Battle of Remagen E-Book

Kai Althoetmar

• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: War Stories
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 36

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

March 7, 1945 - the day that dramatically accelerated the end of the war in Europe. Unexpectedly, the "Remagen Bridge" fell into the hands of American GIs. The Americans were across the Rhine in no time. Hitler did everything in his power to destroy the bridge - fighter divers, jet fighters, V-rockets. In 1968, Hollywood filmed the drama in Czechoslovakia. The filming of "The Bridge at Remagen" was interrupted by the end of the "Prague Spring". Warsaw Pact troops marched in, Soviet tanks blocked roads, military helicopters circled over the set. The crew had to flee... - The book tells both stories alternately, supplemented by up-to-date descriptions of the battlefields of yesteryear. For the research for this book, the author traveled to Remagen and visited the sites of that time.

Leseprobe

Kai Althoetmar

Battle of Remagen

March 7, 1945. The Crossing of the Rhine River

Imprint:Title of the book: ‘Battle of Remagen. March 7, 1945. The Crossing of the Rhine River’. Year of publication: 2025.Publisher:Edition ZeitpunkteKai AlthoetmarAm Heiden Weyher 253902 Bad MünstereifelGermany

E-Mail: Althoetmar[at]aol.com

Text: © Kai Althoetmar.

Cover design: Kerstin Koller.Cover photo: Ludendorff Bridge on March 17, 1945. Photo: U.S. National Archives.

When exactly Germany lost the Second World War is a question that still divides opinion and historians to this day. Was it the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944 that sealed the defeat? The defeat of the 6th Army in Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943? Or was the declaration of war on the United States in December 1941 the end of the ‘Endsieg’? One person whose assessment could be taken into account was an American named Walter Bedell Smith. During the Second World War, he was Chief of Staff to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. Smith believed that ‘Remagen’ had decided the war. (see endnote 1) The bridge at Remagen, March 7, 1945, when the Americans crossed the Rhine.

January 2015: The first smoke of the day billows from the chimneys, wafting aimlessly over the silent villages. Inns and pubs are still in a frosty slumber. The treetops of the orchards stare bare into the dove-coloured sky. An old man with tousled grey hair scatters granules on the pavement, kale still grows in the farm gardens. From the banks of the Ahr, alders hang their branches in the stream; the river, railway track and country road wind through the valley like a cable. The sun, still a snow-white ball, erases shadows and hoar frost from the slopes. The naked vines stand symmetrically in rows in the vineyards, like crosses in a military cemetery, wavy fields of stelae, circled by bracing wire and wooden posts. There are hardly any people on the train, some armoured against the analogue world with smartphones, their faces tired. Kreuzberg, Dernau, Ahrweiler, Walporzheim, Heimersheim, Bad Bodendorf. The taped voice gives the order: ‘Exit right!’ Remagen.

The war winter of 1944/45, a freezing cold winter in Germany. Everyone has known since the failure of the Battle of the Bulge: Germany can no longer win the war. But the Allies could only win once they had overcome the last major obstacle: the Rhine.

At the beginning of March 1945, the Allies advance into the Rhine plain. In the east, the Red Army has just taken the rear of Pomerania after its successful winter offensive. On March 6, 1945, the Wehrmacht begins a final offensive on Lake Balaton in Hungary to secure the vital oil sources of Nagykanizsa. On the same day, the Americans captured Cologne on the left bank of the Rhine, followed by Bonn on March 8. The staggering Heeresgruppe B under General Walter Model withdraws behind the Rhine. This last line of defence must hold at all costs.

As soon as Allied advance units approach the Rhine bridges, the Wehrmacht responds by blowing them up. The bridges all have detonation chambers. The explosives are ready and only need to be installed in the chambers, wired and detonated. The Germans blow up all of the 47 remaining bridges on the Rhine by mid-March. Except for one: the Ludendorff Bridge in Remagen.

Erich Ludendorff, deputy to Paul von Hindenburg, head of the Supreme Army Command, First Quartermaster General, Hindenburg's military brain, the true hero of the Battle of Tannenberg. And later one of the fathers of the “stab-in-the-back legend”, an opponent of the young Weimar Republic, involved in the Hitler putsch of 1923.

The 325-metre-long railroad bridge was planned in 1912 at the insistence of the military. It cost 2.1 million marks. It was intended to connect the eastern side of the Rhine to the Ahr Valley Railway and the Eifel Railway. In 1916, when the First World War had long been raging and the German army was fighting a war of position on French soil, the Cologne-based construction company Grün & Bilfinger began building the bridge. The Royal Railway Directorate of Cologne had placed the order in the same year - albeit for strategic military reasons. Supplies to the Western Front were to be accelerated by connecting to the Ahr Valley Railway, bypassing the Cologne bottleneck.