Hoping that America would join Germany in saving Europe from Bolshevism offered a final reason to play for time and spend lives. Though the Wehrmacht High Command no longer knew the scale of its own losses, in 1945 each day of fighting would cost the lives of 10,000 German soldiers. As long as the Rhine held, the Wehrmacht was defending a coherent, if greatly shrunken, territory, in which every week kept the prospect alive that the Grand Alliance against the Reich might still fall apart.
