The Rhine has been a great barrier through history. The mighty river became the eastern border of the Roman empire, and no emperor after Caesar tried to permanently conquer the lands beyond it. It was the boundary between Roman ‘civilisation’ and the ‘barbarians’. In countless wars since, it has been an obstacle that only the most successful generals have been able to cross in anger – such as Marshal Blücher, who built an early pontoon-style bridge in 1813 and succeeded in carrying the war against Napoleon into France itself.
And so, at the beginning of 1945, Supreme Commander General Dwight D Eisenhower was naturally daunted by the prospect of having to cross the Rhine. He wrote of it as a ‘formidable military obstacle’. It was wide, deeply embanked and fast-flowing with wild currents. He described trying to cross it as more like ‘assaulting a beach’ than traversing a river. General George C Marshall, the Chief of Staff in Washington, later wrote: ‘I dreaded… the advance to the Rhine more than any other operation during the war.’
Formidable strength
To the Germans, the Rhine was a vital line of resistance, a border in the German national psyche that had to be defended to save the Fatherland. And, of course, the Allies knew that the Germans had explosives planted on most of the bridges across the Rhine, which they would blow up in advance of the arrival of Allied troops.
