the batteries (cannons and guns of the anti -erenhea) were in the skills of the Luftwaffe and the popular militias (VolkSturm) employed by the Nazi party.

To temporarily resolve the situation, General Zanger intervened by ordering a counterattack to block the 3rd American Army Corps or at least to lighten its pressure by gaining time for a retreat and thus demanding the responsibility of the bridge to General Otto Hitzfeld who sent the Major Johannes Scheller to take the command: these, after an adventurous night journey, took the morning of March 7. The man who had the connection radio.

The structures resist the dynamite and the Führer makes V2 bombed with missiles

Two hours later, it was almost 13.00, the Americans made the discovery that the bridge was intact, and then they attacked with the support of Belgian units. The Germans, who had evacuated around 8,000 soldiers through that street, operated the detonators and two strong explosions shook the air. But, dissolving the smoke, the shape of the LUSA REAPPY like nothing: either the explosives provided to the genuins were of little quality, and this was not a novelty at that time, or the quantity received was not clearly sufficient to blow up the bridge that now became a keystone for the continuation of the war.

The Germans tried once again of Destroy the structure with the dynamite But this time there was no explosion, probably for the breakdown of a cable. He learned that Remagen had opened the Via del Reich, Hitler ordered to bomb the bridge from heaven, diverting V2 missiles usually used against England. And in fact just less than a dozen devices were directed against LundoRff, the objective of air attacks (despite the strong garrison of artillery and braking balls) and even units of divers, but it was now late and the Americans had managed to transform men and vehicles into the bridge head.

The shootings, the sudden collapse and the popularity with a 1969 film shot in Czechoslovakia

Then, suddenly, on March 17 the bridge collapsed, revealing the uselessness of the consolidation works of the American genieri, just as a column was reaching the other bank, with dozens of deaths and injuries. The conquest of the bridge had cost a thousand victims and had led to the capture of About 20,000 German soldiers: The strategic importance of those ten days in which it had remained standing, had been enormous, even if not decisive for the fate of the war on the western front which however shortened with saving of human lives. For the lunch suffered Hitler defended the Feldmaresse Gerd von Rundstedt (and it was not the first time, considered the continuous tensions between the two) and replaced it with Albert Kesselring.

Some lower rank officers present in Remagen were shot for high treason. After the war, the Remagen bridge will not be reconstructed, because it was considered an uneconomical investment, while two towers remained testifying to memory thanks also to the opening of a museum. The film made in 1969 was shot in Czechoslovakia, where there was a structure similar to that of Lorendorff, thus making the history of the events of March 1945 very popular.