Eight decades after American soldiers sailed across the Rhine under gunfire to break through German defenses, U.S. soldiers gathered again at the banks of the river, joining veterans and German military counterparts to commemorate the historic crossing.
While an Army band played on Saturday, soldiers in vintage World War II uniforms boarded an amphibious boat from the 1940s named “Tugboat Annie” and sailed down the Rhine, in honor of the brazen March 22, 1945 crossing that helped kick off a massive invasion of Nazi Germany by Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. Along with an Army band playing, the general’s granddaughter Helen Patton was in attendance for the commemoration.
80 years ago this weekend several Allied armies staged massive, different crossings of the Rhine. It was part of major pushes past the last defenses at the German border. The Battle of the Bulge had ended with the Allies able to regroup and continue their advance towards the Siegfried Line. By March 1945, all that remained was to find a way across the Rhine, as Nazis rushed to destroy any crossing they could.
The Allies had scored a miraculous win a week earlier, seizing the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen before the Nazis could blow it up. The First Army moved armor and infantry across the bridge, but Patton and his rival, Bernard Montgomery were racing to get their armies across the river before the other. Montgomery was preparing a major, combined arms push for the night of March 23. On March 22, Patton had his troops just cross without wider aerial support. Late into the night, without an artillery barrage to pave the way, soldiers hurried across the river in amphibious vehicles, crossing at Oppenheim and catching the Nazis — understrength from weeks of fighting — by surprise. In a few days, several divisions of the Third Army had seized a beachhead through the German lines.
At the same time as Patton’s troops were crossing the Rhine, Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group was launching its own invasion into the German heartland. Operation Plunder was a massive endeavor, with airborne units jumping ahead of amphibious crossing while Allied bombers dropped ordnance on German positions. More than four thousand artillery pieces launched a massive bombardment of enemy positions. Combined with the aerial attack, it paved the way for ground forces to cross in amphibious vehicles and for engineers to build bridges across the river. The assault spanned more than 20 miles, and by the end of the fifth day, it was a massive Allied success.
Although beaten across the river by Patton, Operation Plunder was significant not only for its own success but some of the elements within it. On March 24, 1945, Allied airborne units carried out Operation Varsity, the single largest airborne operation targeting a specific location. Two airborne divisions jumped into German-held territory, seizing it and causing chaos for the Nazis as amphibious units pushed across the Rhine.
The event at Nierstein was the latest commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Europe. Since last summer, the U.S. military and its partners have been retracing the steps of the Allied victory. Active-duty service members as well as veterans and reenactors have jumped out of vintage aircraft, landed on the beaches of Normandy and marched through parts of the Netherlands to honor the troops who fought there 80 years ago. Some recent events tied to the final push into Axis territory, such as this weekend’s in Germany, have been smaller affairs than the D-Day commemoration, but still mark major turning points in the war.
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