The Rhine River ran black under a sliver of moon on the night of March 22nd, 1945, and the men of the U. S. Fifth Infantry Division climbed into assault boats with the silence of men who knew they were making history.
No artillery had softened the far shore. No smoke screen concealed their crossing. The only smoke was thirty miles north at Mainz, a deliberate deception laid down to convince the German High Command that the assault would come there.
It would not. At approximately 10:00 p. m.
, the first boats pushed off from the west bank at Oppenheim, ten miles south of the decoy, and by dawn on March 23rd, three American battalions were across the last great natural barrier of Nazi Germany. Total casualties for the entire crossing: eight men. Eight.
The news would not stay secret for long, and when it broke, it would shatter the fragile ego of the Anglo-American alliance, expose the shifting tectonic plates of global power, and seal the fate of a British field marshal who had spent two years believing he was indispensable.
The man who ordered that crossing was Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. , 59 years old, a dyslexic Californian who had memorized his military history rather than read it, a man who wore ivory-handled revolvers, prayed daily, cursed constantly, and had been sidelined for slapping two shell-shocked soldiers in a Sicilian hospital.
He was also, by any measure, the most operationally aggressive commander the U. S. Army possessed.
At approximately 8:00 a. m. on March 23rd, Patton picked up a field telephone from his headquarters trailer forty miles west of the Rhine and called General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, in Luxembourg City.
“Brad, don’t tell anyone, but I’m across,” Patton said, according to Bradley’s postwar memoir. “I sneaked a division over last night, but there are so few Krauts around there, they don’t know it yet.” Bradley, the quiet Missourian who had graduated West Point in the class of 1915 alongside Eisenhower, was silent for a moment.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You mean across the Rhine?” Patton confirmed.
“Sure am.”
The 180 miles of river between Patton at Oppenheim and Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery at Rees would become the longest 180 miles in the history of the Anglo-American alliance. Montgomery, 57 years old, the victor of El Alamein, the ascetic, teetotal, brilliant, and impossible British commander, was preparing Operation Plunder, a meticulously planned assault crossing of the lower Rhine between Rees and Wesel. He had brought to it 1,284,712 men from three national armies, 5,481 artillery pieces, three months of preparation, 250,000 tons of supplies, the largest smoke screen ever laid on a battlefield, and two full airborne divisions—17,000 paratroopers—for a coordinated drop east of the river.
It was, by any professional standard, a masterpiece of planning. But it was not fast. Montgomery would not cross until March 23rd at 9:00 p.
m. , preceded by a four-hour bombardment from 4,000 guns. Patton had crossed twenty-four hours earlier, in the dark, in boats, with no preparation at all.
The comparison was devastating, and it was deliberately engineered. On March 19th, four days before the crossings, Bradley had met with Patton and Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges in Luxembourg. They had learned that Eisenhower was under pressure to transfer as many as ten American divisions to Montgomery’s operational command for the duration of Plunder.
If those transfers went through, the American First and Third Armies would be frozen on the defensive while Montgomery got the credit for the decisive blow into Germany. Bradley did not want that outcome. Hodges did not want it.
Patton, who had spent the previous fall reading about Montgomery’s operational virtue while his own Third Army fought across France, did not want it either. The meeting on March 19th was where they agreed on what to do about it. Bradley told Patton to take the Rhine on the run.
Force the issue on the ground. Once American troops were across in strength, Eisenhower would not be able to divert divisions north. He would have to reinforce success where he found it.
Patton needed no persuading. The crossing at Oppenheim was not the act of a rogue commander defying his superiors; it was the execution of a plan approved by his direct superior three days earlier. And for the rest of March 23rd, Patton tried to keep it quiet.
He wanted twenty-four to forty-eight hours of tactical silence to consolidate his bridgehead before the Germans counterattacked. The Germans did not know. The British did not know.
The American press did not know. Then, on the morning of March 24th, everything changed. Montgomery’s Operation Plunder was in its opening hours.
The four-hour barrage had ended overnight. The commandos, the Highlanders, the Scots, and the Americans of the Ninth Army were fighting across the Rhine between Rees and Wesel. The airborne divisions were about to drop into Operation Varsity.
Every war correspondent in Europe was oriented on the northern sector. At approximately 8:30 a. m.
, in Luxembourg City, General Omar Bradley called a press briefing. He did not have to. Nobody had ordered him to.
He made the decision himself.
Bradley announced the Oppenheim crossing. His exact statement, as recorded by the American war correspondents present, was that the Third United States Army under General Patton had crossed the Rhine River at Oppenheim on the night of March 22nd without benefit of aerial bombardment, ground smoke, artillery preparation, or airborne drop. Read that sentence again.
Without aerial bombardment—Montgomery had aerial bombardment. Without ground smoke—Montgomery had the largest smoke screen in the history of warfare. Without artillery preparation—Montgomery had 4,000 guns firing for four hours.
Without airborne drop—Montgomery had the largest single-day airborne operation ever conducted. Every phrase in Bradley’s briefing was a shot at Montgomery. Every phrase was designed to make the northern crossing, which was still in progress at that moment, look overengineered by comparison.
Bradley, the quiet Missourian, the school teacher’s son, the general whom Ernie Pyle had called the GI general because he seemed so unassuming, had just publicly humiliated a British field marshal in the middle of the field marshal’s greatest operation. And Bradley knew exactly what he was doing.
The American press exploded within twenty-four hours. The front pages of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and every other major American daily were carrying variations of the same headline: Patton Beats Monty Across the Rhine. Third Army Crosses Without Preparation.
Simple Assault Boats Beat Airborne Drops. The British press tried to defend Operation Plunder. It was on any military basis indefensible not to.
Plunder was the more significant operation. Plunder had captured more ground, taken more prisoners, and broken the last German defensive line. Plunder had involved the largest single-day airborne operation in history.
But the British headlines could not overcome the American narrative. Patton was across first. Patton had done it in a night.
Patton had done it with eight casualties. That was the story that traveled. Montgomery read the American press coverage on the morning of March 25th in his tactical headquarters near Wesel.
His staff watched him. His chief of staff, Freddy de Guingand, expected an outburst. There was no outburst.
Instead, Montgomery called his corps commanders together and told them that Operation Plunder had achieved every objective. Casualties were acceptable. The bridgehead was secure.
The enemy was in retreat. They had done their duty. History would judge them accordingly.
It was the response of a professional soldier. It was dignified. It was correct.
But de Guingand, the one man Montgomery listened to, was watching him closely. And de Guingand later told friends that Monty was shattered. Not militarily.
His operation had succeeded. But personally and professionally, in the ways that Bernard Montgomery cared about most, he had just been publicly outmaneuvered by an American commander he had spent two years dismissing as reckless. That afternoon, in his private caravan, Montgomery wrote in his personal journal that he had won the battle and lost the war.
He wrote that he had begun to understand that Britain’s role in the war was no longer to lead, but to follow.
The demonstration of that shift was theatrical. On the afternoon of March 24th, Patton walked out onto his pontoon bridge at Oppenheim. Engineers had built a floating bridge across 400 yards of the German river in less than a day.
American trucks and jeeps were already rolling across it. War correspondents were waiting. Life magazine photographers were waiting.
Signal Corps camera crews were waiting. Patton had told them all to be there. He walked to the middle of the bridge, where the current of the Rhine was running beneath him on both sides.
He stopped. He unbuttoned his fly. He urinated into the Rhine River.
The photographers took the picture. The Signal Corps camera captured it. Patton finished, buttoned his fly, and walked off the bridge without saying a word.
The photograph ran in Life magazine on April 9th, 1945. It became one of the most reproduced images of the war. In it, an American general in a tanker jacket stands on his own pontoon bridge and urinates into the last natural barrier of Nazi Germany.
Every American male who saw the photograph understood the message. Every British field marshal who saw it also understood. The act was not spontaneous.
Patton was a lifelong student of military history. He had read the Civil War memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman, who had ridden his horse into a Confederate river and urinated into it as an expression of contempt. Patton was quoting Sherman, in an act of theater performed for cameras he had personally arranged to have present.
The moment was choreographed. The photograph was intended. And it worked.
Two days after the photograph was taken, on Palm Sunday, March 25th, 1945, Winston Churchill arrived at the Rhine. He was 70 years old, exhausted, overweight, drinking too much, and running on fumes. He had been prime minister since May 10th, 1940, the day the Germans invaded Belgium and the Netherlands.
He had held the country together through the Battle of Britain, through the Blitz, through the fall of Singapore, through the desert campaign, through D-Day. He was accompanied by Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, and by Lord Charles Moran, his personal physician. Montgomery met him at a forward headquarters near Xanten in the Wesel sector.
American commanders, including Lieutenant General William Simpson of the Ninth Army, were also present. There is no evidence in the records of any confrontation between Churchill and Montgomery about Patton that day. There is no letter from Montgomery to Churchill demanding Patton be relieved.
There is no cable from Churchill to Eisenhower rejecting such a demand. There is no diary entry recording Churchill’s private admission that Britain was now the junior partner. What actually happened is more restrained and in its own way more moving.
Churchill greeted Montgomery. Churchill praised Operation Plunder. Churchill praised the American Ninth Army’s contribution.
Churchill was driven in a small boat across the Rhine to the east bank, becoming the first head of a Western Allied government to set foot in Germany during the war. He posed for photographs. He waved to American and British soldiers.
He returned to the west bank. His statement to reporters that day, on the record, was that the German was “whipped.” That is what he said.
That is all he said.
If Churchill made a private choice between American speed and British planning in March 1945, it was not made in a dramatic conversation on a Bavarian airfield. It was not made in dictated messages. It was not made in whispered admissions to his physician over whiskey.
It was made, if it was made at all, in the fact that after that visit, Churchill never again tried, in public or in private, to push British operational preferences onto American commanders. He never demanded that Patton be reined in. He never demanded that Bradley be reined in.
He never demanded that Eisenhower reallocate American divisions to give Montgomery a leading role in the final drive across Germany. He accepted it quietly, without fanfare, without diary entries. That is what actually happened.
Two days after Churchill’s visit, on March 27th, Eisenhower summoned Patton to SHAEF forward headquarters at Reims. It was a private conversation. Eisenhower began by praising the Oppenheim crossing.
The military execution had been brilliant, the casualties minimal, the tactical result maximal. Then he shifted. He told Patton that from a political standpoint, the crossing had created the biggest inter-alliance crisis of the campaign since the Bulge press conference in January.
He told Patton that Bradley’s press briefing had been read by the British press as a calculated humiliation of Montgomery. He told Patton that Churchill had been forced to spend political capital he did not have to spare, choosing quietly and without announcement to accept American operational leadership rather than defend British operational primacy. Eisenhower ordered Patton, not asked him, to stop granting press interviews about the Rhine crossing, to stop making public comparisons with Montgomery, to stop comparing himself to Montgomery in any way whatsoever for the remainder of the campaign.
Patton obeyed. For the remaining forty-two days of the European war, George Patton was operationally aggressive and publicly quiet, precisely as Eisenhower had ordered.
The cost of Montgomery’s masterpiece was not trivial. Operation Plunder cost the Allies 6,781 casualties on the ground, plus 2,378 airborne casualties in Varsity, for a combined total of 9,159 Allied dead and wounded to establish the bridgehead. At Oppenheim, 200 miles to the south, Patton’s Fifth Infantry Division had done a broadly similar strategic thing, though on a narrower front, for eight casualties.
Eight. That comparison is the story of Anglo-American command in the last spring of the war in a single number. It is not by itself the whole story.
Patton’s crossing had been unopposed because his deception at Mainz had worked and because German reserves in that sector had already been shattered by the Third Army’s earlier advance through the Palatinate. Montgomery’s crossing had been opposed because it went across the last credible German defensive line in the west. If the two operations had been reversed in sector, the casualty figures might have been reversed, too.
Montgomery did not fail. His operation succeeded exactly as planned. His casualties were remarkably low for the scale of the assault.
His bridgehead was permanent by the fifth day. By every professional military standard, Operation Plunder was a masterpiece. But nobody in America was reading about masterpieces on the morning of March 24th.
They were reading about Patton, who had done it in one night with eight men dead.
The men who were there paid the price. Major General Thomas Rennie, commanding the British 51st Highland Division, was killed by German mortar fire on the east bank of the Rhine on the morning of March 24th. He was 45 years old, the highest-ranking Allied officer killed in the crossing.
He had been born in Fuzhou, China, the son of a British customs official, had been captured at St. Valery in 1940, had escaped through occupied territory, had commanded troops at El Alamein, had led the British Third Infantry Division ashore at Sword Beach on D-Day. He had 24 hours to live when he went across the river.
He is buried today at the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery in Germany alongside 7,671 other Commonwealth War dead. Major General Matthew Ridgway, commanding the airborne operation, was wounded in the shoulder by a hand grenade fragment on the drop zone. He was 50 years old, 21 days past his birthday.
He would live to be 98, serve as Army Chief of Staff, and quietly tell President Eisenhower in 1954 that intervening in Vietnam to save the French at Dien Bien Phu would be a catastrophic mistake. Eisenhower listened. The 17th Airborne and the British 6th Airborne lost 2,378 men in a single day, the costliest single-day airborne operation of the Second World War.
The 45th Royal Marine Commando watched two lines of red Bofors tracer rise into the sky to mark the axis of their advance. The 4th Canadian Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment fired 13,896 rounds in one night. The Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa Machine Gun Regiment fired continuously for the full duration of the barrage.
All of that happened. All of it is in the record. All of it deserves to be named.
The war in Europe ended forty-four days after the Rhine crossings. At 2:41 a. m.
on May 7th, 1945, in a small red schoolhouse in Reims, Colonel General Alfred Jodl of the German Army High Command signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces. The alliance that the Rhine crossings had tested survived. It became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on April 4th, 1949.
It survived the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the entire 44 years of the Cold War. When the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, Britain took its seat as a founding member. It was a smaller seat than the seat it had held in 1940.
The seat next to it, occupied by the United States, was bigger. Britain understood this and accepted it because Winston Churchill had accepted it quietly on Palm Sunday 1945, standing on the west bank of the Rhine watching Field Marshal Montgomery point at a map. The title of this story says that Churchill chose Patton over Montgomery and that Britain lost control of the war.
Both of those statements are simplifications. Churchill did not choose Patton personally. He did not have the power to demand Patton’s relief and did not attempt to.
Britain did not lose control of the war in a single day or a single conversation. Britain lost control gradually over the entire span of the conflict as American manpower and American industry and American operational tempo scaled past what British doctrine could match. The Rhine crossings of March 22nd through 27th, 1945, did not cause the shift.
They demonstrated a shift that was already permanent.
Patton did not last a year after his triumph. On December 9th, 1945, his staff car, a 1938 Cadillac Model 75 limousine, collided with a slow-moving American Army 2½-ton truck at a railroad crossing near Mannheim. Patton was thrown forward.
His head struck the metal partition. His neck was fractured between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down.
He lay in a hospital in Heidelberg for twelve days, conscious, in traction, unable to move. His wife, Beatrice, flew from Massachusetts to be with him. He died on December 21st, 1945, of a pulmonary embolism.
He was 60 years old. He is buried today at the Luxembourg American Cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg, at the head of the American graves he commanded. Five thousand seventy-six American soldiers from the Third Army lie in the same ground.
Montgomery lived 31 more years. He was elevated to the peerage in 1946 as Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. He served as chief of the Imperial General Staff, then as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe at NATO.
He never apologized to Bradley, to Patton’s memory, to Eisenhower, or to anyone else for anything he had said or done during the war. He never revised his account of the Rhine crossings. He never accepted in print that the balance of Anglo-American operational leadership had shifted in 1945.
He died on March 24th, 1976, exactly 31 years to the day after the airborne casualties of Operation Varsity. Churchill lost the general election of July 1945, four months after his Palm Sunday visit to the Rhine. He returned as prime minister in 1951, served until 1955, and died on January 24th, 1965, at the age of 90.
His state funeral was the first for a commoner since the Duke of Wellington in 1852. He is buried at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon, Oxfordshire, less than a mile from Blenheim Palace where he was born.
Bradley was promoted to General of the Army in 1950, the last American ever to hold that rank. He served as the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He died on April 8th, 1981, at 88.
Eisenhower served two terms as president, warned the nation about the military-industrial complex, and died on March 28th, 1969. Marshall served as Secretary of State, authored the Marshall Plan, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, the only professional soldier ever to receive it. He died on October 16th, 1959.
Say their names. Say the names of the Fifth Infantry Division at Oppenheim. Say the names of the 17th Airborne dropping into Wesel.
Say the names of the Highland Division at Rees, the Scottish Division behind them, the commandos ahead of them. Say the name of Thomas Rennie, killed on the east bank of the Rhine on March 24th, 1945, at 45 years old, buried at Reichswald Forest with his men. Say the name of Patton, dead in a hospital bed in Heidelberg on December 21st of the same year at 60, buried at Luxembourg with his soldiers.
Say the name of Montgomery, quietly writing in his caravan that Britain would follow now instead of leading. Say the name of Churchill, 16 weeks from losing an election he did not expect to lose, buried at Bladon within sight of the palace where he was born. Say the name of Bradley, whose press briefing on the morning of March 24th in Luxembourg was the actual instrument by which the world learned what the Rhine had already decided.
They were all there, all of them, on both banks of one river in one week in the last spring of the most consequential war in the history of the modern West. The Rhine had held for 2,000 years. It was crossed in eight nights.
And Britain did not lose control of the war. Britain handed control over in the last full week of March 1945, on a floating pontoon bridge at Oppenheim and a stone map table at Xanten. Quietly, without ceremony, the way great empires actually end.
Not in defeat. In succession.
