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March 22, 2025The 30th Infantry Regiment, with Phil’s 3rd Battalion in the lead, covered sixty miles in three days to assemble directly west of Mannheim and the Rhine River. The German autobahn, built originally for military traffic, served its purpose well.[1]
On the night of March 24–25, 1945, under a scudding moon periodically obscured by clouds, the assault elements moved up to the Rhine and assembled two to three miles from the river for Operation Rhineland.
The Rhine was about 1,000 feet wide and up to seventeen feet deep at the crossing areas, flowing swiftly between revetted banks. The country on both sides was flat and sparsely wooded, so men and equipment had to be concentrated under cover of darkness.
H-Hour was set for 0230 hours, March 26. Division artillery opened fire at 0152 hours with a terrific barrage: 10,000 shells crashed on the east bank, hitting the Germans’ defensive positions over a thirty-eight-minute period, while assault troops from the 3rd Infantry tensely crouched on the western bank. The artillery bursts painted the dark sky a lurid red.
At 0225 hours, a sudden, eerie silence descended on the Rhine as the Allied artillery barrage ceased. Five minutes later, the hush was broken by the throbbing of skiff engines as the first wave of “storm boats”[2] headed across the river.
Once in the water, each crossing took less than thirty seconds.
American machine guns fired tracers to guide the first wave as it penetrated the fog and smoke. Colored landing lights showed the way for those who followed. The massive bombardment and chemical smoke blinded and stunned the German defenders, lifting just as the first wave hit the shore.
Communication wires that had been destroyed by the opening barrage kept German forward observers from calling in fire missions.
The east bank, defended by the enemy in double foxholes equipped with machine guns, was attacked immediately, resulting in tense, close-quarter firefights which forced the Germans to retreat.
After his successful crossing, Phil observed a larger boat carrying some of the battalion aid station personnel capsize ten to twenty yards from the riverbank. Without a thought, he and several of his men stripped off their coats, boots, and equipment and dove into the ice-cold water.
Phil grabbed the first man, who was panicking and fighting to keep his head above the water. Just as Phil did with his good friend Billy in the Mississippi River [eight years earlier], he dove below the surface, turned the man to face away from him, wrapped him up in a cross-chest lock, and dragged him to shore through the churning water.
Phil was pleased to learn that he had saved the life of Captain Hilard Kravitz, the battalion surgeon who’d tended to his leg wound in a field hospital and offered him a swig of his “private medicine.”
Kravitz was lucky to escape drowning; nine of the seventeen men drowned.
Despite the enemy resistance and artillery fire, the last of the 3rd Battalion assault boats crossed the swift-flowing Rhine by 0305 hours.
When machine gun and small arms fire ceased to harass the crossing sites, engineers began building a pair of floating bridges while still under artillery and mortar fire. They brought in two heavy pontoon rafts and two infantry support rafts to help them complete a 948-foot treadway bridge and a 1,040-foot heavy pontoon bridge in just over nine hours.
During the first twenty-four hours of floating bridge operation, 1,000 support vehicles were transported across the mighty Rhine. Evacuation of casualties back across the river was carried out by DUKWs[3] and ferries, as all bridges were one-way only – into Germany.[4]
Once the majority of the American troops and material were across the Rhine, Germany’s defeat was all but assured.
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[1] Larimore, At First Light, 218.
[2] These high-speed assault boats, equipped with a 55 HP outboard motor, were deployed by the Combat Engineer Battalion and designed to hit the shoreline at high speed. A two-man crew could ferry six soldiers at a time.
[3] The DUKW (colloquially known as a “Duck”) was a six-wheel-drive amphibious truck used in World War II for the transportation of goods and troops over land and water. The name DUKW comes from General Motors nomenclature: D: designed in 1942; U: utility; K: all-wheel drive; and W: dual-tandem rear axles. Surviving DUKWs have found popularity as tourist craft in marine environments.
[4] Larimore, Ibid, 218-219
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