What happened at the bridge at Remagen?
On 7 March 1945 soldiers of the US 9th Armored Division captured the Ludendorff railroad bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, after the German demolition charges failed to destroy it. The Americans rushed troops across and built a bridgehead on the east bank of the river, which the Germans could not destroy. The damaged bridge collapsed on 17 March 1945, but by then pontoon bridges carried the traffic.11
On the afternoon of 7 March 1945 a company of American armored infantry ran across a railroad bridge over the Rhine that the Germans had just tried, and failed, to blow up. It happened at a place no Allied plan had chosen for a crossing, and ten days later the bridge itself lay in the river. The wider campaign is told in our account of the Western Front in World War II.12
A crossing nobody planned
In early March 1945, after the Allies had regained the ground lost in the Battle of the Bulge, their armies closed up to the Rhine, the last great natural barrier before the heart of Germany. Eisenhower's plan put the main crossing north of the Ruhr, near Wesel, under Field Marshal Montgomery. The American armies farther south were to cross later.13
As the Allies reached the river, the Germans blew the Rhine bridges one after another. Remagen, a small town on the Rhine south of Bonn, stood low on any list of crossing sites. In the official US Army history Charles B. MacDonald counts its surroundings among "the most objectionable crossing sites of all": the hills of the Westerwald rise steeply from the east bank, roads are few, and the Rhine runs there through a gorge.14
The Americans coming up to the river hoped for a bridge but hardly expected one. MacDonald writes that the orders issued to the 9th Armored Division on 6 March were only to "cut by fire" the bridge at Remagen, and that the division's main effort was aimed at crossings of the Ahr River to the south. Some units had orders to seize any bridge still standing, he adds, but nobody had made any positive plans for such a windfall, and the Remagen peace museum calls the capture completely unexpected and unplanned.15
The Ludendorff Bridge and its defenders
The railroad bridge at Remagen was named after Erich Ludendorff, the German general of World War I, and was built during that war. MacDonald dates it to 1916, Lengel of the National WWII Museum to 1916 to 1919. Stone towers stood at each end, and on the east bank the tracks ran straight into a tunnel through the Erpeler Ley, a cliff of dark rock above the river.16
On the night before the Americans arrived, German engineers finished laying planks over the tracks, so that vehicles could cross as well as trains.17
Command at the bridge was a tangle. Captain Willi Bratge was the combat commander of the Remagen area, and Captain Karl Friesenhahn, an engineer, commanded the bridge and its demolitions. The antiaircraft troops answered to their own Luftwaffe chain of command, and most of their guns, including those on the Erpeler Ley, were pulled out before the Americans came.18
At 11:15 a.m. on 7 March Major Hans Scheller, adjutant of the LXVII Corps, arrived to take command at Remagen. The reinforcements Bratge had been promised did not come with him.19
The explosives were short too. The Bundesarchiv, the German federal archives, writes that the Wehrmacht lacked both charges and time. In Bratge's account, published by Manfred Michler in 1955 from Bratge's notes, the engineers had asked for 600 kilograms of military explosive for an emergency charge on the east pier and received, late that morning, only 300 kilograms of Donarit, a weaker explosive.20
7 March: the race to the bridge
On 7 March a task force of the 9th Armored Division's Combat Command B, built around the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion and the 14th Tank Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Engeman, moved on Remagen. Shortly before 1 p.m., by MacDonald's account, its leading infantry came out of the woods on the heights above the town and saw the bridge still standing, with German troops and vehicles crossing it.21
Engeman sent Company A of the 27th, under Lieutenant Karl Timmermann, down through the town with a platoon of the new Pershing tanks. "Let's make it snappy", his order ended, in the words of the 9th Armored Division's booklet of 1945.22
At 3:15 p.m., after reports from Sinzig that the Germans would blow the bridge at 4 p.m., the commander of Combat Command B, Brigadier General William M. Hoge, signaled Engeman: "You've got 45 minutes to take the bridge", by the booklet's account. In fact there was no fixed hour. MacDonald says so, and Bratge's account calls the story impossible, since the moment depended on the enemy and only the combat commander knew it.23
The charges that failed
As the Americans came through the town, Friesenhahn fired the charge on the west approach, which blew a crater to stop tanks from reaching the bridge. Bratge's account times it at 2:35 p.m.24
Then came the order to destroy the bridge itself. In Bratge's account Scheller gave it at 3:20 p.m., after Bratge told him he would blow the bridge on his own authority if the major did not. Friesenhahn shouted to everyone to take cover and turned the key of the electric firing circuit. In MacDonald's words: "Nothing happened. He turned it again. Still nothing happened."25
A sergeant volunteered to run onto the bridge under fire and light the fuse of the emergency charge by hand. Bratge's account names him as Unterfeldwebel Faust. The charge went off, at 3:40 p.m. by Bratge's account. Timbers flew, the bridge rose as if lifted from its piers and settled back. When the smoke cleared it still stood. Friesenhahn reported that the charge had been too weak: the bridge had only lifted and fallen back onto its bearings.26
Why the main charge failed has never been settled. In Bratge's account Friesenhahn later found that a tank shell had pierced the deck and cut the firing cable, and the division's booklet says a cable to the main charge had been severed, "possibly by artillery". MacDonald writes that most Germans who knew the events blamed a lucky American shell but that sabotage "hardly could be ruled out", while Lengel writes that a detonator had been placed improperly.27
Across the Rhine
In MacDonald's account Timmermann saw that the footpaths on either side of the torn planking were intact and ordered the attack again, and his men ran onto the bridge, dashing from girder to girder under machine-gun fire from the towers. The American tanks on the west bank kept the far end of the bridge and the tunnel under heavy fire.28
Close behind went three engineers, named in the division's booklet as Lieutenant Hugh Mott, Sergeant Eugene Dorland and Staff Sergeant John Reynolds. In the US Army accounts they cut every wire they could find and shot apart heavy cables with their carbines.29
Sergeant Alexander A. Drabik was the first American across the Rhine at Remagen, with Timmermann and his men close behind. Bratge's account has the first Americans over shortly before 4 p.m., MacDonald has them nearing the bridge around then.30
Hundreds of civilians had taken shelter in the railroad tunnel among the German soldiers, 400 to 500 by Bratge's count. Scheller left the tunnel, to report in person according to MacDonald, while Bratge's account says only that he left with two other officers. When the Americans reached both ends of the tunnel, Bratge and Friesenhahn were taken prisoner.31
The news went up the chain of command within hours. MacDonald writes that the First Army commander, Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, sent engineers and boats to Remagen even before he called Omar Bradley, who later recalled answering "Hot dog, Courtney" and "Shove everything you can across it". Eisenhower, MacDonald adds, told Bradley to push at least five divisions across at once, and by MacDonald's count almost 8,000 men crossed in the first twenty-four hours.32
Ten days under fire
Hitler replaced his commander in chief in the west, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, with Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and MacDonald writes that he told Kesselring the bridgehead had to be wiped out.33
Against the bridge itself the Germans tried almost everything: bombers, artillery, floating mines, frogmen and rockets. MacDonald counts eleven V-2 rockets fired at it from 12 to 17 March, the only tactical use of the German V-weapons in the war, and none hit the bridge.34
Meanwhile American engineers built other crossings, and the Americans had pontoon bridges in place before the railroad bridge fell. MacDonald dates the first of them, a treadway bridge from Remagen to Erpel, to 11 March. The Ludendorff Bridge was then closed for repairs, on 12 March by the III Corps engineer's report, on 13 March by MacDonald. The same report says it had carried continuous one-way traffic for five days.35
The collapse on 17 March
On the afternoon of 17 March engineers were at work on the bridge, about 200 of them by MacDonald's count. At about 3 p.m., with no German planes overhead and the guns silent, the main span gave way near one of the river piers. It twisted and fell into the Rhine, pulling the two side spans with it.36
MacDonald counts 28 killed and 93 injured among the men on the bridge. The Bundesarchiv gives 32 American engineers dead, and the Remagen peace museum at least 30 American soldiers.37
The report of the III Corps engineer, written two days later, found no single cause. Its "basic reason" was the lower chord of the upstream truss, cut by the German emergency charge, which left the other truss carrying loads and twisting forces it was never designed for. Added to that came the weight of the new planking, the vibration of repair machinery and of American 8-inch howitzers firing nearby, near misses from German shells and days of heavy traffic. MacDonald reaches the same verdict, and the National Park Service, the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Bundesarchiv all put the collapse down to accumulated damage and strain.38
By then the bridge was no longer needed: MacDonald writes that its loss had no effect on the fighting in the bridgehead, already served by the new bridges. That same afternoon Hodges had phoned the III Corps commander, Major General John Millikin, to tell him he was relieved. In MacDonald's account, quoting the diary kept at Hodges' headquarters, Millikin answered that he had bad news too: the railroad bridge had just collapsed.39
Scapegoats and verdicts
Hitler wanted someone to blame. A flying court-martial, the Fliegendes Standgericht West under Generalleutnant Rudolf Huebner in the Bundesarchiv's account, sentenced five officers to death for dereliction of duty and cowardice: Majors Scheller, Herbert Strobel and August Kraft, Oberleutnant Karl Heinz Peters, and Bratge, in his absence.40
The four in German hands were shot, on 13 and 14 March near Rimbach in the Westerwald according to the Bundesarchiv. Bratge, already an American prisoner, survived. Friesenhahn, also a prisoner, was acquitted, MacDonald writes. Kesselring, the Bundesarchiv writes, announced the sentences in a secret decree to his officers, under the words "Wer nicht in Ehren lebt, stirbt in Schande" ("He who does not live in honor dies in shame").41
The bridgehead fighting went on. From 7 to 24 March, by MacDonald's count, it cost the III Corps about 5,500 casualties, almost 700 of them killed, while the Germans lost more than 11,700 men as prisoners alone. On 25 March, MacDonald writes, the First Army attacked out of the bridgehead. The Bundesarchiv notes that the bridgehead let the Allies push quickly into Germany, among other places into the Ruhr, its industrial heart. That campaign is told in the Ruhr Pocket.42
How much did Remagen matter? The National Park Service calls the capture pivotal, and Lengel a decisive moment heralding Germany's collapse. MacDonald is more guarded: the bridgehead "dealt a serious blow to German morale", he writes, but "the German Army clearly would have been beaten without it, perhaps just as quickly". The peace museum at Remagen judges it not decisive for the war, but says it let the Allies push east faster than expected.43
The museum itself stands in the surviving towers on the west bank. According to its own history, the mayor of Remagen opened it there on 7 March 1980, after the film The Bridge at Remagen, shot in 1968, which it says has little to do with the real events, had made the bridge famous around the world. The rival Allied drives to the Rhine are told in Patton vs Montgomery.44
