Throughout the night of 23 Mar and the next day, 80,000 British and Canadian troops crossed the 20-mile stretch of the river. Had I not secured a good bridgehead by that time, I was to stop arguing and assume the mournful role of a defender, Patton said. To their surprise, they were not opposed by enemy forces. Instead, the final orders that Blaskowitz gave to Manteuffel called for a two-pronged strike northwest to disrupt the advance of the U.S. 4th Armored Division and retake the crossroads at Chateau-Salins. Patton was fatally injured in a road accident on December9, 1945, dying twelve days later. Lying astride Third Armys route of advance were the key cities of Metz and Nancy, both of which are located on the east bank of the Moselle. He was confident that Eddys 35th Division, with close support of the 4th Armored, could achieve a breach and hold it open to allow Third Armys armored divisions to punch through the wall. From there, the vehicle fired an armor-piercing shell into the side of a Panther in a field 300 yards away. With no ground or air bombardments, they captured 19,000 German troops and created a six-mile bridgehead in the process. Right: U.S. Army Generals Omar Bradley, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George S. Patton. On March 24, 1945, Patton approached a newly constructed pontoon bridge over the Rhine that his troops had placed two nights before and a Third Army division had already crossed. Germany. Major General Clarence Huebner's V Corps made rapid advances with relative ease. Some of the hardest fighting was done by the 704th Tank Destroyer (TD) Battalion. That same day Third Army received about 240,000 gallons of fuel, which was sufficient to resume its advance the following day. Join historians and history buffs alike with our Unlimited Digital Access pass to every military history article ever published (over 3,000 articles) in Sovereigns military history magazines. Having previously been denied permission to photograph the face of the 200,000th prisoner (the Geneva Convention required that a prisoner be protected against acts of public curiosity), Patton announced that this time we will take a picture of his ass. (A week later their POW capture would top 300,000. This time the engineers were able to construct a bridge under the cover of darkness, but the bridgehead was again subjected to concentrated shelling by long-range guns from the Metz defenses and also from counterattacks by various elements of all three of the German Panzergrenadier divisions defending the Moselle. Historical Reads: Patton's Third Army Crosses the Rhine By Jeremy Gypton On March 16, 2021 On March 22nd, 1945, elements of the United States' Third Army, under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton, crossed the Rhine River at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. The bombing started on 21 Mar, and by 24 Mar the German air force were no longer able to put up much of a resistance against its Allied counterpart; 8,000 sorties were launched between 21 Mar and 24 Mar, and Allied airmen reported only about 100 enemy aircrafts sighted. But where he crossed the Main? Unfortunately for the Germans, the 111th Panzer Brigade became lost in unfamiliar countryside and didnt reach the staging area at Bures until late afternoon on the 19th. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler wanted to counterattack at the Allied bridgehead at Oppenheim, but he was told that no reserve forces were available to embark on such an operation. WW2DB site administrators reserve the right to moderate, censor, and/or remove any comment. Company A, advancing on the left, gained high ground west of Juvelize, and with substantial artillery support, it checked the momentum of the enemy armor pushing south. Balck requested that Rundstedt provide Army Group G with three fresh divisions and 80 additional tanks and assault guns to continue the fight. XXX Corps. click here for our comprehensive guide to General Patton. The Sherman crews could do little to deter the advancing Panthers because of the excellent sloped and thick frontal armor the enemy tanks possessed. Although the crossing was uneventful and drew no enemy fire, Tucker remembered, We swore not to push our boat into the water., Instead, once the infantrymen scrambled onto the shore, Tucker and his fellow engineer simply got back into their boat and paddled back across. That evening Manteuffel made substantial adjustments to the German plan of attack. But the Americans stood their ground. In addition, Wood ordered CCB to shift to CCAs right flank to cover the ground between Rechicourt and the Marne-Rhine Canal. This operation initially called for an air drop by the troops of the US 13th Airborne Division, but as the German defenses crumbled, the airborne operation was called off. Along the way the Third Army liberated some of the most ghastly killing and concentration camps in the Reich: Ohrdruf (a subcamp of Buchenwald), Flossenbuerg, Dachau, and Mauthausen-Gusen. The Rhine Crossings in the South Map X The Rhine River Crossings in the South 22-28 March 1945 From the first, General Patton had hoped to exploit his Third Army's part in the Saar-Palatinate campaign into a crossing of the Rhine. Although the 106th Panzer Brigade was led by veterans from the Eastern Front, its crews had received very little training and the brigade suffered from a severe shortage of communications equipment essential to coordinate an assault. Despite the ferocity of the attack, the cavalry held on for four hours before it finally withdrew into the town. A week before the Rhine crossing, Patton had held a press conference in which he delivered a classic performance, mixing the humorous, provocative, and the profane. His superior, General Omar Bradley, released news of this crossing to the press "at a time calculated to take some of the luster from the news of Montgomerys crossing." [5] The very notion was unpalatable to Old Blood and Guts. Click here for our comprehensive information resource on the society, ideology, and key events in Nazi Germany. The eastern thrust of the 113th Panzer Brigades attack that day was aimed at Companies C and D of the 37th Tank Battalion guarding the eastern and southern approaches to Arracourt. His commanding general Omar Bradley, who issued the order for him not to cross to avoid interfering with Bernard Montgomery's operations, did not know of the crossing until the next morning. His high hopes for a rapid advance to the West Wall would be dashed as heavy rains over the next two months restricted Third Armys tank columns to primary roads and sharply curtailed tactical air support. After 48 hours of hard fighting, the bridgehead was abandoned. Click here for parts Two and Three. In 1943 he commanded the U.S. (Back in Berlin, Adolf Hitler urged the Wehrmacht to attack the Allied bridgehead at Oppenheim, only to be told that no reserve forces were available to embark on such an operation.) The 37th Tank Battalion was sent to the rear to rest and refit. . The 134th Infantry Regiment was ordered to cross on the left below Nancy, and the 137th Infantry Regiment on the right. In little more than a months time, Patton, together with his archrival British General Bernard L. Montgomery, commanding the British Eighth Army, liberated the strategic island from Axis control. On 22 March, General George S. Patton sent his Third Army across the Rhine, at Nierstein, to form another bridgehead. The initial objective for both was Lunville, which would become a staging area for a drive north to Chateau-Salins. In Germany, US Third Army captured Frankfurt and Wiesbaden and US Seventh Army captured Mannheim. We hope that visitor conversations at WW2DB will be constructive and thought-provoking. However, Patton was aware that this would be obvious to the Germans, and therefore he and his staff made rapid plans for another site at Nierstein and Oppenheim, about 12 miles south of Mainz. Wietersheim ordered the battle group to break off its attack until the following day so that reinforcements could be sent to Bures. To protect the fatherland, Hitler ordered all German forces on the Western Front to hold their positions on the Moselle to allow engineers to make much-needed improvements to the West Wall fortifications. Meanwhile, US Third Army reached Siegen, Germany. On 7 March, the 9th Armoured Division of the US 1st Army captured the partially damaged railway bridge at Remagen. ww2dbaseTo cross the Rhine presented the Royal Engineer with many highly technical problems, but experiments and preparations for just such a task had been carried out on the River Ouse, near Goole, since 1943, and orders for specialised equipment needed had been placed with the Ministry of Supply in good time. A major firefight developed that resulted in the destruction of seven enemy tanks at the cost of three Shermans. The Hellcats bought precious time for Companies A and B of the 37th Tank Battalion to rumble north from Lezey toward the battlefront. Unlike Patton, Churchill forbade photographs of the occasion. The 111th and 113th Panzer Brigades boasted two tank battalions, one of 45 Panthers and the other of 45 Mark IVs. Although the U.S. First Army had already captured an intact bridge over the river at Remagen, there was still a rivalry between Patton and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to cross next. Old Blood and Gutss fixation with supply problems and haggling with his superiors over reinforcements had distracted him from the detailed planning necessary to get Third Armys divisions across the Moselle as quickly as possible. The attack on the 25th was not substantial enough to disrupt a shuffling of U.S. forces in the Arracourt sector. But Pattons dash ground to a halt shortly after it crossed the Meuse. Although his unit was spearheading the attack toward the river, he assumed there would be a pause to get organized for the crossing. At this location, on March 22 & 23, 1945, the 249th Engineer Combat Battalion, after supporting the U.S. Army 5th Infantry Division at Oppenheim, in the first successful Rhine river assault crossing since Napoleon, completed the construction of a 366 meter floating bridge to carry elements of General George S. Patton's 3rd Army across the Rhine. Two days before, Bradley had called Patton and First Army Commander Maj. Gen. Courtney Hodge to his headquarters at Dreux and informed them that the supply situation was dire. After some confusion as to the location of their target, which was Maj. Gen. Raymond McLains 90th Division of Walkers XX Corps, the Germans regrouped on the evening of September 7 and advanced after midnight in two columns through the village of Briey toward the American position. Eisenhower issued orders in late August to all of his top commanders outlining a two-pronged offensive against western Germany in which the principal targets were the Ruhr and Saar industrial areas. The 37th Tank Battalion would get no rest on September 20. Click here to see our comprehensive article on World War 2. Total losses for the day were five Shermans and more than 40 Panther and Mark IV tanks. Love him or hate him, Patton cuts a singular figure in military history, and left a long, complicated legacy for historians, soldiers, and history buffs to consider. On Pattons left wing, Walkers XX Corps began probing the Metz defenses on September 7. Once again, Company C of the 704th TD Battalion rushed forward to delay the advance supported by P-47s firing rockets and machine guns. They swooped in at extremely low level, catching the German tank crews by surprise. Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. Bradley quickly exploited the opportunity and expanded the bridgehead into a full-scale crossing. The Shermans, which went into action in the morning, knocked out eight enemy tanks in quick order. Patton's troops beat Montgomery across the Rhine by one day. (To be fair to the British 21st Army Group, their Rhine crossings were marshy (Wesel) and twice as wide, with the river carrying a far higher volume of water than the crossings consigned to the U.S. Third and Seventh Armies and the French First Army, meaning that Montgomery could not possibly cross the Rhine on the run.) The next day Patton, showing his contempt for the enemy, made good on his pledge to piss in the Rhine in a week, which he did from a pontoon bridge in full view of his men and news cameras. ww2dbaseBetween Frankfort and the Ruhr River, the American First Army had breached the Rhine River barrier earlier in the month near Remagen. The Germans, in an effort to regroup, turned southwest to escape the ambush. He later went as far as the railway bridge at Wesel by Montgomery's staff car, a bridge that was still under enemy fire. ww2dbaseThe river on XXX Corps' front was 500 yards across and defended on its eastern bank by the German 8th Parachute Division, in and around the town of Rees. With that measure of skill, the 704th managed that day to destroy eight Panthers without losing a single tank destroyer. ", ww2dbaseAdditional Contribution by Alan Chanter. Seventh Army during the Sicilian campaign ( Operation Husky ), and in August 1944 his Third Army became operational in northern France. Our orders were to get the infantry to the east bank, then push our boat back into the river and let it float downstream., To prevent beached boats from blocking follow-up waves, the engineers were ordered to push as many boats back into the river as possible and then gather up the rest of the engineers who landed and pile into a single boat to return. The plan called for a diversionary attack at daybreak by elements of the 11th Panzer Division against the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion atop Hill 265, another key position held by the Americans. To cover CCBs former position in the line, Baades 35th Infantry Division advanced to a new position west of Chateau-Salins. Copyright 20122023 World War II - Day By Day. The 112th Panzer Brigade decimated by the clash at Dompaire, had only two dozen serviceable tanks. Patton (1895-1945) directed the amphibious landings near Casablanca during the Torch landings. We've got him. Fearing Hitlers ire, Blaskowitz berated Manteuffel for failing to make any noticeable gains and ordered him to continue the counterattack regardless of the losses incurred. News of the crossing made it around the world. Still, the 137th Infantry Division that same day managed to establish several small bridgeheads on the eastern bank. Eisenhower (18901969) was chosen in July 1942 to head Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1943. He announced that the Third Army would shortly capture its 230,000th prisoner of war. Right: Patton famously relieved himself in the Rhine on March24, 1945and made sure he was photographed doing so. This was the first crossing of the Rhine River by boat by an invading army since Napoleon Bonaparte. Ive been looking forward to this for a long time, Patton said as he unzipped his fly and urinated into the river while an Army photographer recorded the moment for posterity. Mrz 2023; . While the fighting raged, P-47s flew repeated sorties against Bures, through which the Germans were funneling fresh troops and ammunition into the battle. Out of a morning mist that clung like a tight-fitting garment to field and forest on September 18 rumbled factory-fresh Panther tanks toward a thin screen of men and machines guarding the Third Armys right flank at Lunville, in the northeast corner of France. A severe shortage of fuel in the early days of September slowed Third Armys advance to a crawl, giving the Germans time to rush reinforcements from as far away as Italy to cover thinly defended sectors. The Shermans then retreated behind the crest of the ridge and reappeared at another point to finish off the three remaining Panthers. "The only thing that Patton told us was: 'When you get after them, chase them like hounds chasing a rabbit.' Then he said: 'Go to the Rhine and capture a bridge.' We did everything but capture. He is all through. By August 30, Pattons army was receiving only about 32,000 of the 400,000 gallons of fuel it required to run all of its tanks and vehicles. 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