Crossings Ahead

As usual when victory is in the air. Winston Churchill was as jolly and prankish as a boy on a picnic. Touring the conquered Siegfried Line, the Prime Minister gaily flicked ashes on the futile, grey-green, concrete dragon's teeth which Hitler had set up to keep tanks out of the German heartland. There were hints--decently obscured by censorship--that Mr. Churchill may have expressed his contempt in even more emphatic manner.

It was official, however, that the doughty old Briton had chalked "For Hitler--Personal" on a 360-lb. shell, then yanked a howitzer's lanyard to fire it over the lines. He had vainly tried to persuade a U.S. commander to let him ride a tank up to the Rhine across from enemy-held Dusseldorf. And he had observed that "one good strong heave" by all the Allies might bring an end to the war.

The Toughest Fight. When he got back to London last week and lunched with George VI, the Prime Minister was able to tell his King with pride that British and Canadian troops were beating down the bitterest German resistance of the entire western front. This action was in the Wesel area, where German paratroops, under victory-or-death orders from Hitler himself, were holding a shrinking bridgehead on the Rhine's west bank.

The paratroopers were covering the last withdrawals of Nazi armor and infantry across the river. Germans poured across the two bridges at Wesel, and some took to ferries, barges, even rowboats. Canadian and British troops fighting with Henry Crerar's Canadian First Army slowly pressed the bridgehead back. At its northwest corner, they captured the town of Xanten, whose name comes from the Latin ad sanctos ("to the holy ones"), and which all good Germans believe is the birthplace of Siegfried of the Nibelungen legend.

After the U.S. Ninth Army joined the fight, the jittery Germans blew up the two bridges, one of them carrying down with it a few straggling German tanks. The final bag of German prisoners was only 600. It was the most skillful German defensive effort since the withdrawal from the Ardennes bulge.

The Sacred River. The wiping out of the Wesel bridgehead brought Eisenhower's armies up to a practically unbroken 150-mile front on the Rhine, from Nijmegen to Coblenz. The amazing U.S. crossing at Remagen was a great credit, not only to the local heroes, but to the Supreme Commander himself, who had passed word down the chain of command to be alert for any opportunity and aggressive to seize it.

To hear that the Rhine had been crossed must have been a shattering blow to the remnants of German morale. The Rhine, the sacred river that winds through German song & story, had not been crossed by hostile armies since Napoleon passed over it at Strasbourg in 1805. * As a military factor, the Remagen bridgehead offered the chance of a drive to the northeast, outflanking the Ruhr; or a push to the southeast, forcing a German withdrawal from the Saar and the rest of the Rhineland south of the Moselle.

Confusion or Collapse? The Nazi fumble at Remagen was a sign of German confusion, but it was not necessarily a mark of collapse. The Remagen "accident," as Berlin angrily called it, was in sharp contrast with the well-handled withdrawal at Wesel. Resurgent Allied optimists who now predicted the war's end in a few weeks might possibly be right--but in the meantime it was well to remember that the Wehrmacht had been routed and broken last summer in White Russia and in France. It had recovered from both routs.

The slowness and weakness of the first Nazi counterattacks at Remagen probably reflected a shortage of transport and fuel --and certainly they reflected the massive Allied air campaign against the German rail net which last week roared into its fourth week without a single day's interruption. Field Marshal von Rundstedt must have been thrown badly off balance. He had no doubt counted on plenty of time to regroup his forces, while Eisenhower prepared for the "naval operation" of crossing a bridgeless Rhine.

Now Rundstedt had to pull men and arms from the north to meet the Remagen threat, yet he still had to man 150 miles of the Rhine and be ready to fight a crossing anywhere. It was this harsh stretching of Rundstedt's already paper-thin manpower that led some experts in Washington to say that Remagen had shortened the war by six to eight weeks.

Weakness v. Strength. The German High Command also had to watch Germany's north coast. At Yalta, the Big Three had promised blows on the Reich from "east, west, north and south." Last week in the U.S., an editorial in the Army and Navy Journal said that "the details and the preparations for execution [of an amphibious invasion of Germany] have been worked out," and speculated that the operation might be commanded by Field Marshal Montgomery, with Monty's armies in the west passing to the command of Lieut. General Omar Bradley.

Allied airmen last week reported that the Germans were moving troops eastward in The Netherlands, north of the Lek (northern branch of the lower Rhine). This might foretell a Nazi evacuation of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague. It might mean that the Germans were afraid of being cut off in the western Netherlands by an Allied push to the Zuider Zee. More probably, it meant that they needed the Dutch garrison to help man the Rhine. As against 70 or 80 divisions in December, Rundstedt was now estimated to have no more than 40 or 50 in the west. Since Dday, the Germans had lost over a million prisoners, plus a probable 500,000 in dead and permanently disabled, in the west.

General Eisenhower, on the other hand, had never been stronger. Last week he announced his long-rumored new army, the U.S. Fifteenth. Two facts were disclosed about the Fifteenth: 1) that it was attached to Bradley's Twelfth Army Group; 2) that it was commanded by Lieut. General Leonard T. Gerow, brilliant former commander of the V Corps. The Germans were left to guess the rest. They might plausibly guess that the Fifteenth would be poured over the Remagen crossing, as soon as the defenders were pushed beyond artillery range.

Watch the Second. Now was the time to rain blows without mercy on Germany's bleeding western flank. The Remagen bridge led into rugged country without any close objective of strategic importance. To realize Remagen's fullest value, ten or even 20 more crossings of the Rhine were needed, crossings by every means possible: assault boats, amphibious armor and carriers, motor-driven rafts, pontoon bridges, pneumatic-float bridges, even perhaps by multiple-span Bailey bridges longer than any yet thrown together. In the north, the Rhine is wide.

But it is shallower and slower there--and last week it was falling. If the Germans can pull themselves together, the Allied crossings are likely to be bloodily contested, especially if made in a frontal attack on the Ruhr. The Germans seemed to fear landings north and south of the Ruhr, aimed at quick envelopment of that vital industrial basin. Particularly, they seemed to fear the British Second Army, which, D.N.B. screamed, was moving up to Emmerich under smoke screens with 80,000 to 120,000 men and lavish bridging equipment.

Hope and Pride. The British Second is now the most fully rested of Eisenhower's seasoned armies. Direct offspring of Britain's famed Eighth (which Monty rolled from El Alamein to Tunis, and which is now bogged down in Italy), the Second had the hard job of holding the anchor at Caen, in Normandy, while Bradley's men made their spectacular breakout. The Second now carries the main burden of British hope and British pride in western Europe. It has had no full-scale action since it pushed the Germans behind the Maas River last autumn.

The British ground armies as a whole have come a long way since Dunkirk. They were ill-trained and vitiated by appeasement when war came, not unlike the "Old Contemptibles" which the Kaiser scorned in 1914. But they have learned and grown in the hard school of battle.

Five years ago, when the British went in & out of Norway, they were short of overcoats and their other winter equipment was pathetic. Now they are among the best-clad and best-equipped armies in the world, surpassing in some respects (e.g., footgear) the U.S.

The New Style. Like the British armies, the Second's commander, Lieut. General Sir Miles Christopher Dempsey, has learned and grown in World War II. He was a Lieutenant colonel in 1939. In those days, the usual type of top-ranking British general was majestic, rugged, slow-moving and often slow-thinking. The current type is trim, compact, quick-moving, quick witted and willing to learn -- like Montgomery, Alexander and Dempsey. Dempsey is the tallest of the three (six feet) but he is slender.

In many other ways, Monty and Dempsey are unlike. Monty is abstemious; Dempsey likes an occasional drink and a frequent smoke. Monty sometimes acts like a prima donna; Dempsey never does.

Monty is the subject of a hundred anecdotes ; nobody ever tells a story about Dempsey. He never tells one himself. He is modest and reticent, and enjoys being inconspicuous.

Despite these differences, despite the fact that Dempsey has never been known to seek favor, even despite the fact that he was not one of Monty's original men in the Homeric African-desert campaigns, Monty picked him for his present job --a true accolade for his military ability.

The Quiet Man. Born 48 years ago in Cheshire, of Irish parents, young Miles Christopher Dempsey went to Shrewsbury and Sandhurst. He fought in the last war, was wounded, won the Military Cross. Since then some wits have called him "Empsey Dempsey Empsey" (M.C. Dempsey, M.C.). Like many another aloof and quiet man, Dempsey has perversely acquired nicknames. Samples: "Bimbo" and "Lucky." In 1940 Dempsey went to France with the 13th Infantry Brigade and took it out again over the Dunkirk beaches. In England he rose rapidly through command and staff posts, learning about tank warfare and amphibious operations. He got into the last stages of the Africa campaign commanding the XIII Corps (he considers 13 his lucky number), took it into Sicily and Italy, fought several highly successful and highly unpublicized actions on the Biferno and Sangro Rivers. Then he was called back to lead Britain's invasion army. Three weeks after Dday, he was knighted.

Dempsey is the kind of general who, when he wants to see his corps commanders, goes to their headquarters. And if they happen to be busy with their own division commanders, he waits until they get through. Although he despises traffic jams, he never allows his driver to sound his siren. He likes cricket, maps, horses, detective stories, dislikes paper work and people who chew gum, has no interest in music or art. A bachelor, he lives with a brother in Sussex when he is in England.

Dempsey's acquaintances, of whom he has many, and his cronies, of whom he has none, agree that he is a splendid general but not a colorful man. Drowned in Monty's color, he was hardly known at all to the British public before Dday, and not much better known now. But the British, and the rest of the world, may hear a great deal about him in the near future.

* Napoleon's crossing was not contested; the people of Baden were on his side. Napoleon was moving to fight Austria, not Bavaria or Prussia.

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