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American trucks helped turn Germany’s river defenses from an obstacle into a weakness, changing how U.S. forces crossed the Rhine and other waterways in World War II. This military history story contrasts a regiment’s devastating struggle at a narrow French river with its later crossing of Germany’s last great barrier, tracing why German commanders believed rivers could stop an advancing army—and what rolled up behind the first boats to challenge that belief.
A narrated account of WWII river crossings, the Moselle, the flooded Roer, and the Rhine, this story explores battlefield logistics, American military vehicles, and the changing tactics of the Western Front. Discover WW2 history through a focused account of river warfare, army transport, and the equipment that helped keep an advance moving.
A narrated account of WWII river crossings, the Moselle, the flooded Roer, and the Rhine, this story explores battlefield logistics, American military vehicles, and the changing tactics of the Western Front. Discover WW2 history through a focused account of river warfare, army transport, and the equipment that helped keep an advance moving.
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LearningTranscript
00:00March 22, 1945. The west bank of the Rhine at Nieerstein, a small wine town about 10 miles
00:07upstream from Mainz. It is a few minutes before 10 at night, and in front of the town lies close
00:12to 1,000 feet of black, cold, fast-moving water. On the far bank, a handful of German soldiers are
00:20watching that water. They are not elite troops. The German corps holding this stretch of the river
00:25has, on paper, no divisions at all. Only rear area security detachments. Students and instructors
00:32pulled out of training schools, and companies of men who were lying in hospital beds a few weeks ago.
00:37Their job is simple. The river does most of the work. All they have to do is see the enemy
00:42coming.
00:43And the enemy is not supposed to be coming. Not here. Not tonight. There has been no artillery barrage.
00:50On the American side, 13 battalions of guns are loaded and laid, and every one of them is silent.
00:57That silence is deliberate. Then shapes appear on the river. Low, flat assault boats paddled hard
01:04against the current. Half an hour behind schedule, the first of them grinds into the mud of the east
01:10bank. Outclimb a platoon leader, eight riflemen, and the commander of Company K, 11th Infantry Regiment,
01:175th Infantry Division, 1st Lieutenant Irvin Jacobs. The rest of his company lands moments later.
01:25Now, pay close attention to what the Germans on that bank did next, because the official U.S. Army
01:31history of this campaign recorded it in a single, almost casual sentence. Seven of them surrendered
01:39on the spot. And then, without a single American guard, they climbed into an empty boat and paddled
01:45themselves back across the Rhine to the American side, to go into captivity. Think about that for a moment.
01:53For generations, the Rhine had been the line Germany believed no invader could simply walk across.
02:00The moat around the castle. And the first German soldiers to meet the Americans on it did not fire.
02:06They did not run. They picked up paddles and delivered themselves. A couple of miles upstream at
02:14Oppenheim, it went differently. The leading boats of the regiment's 1st Battalion were in midstream when
02:20German machine guns opened up. For half an hour, there was a real fight on that bank. Then, the last
02:27German
02:27defender gave in. By morning, the 11th Infantry was across. Its total casualties in the assault
02:34crossing of the Rhine? Twenty men. Twenty. Hold on to that number. It is going to matter a great deal
02:43later in this story, when you see what the same regiment paid the last time it tried to cross a
02:48river held by Germans. And that was only the first surprise. The second arrived with the daylight.
02:56By about 6.30 on the morning of March 23rd, anyone watching this stretch of the Rhine could see
03:02something on the water that had no business being there. Gray, square-bowed landing craft. The same
03:10kind of boat that had carried American infantry onto the beaches of Normandy. Twenty-four of them,
03:15crewed by sailors of the United States Navy. In the middle of Germany. The nearest saltwater was
03:21hundreds of miles away. The only water route to this spot ran through hundreds of miles of German-held
03:27river. Those boats had not sailed to Oppenheim. They had been driven there. Behind the American lines,
03:35on country roads never built for anything that size, columns of trucks hauling long trailers had
03:40carried them across France. Cutting down trees along the way and, now and then, knocking the corner
03:46off a house. Keep those boats in mind. The trucks that carried them were only one kind of truck rolling
03:53toward the Rhine that week. There were others, stranger still. And before this story ends, you will
03:59watch every one of them go into the water. That is the question at the center of this video. What
04:05exactly were
04:05American trucks carrying to the edge of Germany's Great River? What did they do once they reached the
04:11water? And why did it leave the men defending that river with nothing left to say? If you want to
04:18see
04:18how the American army turned Germany's last Great River into a road, and what it cost the GIs who did
04:25it,
04:25hit like and subscribe. To understand why that morning mattered, you have to see the Rhine the way the
04:32German command saw it. By March of 1945, Germany had lost France, Belgium, and nearly everything west
04:41of the river. Its armies in the west were badly broken. But for months, German defense had leaned
04:47on one idea, and the idea was water. Every time the Americans approached a river, the bridges went up in
04:55smoke and the defenders dug in on the far bank. Here is why that works. A river forces an attacking
05:02army to stop. To gather boats. To bring up bridging. To pile men and vehicles into one obvious place.
05:10And while the attacker does all of that, the defender gets the one thing a losing army needs most.
05:16Time. Time to see where the blow is coming. Time to shift reserves. Time to aim every gun he has
05:24left
05:24at the only spots where a crossing is possible. The Rhine was the biggest version of that idea.
05:31In March, it runs wide, fast, and swollen with snowmelt. By the time the Americans reached it,
05:37the Germans had blown almost every bridge along its length. General Hans Felber, whose German 7th Army
05:43was responsible for this part of the river, had one real reserve to throw at an American crossing.
05:48The 159th Volksgrenadier Division. Two weak infantry regiments. Two light batteries of guns. That was the
05:58plan. Let the river hold the Americans in place and rush whatever was left to wherever they tried.
06:04Now ask yourself why anyone on the German side still believed that could work. The answer is that,
06:11for most of the war, it had. Rivers had bled the Allies in Italy. They had bled them in France.
06:18Only weeks earlier, the Germans had turned a river in the Rhineland into a lake more than a mile wide.
06:24And the 11th Infantry Regiment knew what a German-held river could do better than almost anyone.
06:31Six months before Lt. Jacobs stepped onto the East Bank at Nieerstein,
06:35his regiment had crossed another river under German guns. It went in with courage,
06:41with boats, and with almost nothing else behind it. What that crossing cost is the reason the Navy was
06:49waiting on trucks behind Oppenheim. And it is the first piece of the answer to what happened on the Rhine.
06:55September 8, 1944. The Moselle River at Dorneau, a village southwest of Metz. Six and a half months
07:04before Nieerstein. The man at the water's edge is Lt. Col. Kelly Lemon, Jr., commander of the 2nd
07:11Battalion, 11th Infantry. Two weeks earlier, at the Seine near Fontainebleau, Lemon had found the
07:17bridge blown. So he swam the river himself, found five small boats on the far bank, tied them together,
07:24and paddled them back for his men. That is how rivers were crossed in the summer of 1944.
07:30With whatever you could find, and with nerve. Now Lemon is looking at the Moselle,
07:36and the problem is boats again. When his battalion arrived, the only assault boats at Dorneau were
07:43the handful brought by an attached platoon of engineers. Around 8 in the morning, about 20 more showed up.
07:49They were there because Brigadier General John Thompson of the 7th Armored Division had spent
07:54the night personally driving through the rear areas, hunting for them. Remember that picture?
08:00A general, in the dark, searching for rowboats. It tells you exactly where the American Army's river
08:07problem stood in September. The Moselle here is only about 90 yards wide, six or seven feet deep. But the
08:15water is cold, the current is fast, and the far side belongs to the Germans. Lemon's companies,
08:22together with armored infantrymen of the 7th Armored, paddled across under fire, and pushed
08:27into a small patch of woods, shaped roughly like a horseshoe. That was as far as they got. After a
08:33full day of fighting, the bridgehead measured about 200 yards deep and 200 yards wide. The men dug holes
08:40they called mole holes. And the Germans came. Listen to how the Army's own study describes the
08:47first night. Almost every hour, the Germans counterattacked. The Americans could hear orders
08:53shouted across the road. And then the charge would come, men bunched together and yelling. More than
08:58once, a German officer called out in English, cease firing, while his men formed up for another rush.
09:05Over three days, the defenders counted an estimated 36 separate assaults. First Lieutenant Nathan Drake,
09:12leading Company F, was killed by a sniper. First Lieutenant Robert Robertson took over.
09:18In Company G, when a machine gunner was killed early on the 9th, Private Dale Rex took his gun and
09:25kept it
09:25firing for the rest of the battle. Almost every officer in the woods was killed or wounded. Because they kept
09:32climbing out of their holes to move from man to man. And here is a detail from that study that
09:38stays with
09:39you. Some of the men said their officers apologized to them for getting hit. Company K came across to
09:47reinforce. Its medic, Technician 5th Grade William Ray, crawled 300 yards under machine gun fire to reach
09:54one wounded man. Now notice what is missing from this picture. No bridge went across at Dornot. Nothing
10:03heavy reached the horseshoe woods. The men on the east bank fought with what they had carried in the
10:09boats. The regimental commander, Colonel Charles Ewell, called division. The bridgehead is desperate,
10:16he said. He needed an air mission, and it was vitally important. On the night of September 10th,
10:23the order came to pull out. Read the plan, because it tells you everything. Withdrawal would be by swimming,
10:30boats, and whatever would float. All weapons and equipment were to be thrown into the river.
10:36When the moment came, what the men had was three assault boats riddled with bullets and one rope.
10:43They swam. They hung onto that rope. They pushed empty water cans and ammunition tins ahead of them as floats.
10:50The water was intensely cold, the current swift, and many men drowned in a river not as wide as a
10:56football
10:56field is long. A German shell struck a boat full of men from Company H and tore away its front.
11:03At the loading point, a group of men broke and panicked. First Lieutenant Ross Stanley and Sergeant
11:09Hembree forced them back into line. Around 10.30 that night, engineers arrived with rubber boats,
11:15and the evacuation of the wounded finally sped up. Their unit was the 204th Engineer Battalion.
11:22Keep that name. You have already heard it once in this story. And there was one more man. Private
11:28Joseph Lewikowski of Company G had passed out or fallen asleep in his foxhole. He woke up alone. The
11:36woods were empty. He walked across dead Germans to the bank and pulled himself over the Moselle by the
11:42ropes. Then the count. The three rifle companies of the 2nd Battalion came back with two officers
11:49between them and more than 300 casualties. The armored infantry battalion that fought beside them
11:55lost 200. And Company K, the company that came over to help, walked out of those woods with no officers
12:03at all. And 50 men. Now go back to the Rhine. March 22nd. The first boat to touch the east
12:10bank at
12:11Nierstein carried the commander of Company K, 11th Infantry. The same company. And the whole regiment
12:18crossed the greatest river in Western Europe for 20 casualties. Here is what to hold on to. The 11th
12:26Infantry of March was not braver than the 11th Infantry of September. The men at Dornot could not have
12:32given more than they gave. What changed was not the first boat. It was everything that came behind it.
12:39The Germans drew their own conclusion from Dornot. A river, held by determined men with guns on the
12:45high ground, could still stop the Americans cold. That belief would shape every German defense for the
12:51next six months. But the Americans drew a lesson too. And part of it came from only a few miles
12:57upstream
12:57on those very same days. At a village called Arneville, the 5th Division's 10th Infantry crossed the same
13:04river, under the same German guns, on the same heights. 40 German batteries would fire on that
13:11crossing. And that bridgehead held. The difference began with something the 3rd Army had never tried in
13:17combat before. It did not fire a single round. And within hours, the German gunners on the heights
13:24were shooting at a target they could no longer see. September 10th, 1944. Daybreak on the west bank
13:31of the Moselle, near the village of Arneville. A few miles downstream, the men in the horseshoe woods
13:38at Dornot have one more night to hold. Along the river road, a company of soldiers is setting up
13:45machines that look nothing like weapons. This is the 84th Chemical Smoke Generator Company.
13:52And here is a detail worth pausing on. Only days earlier, these men had not been doing chemical work
13:59at all. They had been driving trucks on the Red Ball Express, hauling fuel and ammunition across France.
14:07They were pulled off the highway and sent to the river. According to the Army's own study of this
14:12battle, theirs was the first unit of its kind in the entire European theater.
14:17Their machines burned fog oil. Each one swallowed about 50 gallons an hour and turned it into a thick
14:24white cloud. As the sun came up, that cloud rolled out over the crossing site and hung there.
14:32Now think back to the German plan. It needed three things. A river, men dug in on the far bank,
14:39and eyes on the high ground, calling artillery down on the only places the Americans could cross.
14:45At Dornot, all three had worked. At Arneville, the Americans had just taken away the eyes.
14:52The 10th Infantry had started across in the dark, around one in the morning. When daylight came,
14:57the German guns on the heights kept firing, and firing heavily. But the Army's study notes that
15:03most of their fire on the crossing site appears to have been unobserved. The German gunners were
15:07shooting at their memory of where the river had been. It was not perfect. Around 10 that first morning,
15:15the wind swung from west to northeast and carried the smoke away from the crossing. The generators had
15:21to be moved and started again. Over the first 12 days, the company would burn an average of 2,200
15:28gallons
15:28of fog oil every day. And one morning, the smoke stopped for a different reason. Around 9 o'clock,
15:35an engineer whose name was never recorded ordered the generators shut down. He was probably trying to
15:41speed up the bridge work. The study describes what followed in plain words. As soon as the smoke cleared,
15:49the German artillery reaction was swift and deadly. A jeep was destroyed by a direct hit. An air compressor
15:56was damaged. So was a Brockway truck. Six engineers were killed, and about eight were wounded.
16:03Pay attention to that truck. A Brockway was one of the big, six-wheel trucks built to carry bridge
16:10sections to the river, lift them off with a hydraulic arm, and set them down where the engineers needed them.
16:16At Arneville, it was among the first things hit the moment the Germans could see again. Remember that
16:23kind of truck. You will see it again, on a much bigger river. Meanwhile, the infantry across the river
16:30needed something smoke could not give them. Armor. P-47 fighter bombers had already broken up German tank
16:38attacks around the bridge head, but planes could not stay overhead forever. At 10.30 on the morning of
16:45the 11th, engineers of the 204th Engineer Battalion, the same battalion that had pulled the wounded out of
16:52Dorno the night before, finished leveling the banks at a ford. Tank destroyers started across.
17:00At one point, German shells literally blasted treadway sections out of the river. One tank destroyer was
17:07hit and disabled. By 4.30 that afternoon, six tank destroyers were on the far side. Six. By the next
17:17morning, the rest of a tank company and two more platoons of tank destroyers had made it over.
17:23At 12.30 on September 12th, a treadway bridge finally spanned the Moselle at Arneville.
17:30Now remember how long that took, because you were going to want this number later.
17:3658 hours after the first infantry pushed off. Two days after that, under the smoke, engineers put a
17:43heavier ponton bridge across in two hours. There is one more crossing at Arneville worth telling.
17:50On the first day, Staff Sergeant James O'Connell of the 10th Infantry was looking for a place to get
17:55his jeep over the Moselle Canal, which runs beside the river. A young French woman saw him. She pointed
18:02to a spot in the canal, beckoned him to follow, lifted her skirt, and waded in. Just under the
18:09surface was a submerged concrete bridge. By that route, the kitchen trucks crossed the canal,
18:14and late on the 11th, they were ferried over the river itself. Men who had been fighting at hand
18:20grenade range got hot food. Now set Dorneau and Arneville side by side, the same division,
18:27the same river, the same German guns on the same heights, in the same week. At Dorneau, men came back
18:35swimming, hanging onto one rope. At Arneville, the bridgehead held. The difference was not courage.
18:44The difference was everything that came up behind the infantry. Smoke, a ford, rafts, a bridge,
18:54trucks that could carry a bridge to the water, and trucks that could carry soup across it.
18:58The Americans took that lesson seriously. From then on, smoke became standard procedure in Third
19:04Army river crossings. And the planners began to look at a river not as a place for heroics,
19:10but as a problem of delivery. How fast could everything an army needs be brought to the water's
19:16edge, put into the water, and pushed across? But Arneville had still taken 58 hours. The engineer
19:23group that built its bridges lost 13 men killed and 100 wounded. And 58 hours is a very long time
19:30to give a defender. The Germans had learned something too. If the Americans could bring bridges
19:36faster than artillery could smash them, then the answer was a river no bridge could reach.
19:41By February, they had one. Their next move did not use a single gun. It used the dams in the
19:48hills of
19:49the Eiffel, and it would hold an entire American army in place for nearly two weeks. February 10, 1945.
19:57The Roar River, west of Cologne. The U.S. Ninth Army is ready to attack. More than 2,000 guns
20:05are in
20:05position. The assault boats are stacked near the water. The infantry divisions know their crossing sites.
20:12The Roar is not a big river. In most places, it runs about 25 or 30 yards wide. After the
20:19Moselle,
20:20this should be the easy one. And then, on the eve of the attack, upstream in the hills,
20:26the Germans destroyed the discharge valves on the Roar dams. The reservoirs began to empty into the
20:33valley, and they would keep emptying for about 12 days. Near the town of Linich, a river you could throw
20:40a stone across, spread into a lake more than a mile wide. In other places, the flood ran 300 and
20:47400
20:47yards across. Upstream near Douauvin, the current was clocked at more than 10 miles an hour.
20:55Now picture yourself as one of the engineers standing at the edge of that water. Everything you learned at
21:00Arneville says you can beat German artillery with smoke. You can beat a German bank with a ford and a
21:06bridge. But a bridge has to be anchored. A boat has to be paddled. And the Germans had just turned
21:12the river itself into the weapon. No gun on the heights. No man on the far bank. Just water,
21:19moving faster than a man can row. That was the German answer to everything the Americans had
21:24learned since September. It did not need eyes. It could not be hidden by smoke. And for nearly two weeks,
21:31it froze an entire American army in place. The 9th Army's commander, Lieutenant General William Simpson,
21:38did not wait for the river to go back to normal. His engineers measured the water every day. When
21:44the current had dropped to where, at few places, it ran faster than six miles an hour, Simpson picked his
21:50day. February 23rd, one day before the reservoirs were expected to run dry. The Germans would be
21:57expecting him to wait for that last day. He would not give it to them. At 2.45 that morning,
22:04the guns
22:04opened up. 45 minutes of it. At about 3.30, the infantry went into the water. What happened next
22:12reads like a list of everything that can go wrong on a river. At Linnock, the current carried almost all
22:18of the 84th Division's boats some 75 yards downstream. And in the dark, the men could barely get them back.
22:25At Ulick, an assault boat full of soldiers slammed into a bridge the engineers were building and knocked
22:31it out. On the 30th Division's front, a tree fell across a footbridge, snapped a cable, and set the
22:37pontoons drifting away. Three low-flying German planes knocked out another bridge. At 1 8th Division's site,
22:45the engineers worked under an estimated 125 German shells an hour, all day and into the night.
22:52And still they got across. Now pay attention to what was sitting behind all of this, because the plan
22:59had changed since Dorneau. If the bridges went out, amphibious tractors and duks were to carry the
23:05essential supplies. A duk, for anyone who has never seen one, was a 2.5-ton army truck with a
23:12boat hull
23:12built around it and a propeller underneath. It drove down to the river on its wheels, drove straight into
23:18the water, and kept going. And if even that failed, 500 C-47 transport planes sat loaded on airfields,
23:26carrying enough supplies to keep a division fighting for a day. Think about what that means.
23:32At Dorneau, the only backup had been one rope. At the Roar, the Americans came with a backup for the
23:38backup for the backup. The 9th Army crossed a flooded river in the face of a German army
23:44for just over a thousand casualties. It was a hard fight. It was not a disaster. And the Germans had
23:52used the best card they had left. Two weeks later, the war handed the Americans a gift. On March 7th,
23:59men of the 9th Armored Division, led by 2nd Lt. Carl Timmerman's company, ran across the Ludendorff
24:05Railroad Bridge at Reymagen before the Germans could bring it down. The first Allied bridge over
24:12the Rhine. Here is the part of Reymagen most people never hear. Within days, American units were pouring
24:18over. And much of what came across did not use that bridge at all. Engineers built raft ferries from
24:25pontons driven by outboard motors. Twenty-four Navy landing craft of Naval Unit No. 1,
24:31under Lt. Wilton Winker, went into the Rhine as free ferries.
24:36From March 14th, Dukes of the 819th Amphibious Truck Company were swimming back and forth across the
24:43river. By 7 in the morning, on March 11th, a treadway bridge spanned the Rhine right beside the
24:49railroad bridge. The Germans threw everything they had at Reymagen. Dive bombers. A giant siege
24:55mortar that fired a projectile weighing more than two tons. Eleven V2 rockets fired from the Netherlands.
25:03Seven frogmen in rubber suits, carrying explosives, who swam downriver at night, were blinded by American
25:09searchlights and surrendered. On March 17th, the Ludendorff Bridge finally collapsed into the river.
25:16Twenty-eight Americans died in the fall. And the bridgehead did not even stagger. The ferries kept
25:23running. The landing craft kept running. The dukes kept swimming. The treadways held. The Americans had
25:31lost the famous bridge. And it barely mattered. Because by then, they no longer depended on it.
25:37Hitler drew a very different lesson from Reymagen. He removed his commander in the west,
25:43Field Marshal von Rundstedt. A special court condemned five German officers to death over the
25:49lost bridge. The message to every German commander on the Rhine was unmistakable. No bridge must ever
25:56fall into American hands again. Now hold those two lessons side by side, because this is where the story
26:04turns. The Germans concluded that the danger was a bridge they had failed to blow. The Americans had
26:10already learned that they did not need a German bridge at all. And while German engineers checked
26:15their demolition charges up and down the Rhine, American trucks were already rolling toward a
26:20stretch of the river the Germans had left to convalescents and students. What those trucks carried,
26:26and how they got it there, is the part of this story the German command never saw coming.
26:32March 22, 1945. The west bank of the Rhine, south of Mainz. Major General Leroy Irwin, commanding the 5th
26:41Infantry Division, has a problem with his calendar. Irwin believes his division cannot be ready to cross
26:47the Rhine before the 23rd. His army commander disagrees. George Patton wants the crossing that
26:54night. Not because of the Germans. Because of the British. Field Marshal Montgomery's great set-piece
27:02crossing in the north is scheduled for the night of the 23rd, with a massive buildup behind it. If Patton
27:09is going to get across first, he has to go on the 22nd. Now stop and think about what Patton
27:15is asking.
27:17At Arneville, it took 58 hours after the first boat to get a bridge across a river 90 yards wide.
27:24At the
27:25Roar, the 9th Army waited nearly two weeks for the water to fall. And here is Patton telling a division
27:32to cross the widest river in Western Europe with a few hours' notice. The reason he could even ask is
27:39sitting in the rear areas of the 3rd Army. And it was sitting on wheels. Listen to this
27:45inventory because it is the key to everything that happened that week. In the 3rd Army's dumps,
27:52ready for the Rhine, there were 1,500 assault boats and 300 storm boats, more than 900 outboard motors,
28:007,000 feet of Floating Bailey Bridge, 2,200 feet of Heavy Ponton Bridge, and 11,000 feet of Treadway
28:11Bridge.
28:1311,000 feet. That is more than two miles of floating road, broken down into sections and
28:20loaded on trucks, waiting for someone to name a river. And behind that, something even stranger
28:27was on the move. That winter, the U.S. Navy had formed a special task group for the Rhine under
28:33Commander William Whiteside. Four boat units, each with 24 landing craft. One unit for each of three
28:41American armies, and one in reserve. Their job was to do on a German river what the Navy had done
28:47at
28:47Normandy. Carry tanks, trucks, and men across open water under fire. There was only one problem. The
28:56boats were at the coast. The Rhine was hundreds of miles inland. And there was no water route. So the
29:03Army and the Navy did something that sounds almost absurd when you say it out loud. They put the Navy
29:09on the highway. The smaller landing craft, the LCVPs, fit on heavy Ponton trailers. The bigger ones,
29:17the LCMs, were another story. They were too wide for Bailey Bridges and too wide for two-way traffic
29:24on most roads in France. For Patton's Army, they had to come overland all the way from Le Havre,
29:30riding on M25 tank transporters, the heaviest trucks the Army owned. Loaded, they stood too tall to pass
29:38under bridges and wires. So the crews cut the armor off the operator's tower, bringing the height down
29:45from 17 and a half feet to just under 16. And when a village street was simply too narrow, the
29:52Army's
29:52own account of it says, in some cases, the corners of buildings were blown off to let the boats through.
30:00Picture a French farmer standing in his doorway as a Navy landing craft rolls past his window,
30:07riding on a tank transporter 300 miles from the sea. Now picture the German intelligence officer
30:14trying to decide where the Americans can cross the Rhine. Every one of his maps shows the same thing.
30:22The Americans need a bridge or they need weeks. He is not thinking about landing craft on trucks.
30:28Why would he? So on the night of March 22nd, the Germans were watching for the wrong thing in the
30:34wrong
30:35place. Near Mainz, the 90th Division was staging a demonstration to draw their eyes. At Nierstein
30:43and Oppenheim, facing convalescents, students, and rear area troops, the 11th Infantry went to the water.
30:51Patton had even floated an idea that tells you exactly how his headquarters was thinking that week.
30:56Load about a hundred small artillery spotter planes with one soldier each and fly them over the river.
31:03German planes appeared over the crossing sites and the idea was dropped. But look at the logic.
31:09By March of 45, the Americans were no longer asking how to cross a river. They were asking which vehicle
31:15to cross it in. 500 assault boats were allotted to the regiment that night, manned by the 204th
31:23engineer battalion. That is the third time you have heard that name. At Doornot, those engineers came
31:30up in the dark with rubber boats to pull the wounded out of the horseshoe woods. At Arneville, they leveled
31:36the banks of a ford under fire so six tank destroyers could creep across. Now they were pushing off into
31:43the Rhine with 500 boats. You already know what happened next. Company K touched down first at Nierstein.
31:51Seven Germans surrendered and paddled themselves over to captivity. At Oppenheim, machine guns opened fire
31:57in midstream and for half an hour there was a real fight on the bank. But here is what you
32:03did not see
32:03in that first scene. While the rifle companies were climbing the east bank, the trucks were already
32:09moving up behind them in the dark. Trailers were being backed toward the water. Bridge trucks were lining
32:15up on the approach roads. And a Navy boat unit under Lieutenant Commander William Leedy was getting
32:21its landing craft into position to go into the Rhine. This is the moment when the German plan finally
32:27broke. And it is worth being precise about why. For six months, the German defense of rivers had rested
32:34on a single assumption. The river buys time. The attacker must stop, gather, build, and wait. And while
32:43he waits, he can be hit. On the night of March 22nd, the Americans did not stop. There was no
32:50gathering on
32:51the bank for days because everything had been gathered on wheels miles back before the Germans could see it.
32:56There was no artillery preparation to warn anyone. The boats, the bridge, the ferries, and the Navy
33:04were already on the road. And the road now ran straight into the river. By the time the sun came
33:10up on March 23rd, the Germans on this stretch of the Rhine had a new problem. It was not the
33:16rifle
33:16companies. Those they might have fought. It was what the Americans started putting into the water after
33:22daylight. And one German, far from this river, would soon take one look at a map of Oppenheim and say,
33:29it was the worst thing on it. March 23rd, 1945. 6.30 in the morning. The Rhine at Oppenheim.
33:39Daylight comes up gray over the river, and the landing craft are already in the water.
33:4524 LCVPs of the Navy's Boat Unit 2, under Lieutenant Commander William Leda.
33:51The same boats that crossed France on trailers are now running a shuttle across the Rhine.
33:56What they carry that morning is the thing the German plan was built to prevent. Not riflemen.
34:02Armor. During the morning, the tanks and tank destroyers attached to the 5th Division began
34:08moving across by ferry and by Navy landing craft. The heavy weapons that never reached the horseshoe
34:15woods at Dorneau were rolling up the east bank of the Rhine within hours of the first boat.
34:20And just upstream of them, something else was growing out from the west bank.
34:24At midnight, two hours after the assault began, engineers of the 150th Engineer Combat Battalion
34:31had started building a treadway bridge. They worked through the rest of the night in the dark.
34:36At 7 in the morning, German artillery found the site and hid it. They kept building. The trucks kept
34:42coming down to the water with more sections. Now, remember the number I asked you to keep from
34:48Arneville? 58 hours to put one bridge across a river 90 yards wide.
34:54At 5.45 on the afternoon of March 23rd, the treadway at Oppenheim opened to traffic. 972 feet long. It
35:05had taken
35:06about 18 hours. Let that sink in. More than three times the length of the Moselle Crossing in less than
35:14a
35:14third of the time. On the biggest river in Western Europe. Under fire. The next day, a heavy ponton bridge
35:22nearly 1,300 feet long was carrying traffic by noon. That is the difference six months had made. Not braver
35:31engineers.
35:32The engineers at Arneville had died building their bridge. The difference was that at Oppenheim, the
35:38bridge was already sitting on trucks a few miles back. The boats were already on trailers. The navy
35:44was already on the road. And none of it had to be found, borrowed, or scrounged in the dark by
35:49a general
35:50driving around the rear areas. So what were the Germans doing while all of this happened? Here is where
35:57the German side of this story goes quiet. And it is worth listening to that quiet carefully.
36:03General Felber, commanding the German 7th Army, did what a commander is supposed to do. At midnight on
36:09the 23rd, he threw in what he had. An officer candidate unit from Wiesbaden was sent to counterattack
36:16the northern edge of the bridgehead. The young men got into a few villages in the dark. When day came,
36:22the 5th Division's infantry dug them out. His real reserve, the 159th Volksgrenadier Division,
36:30never went into the fight in strength. The Luftwaffe came too. One or two planes at a time. All that
36:37day,
36:37the raids wounded two American soldiers and damaged one ammunition truck. American pilots claimed 19 German
36:44planes shot down. And the prisoners kept coming. By the end of March 23rd, more than 2,500 Germans had
36:52surrendered in the Oppenheim bridgehead. Think back to those first seven, paddling themselves across in
36:58the dark. By nightfall, they had company. On the American side, the tone was very different.
37:05That morning, George Patton picked up the phone and called his Army Group Commander,
37:10Omar Bradley. Brad, he said, don't tell anyone, but I'm across. Patton wanted a little time to be
37:18sure the bridgehead would hold. By that evening, he was sure. He called Bradley again and told him to
37:24let the world know. And the timing of that announcement was no accident. That night, Montgomery's great
37:31crossing in the north was going in. So Bradley's headquarters told the press that American troops
37:36had crossed the Rhine on the night of March 22nd, without so much as an artillery preparation. Montgomery had the
37:44biggest buildup of the war behind his crossing. The Third Army had gone across a day earlier with boats,
37:50trucks, and silence. Now go to Berlin. That same evening, March 23rd, Hitler held his situation
37:58conference. The new bridgehead at Oppenheim was on the map in front of him, and it was singled out as
38:04the
38:04most dangerous thing on it. Hitler wanted it attacked. He was told there were no reserves available to
38:11attack it with. That is the real silence at the center of this story. Not a German officer lost for
38:18words on a riverbank. The German command itself looking at a map with nothing left to say. Its whole
38:25defense of the Rhine had been built on the idea that a river would make the Americans stop, gather, and
38:30wait.
38:31The Americans had not stopped. By the time Berlin understood where they were, they had tanks on the far
38:38bank and a bridge behind them. And the next afternoon, an armored division rolled across.
38:44By midnight on March 24th, its lead elements were 15 miles from Oppenheim.
38:51So here is part of the answer. What the American trucks did at the Rhine was carry the entire
38:56crossing to the water, ready to go in, before the Germans could see it coming. Boats, bridges, and the
39:03navy itself arrived on wheels. And the river stopped being the place where an army had to halt.
39:10But that is only part of it. Because everything you have seen so far still needed something.
39:16A quiet bank. Engineers who could work. Boats that went in once the infantry had cleared the far side.
39:23Three days later, 100 miles down river in the Rhine Gorge, a division commander faced a crossing where
39:29German fire was still sweeping the water. The assault boats were being shot up. And he turned to a kind
39:34of truck you have only heard about in passing, the one that did not need a trailer, a crane, or
39:39a bridge,
39:40and ordered it into the river before the crossing sites were even clear of enemy fire.
39:44March 26, 1945. Two o'clock in the morning. The Rhine Gorge between St. Gore and Oberwesel.
39:53If you have ever taken a river cruise down the Rhine, you have seen this place in daylight. Cliffs three
39:59and four hundred feet high, terraced vineyards, castles, and at the foot of the cliffs, a river
40:05that runs fast and treacherous, with its banks in many places walled in stone 15 feet high.
40:12Now see it the way the 89th Infantry Division saw it that night. German 20mm anti-aircraft guns were dug
40:19in high on the cliffs, firing straight down at the water. At St. Gore, the assault battalion came under
40:26fire before it could even launch its boats. German tracers set a gasoline-soaked barge on fire in midstream,
40:33and between the flames and the flares, the whole gorge was lit up like a stage.
40:38A shell struck the command boat of Company E. It killed the company commander, Captain Paul Wofford,
40:45and his first sergeant. The losses at St. Gore ran to 29 killed, 146 missing, and 102 wounded.
40:54This is the doorknob problem all over again. High ground, guns looking down, men in small boats,
41:01out in the open, on moving water. And if the story ended with assault boats,
41:07it might have ended the same way. Eight miles upstream at Oberwesel, the division commander,
41:12Major General Thomas Finley, went down to the river himself. His infantry needed reinforcements across,
41:19and the assault boats were slow and loud. So he went to the engineers and, in the words of the
41:25army's
41:25history, personally prevailed on them to put the ducks of the 453rd amphibious truck company to early use.
41:34Early meant now. The crossing sites were not yet free of German small arms fire.
41:41You have heard the word Duke several times in this story. Now watch what it actually did.
41:47A Duke drove down to the river on the road, on six wheels, like any army truck. It did not
41:54wait for
41:54a trailer or a crane. It did not wait for a bridge. It rolled straight into the Rhine. Its propeller
42:01took
42:02over, and it headed for the far bank, with 18 infantrymen on board. It was quieter than the
42:08motorized assault boats around it. Where it found a slope on the far side, its wheels took hold again,
42:14and it drove up out of the water. The driver could even let air out of his tires from his
42:19seat to get
42:20a grip on a soft bank. Then it turned around and went back for 18 more. Think about what that
42:28meant
42:28for the German gunners on the cliffs. For six months, their whole idea of a river crossing had
42:34been a place where the attacker was stuck on the bank, gathering boats and building. Here was an attacker
42:40whose trucks did not stop at the water at all. They simply kept driving. By the afternoon, after American
42:47P-51s had worked over the cliffs, German resistance crumbled. By late afternoon, American soldiers had
42:55raised the stars and stripes on top of the Lorelei, the rock where, in German legend, a siren sang sailors
43:01to
43:01their deaths on this very stretch of river. Now go back two days, and north, to the other end of
43:08the American
43:08line. March 24th. The Rhine, opposite Spellen, south of Vesel. The 9th Army's Operation Flashpoint. More than
43:202,000 guns had opened fire at one in the morning. The 30th and 79th Infantry Divisions went over in
43:26stormboats and
43:27assault boats, and Navy landing craft of Naval Unit 3 followed them in. The two divisions crossed the
43:34Rhine for 31 casualties. That morning, Company E of the 17th Armored Engineer Battalion, under Captain
43:42James McAdams, started building. The trucks came down to the bank loaded with treadway and rubber floats.
43:49German artillery found them. Before the last float was worked into place, the shelling had caused 20
43:56casualties among the engineers. They kept going. In about seven hours, they laid more than 1150 feet
44:03of treadway on 93 floats across the Rhine. Later, a runaway ferry smashed into the bridge and wrecked
44:11nine floats. They fixed it and had it open again by 2 the next morning. Company E received the
44:18Presidential Unit Citation. Seven hours. For a bridge more than four times as long as the one that took 58
44:25hours at Arneville. So now you can see the whole of it. This is the answer to the question this
44:32story
44:32began with. The Germans had built their last defense in the West on water. A river forces an army to
44:40stop,
44:40and an army that stops can be seen, shelled, counter-attacked, and bled, exactly the way the
44:4711th Infantry was bled at Dorneau. Every German plan on the Rhine assumed that the Americans would have to
44:54pause at the water's edge for days and that those days would belong to Germany. What American trucks
45:01did in the rivers was take those days away. Truck-drawn transporters carried the Navy's landing
45:06craft hundreds of miles overland and put them into a river in the middle of Germany. Bridge trucks carried
45:13more than two miles of floating road in one army's dumps alone and laid it across the Rhine in hours
45:19instead of days. Truck drivers pulled off the red ball express became the smoke that blinded the German
45:26guns. And the Dukes did not need any of it. They were the truck and the boat at once, and
45:33they drove
45:33into the Rhine under fire. By the Navy's own count, the landing craft at Oppenheim alone carried more than
45:4115,000 men and 1,200 vehicles across the river in four days. Hitler, looking at the Oppenheim bridgehead
45:50on his map, wanted it attacked and was told there was nothing left to attack it with. The river had
45:56not been crossed. It had been driven over. And that brings us back to where we started, to the east
46:03bank
46:03at Nierstein, in the dark, and a question that is still open. Seven German soldiers had rifles in
46:10their hands and the Rhine at their backs. They could have fired. They could have run. Instead, they picked
46:17up paddles and rode themselves to the Americans. What they understood in that moment, and what the men of
46:24Company K understood about that same river, is the last piece of this story. March 22, 1945.
46:32Nierstein, a few minutes after 10 at night. Go back to that bank one last time. Seven German soldiers,
46:40standing in the dark, and in front of them, a platoon leader, eight riflemen, and First Lieutenant
46:45Irvin Jacobs of Company K, just stepped out of an assault boat. We do not know the names of those
46:52seven
46:52Germans. No record tells us what went through their minds. The Army's history gives us only what they did.
46:59They surrendered. They got into a boat, and they paddled themselves across the Rhine to the Americans.
47:06But you now know what was in front of them, and they did not. Behind Company K, back in the
47:12dark,
47:13there were 500 assault boats and the engineers to man them. There were trucks lined up on the approach
47:19roads, loaded with a bridge. There were trailers carrying Navy landing craft that had come overland from
47:25the sea. Somewhere behind those, there were dukes that would drive straight into the river on their own wheels.
47:32Everything Germany's river defense had counted on—the waiting, the gathering, the days—had been used up
47:39miles back, on roads, before the first boat ever touched the water. The seven men on that bank were
47:46the last link in a plan that had already failed. Whatever they understood that night, their answer
47:52was the most honest one any German gave on the Rhine. They didn't fight the river war. They left it.
47:59Now look at the men who met them. Six months earlier, Company K of the 11th Infantry had come out
48:05of the
48:05horseshoe woods at Dorneau with no officers at all and 50 men. It had watched its wounded carried across
48:12the Moselle in three bullet-riddled boats. It had watched men swim for their lives, holding onto one
48:19rope, pushing empty ammunition tins ahead of them in the cold water. Some of them did not make it to
48:25the
48:25other side. That company was rebuilt—new officers, new men alongside the survivors. And on the night
48:32of March 22nd, it was Company K that touched the east bank of the Rhine first. What did Company K
48:38understand about that river that the Germans did not? That it was no longer crossing alone. At Dorneau,
48:45the men had gone into the water with courage and almost nothing behind them. At Nieerstein,
48:50they went in with the same courage and with the full weight of an army that had learned,
48:55river by river, how to carry everything it needed right to the edge of the water and straight into
49:01it. The price of learning that lesson was paid on the Moselle. It was paid by the six engineers killed
49:07at Arneville in the minutes after the smoke stopped. By the twenty-eight men who died when the Ludendorff
49:13bridge fell. By Captain Paul Wofford and his first sergeant in a burning gorge at St. Gore.
49:19And it was paid at Dorneau, where the people of France keep a memorial today to the soldiers of
49:25the 11th Infantry and the armored infantry who held the horseshoe woods. The twenty casualties at Oppenheim
49:31were real men too. But the distance between twenty and what Dorneau cost is the whole story of this video.
49:39And the man who led the 2nd Battalion into Dorneau? Kelly Lemon Jr. received the Distinguished
49:45Service Cross by order of George Patton for what he did on the banks of the Seine. That was the
49:51day
49:51he swam the river alone to find five boats for his men. He stayed in the army and retired as
49:58a major
49:58general. Then, in retirement, he took up competitive swimming. He swam with a master's team in Washington
50:05and set records. In 1999, he was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
50:11He died in February of 2012, in his hundredth year. The officer who once had to swim a river because
50:18there was nothing else to cross it in, lived long enough to swim for the joy of it. So what
50:24did
50:24American trucks do in rivers that the German army could not answer? They carried the whole crossing to
50:29the water before anyone could see it coming. Boats on trailers. The navy on tank transporters.
50:36Two miles of floating bridge in one army's dumps. Smoke from men who had been driving the Red Ball
50:42Express a week before. And trucks that were boats, driving into the Rhine under fire. The Germans had
50:50built their last defense on the idea that a river makes an army stop. The American army didn't stop.
50:57It drove across. In September, Company K came back over a river holding onto one rope. In March,
51:05it went across first. And everything the American army could put on wheels was right behind it.
51:14It was a very simple story.
51:17It was a very simple story to help a story like this reach people who have never heard of Dorneau,
51:22or of the navy boats that crossed France on trucks.
51:25If you haven't subscribed yet, please do. And turn on the bell so you don't miss the next one.
51:30Tell us in the comments where you're watching from. And if your father, grandfather, or uncle served in
51:35the Second World War, whether he drove a truck, built a bridge, or crossed a river in the first boat,
51:40write his name and his unit below. The American engineers, drivers, sailors,
51:46and riflemen who put an army across those rivers deserve to be remembered by name.