The Battle of Remagen was an 18-day battle during the Allied invasion of Germany in World War II. It lasted from 7 to 25 March 1945 when American forces unexpectedly captured the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine intact. They were able to hold it against German opposition and build additional temporary crossings. The presence of a bridgehead across the Rhine advanced the Western Allies' planned crossing of the Rhine into the German interior by three weeks.
After capturing the Siegfried Line, the 9th Armored Division of the U.S. First Army had advanced unexpectedly quickly towards the Rhine. They were very surprised to see one of the last bridges across the Rhine still standing. The Germans had wired the bridge with about 2,800 kilograms (6,200 lb) of demolition charges. When they tried to blow it up, only a portion of the explosives detonated. American forces captured the bridge and rapidly expanded their first bridgehead across the Rhine, two weeks before Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's meticulously planned Operation Plunder. The U.S. Army's actions prevented the Germans from regrouping east of the Rhine and consolidating their positions.
The battle for control of the Ludendorff Bridge saw both the American and German forces employ new weapons and tactics in combat for the first time. Over the next 10 days, after the bridge's capture on 7 March 1945 and until its failure on 17 March, the Germans used virtually every weapon at their disposal to try to destroy it. This included infantry and armor, howitzers, mortars, floating mines, mined boats, a railroad gun, V-2 rockets, and the 600 mm Karl-Gerät super-heavy mortar. They also attacked the bridge using the newly developed Arado Ar 234B-2 turbojet bombers. To protect the bridge against aircraft, the Americans positioned the largest concentration of anti-aircraft weapons during World War II leading to "the greatest antiaircraft artillery battles in American history". The Americans counted 367 different German Luftwaffe aircraft attacking the bridge over the next 10 days. The Americans claimed to have shot down nearly 30 percent of the aircraft dispatched against them. The German air offensive failed.
On 14 March, German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered Schutzstaffel (SS) General Hans Kammler to fire V2 rockets to destroy the bridge. This marked the first time the missiles had been used against a tactical objective and the only time they were fired on a German target. The 11 missiles launched killed six Americans and a number of German citizens in nearby towns, the closest direct warhead impact of which landed 300 metres from the bridge. Next, the Germans sent a squad of seven navy demolition swimmers equipped with Italian underwater-breathing apparatuses. For the first time in combat, the Americans deployed the top-secret Canal Defence Lights which successfully detected the frogmen in the dark, who were all killed or captured.
The sudden capture of a bridge across the Rhine was front-page news in American newspapers. The unexpected availability of a bridgehead on the eastern side of the Rhine more than two weeks in advance of Operation Plunder allowed Allied high commander Dwight Eisenhower to alter his plans to end the war. The Allies were able to rapidly transport five divisions across the Rhine into the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland. The bridge had endured months of aircraft bombing, direct artillery hits, near misses, and deliberate demolition attempts. It finally collapsed at 3:00 pm on 17 March, killing 33 American engineers and wounding 63. But by then U.S. Army combat engineers had finished building a M1940 aluminum-alloy treadway bridge and a M1938 pontoon bridge followed by a Bailey bridge across the Rhine. Over 125,000 troops established a bridgehead of six divisions, with accompanying tanks, artillery pieces, and trucks, across the Rhine. The Americans broke out of the bridgehead on 25 March 1945, 18 days after the bridge was captured. Some German and American military authorities agreed that capturing the bridge shortened the war, although one German general disputed this.
The Ludendorff Bridge was not rebuilt following World War II. In 2020, plans were initiated to build a replacement suspension bridge for pedestrians and cyclists. There is no other river crossing for 44 km (27 mi) and few ferries. Local communities indicated an interest to help fund the project and an engineer was commissioned to draw up plans.
Background
Romans originally built a settlement at Remagen in the first century AD. Over that long period of time, it had been destroyed multiple times by invading armies from several nations. The town was rebuilt each time. In March 1945 about 5,000 people lived in the small resort town. The Rhine near Remagen was about 270 meters (890 ft) wide. The Ludendorff Bridge had been built by Russian prisoners of war during World War I to help transport supplies from Germany to France.
Bridge construction and design
The bridge connected the village of Erpel on the eastern side with Remagen on the west bank. It had been named after the World War I German General Erich Ludendorff, who had been a key proponent for building this bridge. It carried two rail lines and pedestrian catwalks on either side across the Rhine. The total length was 400 metres (1,300 ft), while the main steel structure was 325 metres (1,066 ft) long. The arch spanned 156 metres (512 ft) and at its highest measured 28 metres (92 ft) above the water. Two trusses on either side of the central arch were both 85 metres (279 ft). An elevated overpass on each end of the span connected the approach to the bridge and allowed a rail line or roads to pass underneath, parallel to the river. The bridge was normally about 15 metres (49 ft) above the Rhine. Since it was built for military purposes, it had solidly built stone towers on either side of the rails on both banks, equipped with fighting loopholes and accommodations for up to a battalion of troops. On the eastern side, a 1,299-foot-long (396 m) tunnel was cut at almost 90° through Erpeler Ley, a steeply sided hill that overlooks the Rhine.
Demolition charges
The designers built cavities into the piers where demolition charges could be placed, but when the French occupied the Rhineland after World War I, they filled these cavities with concrete. After the Germans reacquired the Rhineland and control of the bridge, in 1938 they attached 60 zinc-lined boxes to the bridge girders, each capable of containing 3.66 kilograms (8.1 lb) of explosives. The system was designed to detonate all 60 charges at once, though by 7 March 1945, the charges had been removed and were stored nearby. They placed additional charges on the two piers. Within an inspection shaft in the west pier, the Germans placed 2,000 kilograms (4,400 lb) of explosives, and on the east pier they attached two charges of 300 kilograms (660 lb) to the girders connecting the bridge to the pier. The approximately 2,800 kilograms (6,200 lb) of charges were attached to an electric fuse and connected by electrical cables run through protective steel pipes to a control circuit located in the entrance to the tunnel under Erpeler Ley. As a backup, the Germans attached a primer cord to the charges under the eastern pier that could be manually ignited.
Allied Rhineland campaign
During the autumn of 1944, the Allies had repeatedly attempted to destroy the bridge to disrupt German efforts to reinforce their forces to the west. On 9 October 1944, a raid by 33 bombers damaged the bridge and it was reported as destroyed, but the bridge was back in use again on 9 November. A few weeks later on 28 December 1944, 71 B-24 Liberator bombers were dispatched to strike the bridge. They hit it with four bombs but the Germans quickly repaired it. The 446th Bombardment Group attacked the bridge again on the next four consecutive days from 28 to 31 December 1944. More bombers struck at the bridge during raids in January and February 1945. On 5 March 1945, B-24 bombers from the 491st Bombardment Group attempted one more time to destroy the bridge, but failed.
Operation Lumberjack was planned to prepare the way for Field Marshal Montgomery's massive Operation Plunder, an operation that rivaled the Normandy landings in size and complexity, eventually involving over a million troops and more than 30 divisions. Montgomery's typically cautious plan was to cross the Rhine in late March and invade central Germany. It included a large array of transport aircraft to ferry paratroopers and glider-borne infantry across the Rhine to set up the river crossing.
Montgomery's ground assault plan included the British 21st Army Group, consisting of the British Second Army, First Canadian Army and the attached US 9th Army. They were charged with crossing the Rhine north of the Ruhr following the airborne assault. To the south, Montgomery would be supported by Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group, including the First Army under the command of Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges. Hodges was given the objective of capturing dams on the Rur River and then trapping the Germans in a pincer move west of the Rhine. Plans for Operation Plunder had begun in England in August 1944, almost since Operation Market Garden failed.
After pushing the Germans back during the Battle of the Bulge, the Allies quickly advanced into western Germany. General Eisenhower established a twofold mission. The first was to prevent German forces defending the west bank of the Rhine River from escaping to the east bank. The second was to allow the Allied forces to select a river crossing where they could concentrate the attack leaving minimum forces defending the remainder of the front. The Allies held little hope they would be able to capture a Rhine River bridge intact. Instead, they brought up huge amounts of bridging equipment to the front. But Eisenhower left a standing order that if any unit found a bridge intact, they were to "exploit its use to the fullest, and establish a bridgehead on the other side".
Battle west of the Rhine
On 1 March 1945, of the 22 road and 25 railroad bridges across the Rhine, only four remained standing: the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne (destroyed by the Germans on 6 March), the Rhine Bridge at Bonn (blown up by the Germans on the evening of 8 March), the Crown Prince Wilhelm Bridge at Urmitz (destroyed by the Germans on 9 March) and the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen. In early March, units assigned to Operation Lumberjack, including the U.S. Army's 9th Armored Division, were tasked with mopping up elements of the German Army trapped on the west bank of the Rhine and to prevent a counterattack against the Ninth Army's flank.
To the south of the First Army, Lieutenant General George Patton's Third Army would also support Montgomery's advance across the Rhine. But the First Army had been delayed by two weeks when the Germans released water from the Rur river dams, flooding the valley below and slowing down the advance of Hodges' units.
During the two weeks that the valley was flooded, Hitler refused to allow Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander-in-Chief of the Western Front, to withdraw German forces to the east side of the Rhine. Hitler believed that this move would only delay the inevitable fight and ordered Von Rundstedt to fight where his forces stood. By the time the flooding subsided and the U.S. Ninth Army was able to cross the Ruhr on 23 February, other Allied forces were also close to the Rhine's west bank. The German divisions on the Rhine's west bank were cut to pieces. About 280,000 German troops were captured and another 120,000 were killed, wounded, or missing in action.
Capture of Cologne
Major General John W. Leonard, commanding officer of the 9th Armored Division, later recalled that on 6 March, III Corps commander Major General John Millikin, referring to the Ludendorff Bridge, told him over the phone, "You see that black line on the map. If you can seize that your name will go down in history." In the last week of February, Colonel Charles G. Patterson, the anti-aircraft artillery officer for III Corps, led a meeting for brigade and group commanders during which they discussed what they would do if they were lucky enough to capture a bridge intact.
On 2 March, Millikin assigned the 14th Tank Battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Leonard E. Engeman to the north flank and attached it to the 1st Division. The 9th Armored's Combat Command B attacked towards the Erft river, and Combat Command A advanced towards the Ahr river. They were to then move south to capture Remagen and Sinzig before linking up with the flanks of Patton's Third Army.
On the right flank of the First Army south of Bonn, the 9th Armored Division moved swiftly, and the closer they got to the Rhine, the more quickly they advanced. The speed of their movement towards the Rhine surprised the Germans.
When the First Army captured Cologne and reached the west bank of the Rhine, it was greeted as a major success of the Allied campaign, but German engineers dropped the Hohenzollern Bridge on 6 March, shortly before the 3rd Armored Division arrived.
Bridgehead location
General Eisenhower offered his generals some latitude in choosing the exact points for crossing the Rhine, though two areas where the Rhine valley was relatively broad were generally considered favorable. The first was between Cologne and Bonn in the north, and the other was between Andernach and Koblenz in the south. Both had some challenges, but offered relatively rapid access to the autobahn and into the Lahn river valley connecting to the Frankfurt–Kassel corridor. The least favored crossing points were in the area around the railroad bridge at Remagen. The upstream confluence of the Ahr River south of Remagen added considerable speed and turbulence to the 270-metre-wide (890 ft) Rhine at Remagen. The Americans in the area around Remagen were not even supposed to cross the Rhine.
Geographically, the northwest shoulder of the bridge was situated on a shallow salient exposed to the eastern bank of the Rhine. There was only one primary road into the town of Remagen from the west, and that road did not parallel the normal Allied axis of supply. From a logistical viewpoint, the location of the bridge was badly situated near the southern boundary of the First US Army.
The ground on the eastern side of the bridge rose steeply from the river. Inland, the steeply sloped terrain and gullies provided natural tank traps against advancing armor. The rough, wooded Westerwald forest rose from the Rhine to elevations ranging from 200 to 400 metres (660 to 1,310 ft) about 500 metres (1,600 ft) inland. The primary road network on the eastern side was severely limited, consisting of only a river road and two narrow mountain roads, any of which could be easily blocked by the Germans.
German defenses
General Gustav von Zangen's Fifteenth Army staff believed that the Allies would cross the Rhine using the open terrain of the Rheinbach Valley near the Ahr River. Zangen thought that the Rheinbach Valley offered the Allies a natural funnel for military operations. He argued with German Army Group B commander Field Marshal Walter Model, "The Americans would have to be stupid not to take advantage of this hole and push tanks toward the Rhine. I think they will use this valley—like water flowing downhill."
Zangen believed that the Rhine River towns of Sinzig and Remagen were likely targets of Hodges' First Army. Zangen tried and failed to persuade Model to block the Americans by withdrawing two corps from the West Wall defenses along the German frontier and placing them at Remagen to protect the Ludendorff Bridge.
Model believed like the Americans that "only a fool would try to cross the Rhine where the cliffs rose steeply on the opposite bank". He refused to allocate more troops to Zangen's Remagen sector.