The Ruhr Pocket, 1945: the greatest American encirclement of the war

In the spring of 1945 the Ruhr, with its coal mines, steelworks and the Krupp works at Essen, was one of the last industrial centers the Reich still held. Fighting through it street by street could have become, in the words of the historian Robert Citino, a super-Stalingrad. Instead the U.S. Army surrounded it, and in less than three weeks took more prisoners than the Soviets had taken at Stalingrad.²

The pincers

After the capture of the bridge at Remagen in March, General Dwight D. Eisenhower planned a classic double envelopment. Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges's First Army would break out of the Remagen bridgehead and drive east, then swing north. About 90 miles to the north, Lieutenant General William Simpson's Ninth Army would cross the Rhine near Wesel with Montgomery's 21st Army Group and drive east along the northern edge of the Ruhr. The two would wheel inward and meet behind Field Marshal Walter Model's Army Group B.³ › Dwight D. Eisenhower

The First Army attacked before dawn on 25 March and broke clean through, advancing twelve miles the first day and twenty the second. On 28 March the 3rd Armored Division's commander, Major General Maurice Rose, sent Task Force Richardson north toward Paderborn with the order to "just go like hell"; it covered 45 miles in a day. At Paderborn the Americans ran into SS training units with tanks, and on 30 March Rose himself was killed when his small party met German Tiger tanks on a road at dusk.⁴

Easter Sunday at Lippstadt

Late on 31 March the VII Corps commander, Major General J. Lawton Collins, asked Simpson to turn a combat command of the 2nd Armored Division toward Lippstadt, midway between Beckum and Paderborn, while a force from the 3rd Armored came to meet it. Before dawn on 1 April, Easter Sunday, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Kane's task force set off, meeting little more than small-arms fire and the odd flak gun whose crews fled or surrendered. Just after noon the two armies met at Lippstadt, and the pocket was closed.⁵

Inside it, by the LWL's count, were about 350,000 soldiers of Army Group B. The National WWII Museum lists the 5th Panzer and 15th Armies, seven corps and 19 divisions, along with 26 generals and an admiral. Hitler forbade any withdrawal on pain of death, Berlin demanded that Model defend Fortress Ruhr, and promises of relief by a new Twelfth Army came to nothing.⁶

Squeezing the pocket

The Americans placed four corps around the perimeter and drove inward from every side. North of the Ruhr River lay the dense chain of industrial cities, Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Bochum and Dortmund, where a stronger enemy could have forced a block-by-block campaign. The Germans no longer had the strength. Wherever a town resisted, American firepower flattened it; the artillery of XVI Corps alone fired 259,000 rounds in fourteen days.⁷

The advance freed tens of thousands of prisoners and forced laborers. At Hemer the 7th Armored Division found 23,302 prisoners of war, most of them Soviet, dying at a rate of more than a hundred a day; in Hagen alone 16,000 forced laborers were freed, in Wuppertal 30,000. By the LWL's dating, the pocket was split near Hagen and Witten on 12 April; the U.S. official history has the decisive link-up on the Ruhr at Hattingen on 14 April.⁸

Surrender

The eastern part of the pocket around Iserlohn gave up on 15 April. General von Zangen of the 15th Army surrendered with his staff to the 7th Armored Division, and the remains of the Panzer Lehr Division gave up to the 99th Division. On 16 April, the U.S. official history records, an all-out rush to surrender began, with civilians and soldiers waving sheets, tablecloths and shirts; the 78th Division's historian wrote that the predominant color was white. Paratroopers caught General Harpe of the 5th Panzer Army trying to slip across the Ruhr.⁹

On 18 April all but a few stragglers gave up. Some 317,000 Germans were captured, more than the Russians took at Stalingrad and more than the Germans and Italians taken at the end of the campaign in North Africa. Citino notes that it was twice the U.S. intelligence estimate, and the prisoners were held in open fields behind barbed wire, the Rhine meadow camps. The cost to the Ninth Army was 341 killed, 121 missing and nearly 2,000 wounded, with the First Army's losses about three times as high; Citino puts American casualties at about 10,000 in all.¹⁰

The field marshal's end

Model refused a call from General Matthew Ridgway to surrender. Rather than capitulate formally, he dissolved Army Group B. "What is there left to a commander in defeat?" he asked his chief of staff, and answered himself: "In ancient times, they took poison". On 21 April, in a wood near Duisburg, he shot himself. The German Historical Museum notes that, loyal to Hitler as he was, Model had not carried out the Nero Decree ordering the destruction of the Ruhr's industry and utilities. Less than three weeks later the war in Europe was over.¹¹