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In early March 1945, American commanders decided Trier could not be taken without four divisions, so Patton’s Third Army was ordered to bypass the German city. What they did not know was how far his tanks had already pushed forward, or that the 10th Armored Division had been borrowed from Eisenhower’s reserve and was still deep in the fight.
The story moves through seven brutal weeks in the Saar-Moselle Triangle: a fortified line attacked piece by piece, a rifle company cut off in the snow at Orscholz, a river crossing under the guns of the Siegfried Line, and a battalion of Rangers holding a road alone. On the night of March 1, Lt. Col. Jack Richardson led his task force toward the Moselle bridges, wired to blow, setting up the moment behind one of Patton’s most famous wartime lines.
For viewers and listeners who enjoy World War II history, military history storytelling, WW2 documentaries, and battlefield narratives, this is a tense account of Patton’s Third Army, the Moselle bridges, Trier, the Siegfried Line, and the cost of moving fast in late-war Europe. Ideal for fans of historical war stories, campaign analysis, and forgotten WW2 episodes.
WW2 history, Patton stories, and military history narration like this appeal to anyone searching for World War II stories, Third Army history, German front campaigns, and battlefield documentaries. It is a strong choice for history listening, war story fans, and viewers interested in tactical maneuvering, armored warfare, and the forgotten actions that shaped the final months of the war.
The story moves through seven brutal weeks in the Saar-Moselle Triangle: a fortified line attacked piece by piece, a rifle company cut off in the snow at Orscholz, a river crossing under the guns of the Siegfried Line, and a battalion of Rangers holding a road alone. On the night of March 1, Lt. Col. Jack Richardson led his task force toward the Moselle bridges, wired to blow, setting up the moment behind one of Patton’s most famous wartime lines.
For viewers and listeners who enjoy World War II history, military history storytelling, WW2 documentaries, and battlefield narratives, this is a tense account of Patton’s Third Army, the Moselle bridges, Trier, the Siegfried Line, and the cost of moving fast in late-war Europe. Ideal for fans of historical war stories, campaign analysis, and forgotten WW2 episodes.
WW2 history, Patton stories, and military history narration like this appeal to anyone searching for World War II stories, Third Army history, German front campaigns, and battlefield documentaries. It is a strong choice for history listening, war story fans, and viewers interested in tactical maneuvering, armored warfare, and the forgotten actions that shaped the final months of the war.
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LearningTranscript
00:00At 10 o'clock on the night of March 1, 1945, at a crossroads west of the German village of
00:06Lampedin,
00:08Lieutenant Colonel Jack Richardson gave the order to move.
00:12Tanks and half-tracks pulled onto a back road in single file.
00:16The moon was full.
00:18The men in the lead vehicles could see the road, the hedges, and each other's faces,
00:23and they understood that anyone waiting ahead could see them just as well.
00:29Richardson was 33, a West Pointer from Athens, Texas.
00:33His orders that night fit into one sentence.
00:37Get into Trier tonight and seize, intact if possible, the two key bridges over the Moselle.
00:45Think about what that sentence was asking for.
00:48Trier was the oldest city in Germany.
00:51It sat behind the Siegfried Line, and on its outskirts were pillboxes and 88mm guns,
00:58that had stopped two larger American columns on the main roads that same day.
01:02Richardson was being sent in between them, down a secondary road, in the dark,
01:08with a battalion of armored infantry and some tanks.
01:11And the bridges he was sent for were wired to blow.
01:16Now here is what the men in that column did not know.
01:20Their division did not belong to the general who was using it.
01:24The 10th Armored had been borrowed from Eisenhower's own reserve, on a loan with the deadline,
01:29and that deadline had run out two nights earlier.
01:33Every mile Richardson drove toward Trier, he drove on time that nobody had officially granted.
01:39And far behind that moonlit road, at a higher headquarters,
01:43a staff had studied the same city and reached a conclusion.
01:47Trier could not be taken with fewer than four divisions.
01:50The 3rd Army should go around it.
01:53That conclusion was about to become a message addressed to George Patton.
01:59So two things are moving through the same night.
02:02One American task force rolling toward two bridges,
02:05and a piece of paper saying the job needs four divisions.
02:09Patton's reply to that paper is one of the most repeated lines of the war.
02:13It is short enough to fit on a telegraph form.
02:16But I'm going to ask you to wait for it, because on its own, it is only a wisecrack.
02:21What gives it weight is what it costs to be in a position to send it.
02:25And most of that bill was paid before Richardson's engines ever turned over.
02:30If you value a careful account of what U.S. soldiers did on the road to Trier,
02:35and what it costs them, a like and a subscription keep this channel going.
02:39To see where that night came from, go back seven weeks.
02:43On January 7th, 1945, the 94th Infantry Division took over a frozen stretch of line
02:49in a corner of Germany most Americans have never heard of.
02:53Picture the place where the Saar River runs north into the Moselle.
02:57The two rivers close in on each other and form a wedge of high ground,
03:00and the point of that wedge is aimed straight at Trier.
03:04The soldiers called it the Triangle.
03:07Across the base of it, the Germans had built a wall.
03:10Pillboxes, dragon's teeth, anti-tank ditches, minefields,
03:14a spur of the Siegfried Line running from one river to the other.
03:17On German maps, it was the Orschultz switch.
03:21Whoever broke it had a road to Trier.
03:24Whoever sat behind it could watch every American move for miles.
03:28The 94th was not an obvious choice to break anything.
03:32It had spent the autumn in Brittany, fencing in German garrisons that had been left behind
03:37in the Atlantic ports.
03:39Its commander, Major General Harry Maloney, now had a real front and almost no permission
03:44to use it.
03:46The war's attention was elsewhere.
03:48Patton's army was still finishing the fight in the Ardennes, and the next great offensive
03:52was being built in the north, for Montgomery.
03:55So the Corps commander, Walton Walker, set a rule for the Triangle.
04:00No attack larger than one reinforced battalion.
04:03Keep that rule in mind.
04:05One battalion at a time, against a fortified line.
04:09It was meant to keep things small.
04:12It is the reason things got expensive.
04:15And notice what is missing from this picture.
04:18There is no armored division in it.
04:21Walker had none of his own to commit there, and armor, in the winter of 1945, was something
04:27a commander on a quiet front had to ask for, with reasons, and usually give back.
04:33At first, the rule seemed to work.
04:36On January 14th, Lieutenant Colonel Russell Miner's battalion of the 376th Infantry
04:42walked through the snow into the village of Tedingen, and had the next village, Butzdorf,
04:47before noon.
04:49The following day, another battalion took Nennig, down by the Moselle.
04:53The German division holding the line was stretched thin.
04:57It threw in its replacement battalion, about 400 men, to take the villages back.
05:03Barely a hundred of them got away.
05:05For three days, it looked as if the switch might simply crack.
05:09Here is the detail that changes the story.
05:11By pure coincidence, the German command had picked that same week and that same sector
05:17for a raid of its own.
05:19And it had sent a formation to carry it out.
05:22The 11th Panzer Division.
05:25It was known as the Ghost Division, and it arrived with some 30 tanks, two dozen assault
05:31guns, and two regiments of panzer grenadiers.
05:35The axis chosen for its attack ran directly through Tedingen and Butzdorf.
05:40Through the two villages, an American battalion had just been told it was allowed to hold.
05:45They came on January 18th, and two days after that, at the far eastern end of the line,
05:51a single American rifle company would be ordered to pull back out of a snow-covered wood.
05:57Its captain would answer by radio that he could not comply.
06:02What happened to that company is where a general who had been told to hold still
06:06began to want a division that was not his.
06:10So why did he believe one borrowed division could do what the planners said needed four?
06:15The 11th Panzer came out of the morning mist on January 18th, 1945, and it came exactly
06:22where the map said it would.
06:24Tanks and panzer grenadiers hit Butzdorf and Tedingen, the two villages Russell Miner's
06:29battalion had taken four days earlier.
06:32Butzdorf was a handful of stone houses.
06:35The American company inside it fought from cellars and upper windows through the day,
06:40with German tanks firing into the walls from the street.
06:43By dark, there was not enough of the village or the company left to hold.
06:49First Lieutenant David Stafford gathered the survivors and brought them out through the
06:53night, back to Tedingen.
06:55Tedingen held.
06:57So did Nenik, down by the river, though it took days.
07:01The Germans got into half the village and into a castle on its edge, and no farther.
07:07When a battalion of the 376th went back in on January 23rd to clear the northern end,
07:13five German tanks were knocked out in the streets.
07:16Three of them were credited to three men.
07:19Technical Sergeant Nathaniel Isaacman, Private John Petra, and Private Albert Beardsley.
07:26Stop there for a second, because this is easy to pass over.
07:30A division that had spent the autumn watching bypassed ports had just met a veteran panzer
07:36division head-on in its first real battle, and had not been pushed off the line.
07:42That matters for everything that follows.
07:44The men were not the problem.
07:47The rule was the problem.
07:50And the place where the rule showed its price was at the other end of the switch, at a village
07:56called Orschultz.
07:59Orschultz was the eastern anchor of the whole fortified line, sitting on high ground above
08:04the Tsar.
08:05The job of taking it went to the 300 1st Infantry, under Colonel Roy Haggerty, and under
08:12the rule, it went to one battalion.
08:15The plan depended on surprise.
08:18Two companies would cross the line of departure around midnight on January 19th, move through
08:23a forest in the dark, and be among the pillboxes before the Germans understood what was happening.
08:29It was snowing hard.
08:30Company B went first and got through.
08:33It crossed an open clearing, slipped past the outer positions, and into the woods beyond,
08:38close to the village itself.
08:40For a short while, the surprise was real.
08:43Then Company A started across the same clearing, and walked into a minefield.
08:48The explosions did what no sentry had done.
08:52Every pillbox covering that clearing woke up.
08:55Machine guns swept the snow.
08:57The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel George Miller, was killed.
09:01The rest of the battalion could not get forward, and Company B, about 230 men with their attachments
09:07under Captain Herman Straub, was now on the wrong side of an alerted fortress line, with
09:13the door shut behind it.
09:15Haggerty looked at what he had, and reported the truth to his division commander.
09:19To get through to them, he said, would take an entire regiment.
09:24A regiment was exactly what the rule did not allow.
09:28Maloney called the attack off.
09:30Straub was ordered to withdraw.
09:32His men were in the open woods, in deep snow, low on ammunition, with wounded they could not
09:38move, and German fire on every route back.
09:42He answered that he could not comply.
09:45Company B surrendered.
09:48I want you to keep that company in mind for the rest of this story.
09:52Not as a failure, because they had done precisely what was asked.
09:56As a measurement.
09:58That is what the Orschultz switch cost when you approached it one battalion at a time,
10:03and every officer in the 94th, and the corps commander above them, and the army commander above
10:09him, now knew the number.
10:12Here is where the armor enters, and this is the detail to hold on to, because it will come
10:17back twice.
10:19After Orschultz, Walker got tanks.
10:21A combat command of the 8th Armored Division, newly arrived and never yet in battle, was lent
10:27to the triangle under Brigadier General Charles Coulson.
10:30But look at the terms.
10:32It was lent for 48 hours.
10:34Two days, to give green tankers a taste of combat, after which they were to be handed
10:40back.
10:41On January 25th, the infantry and the borrowed armor went for the next village in the line,
10:47Sins.
10:48The fighting ran three days in snow and bitter cold.
10:52The 18th Tank Battalion knocked out eight German tanks and lost six of its own.
10:57Walker stretched the loan by a couple of days to keep the attack alive.
11:02Then the clock ran out, the combat command was pulled away, and Sins was still not fully
11:07in American hands.
11:09Do you see what that taught the men running this battle?
11:12Armor that arrives on a timer leaves on a timer, whether the job is finished or not.
11:1948 hours had bought some wrecked panzers and a few hundred yards.
11:22It had not bought a breakthrough, because nobody had been allowed to stay long enough to make
11:27one.
11:28The infantry went back to doing it alone.
11:32Sins finally fell to the 301st, on February 7th.
11:36The woods beyond it did not.
11:38Men who had been living in frozen holes for a month were coming down with trench foot and
11:42frostbite at a rate that brought Patton himself down on the division's officers, and he was
11:47not gentle about it.
11:49One month on the switch had bled the 94th, and the lines still stood across the base of
11:55the triangle.
11:56Yet something had changed on the other side, too.
11:59The 11th Panzer, which had been sent for a short raid, had been held in place and ground
12:05down for weeks.
12:06And in early February, it began to be pulled out for use elsewhere.
12:11The German infantry division behind the pillboxes had lost its replacement battalion, and much
12:16more besides.
12:17Maloney could feel the line in front of him getting thinner, so he asked for the one thing
12:22he had been denied since January.
12:24The whole division, all three regiments, attacking together.
12:29This time, Walker said yes.
12:32The date was set for February 19th.
12:34And behind the front, in reserve, sat a full armored division, the 10th.
12:40It could turn a hole in that line into a road to Trier.
12:45There was just one condition attached to it, and the condition came from Eisenhower personally,
12:50who, on the morning the line finally broke, was going to be able to give permission.
12:55At four o'clock in the morning on February 19th, 1945, it was raining on the triangle.
13:01The snow that had covered the minefields for a month was turning to slush, and in the dark
13:06below a long ridge near the village of Munzingen, the 300 First Infantry started uphill.
13:13For the first time since January, it was not going alone.
13:17All three regiments of the 94th were moving at once.
13:20That ridge was the backbone of the whole wedge.
13:23Take it, and the pillboxes on either side were looking the wrong way.
13:28Company B's first platoon found the mines first.
13:32Men went down one after another in the dark, and those still standing could not go forward
13:37or back without stepping on more.
13:40By the time anyone had a way out, the platoon was down to 16 men.
13:45The way out came from Technical Sergeant Henry Crandall.
13:49He took a length of primachord, the explosive line engineers used to set off charges, laid it
13:54out across the field ahead, and fired it.
13:57The blast cut a lane through the mines.
13:59The company went up through that lane.
14:01By daylight, two battalions were on the crest.
14:04On their left, the 376th finally cleared the woods beyond Sins that had thrown back every
14:11attack for two weeks.
14:13On the right, the 302nd came out of its own patch of forest and kept going.
14:19Prisoners were coming back down the slopes in groups.
14:22Harry Maloney had been in front of that line for six weeks.
14:25He knew what it felt like when it was holding, and this was different.
14:30Sometime that morning, he picked up the telephone, called Walker, and said the thing he had not
14:35been able to say since January.
14:38Send the armor through.
14:41Now follow what happens next, step by step, because this is the first move of the game
14:46that ends with the wire.
14:49Walker did not own the 10th Armored.
14:51He called Patton.
14:53Patton did not own it either.
14:55The division had been placed in the reserve of Supreme Headquarters, and Eisenhower had
14:59specified that it was to be used only with his approval.
15:03So Patton reached for the proper channel, his own superior, Omar Bradley.
15:09Bradley could not be reached.
15:11Think about the position that put him in.
15:13The hole was open now.
15:15It had cost a month and a company at Orschultz, and a platoon on that ridge to open it.
15:21And holes in a fortified line do not stay open while generals wait for a return call.
15:27The 8th Armored had already shown what happened when tanks arrived late and left early.
15:33So Patton went over the channel.
15:34He telephoned Supreme Headquarters directly and got Eisenhower's operations chief, Major
15:41General Harold Bull.
15:43And Bull said yes.
15:45But listen to the condition, because everything afterward turns on it.
15:50The 10th Armored could be used to clear the triangle.
15:53When the triangle was clear, the division went back into reserve.
15:58The official history uses one word for how Patton took that.
16:02It rankled.
16:03He had asked for a division and been handed an errand.
16:07Still, he told Walker to turn the armor loose.
16:10At 7 o'clock on the morning of February 20th, the 10th Armored Division under Major General
16:16William Morris passed through the infantry and went north.
16:20One column, under Colonel Wade Gatchel, with the 376th Infantry riding along, drove up the
16:27Moselle side of the wedge.
16:30Another, Brigadier General Edwin Pyburn's Combat Command A, went straight up the middle
16:36for the high ground at Tauron.
16:38In that second column was an armored infantry battalion commander you have already met.
16:44Jack Richardson's task force took its hills near Tauron that first day.
16:49What had taken the infantry five weeks to crack, the armor ran through in two days.
16:54By February 21st, Gatchel's tanks stood at the very tip of the triangle, where the
17:00Tsar meets the Moselle.
17:02The German division that had held the switch had ceased to exist as a formation.
17:07The estimate for the whole fight was about 3,000 Germans killed and wounded, and as many
17:12again taken prisoner.
17:14And from the hills at the tip, on a clear day, you could see the edge of Trier.
17:19Here is the fact I asked you to watch for.
17:22By the terms Bull had set, the loan was now over.
17:26The triangle was clear.
17:28The 10th Armored was due back.
17:30On that same day, February 21st, Patton gave Walker a new order, and Walker handed it down
17:37to Morris.
17:39Cross the Tsar and take Trier.
17:42Notice what that order is.
17:44It is not a request for an extension.
17:46Nobody at Supreme Headquarters had agreed to a river crossing or to a city.
17:51Patton was betting that if the division was already over the Tsar and moving, no one would
17:57reach in and pull it back.
17:59Speed was the whole argument.
18:01The Germans on the far bank were disorganized that night and would not be for long.
18:06And the far bank mattered, because the main belt of the Siegfried Line ran along it.
18:12Pillboxes on the heights, looking straight down at the water.
18:16So the crossing was set for that very night.
18:18The 10th Armored's infantry would go over at a village called Okfen, just north of Saarburg.
18:25The 94th, which had been attacking for three days without rest, would go over farther south,
18:31at Taben and Tsedig, where the river runs through a gorge.
18:35The men who had to make it work were the engineers, and they were already paying.
18:40On February 21st, the commander of the 10th Armored's own engineer battalion,
18:46Lt. Col. Wadsworth Clapp, was killed near the river at Isle.
18:50The assault boats had to come up over roads jammed with a whole division's traffic,
18:55in the dark, to crossing sites nobody had seen in daylight.
19:00Four in the morning was the hour set for the assault.
19:03At Okfen, the infantry of the 376th came down to the bank in the fog and waited.
19:09The boats were not there, and every hour they waited, two clocks were running.
19:14One belonged to the Germans in the pillboxes across the water.
19:18The other belonged to the people who had lent Patton the division.
19:22Which one was going to run out first?
19:23At Taben, on the morning of February 22nd, 1945,
19:28the Tsar runs fast through a gorge, and the far bank goes up almost like a wall.
19:34The assault there had been set for four o'clock.
19:37The first boats reached the water about an hour late.
19:41But the fog that had hidden the missing boats was still hiding the river.
19:46At ten minutes to seven, a boat carrying Staff Sergeant John Smith of the 302nd Infantry
19:52touched the east bank.
19:54The men climbed out under the muzzles of pillboxes whose crews could not see twenty yards
19:59and started up the height behind the village, a steep mass of rock called Hoeker Hill.
20:06Company after company followed them up.
20:09By the time the Germans understood that Americans were across at Taben, the Americans were above them.
20:16A mile downstream at Sarig, the same fog was not enough.
20:21A battalion of the 301st came to the bank late, was spotted, and launched into machine gun fire
20:28and a current that carried boats away sideways.
20:31Only a few reached the far side.
20:34Captain Charles Donovan got the men who had made it into a small cluster of buildings by
20:38the river and held there, cut off, until a second wave came over in boats fitted with
20:44outboard motors.
20:46That night the two footholds, Taben and Sarig, were joined into one.
20:50So the tired infantry division, the one that had been attacking for four days straight, was
20:57over the Tsar by evening.
20:59Now look north to Okfen, where the borrowed armored division was supposed to cross, and
21:04where the whole plan for Trier was pointed.
21:07There the boats did not come at four, or at dawn.
21:11A bridging unit had lost its way in the dark on the crowded roads.
21:15The boats finally arrived around midday.
21:18By then the fog had burned off.
21:20The pillboxes on the heights could see the whole riverbank, and when the engineers tried
21:25to lay smoke, German fire drove them off the generators.
21:29Sending infantry across in daylight would have been a slaughter.
21:33Morris waited for dark.
21:35The 376th went over that night, February 22nd, into the pillbox belt.
21:41Their regimental commander, Colonel Harold McClune, was wounded three times in the crossing.
21:47One company cleared 11 pillboxes on the slope above Okfen, and took 54 prisoners for four
21:53casualties of its own, which tells you something about how these men had learned their trade
21:57since January.
21:59By the 23rd, the regiment was across.
22:02But here is the problem, and it is a problem for tanks.
22:07Infantry can cross a river in a plywood boat.
22:10A Sherman needs a bridge.
22:12And every time the engineers tried to put a bridge in at Okfen, German artillery found it.
22:18On the 24th, two 88mm shells hit a command post at Isle, killing Major Walter Barnes.
22:25The 10th Armored had its riflemen on the far bank, and its armor stuck on the near one.
22:31Remember the two clocks.
22:32On February 23rd, with nothing over the river but infantry, Patton went back to his superiors
22:38and asked for more time.
22:40He got 48 hours.
22:43You have heard that number before.
22:45It is what the 8th Armored was given at Sintz.
22:49Walker did not wait for the bridge.
22:51That same night, he reached for a unit that needed no bridge at all.
22:55The 5th Ranger Battalion, the men who had gone up the bluffs at Omaha Beach,
23:00now under Lieutenant Colonel Richard Sullivan, crossed at Tabin around midnight on the 23rd.
23:07Their orders were to walk through the German lines, several miles deep,
23:11and plant themselves on the one good road the Germans needed to move reinforcements north toward Trier.
23:18The road ran through a village called Zerf.
23:22They did it.
23:23They filed through the woods in the dark, set up across the highway west of Zerf, and stayed there.
23:30German shells came down on them.
23:32German infantry came at them from more than one direction.
23:35The rangers held the block and collected about 100 prisoners while they were at it.
23:40Alone.
23:41With no one behind them.
23:43That left a simple and urgent question.
23:46Who was going to reach them?
23:48The answer shows you how this operation had changed shape.
23:52Since the tanks could not cross where the armored division had its bridgehead,
23:56they went to where the infantry division had built one.
23:59On February 25th, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored, under Colonel William Roberts, drove south,
24:07rolled over the 94th's bridge at Tabin, and turned north again on the far bank.
24:13The armor was now using the infantry's crossing.
24:16The infantry was clearing the road for the armor.
24:20From here to Trier, you cannot really separate the two divisions.
24:24Hold on to that.
24:25Two divisions, working as one.
24:27The road north was blocked at the town of Berig,
24:30so the column took a trail through the woods and came out at a village named Ersch.
24:35A tiger tank was waiting there, with an 88 on the ground beside it,
24:39and men with panzafausts in the houses.
24:41They let the head of the column pass,
24:43and then knocked out the last three tanks of the lead platoon.
24:46It took rangers and a company of armored infantry,
24:50working house to house into the night, to clear the place.
24:54They took 290 prisoners.
24:57Mid-morning on February 26th,
25:00Roberts' tanks reached the rangers on the Zurf Road.
25:03The same day, the 301st cleared Berwig.
25:06On the 27th, the engineers finished a pontoon bridge at Saarburg,
25:11and Zurf itself was in American hands.
25:14The road to Trier was open at its southern end.
25:17Fifteen miles of it lay ahead,
25:19climbing along a ridge, mined, and covered by guns.
25:23And by now, the 48 hours had come and gone.
25:28Patton had gone to Bradley,
25:29and Bradley had given him a final date.
25:32He could keep the 10th armored until nightfall on February 27th.
25:36At dawn that day,
25:37Morris turned his lead combat command north up the highway.
25:41By dusk, it was still about six miles short of the city,
25:44stopped in front of a minefield 300 yards deep.
25:48Nightfall came.
25:49The loan was over.
25:52So Patton picked up the telephone one more time.
25:55What Bradley told him is the reason there was anything left to bypass.
25:59On the evening of February 27th, 1945,
26:02with his lead tanks halted six miles short of Trier,
26:06and the deadline for returning them passing as he spoke,
26:10Patton telephoned Omar Bradley and asked for more time.
26:13Bradley did not give him a new date.
26:16According to Patton's own account,
26:18Bradley told him to keep going until higher authority ordered him to stop.
26:22And then he added that he would make it a point to stay away from the telephone.
26:26Take a moment with that,
26:28because it is easy to hear it as a joke between two generals.
26:32It is not a joke.
26:34Bradley was Patton's commander.
26:36The division in question belonged to Eisenhower's reserve,
26:39and the order to send it back could only come down through Bradley's headquarters.
26:44A group commander who cannot be found
26:46cannot pass along an order to halt.
26:49Bradley was not granting permission.
26:51He was arranging not to be available to refuse it.
26:54So from the night of the 27th,
26:56the 10th Armored Division was fighting on no schedule at all.
26:59It had not been extended.
27:01It had simply not been recalled yet.
27:03That could change with one call from Supreme Headquarters, at any hour.
27:07And every officer from Patton down to the task force commanders understood
27:11that the only safe place for that division to be when the call came was inside Trier.
27:18Now put yourself on the road,
27:19because the road did not care about any of this.
27:22The highway from Zerf to Trier climbs onto a long, bare ridge and stays there.
27:27The Germans had no line left to hold it with,
27:30so they held it with ambushes.
27:32A single tank or assault gun dug in at a bend.
27:36An .88 sighted down a straight stretch.
27:39And mines.
27:40South of the village of Pelingen,
27:42the lead column of Combat Command A ran into a belt of them 300 yards deep.
27:47Two tanks were disabled in it.
27:50The Armored Engineers went forward on foot, under rifle fire, and cleared a lane by hand.
27:55That is how those six miles were covered.
27:58Listen to what it did to the units doing it.
28:00One team took the hamlet of Oberzehr from about 80 Germans,
28:05and then its commander was wounded clearing a minefield.
28:08A lieutenant named Cook took over the engineer platoon, and he was wounded too.
28:14Another team captured a hill and 158 prisoners,
28:18and lost both its commander and his executive officer.
28:22A company of the 54th Armored Infantry overran five .88s and brought in 40 men.
28:28On the road, a half-track belonging to Staff Sergeant Don Jurg took a direct hit.
28:35One of his men was killed, and two wounded.
28:38By the end of February 28th,
28:41the task force leading Combat Command B's attack,
28:44under Major Warren Haskell,
28:46was down to four tanks and five half-tracks.
28:49Four tanks.
28:52Patton came forward to the division command post that day.
28:55What he said to them was recorded.
28:58Daring operation.
28:59Well executed.
29:01He did not tell them to slow down.
29:03Here I want to bring back the main question,
29:05because you now have enough to see why it is harder than it looks.
29:10Somewhere, a staff was concluding that Trier required four divisions.
29:15Were they wrong?
29:16On paper, no.
29:18Trier lay behind the Siegfried line,
29:20behind a river, ringed by hills,
29:23with anti-aircraft batteries that could be turned on tanks.
29:27A German infantry division had been assigned to defend it.
29:30A mountain division was moving up from the south to reinforce the sector.
29:35An attacker who came at that with one armored division,
29:39worn down to task forces of four tanks,
29:42plus an infantry division that had been in the line without relief since the 7th of January,
29:47was inviting a disaster.
29:50Any staff officer would have written the same estimate.
29:53What the estimate could not show was time.
29:57The division assigned to hold Trier was no longer there.
30:01North of the city, another American corps was driving on the town of Bitburg,
30:05and the German 7th Army had pulled most of that division away to stop it.
30:09What remained inside Trier was two local defense battalions,
30:14the city police, and the crews of the fixed 88 batteries.
30:18And the mountain division coming up from the south arrived too late and in the wrong place.
30:24The rangers on the Zurf Road and the armor that relieved them had already cut the route north.
30:30It could block to the east.
30:32It could not get between the Americans and the city.
30:35In other words, the four-division city existed.
30:39It had existed a week earlier,
30:41and it would exist again as soon as the Germans had a few days to put it back together.
30:47Every hour spent arguing over a loaned division was an hour of that.
30:53This was the thing Patton had been betting on since the telephone call to Bull,
30:57and it is the first real glimpse of what his famous reply actually meant.
31:03Keep it in mind, because there is more to it than this.
31:06Hellingen fell on March 1st.
31:08From there, the attack fanned out.
31:10The main body of Combat Command A swung northwest,
31:14toward the meeting of the rivers, to cut off Germans falling back from the Tsar.
31:18One of its task forces kept on up the main highway.
31:22Combat Command B passed through Pellingen and curved around to come at the city from the east.
31:27Both ran into the same thing on the outskirts.
31:30Pillboxes and 88s firing flat down the roads.
31:34Both stopped.
31:36So it was the afternoon of March 1st.
31:38Two columns were held at the edge of the city.
31:41The division was two days past its deadline,
31:43and the Moselle bridges, the whole reason for taking Trier quickly instead of slowly,
31:48were still in German hands with their charges in place.
31:52Colonel Roberts had one uncommitted force.
31:55Jack Richardson's task force had been guarding Zurf,
31:58and had been brought up that day to a crossroads west of Lampaden, where it sat waiting.
32:03Robert sent Richardson his sentence.
32:05Get into Trier tonight.
32:07The bridges intact, if possible.
32:11At 10 o'clock they moved out under the full moon,
32:14and at about the same hour, inside the city,
32:16a German soldier was sent out on foot with a warning for the demolition crew at one of those bridges.
32:22Which of them would get there first?
32:24The back road Jack Richardson had been given ran north, through the hills, east of the main highway.
32:29And on the night of March 1st, 1945, it was lit almost like day.
32:35Captain Bud Billet's team led.
32:38Behind it came Team Riley.
32:40And behind that, the headquarters company.
32:43Tanks, half-tracks full of armored infantry,
32:45a long file of vehicles with no way to hide and no room to turn around.
32:51Everyone in that column had spent the last three days learning what waited on roads into Trier.
32:56They drove, expecting the first 88 at every bend.
33:00It did not come.
33:02At a village on the approach, they found three 88mm guns sitting in position, with nobody on them.
33:09The crews had gone.
33:11The German garrison in the place came out with its hands up,
33:14and when the Americans pointed at the roadblock barring the street, the Germans took it apart themselves.
33:20Think about what Richardson was seeing.
33:23Two strong American columns had been stopped cold that afternoon, a few miles to either side of him.
33:29Here, between them, guns stood abandoned and soldiers were clearing the road for him.
33:35He could not know yet whether he had found a gap or was being led into a trap.
33:39He kept the column moving.
33:42Before midnight, the lead vehicles reached the suburb of Ollevig at the city limits.
33:48Ahead was a railroad crossing, and at the crossing sat a full German infantry company
33:53with four anti-tank guns laid on the road.
33:57Four anti-tank guns at a rail crossing, at night, against a column in single file.
34:04On the ridge two days earlier, one Tiger and one gun had cost a platoon three tanks.
34:10The company surrendered.
34:12Not one of the four guns fired.
34:16Here is the detail everything else that night depends on,
34:19and it came out of the mouth of a prisoner.
34:22Among the Germans taken at that crossing was a soldier who admitted he had been given an errand.
34:27He had been sent as a runner to alert the demolition party at one of the Moselle bridges that the
34:32Americans were coming.
34:33He had not delivered it.
34:35He was standing in the road with his hands on his head instead.
34:39So now Richardson knew three things.
34:42The bridges were prepared for demolition, with crews standing by.
34:46The crews had been waiting on a warning.
34:49And as far as this one man could tell him, the warning had not arrived.
34:53How long would that last?
34:55A city does not stay quiet with a column of tanks inside it.
35:00Someone would telephone.
35:01Someone would run.
35:03Remember why those bridges were worth a battalion.
35:07Trier itself lies on the near bank of the Moselle.
35:10Take the city and lose the bridges,
35:12and the army stands looking at another river, waiting on engineers and boats,
35:18exactly as it had at Aukfen nine days before.
35:22Take a bridge, and the third army is across the Moselle and on the road toward the Rhine.
35:28The city was the prize the newspapers would print.
35:31The bridge was the one the generals wanted.
35:33There were two of them, a mile or so apart,
35:35and Richardson had no way to know which was still standing,
35:39or whether either was.
35:41So he did the only thing that covered both.
35:44He cut his task force in half.
35:47Billet's team would go for the northern bridge.
35:50Team Riley would take the river road to the southern one.
35:54Then he waited by his radio in a dark street in the oldest city in Germany.
36:00I'd ask you to picture the place for a moment,
36:02because the men driving through it could see it clearly in that moonlight.
36:07Trier had been bombed for months.
36:09Whole blocks were rubble.
36:11And standing up out of the rubble were things far older than the war.
36:16The black stone gate the Romans had built at the north end of their city.
36:20The shells of their baths.
36:22The outline of their arena.
36:24The southern bridge itself stood on stone piers that Roman engineers had set in the riverbed some 1800 years before.
36:32Legions had crossed the Moselle on them.
36:35Around two o'clock in the morning, Billet came up on the radio.
36:39He had reached the northern bridge.
36:41It was gone.
36:43The Germans had already dropped it into the river.
36:46One left.
36:48Team Riley was running along the road beside the Moselle.
36:51And what came back from it next was the message the whole operation had been built to hear.
36:56They were at the southern bridge.
36:59It was standing.
37:01It was intact.
37:03And they were under fire.
37:05From the far bank, rifles and machine guns were shooting across the water at the Americans gathered at the near
37:11end.
37:12That fire told Richardson something as plainly as the prisoner had.
37:16There were Germans on the other side.
37:18Awake.
37:19And they knew exactly where the Americans were.
37:22Whatever grace the undelivered warning had bought was used up.
37:26If a hand was going to close a firing circuit, it would be in the next few minutes.
37:32Richardson did not send an order.
37:34He went.
37:35He got into a tank and drove to the bridge himself.
37:38When he arrived, his men were pinned at the eastern end, taking fire down the length of the span.
37:44He did what a commander on the spot can do and a headquarters cannot.
37:48He had the heavy machine guns on the tanks, the .50 calibers, turned onto the far end of the bridge
37:54and the buildings beyond it, and kept them firing.
37:57Under that fire, he gave the next order to a lieutenant named Wilbur Beadle.
38:02Take a platoon of infantry across on foot.
38:05A platoon of tanks would go with them.
38:08Consider what Beadle's men were being asked to walk onto.
38:11A stone bridge, in bright moonlight, with the enemy at the other end, and explosive charges somewhere beneath their boots.
38:20Nobody could tell them whether those charges were wired.
38:23Nobody could tell them where the firing point was.
38:26The only way to find out was to be standing on the bridge when the answer came.
38:30They went out onto it.
38:32And as they started across, on the far bank, six figures broke from cover and ran toward the western end
38:39of the bridge.
38:39A German major and five soldiers.
38:43They were carrying detonating caps and an exploder.
38:47A platoon of Americans was on the span.
38:50Six Germans were racing for its far end with the means to bring it down.
38:54Who got there first, and why had it taken that major so long to start running?
38:59The Americans got there first.
39:01Lieutenant Beadle's platoon and the tanks behind it reached the western end of the bridge,
39:05while the German major and his five men were still short of it.
39:09The official history says it in four words.
39:12They were too late.
39:14The six were taken prisoner, with the detonating caps and the exploder still in their hands.
39:20And in the early hours of March 2, 1945, the Roman bridge at Trier belonged to the United States Army.
39:28Later that day, men of the 55th Armored Engineer Battalion climbed down ladders along its sides and began lifting out
39:35the charges.
39:36They removed two tons of explosive.
39:46The army's historians, working from the interview Richardson gave afterward, would only say it was unclear.
39:54Perhaps someone had hesitated to destroy a monument that had stood since the Romans.
39:59Or perhaps, they wrote, the officer was drunk.
40:03The soldier's newspaper, Stars and Stripes, was less careful.
40:07It reported that the German in charge of the bridge had lingered in a bar,
40:11and the division's own history adds something the newspaper left out.
40:15After his capture, the major led the Americans to 17 more German officers and men, all of them drunk.
40:23Set that beside the runner, who never delivered his warning, the three guns with no crews,
40:28and the company at the rail crossing that did not fire.
40:32Those were not accidents.
40:34That is what a defense looks like when the attacker arrives days before the defender believed he possibly could.
40:41By dawn, Richardson had his command post in the center of the city.
40:45His task force alone had taken more than 800 prisoners.
40:49Through the morning, the rest of the division came in from the south and the east,
40:53and the men of the 94th's 376th Infantry followed to hold what the tanks had taken.
41:00Two tankers of the 21st Tank Battalion, Sergeant Vernon Smith and Corporal Eugene Dutschak,
41:06walked into a house, and found three German soldiers having breakfast in bed.
41:11Captain Robert Wilson took a flag his wife had mailed him from Newark, New Jersey,
41:16and raised it over the hotel beside the Black Roman Gate.
41:20And then, the paper arrived.
41:23On March 2nd, with the city already in American hands,
41:27a message from Supreme Headquarters reached the 3rd Army.
41:31It instructed Patton to bypass Trier.
41:34Taking the city, it said, would require four divisions.
41:38Here is the reply, in the form the account published with Patton's own memoir gives it.
41:44Have taken Trier with two divisions.
41:47What do you want me to do? Give it back?
41:49The men of the 10th Armored remembered it with rougher language than that,
41:53and counted it as one division, their own.
41:57I can't hand you the original form with a time stamp on it, and I won't pretend to.
42:01But every version agrees on the substance, and so did the people on the receiving end, as you'll hear.
42:08So that is what Patton wired.
42:10You have waited an hour for it.
42:13Now look at how much is inside those few words.
42:17Because you are in a position to hear things in them that the men who first laughed at the line
42:22could not.
42:23Start with two divisions.
42:25Which two?
42:27One was the 94th Infantry, a division that in January had been thought fit to watch bypassed ports,
42:34and had been allowed to attack only one battalion at a time.
42:38The other was the 10th Armored, which was not Patton's.
42:41He had it by a telephone call made over his own commander's head,
42:46then by 48 hours, then by a deadline that expired on the night of February 27th,
42:52and after that, by nothing but Omar Bradley's promise to stay away from the telephone.
42:57When Patton wrote two divisions,
43:00one of them was three days overdue for return to the very headquarters he was writing to.
43:05Next, the four divisions in the message he was answering.
43:08You know now that the estimate was reasonable.
43:11What made it wrong was not arithmetic.
43:13It was the calendar.
43:15The city that needed four divisions was the city as it would have been with its assigned garrison in place,
43:21the mountain division up, and sober men standing at the firing points.
43:26That city was about a week away in either direction.
43:30Two divisions were enough, because they came before anyone was ready,
43:33and they came that fast only because nobody had stopped to ask whether they should.
43:39Then the words, give it back.
43:42That is the joke, and it is a good one.
43:45But listen to what he is really saying to the people who lend out divisions on a timer.
43:50You told me this could not be done with what I had.
43:53You were going to take away half of what I had.
43:57It is done, and there is nothing you can do about it now short of handing the Germans their bridge.
44:04And last, think about what the wire does not mention, because Patton did not have to.
44:09Captain Straub's company cut off in the snow at Orschult's because one battalion was all the rule allowed.
44:15A platoon reduced to 16 men on the ridge, and Sergeant Crandall with his prime accord.
44:22Wadsworth Clapp killed the river.
44:25Colonel McLoone hit three times in the boats.
44:29The Rangers alone on the Zurf Road.
44:31Major Haskell with four tanks left.
44:35The 94th Division came out of the campaign with more than a thousand men wounded.
44:40That is the bill I mentioned at the very beginning.
44:43Thirteen words and seven weeks of it underneath.
44:47So the line is not really a boast about a city.
44:50It is the receipt for a way of fighting.
44:53The soldiers at the front had seen that the door was open and gone through it,
44:56and each commander above them, from Richardson to Roberts to Morris to Walker to Patton,
45:02and finally Bradley, had chosen to back the man below him,
45:07instead of waiting for the question to come down from the top.
45:09But a wire like that, sent to the supreme commander's own staff,
45:13by a general holding a division he was not entitled to,
45:16could have ended a different way.
45:19Five days later, Eisenhower came to Trier in person,
45:22and stood in the 10th Armored's headquarters, with Patton and Walker beside him.
45:26What did he say about it?
45:28And what became of the lieutenant colonel who drove to the bridge in a tank?
45:31On March 7th, 1945, five days after the bridge was taken,
45:36a line of staff cars pulled up in Trier outside a building that had belonged to the SS
45:41and now housed the headquarters of the 10th Armored Division.
45:45A sergeant named Herb Dynan watched them arrive.
45:49Walton Walker came first, then Patton, then Dwight Eisenhower.
45:55This was the man whose reserve the division had been taken from,
45:58whose approval had been required, and never quite obtained,
46:02and whose headquarters had received that reply.
46:06The division's operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Sheffield,
46:10stood up in front of all three of them and briefed the capture of the city.
46:14The division's history records what was said afterward.
46:18Patton turned to his corps commander and told him,
46:20Johnny, if it hadn't been for the 10th Armored Division, I would have relieved you.
46:26And Eisenhower answered Patton,
46:28Well, Georgie, if it hadn't been for the 10th Armored, I might have done a little relieving.
46:32Everybody in the room understood both halves of that.
46:35It was a laugh.
46:36And it was also the supreme commander saying, in front of witnesses,
46:40that he knew precisely what had been done with his division, and how.
46:44And then he let it stand.
46:46The 10th Armored was not sent back to reserve.
46:49It stayed with the 3rd Army and kept going.
46:52The bridge had already changed what going meant.
46:56On March 3rd, troops of the 76th Division, coming down from the north,
47:00met the armor on the far bank of the Moselle.
47:04Within two weeks, the 3rd Army was driving through the country beyond that river,
47:08toward the Rhine, and the 10th Armored was near the front of it.
47:12The men who had been lent for 48 hours fought on across Germany until the war ended.
47:18Patton went to see Trier for himself later that month.
47:21He drove in along the old road from Luxembourg,
47:24and he wrote about it in his memoir in a way that tells you what the place meant to him.
47:28It was the same road Caesar's legions had used, he said,
47:31and one could almost smell the coppery sweat,
47:34and see the low dust clouds where those stark fighters move forward into battle.
47:39He was reading history.
47:41He was also standing in a city his own soldiers had taken across a bridge those legions had marched over.
47:47Now the people, because you have carried some of them a long way.
47:52Harry Maloney, who had asked for his whole division in January,
47:56and been given a battalion at a time,
47:58commanded the 94th until the fighting in Europe was over.
48:02His division had gone into the Triangle untested.
48:05It came out having broken a fortified line,
48:08crossed a river under the guns of the Siegfried Line,
48:10and opened the road for an armored division,
48:13at a cost of more than a thousand wounded and many dead.
48:17Captain Hermann Straub and the men of Company B,
48:20the ones who could not comply,
48:22went into German captivity from the woods at Orschultz.
48:26Their company is not in the wire.
48:28But the lesson of that night,
48:29that one battalion was not enough,
48:31is why the whole division finally attacked together on February 19th.
48:36And that attack is why any of the rest happened.
48:39The 5th Rangers, who had held the road at Zerf with nobody behind them,
48:43went back into the line and finished the war in Germany.
48:46And Jack Richardson.
48:48He led his battalion out of Trier,
48:50and on through the March campaign,
48:52and then across the Rhine into southern Germany.
48:54On April 22nd, 1945,
48:58near the town of Munderkingen on the Danube,
49:01he was killed by German shell fire.
49:03He was 33.
49:05The war in Europe ended 16 days later.
49:09He is buried in the Lorraine American Cemetery in France,
49:12among more than 10,000 other Americans,
49:15about 60 miles from the bridge.
49:17His decorations include the silver star with two oak leaf clusters.
49:22He never commented on the famous line.
49:25As far as the record shows,
49:26his own account of that night
49:28was the plain interview he gave an army historian,
49:31the one the official history is built on.
49:34A column,
49:35a prisoner,
49:36two bridges,
49:37a platoon sent across.
49:40So go back,
49:41one last time,
49:42to where this began.
49:4410 o'clock at night on March 1st,
49:46a crossroads west of Lampedin,
49:48a full moon,
49:50a back road,
49:51and a lieutenant colonel from Athens, Texas,
49:54with a single sentence of orders.
49:57At the start,
49:58I told you there were two things moving through that night.
50:00His column,
50:02and a piece of paper saying the job needed four divisions.
50:06You know now that the paper was not foolish,
50:08and that the column was not lucky.
50:11The paper measured what the enemy could do if he was given time.
50:15The column was what happened when an army decided not to give it.
50:19That decision was not made in one place.
50:22It was made by a sergeant,
50:23with a length of prime accord.
50:25By a captain,
50:26holding a few houses at Sarig.
50:28By a corps commander,
50:30who sent rangers instead of waiting for a bridge.
50:33By a general who would not answer his telephone.
50:36And at the end,
50:38by a lieutenant,
50:38who walked his platoon onto a bridge
50:40without knowing if it would hold.
50:43What did Patton wire when he was told to go around the city?
50:47He wrote that he already had it,
50:49and asked if they wanted it returned.
50:51The reason he could write that was not in his headquarters.
50:54It was standing on the west bank of the Moselle,
50:57with 800 prisoners,
50:59and a bridge that still carries traffic today.
51:02Thank you for staying with this account to the end.
51:05If it was worth your time,
51:07a like helps the story of the American soldiers who took Trier
51:10reach people who have never heard of the triangle or the bridge.
51:13Subscribe and turn on the bell so the next one finds you.
51:17Tell me in the comments where you're watching from.
51:19And if your father, grandfather, or uncle
51:22served with the Allied forces in the Second World War,
51:24write his name and his unit below.
51:27The GIs of the 94th and the 10th Armored
51:30are named in very few books.
51:32A name in the comments is one more place
51:35where it is written down.