March 7, 1945: The Allies Cross the Rhine

March 7, 1945: The Allies cross the Rhine River. This was considered a big deal at the time.

After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germany from placing any troops in "The Rhineland," between the Rhine and the border with France. To put it in Star Trek terms, this was effectively a "neutral zone," about 60 miles wide.

When Chancellor Adolf Hitler decided to make his 1st big military statement in 1936, it was violating the Treaty by crossing the Rhine. So the Allies pushing the Nazis back across the Rhine was big for symbolic reasons.

The bridge over the river, built in 1919, was 14 miles south of Bonn, hometown of composer Ludwig van Beethoven, and 35 miles south of Cologne. It was named the Ludendorff Bridge, after General Erich Ludendorff. Despite what you may have seen in the 2017 film Wonder Woman, he did not die in the closing days of World War I: He was an early Nazi, and was with Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. He lived until 1937.

The Allies didn't expect crossing the river to be easy. The Nazis had a "scorched-earth" policy, wrecking things so that their enemies couldn't use them. The Allies expected the bridge to have been blown up. On March 7, the 1st U.S. Army got there, and discovered that it was still there.

By crossing it, the 1st Army was able to start building a pontoon bridge, one strong enough to hold up their jeeps, trucks, tanks, and foot-soldiers. German troops got to the site and attacked it, to no avail. By the time the bridge actually collapsed on March 17, killing 28 U.S. soldiers, the pontoon bridge had already been crossed by 125,000 men.

The Allies were now 384 miles west of downtown Berlin. It had become clear that Germany's "thousand-year Reich" is going to end sometime in its 13th year. Just 2 months later, the Nazis surrendered.

In the film It's a Wonderful Life, during the World War II montage, the narrator, Joseph, says of the character Marty Hatch, "Marty helped capture the Remagen Bridge." In 1969, the film The Bridge at Remagen was released, a highly fictionalized version of events.

Since 1980, the surviving towers on the western bank of the Rhine have housed a museum called "Peace Museum Bridge at Remagen," containing the bridge's history and "themes of war and peace."

UPDATE: This post is dated March 7, 2022. Later in 2022, a plan was put forward to build a suspension bridge on the site, for pedestrians and bicyclists, but not for cars or trains like its predecessor.

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March 7, 1945 was a Wednesday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There was 1 game in the NHL: The Chicago Black Hawks beat the New York Rangers, 6-3 at the Chicago Stadium.