Before the end of the day the airborne troops had all their objectives, and over the next couple of days the linkup with the infantry was complete. Twenty-first Army Group was over the Rhine.
BY THE FIRST week of spring 1945, Eisenhower’s armies had done what he had been planning for since the beginning of the year_close to the Rhine along its length, with a major crossing north of Dusseldorf-and what he had dared to hope for, additional crossings by First Army in the centre and Third Army to the south. The time for exploitation had arrived. The Allied generals were as one in taking up the phrase Lieutenant Timmermann had used at the Remagen bridge-Get going!
The 90th Division, on Patton’s left flank, headed east towards Hanau on the Main River. It crossed in assault boats on the night of March 28. Major John Cochran’s battalion ran into a battalion of Hitler Youth officer candidates, teenage Germans who were at a roadblock in a village. As Cochran’s men advanced, the German boys let go with their machine gun, killing one American. Cochran put some artillery fire on the roadblock and destroyed it. “One youth, perhaps aged 16, held up his hands,” Cochran recalled. “I was very emotional over the loss of a good soldier and I grabbed the kid and took off my cartridge belt.
“I asked him if there were more like him in the town. He gave me a stare and said, ‘I’d rather die than tell you anything.’ I told him to pray, because he was going to die. I hit him across the face with my thick, heavy belt. I was about to strike him again when I was grabbed from behind by Chaplain Kerns. He said, ‘Don’t!’ Then he took that crying child away. The Chaplain had intervened not only to save a life but to prevent me from committing a murder.” From the crossing of the Rhine to the end of the war, every man who died, died needlessly. It was that feeling that almost turned Major Cochran into a murderer.
Hitler and the Nazis had poisoned the minds of the boys Germany was throwing into the battle. Captain F.W. Norris of the 90th Division ran into another roadblock. His company took some casualties, then blasted away, wounding many. “The most seriously wounded was a young SS sergeant who looked just like one of Hitler’s supermen. He had led the attack. He was bleeding copiously and badly needed some plasma.” One of Norris’s medics started giving him a transfusion. The wounded German, who spoke excellent English, demanded to know if there was any Jewish blood in the plasma. The medic said damned if he knew, in the US people didn’t make such a distinction. The German said if he couldn’t have a guarantee that there was no Jewish blood he would refuse treatment.
Norris remembered: “In very positive terms I told him I really didn’t care whether he lived or not, but if he did not take the plasma he would certainly die. He looked at me calmly and said, ‘I would rather die than have any Jewish blood in me.’
“So he died.”
BY MARCH 28 First Army had broken out of the Remagen bridgehead. General Rose’s 3rd Armoured Division led the way, headed for the linkup with Ninth Army. That day Rose raced ahead, covering 90 miles, the longest gain on any single day of the war for any American unit. By March 31 he was attacking a German tank training centre outside Paderborn. Rose was at the head of a column in his jeep. Turning a corner, his driver ran smack into the rear of a Tiger tank. The German tank commander, about eighteen years old, opened his hatch and levelled his burp gun at Rose, yelling at him to surrender.
Rose, his driver, and his aide got out of the jeep and put their hands up. For some reason the tank commander became extremely agitated and kept hollering while gesturing towards Rose’s pistol. Rose lowered his arm to release his web belt and drop his holster to the ground. Apparently the German boy thought he was going to draw his pistol. In a screaming rage he fired his machine pistol straight into Rose’s head, killing him instantly. Maurice Rose was the first and only division commander killed in ETO.