World Battlefronts: Goodbye to the Rhineland

Five thousand U.S. artillery shells rained down on Coblenz — one of them blowing to smithereens a statue of Emperor Wilhelm I. Then, one evening, a lone U.S. medium tank equipped with a loudspeaker rolled up to the Moselle river bank and hurled a surrender ultimatum across to the survivors of the Coblenz garrison. There was no answer.

At 3 a.m., units of the Third Army’s 87th Division crossed the Moselle in as sault boats. Weak enemy, mortar and machine-gun fire soon died out, and later that day Coblenz was in U.S. hands. The Nazis began shelling the city from the Ehrenbreitstein fortress across the Rhine. Some 500 prisoners rounded up in Coblenz were tatterdemalion survivors of 15 or 20 different outfits. They were angry at SS troops who had scuttled for safety across the Rhine and blown up the bridges.

Coal for France. The fall of Coblenz, headquarters of U.S. occupation after World War I, was only an incident in a swift clatter of events in the southern Rhineland. The Nazis had already lost the Rhineland north of the Moselle; now they were fast losing the rest of it, from Coblenz to the Karlsruhe corner. Soon the coal of the Saar would be flowing into fuel-starved France.

On the Moselle, upriver from Coblenz, Lieut. General George S. Patton’s 5th and goth Divisions had carved out substantial bridgeheads on the south bank. Major General Hugh J. Gaffey’s crack 4th Armored Division poured through, shot south into the Hunsrück plateau. Resistance was almost nil. At the narrow Simmer River, the tankmen found the bridges intact, pressed on to Bad Kreuz-nach, junction of three rail lines and four highways. The goth tagged along on Gaffey’s left, taking mellow old Rhine towns —Boppard, St. Goar, Bingen—like buttons from a ripped-open shirt.

Scramble for Safety. South of Trier, Patton’s 26th and 94th Divisions slammed into the face of the German salient. Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch’s Seventh Army, with French units on the right, hit the south flank from Saarbrikken to Haguenau. Thus assaulted on three sides, the German First and Seventh Armies began a scramble to get across the Rhine. Allied tactical airplanes swarmed down on the crowded roads and resumed their familiar, pleasant pastime of smashing enemy transport. Some Germans clung to Siegfried Line defenses on the south flank; the longer they fought there, the more they were menaced from the rear.

So precarious was the enemy situation south of the Moselle that front correspondents foresaw Eisenhower’s armies coming up to the Rhine from Bingen to Strasbourg without much delay. German industrial towns of the west bank (Mainz, Worms, Ludwigshafen) would be put out of action, and some on or near the east bank (Wiesbaden, Mannheim, Karlsruhe) would be brought under artillery fire. And the Nazis would go cross-eyed watching the whole 800-mile stretch of the Rhine from Switzerland to The Netherlands.