Operation Plunder

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Plunder sent three Allied armies across the Rhine on the night of the 23rd of March 1945. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery commanded the 21st Army Group behind the assault. He had planned an artillery barrage of five thousand guns, backed by squadrons of Anglo-American bombers. For weeks beforehand, his forces massed thousands of tons of supplies and huge stocks of bridging equipment. The British Second Army, under Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey, would strike at Rees and Wesel. The US Ninth Army, under Lieutenant General William H. Simpson, would land to the south, near the river Lippe. The ground had already been softened in February, when Operation Grenade sent Simpson's Ninth Army and Harry Crerar's First Canadian Army toward the river. From the 16th of March, a heavy smoke screen shielded the buildup, including the secret transport of 36 Royal Navy landing craft. How did the crossing play out along the riverbank, and why would one American general want the world to know his men beat Montgomery across?

• 2. Building a Bridge in Hours

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  On the night of the 23rd of March 1945, companies E and C of the 17th Armored Engineer Battalion started work. The unit, part of the US 2nd Armored Division, built treadway rafts about five kilometers south of Wesel. Full bridge construction began at 9:45 in the morning, and by 4:00 in the afternoon the first truck rolled across the newly finished pontoon bridge. Engineers laid over 1152 feet of M2 treadway and 93 pneumatic floats in six hours and fifteen minutes. It was a record for a bridge of that size. Twenty-five 2-ton GMC CCKW trucks hauled the bridge parts to the site, part of the Red Ball Express supply network. The bridge that engineers built in just over six hours would soon carry tanks toward German positions still holding the riverbank.

• 3. Storming the Riverbank

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  Four thousand Allied guns opened the assault, firing for four hours on the 23rd of March 1945. British bombers struck Wesel through the day and into the night. Three Allied formations led the ground assault: the British XII Corps, the British XXX Corps, and the US XVI Corps. The British 79th Armoured Division, veterans of the Normandy landings under Major General Percy Hobart, brought unusual, purpose-built vehicles nicknamed Hobart's Funnies. One of them, the amphibious LVT-2 'Buffalo,' was operated by the 4th Royal Tank Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Alan Jolly. It could cross soft or flooded ground and carried the spearhead infantry across.

  Near Rees at 21:00 on the 23rd of March, the 51st Highland Infantry Division attacked, spearheaded by the 7th Battalion, Black Watch, of 154th Brigade. The 7th Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, also of 154th Brigade, followed close behind. At 02:00 on the 24th of March, the 15th Scottish Infantry Division landed between Wesel and Rees. There was no opposition at first, but machine-gun nests soon slowed the advance. That same day, Major-General Tom Rennie, commanding the 51st Division, was killed by mortar fire. The British 1st Commando Brigade pushed into Wesel itself. South of Wesel, the US 30th Infantry Division landed after artillery and air bombardment had broken local resistance. The US 79th Infantry Division landed next, and American casualties stayed minimal. German troops kept resisting the British landings, launching armored counter-attacks, though Allied tanks and heavy equipment kept arriving.

  Fighting was fiercest at Bienen, north of Rees, where the entire 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade had to relieve the Black Watch. By the 27th of March, the bridgehead stretched 35 miles wide and 20 miles deep, secured by Allied strength in numbers and equipment. That expanding foothold gave paratroopers who had dropped east of the river solid ground to link up with.

• 4. Wings Over Wesel

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  At 10:00 on the 24th of March 1945, Operation Varsity sent the First Allied Airborne Army over the Rhine to disrupt German communications. The force combined the US XVIII Airborne Corps with the British 6th and US 17th Airborne Divisions, dropping by parachute and glider near Wesel. The Special Air Service ran a parallel mission, Operation Archway, alongside the landings. Anti-aircraft fire hit the descending troops hard, both during the drop and in the fighting that followed. Even so, the airborne divisions pushed forward and beat back German counterattacks. Commanders had studied the failures of Operation Market Garden closely, and it showed in how the landings were handled. By that afternoon, the 15th Scottish Infantry Division had fought through to link up with both airborne divisions. East of the river, the fighting had already begun to unravel the German command trying to hold the line.

• 5. The German Collapse

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  General Alfred Schlemm's German 1st Parachute Army, part of Army Group H, stood in the way of the Allied advance. It was considered the most effective German force in the area, but the Battle of the Reichswald had already worn it down. Unable to hold, it withdrew northeast toward Hamburg and Bremen, tearing open a gap next to the German 15th Army in the Ruhr.

  On the 24th of March, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels began his diary entry with a warning. 'The situation in the West has entered an extraordinarily critical, ostensibly almost deadly, phase,' he wrote. He recognized the broad-front crossing for what it was, and foresaw an Allied attempt to encircle the Ruhr's industrial heartland.

  Schlemm was wounded, and on the 27th of March, command passed to General Günther Blumentritt. Blumentritt and his superior, Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz, both saw the situation as lost. The front was incomplete, reserves were gone, artillery was weak, and air support and tanks were nearly absent. Communications had broken down so badly that one corps was never even contacted. What reinforcements did arrive were so poor that the generals chose not to use them, to spare needless casualties. Supreme Command had ordered Blumentritt to hold and fight, but from the 1st of April he withdrew instead, keeping casualties minimal. His retreat eventually carried the army beyond the Dortmund-Ems Canal to the Teutoburg Forest. Within a week of Plunder's start, the Allies had already taken 30,000 prisoners of war north of the Ruhr. None of this was hidden from the Allied leader who had come to watch the crossing in person.

• 6. Churchill's Uninvited Visit

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  Winston Churchill arrived at Field Marshal Montgomery's headquarters near Venlo on the eve of Operation Plunder. The next day, the two men watched the Varsity air landings together. On the 25th of March, they visited General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters. After lunch and a briefing, the party went to a sandbagged house overlooking a quiet, undefended stretch of German-held riverbank. Once Eisenhower had left, Churchill, Montgomery, and a party of US commanders and armed guards boarded an LCVP landing craft. They landed on enemy territory and stood there, unchallenged, for about 30 minutes. From there, they went to see the destroyed railway bridge at Wesel. German artillery appeared to be targeting the group, and they left. Churchill's brush with the front line came just as a very different contest was playing out among the Allied commanders themselves.

• 7. A Rival Crossing

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  At the Yalta Conference in early February 1945, Allied leaders decided to add a second Rhine crossing south of the Ruhr. The extra crossing was meant to pull German forces away from Plunder, though two crossings ended up happening ahead of schedule. On the 7th of March, US troops seized the Ludendorff Bridge by surprise, sparking the Battle of Remagen. Inside the next 10 days, six divisions and 25,000 troops had a bridgehead in place on the far bank. On the 22nd of March, General George S. Patton sent his Third Army across the Rhine at Nierstein.

  General Omar Bradley, Patton's superior, released news of the crossing to the press. The release was timed, as one description put it, 'to take some of the lustre from the news of Montgomery's crossing.' Bradley later recalled that Patton had pushed hard for the announcement. 'I want the world to know that Third Army made it before Monty starts across,' Patton had said. That was not, in fact, how the two armies' operations actually played out.

  Decades later, the rivalry still surfaces on screen, in a 2004 History Channel episode titled 'Crossing the Rhine' and a comedic retelling on Drunk History.