Pistol to Flank

Larks sang in the spring sky and the shaky-legged lambs frisked in the German fields. In some of the smashed beer houses were broken pianos, drums, brass horns. But the most fascinating thing in sight was the rolling ribbon of the Autobahn --the four-lane superhighway connecting Frankfurt am Main and the Ruhr.

Advancing in the Remagen bridgehead, Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges' First Army men brought the highway under artillery fire, then inched forward to machine-gun range. Thus they cut an important Nazi lateral communication line ori the east bank of the Rhine. Finally a 78th Division platoon, led by a staff sergeant, crossed the road in what one correspondent called "a gallant, old-fashioned infantry charge across 250 yards of coverless, fire-swept ground." At week's end the Yanks were astride the road along a six-mile stretch and had pushed a mile beyond.

The Yanks lengthened the bridgehead to the north and seized rail yards at Koenigswinter, after bypassing a summit called the Drachenfels ("Dragon's Rock"), where the legendary Siegfried slew the dragon Fafnir. They were coming out of the deep-gashed hills toward the flat plain that leads straight to the Ruhr.

Earlier, the Nazis had seemed unable to decide what to do about the bridgehead. One of their counterattacks pushed the doughboys back 400 yards; at another spot, 9th Infantry Division units ran into 24 German tanks, including three Mark VI Tigers. Nevertheless, the enemy seemed to be pulling his nondescript infantry back, leaving a shell of armor and self-propelled guns. Berlin claimed that Lieut. General Leonard T. Gerow's new Fifteenth Army had been sent over the Remagen crossing, that Fifteenth and First Army men in the bridgehead totaled 100,000. Apparently Berlin was not hopeful of throwing any such force as that back into the Rhine. Even the collapse of the Remagen bridge (see below) was only a minor inconvenience for the Americans.

This week the Remagen bridgehead area had grown to 144 square miles. As the beachhead at Anzio had been, Remagen was a pistol jabbed into the Nazi flank. Also like Anzio, the breakout would probably be timed with attacks elsewhere.

What's Cooking? It seemed clear that Field Marshal Montgomery was getting ready for multiple crossings in the north, and that the attacks would be spearheaded by Lieut. General Sir Miles Christopher Dempsey's British Second Army. In the House of Commons, War Secretary Sir James Grigg stated flatly that "our forces" were preparing to cross ''in force."

At Duisburg, Ninth Army patrols and German patrols were trying to feel out the opposite banks. Ninth Army guns shelled German workers who still came & went from the Duisburg factories, and eight-inch guns reached twelve miles to the Krupp works in air-battered Essen.

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