The German Field Marshal Kesselring conferred on March 10, 1945 with senior Luftwaffe commanders, urging them to destroy the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen and any auxiliary bridges the Americans might construct. From 8 through 16 March, 1945 the Luftwaffe tried. The German planes struck at the railroad bridge, at the ferries, and at the tactical bridges, but with no success. Even when the German pilots got through the fighter screen, they ran into a dense curtain of antiaircraft fire. American antiaircraft units estimated that during the nine days they destroyed 109 German planes and probably eliminated 36 others out of a total of 367 that attacked. From 12 through 17 March 1945 a rocket unit with weapons emplaced in the Netherlands fired eleven V-2's (Vergeltungswaffen, for vengeance) in the direction of the bridge, the first and only tactical use of either of the so-called German V-weapons during World War II. One rocket hit a house 300 yards east of the bridge, killing three American soldiers and wounding fifteen.
That was the only damage. In the night of 16 March, the Germans tried another method, seven underwater swimmers in special rubber suits and carrying packages of plastic explosive compound - but from the first the Americans had anticipated such a gambit. When the German swimmers first tried to reach the bridge, American artillery fire discouraged them from entering the water. On the next night, they moved not against the railroad bridge but against tactical pontoon bridges, only to be spotted by the American searchlights. Blinded by the lights, the seven Germans, one by one, surrendered. On March 17, 1945 the Ludendorff Bridge finally collapsed while two hundred soldiers from the 276th Engineer Combat Battalion and 1058th Engineer Port Construction and Repair Group were still desperately working to maintain it, killing twenty-eight soldiers and injured sixty-three others. By that time, however, the Allies had gained a true foothold deep in German territory.
Source: The last Offensive by Charles B. MacDonald
Picture: The Ludendorff Bridge on March 17, 1945, approximately four hours before its collapse. National Archives and Records Administration.
Sac and Fox tribal members in front of a bark-covered lodge house, somewhere in Kansas. c.1850-1870 photo.
Abilene became Kansas’s first “queen” of the cowtowns when the first Texas herds arrived in 1867 at the frontier village on the Smoky Hill River. Four years later, after more than 440,000 beeves were shipped out of the former stage stop, Texas drovers shifted their herds to new railheads in Newton, Ellsworth and Wichita.
