OPPENHEIM, Germany — In the predawn darkness of March 23, 1945, six battalions of American infantry stood on the eastern bank of the Rhine River, having crossed Adolf Hitler’s most sacred natural barrier without firing a single artillery shell, and the news that reached Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower within hours would trigger one of the most consequential and politically explosive moments of the entire European campaign.
The crossing had been executed by the 5th Infantry Division’s 11th and 10th Infantry Regiments under Major General S. Leroy Irwin, part of Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Third Army, and it unfolded in near-total silence beginning at 10 p.
m. on March 22. Soldiers carried assault boats by hand to the waterline rather than driving them, paddled across the 1,000-foot-wide river without engine noise, and met almost no organized resistance from a German garrison composed largely of Volkssturm militia — elderly factory workers and boys handed bolt-action rifles and told to defend the fatherland.
By 2 a. m. on March 23, the entire 11th Infantry Regiment was across.
By 6 a. m. , six full battalions had established a bridgehead on the eastern shore.
Total American casualties for the assault: approximately 34 dead and wounded, a figure that military historians have described as bordering on miraculous for a night river crossing against a defended bank.
The operation had been set in motion four days earlier when General Omar Bradley, commanding the 12th Army Group and Patton’s direct superior, authorized Patton to “take the Rhine on the run” — a directive that placed the Third Army in direct competition with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s massive Operation Plunder, scheduled for the night of March 23 and involving more than one million men, 4,000 artillery pieces, and 36 Royal Navy landing craft hauled overland from the English Channel.
Patton called Bradley first on the morning of March 23. “Brad, don’t tell anyone, but I’m across,” Patton said, according to Bradley’s memoir “A Soldier’s Story.” “I sneaked a division over last night, but there are so few Krauts around there they don’t know it yet.
So don’t make any announcement. We’ll see how it goes.”
Bradley’s recorded response: “Well, I’ll be damned. You mean across the Rhine?”
“Sure am,” Patton replied.
The news traveled north to Eisenhower’s headquarters at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, arriving first as fragmentary reports of unusual Third Army activity near Oppenheim. Multiple accounts from aides present in the room describe Eisenhower as outwardly calm but visibly taken aback — putting down his cigarette, picking it up again, and responding to the news that Montgomery did not yet know with a profanity that has been retold in various forms across postwar memoirs.
Exactly what Eisenhower said in that moment remains a matter of historical interpretation, filtered through aides’ recollections recorded years later. But the picture across multiple accounts is consistent: surprise, followed immediately by the cold calculation of political consequences.
On March 23, Eisenhower wrote Patton a warm letter acknowledging the accomplishment and praising the Third Army’s performance. Publicly, however, he was measured and careful. He could not celebrate too loudly.
Montgomery was British. Britain was an ally. The coalition Eisenhower had spent two years holding together at enormous personal cost required maintenance, and a public declaration that Patton’s improvised night crossing had outdone Montgomery’s painstaking million-man assault would have been diplomatically ruinous.
In private conversations recorded by aides and revealed through postwar memoirs and biographies, Eisenhower reportedly called Patton’s crossing one of the most brilliant tactical maneuvers of the European campaign. Whether those exact words were used is difficult to verify definitively — they come to us filtered through recollections recorded years later — but they are consistent with Eisenhower’s documented admiration for the achievement and his private correspondence. He never made the sentiment public.
Given the political realities of coalition command, he could not.
Later that same day, when German forces had discovered the bridgehead and secrecy was moot, Patton called Bradley again with very different instructions. “Brad, for God’s sake, tell the world we’re across,” he reportedly said. “I want the world to know Third Army made it before Monty starts across.”
Bradley obliged. The press release went out, and by the time Montgomery’s massive artillery preparation began thundering on the night of March 23, American newspapers already had a story dated the previous evening that made Montgomery’s crossing look like it was playing catch-up.
The engineering feat that followed the infantry assault was, by any measure, extraordinary. The 249th Engineer Combat Battalion, part of the 1,135th Engineer Combat Group under 12th Corps, was tasked with constructing a 366-meter floating bridge across the Rhine at Nierstein, adjacent to Oppenheim. They completed it in 18 hours, working in darkness, under orders that no noise was permitted, with the enemy only 400 yards away.
A memorial plaque erected at the crossing site in 2017, attended by Robert Shallato, the last living veteran of the operation, records the achievement. “This remarkable engineering accomplishment undoubtedly contributed to the shortening of the war, thus saving countless lives on both sides of the conflict,” the plaque reads.
German artillery did find the engineers during construction, scattering shells that fell in the vineyards and around the riverbank, but failed to score direct hits on the bridge itself. German aircraft appeared and were driven off by American anti-aircraft batteries pre-positioned on the western bank. The bridge survived intact.
By the time the sun rose on March 23, tanks were rolling across it.
On March 24, two days after the crossing, Patton arrived at the Oppenheim pontoon bridge. His aide, Colonel Charles Codman, recorded in his own memoir that Patton led a small procession casually across the bridge, stopped halfway, walked to the bridge’s edge, surveyed the slow-moving surface of the river, and without further comment unbuttoned his trousers and relieved himself into the Rhine.
“I have been looking forward to this,” Patton reportedly said.
Patton’s own memoir records that he and his aides “stopped to spit in the river” — a discrepancy that historians have noted as one of the small ambiguities of the historical record. Codman’s account is more detailed and specific, and the famous photograph taken on the bridge, along with the telegram Patton sent to Eisenhower afterward, strongly corroborates that something considerably more dramatic than spitting occurred.
That evening, Patton sent a communiqué to Eisenhower at SHAEF that read: “Dear SHAEF, I have just pissed into the Rhine River. For God’s sake, send some gasoline.”
When he reached the eastern bank, Patton stepped out, scooped two handfuls of German soil from the ground, and said, “Thus, William the Conqueror” — a deliberate reference to the Norman king who stumbled and fell when landing in England in 1066, then turned the bad omen into a symbol of possession.
Meanwhile, 300 miles to the north, Montgomery was conducting final preparations for Operation Plunder. He did not know, could not yet know, that an American general had already crossed the Rhine 34 hours ahead of him. When he found out, the fury was contained but absolute.
Operation Plunder launched on the night of March 23 and proceeded, by all measurable military standards, brilliantly. Roughly 4,000 Allied artillery pieces fired for four hours in a bombardment that shook the ground for miles. Crossings at Rees, Wesel, and south of the Lippe River went largely to plan.
On March 24, Operation Varsity dropped 14,000 paratroopers east of the Rhine — the largest single-day airborne operation in history.
But Operation Plunder cost 6,781 Allied casualties. On March 24 alone, 1,111 Allied soldiers were killed — the worst single day for Allied airborne troops of the entire war. By the time Plunder launched, Patton’s engineers already had a bridge across the Rhine, armored vehicles were already rolling east, and the headlines in American newspapers were already written.
Montgomery never forgave being upstaged. His memoirs, published after the war, devoted substantial space to Operation Plunder and mentioned Oppenheim in a single sentence, characterizing it as a crossing of minor tactical significance. Military historians have disagreed with that characterization ever since.
What followed the Oppenheim crossing was not so much a battle as a dissolution. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had defended Italy for 18 months against Allied invasions and had been commander-in-chief of the Western Front for only 11 days, asked his staff what reserves could reach Oppenheim to seal the bridgehead. The answer was almost nothing — perhaps 60 tanks from remnants of the 11th Panzer Division, roughly 30 miles away with limited fuel and ammunition, and 18 artillery pieces of mixed calibers with no unified fire control.
Kesselring attacked anyway. The German armor rolled toward American lines. American artillery — not 18 guns, but over 100 guns from division and corps artillery combined — opened fire with full air observation.
P-47 Thunderbolts dove on the scattered panzers. None of the German tanks reached the bridge. The Luftwaffe sent roughly 15 fighters and fighter-bombers to destroy the bridge from the air.
American anti-aircraft guns on both banks drove them back. The bridge stood intact.
Kesselring sent a message to Hitler recommending withdrawal to prepared positions east of the Rhine. Hitler’s response was four words: “Hold at all costs.” There was nothing left to hold with.
By March 26, 18,000 American soldiers had crossed at Oppenheim and Nierstein. By late March, an entire armored division was rolling east. By March 28, the bridgehead was 30 miles deep.
German resistance in the central front didn’t just break — it collapsed. Entire divisions surrendered. Command structures ceased to function.
Patton’s Third Army took Frankfurt on March 29. They reached Nuremberg in early April. By mid-April, they were in Bavaria.
The drive from the Rhine to the Austrian border took fewer than four weeks. Compare that to the eight months it had taken to fight from Normandy to the Rhine — through the hedgerows of Normandy, the Siegfried Line, the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge. Eight months to reach the river, then four weeks to cross Germany and end it.
Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, less than seven weeks after Patton crossed the Rhine in silence.
The memorial at Nierstein, dedicated in 2017, stands at the exact spot where the first boat landed. It commemorates the 249th Engineer Combat Battalion by name. Helen Patton, the general’s granddaughter, attended the ceremony alongside Katherine Rommel, the granddaughter of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel — the descendants of two opposing commanders standing together at the place where one of the war’s decisive moments unfolded.
Patton himself was killed not in battle, but by a car accident on December 9, 1945, on a road near Mannheim, seven months after the victory he had done so much to achieve. He was riding in his 1938 Cadillac staff car heading to a pheasant hunt when it struck a U. S.
Army truck at a road junction. The collision broke his neck. He was taken to the U.
S. Army Hospital in Heidelberg, where he was told he would never ride a horse again or lead any kind of normal life. His reported response was, “This is a hell of a way to die.”
He died on December 21, 1945, 12 days after the accident, from a blood clot, paralyzed from the neck down at age 60. He was buried on Christmas Eve at the Luxembourg American Cemetery, among the soldiers of the Third Army who had fallen at the Battle of the Bulge.
Montgomery lived until 1976, carrying his resentment right to the end. Eisenhower became the 34th president of the United States and served two terms, managing in public to be as measured about the Rhine crossing as he had been in March 1945.
The Rhine still runs through Oppenheim. The vineyards still climb the eastern bank. At Nierstein, there is now a monument, granite and bronze, marking the exact spot where the first boat landed.
It has German flags flanking it. It gives the date, the unit, and a description of what happened. The quietest possible marker for one of the war’s most audacious moments.
But it names the right people — the engineers who built the bridge.