Dimitri’s Reviews > Fire and Steel: The End of World War Two in the West > Status Update

Part of the underlying logic of the VARSITY airborne operation had been to help fix Armeegruppe B 's armored reserves and prevent them from being deployed elsewhere and it that the airborne operation was highly succesful.

As Stalingrad, or Ortana had demonstrated earlier.. urban warfare was not only an expensive business, but one in which the West's air suppremacy was an asset of limited value. Eisenhower saw no point in capturing an objective like Berlin at the estimated price of 100k casualties, only to later hand it over as part of the Soviet occupation zone as already defined at Yalta.

The weather, so often overlooked in these accounts, made a difference here, for the drizzle of spring softened everything apart from metalled roads, forcing the American vehicles to keep to the highways, where they were targeted by Panzerfaust wielding Volksgrenadiers. Despite the overcast, Messerschmitt 109s and jet-propelled 262 swooped on US units at every turn.

Those 67 Wehrmacht "divisions" in the West included 150k fully equipped personnel uselessly bottled up in four Atlantic ports, the Channel Islands & Dunkirk. In addition, 23 divisions were still contesting Italy against Mark Clark's Fifteenth Army Group, with 11 pointlessly lurking in Norway & 12 operating in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean.

"The Rhine is as swift as the Rhône, as wide as the Loire, limpid and green as the Somme, historic as the Tiber, royal as the Danube, mysterious as the Nile, spangled with gold like a river of America and covered with fables and phantoms like a river of Asia."

VICTOR HUGO

The Reich's western moat, a cornerstone of the German psyche, had proved to be a gentler experience than 6th Army Group had right to expect.

The throb of a hundred little engines carried through the silence of the night & the Germans soon realised what was afoot. The first wave of the Thunderbirds were unmolested, but the second wave had a hard time, losing half its boats, their occupants swept away & drowned in the speedy current.Enough made it, there was a glint of bayonets in the moonlight & the closest German positions fell.

Far from the rapid exploitation the senior commanders claimed in their memoirs & in many popular narratives, SHAEF had been stricken with nearly 2 weeks of operational indecision & paralysis about what do to with Remagen (because the master plan had been to use the Rhine as a moat to respectively trap German armies on the west bank & barrier their counterattacks on the east bank. Prepare the next big push at ease.

"Tough the Germans were on the run, the cost to those in the spearhead was high. Historians tend to concentrate on the divisional contributions, but the [2 regiments in Third Army] US cavalry are often forgotten. As a former cavalryman, I would be remiss in overlooking the assertation that "the cavalry contributed to a huge victory & helped zthird Army destroy 12 German divisions in its drive to the Rhine"

Thus by '45 the much vaunted Sigfried Line was less a wall than a curtain. More to the point, Hitler misread the utility of fixed defences. They can only DELAY. they cannot halt an opponent unless fully manned & infinitely resourced. Germany had neither the manpower nor the resources for the Westwall to do its job.

All US infantry divisions had independent tank battalions assigned to them, which were usually parcelled up into tank platoons to support regiments. This was against US tank doctrine, which insisted that armour should be deployed en masse... the infantry were [often] the beneficiaries of this slippage of doctrine, knowing they could always rely on immediate armor support.