Race to the River

The dash and aggressiveness that enabled one American outfit to cash in on the Remagen bridge paid other dividends along the Rhine front last week.

Lieut. General George S. Patton's Third Army was going strong. So were the battle-famed 1st Infantry Division and other outfits of the First Army. They bore the scars of the Battle of the Bulge and were out for meat. Major General Hugh J. Gaffey's 4th Armored Division (Third Army)* had been given a task of exploiting to do after the Kyll River had been bridged near Trier. Its tankmen and motorized infantrymen were given rations for ten days, ordered to pour on the coal and get to the Rhine.

Speed Record. Fifty-eight hours and more than 50 miles later they were there, close to Coblenz. They had slashed out a corridor north of the Moselle with one of the war's swiftest armor strokes. Behind their tanks the infantry mopped up thousands of prisoners from shredded German divisions. Among them was a befuddled German general. Out of touch with his troops, he had stood on a knoll looking for some sign of them. Finally his binoculars found a large batch of Germans. He hurried over to find that they--and he--were prisoners.

One combat command of the 11th Armored Division, ripping through a parallel corridor, roared up to the Rhine at Brohl and Andernach. They picked up a German major general, his staff and 3,300 men plus a ferry, intact. West of the Rhine they curved northward, met the First Army's southward drive, snapped the handcuffs on more than 40,000 pocketed Germans. Patton's men had Coblenz surrounded and were flattening other pockets back against the Moselle.

* German soldiers facing the 4th Armored were told (according to a captured document): each American had qualified for the Division by proving that 1) he had been born a bastard, 2) he had murdered his mother.

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