While British Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery’s 21st Army Group was marching across Belgium, Holland, and into northern Germany on his way to the Rhine, Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, made up of Courtney Hodges’s First and George Patton’s Third U.S. Armies, was doing the same on Monty’s southern shoulder.
In the previous weeks, Bradley’s group had overcome numerous rivers in the western half of Germany: the Erft, the Ruhr, the Roer, the Mosel, the Main, the Ahr, the Our, the Lauter, the Saar, the Nahe, the Kyll, and many more—each waterway being more or less vigorously defended by desperate German troops on home soil. Before them now was the Rhine, mightiest of them all.
American intelligence had identified the remnants of 21 German divisions lined up across the Rhine, but all were believed to be exhausted, seriously understrength, and incapable of putting up a sustained fight.
Hitler’s hopes for a victorious last stand were dashed when, on March 7, 1945, elements of the 9th U.S. Armored Division captured the still-standing Ludendorff railroad bridge over the 980-foot-wide Rhine at the town of Remagen, between Cologne and Koblenz.
