[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 42 (Tuesday, March 7, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H2782-H2784]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1915
REMEMBERING WORLD WAR II
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Vucanovich). Under a previous order of
the House, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for
5 minutes.
Mr. DORNAN. Madam Speaker, I wish I had an hour because my subject
certainly is worthy of it.
Madam Speaker, 50 years ago today the House of Representatives came
to a screeching halt, and so did the United States Senate. They stood
in the aisles here and cheered because the United States had crossed
the Rhine on the Ludendorf railroad bridge at Remagen. And in just
these few minutes--I will expand my remarks later--but in just these
few minutes I think again of Ronald Reagan's goodbye to his country 9
days before George Bush was sworn in as President.
In the close of President Reagan's goodbye after 8 wonderful years,
he said, ``We must teach our young people about the history of our
country, what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant.'' He mentioned D-day.
He mentioned Vietnamese boat people, Vietnamese rescue at sea, with a
refugee yelling up to an American sailor, ``Hello, freedom man.'' He
mentioned all the sacrifices that had gone before us. He told the
children of America, ``If your parents are not teaching you at the
kitchen table the history of your country, hit them on it.'' I think
that would be a very American thing to do.
Listen to this moment in history that President Eisenhower said was
absolutely stunning.
Time magazine said it was a moment for all history.
After the war, General Eisenhower was quoted:
Broad success in war is usually foreseen by days or weeks,
with the result that when it actually arrives, higher
commanders and staffs have discounted it and are immersed in
plans for the future. This, however, was completely
unforeseen.
We were across the Rhine, 600 people, by midnight. We were
across the Rhine on a permanent bridge, the traditional
defensive barrier to the heart of Germany, the Rhine was
pierced.
Finally, defeat of the enemy, which we had long calculated
would be accomplished in late spring, the summer campaign of
'45 was now on our minds just around the corner.
General Eisenhower's chief of
staff, his alter ego, General Walter Bedell Smith, termed the
Remagan Bridge worth its weight in gold. And a few days later it
collapsed, killing 14 brave engineers.
Let me give the names of our great heroes. The first ones across
should certainly have gotten the Medal of Honor. When the young
Brigadier General Hoge said, ``Get across that bridge,'' a young
sergeant and a young lieutenant did not pause or say, ``But, sir, every
sniper on the east side of that river is going to have my heart or my
forehead in his gunsights.'' They just obeyed.
The first man across was a sergeant, the backbone of the military,
Sergeant Alex Drabik of Holland, a suburb of Toledo, Ohio. He was a
squad leader in the 3d platoon.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur].
Ms. KAPTUR. I say to the gentleman that Drabik was a very
distinguished resident of my district for many years until his death
about a year ago. We were very proud of his service. He was the first
U.S. soldier across the Rhine.
Mr. DORNAN. I wish he was here. If I were running this place, I would
have him address a joint session of Congress. That is what this man did
to save tens of thousands of Germans who did not vote for Hitler who
were being wiped out. All the people in the concentration camps that
lived because the war ended 3 months earlier and had stopped them from
starving to death and all of the untold GI's and the Navy and Army Air
Corps and Marines and everybody that died.
By the way, today we were only day 17 of 36 days on Iowa Jima. The
Navy shelling stopped today. The Marines were still pressing on to lose
almost 6,000 people and 800 others killed in action.
Here is Drabik. He was with the 27th Armored Infantry.
The second man across was an officer, 2d lieutenant, and
get this German-American name, Karl Timmermann, of West
Point, not New York with the academy, but Nebraska, company commander
as a 2d lieutenant, company CO, 27th Infantry Battalion, first officer
over the bridge.
Sergeant Joe DeLisio, of Bronx, NY, platoon leader of the 3d platoon,
Company A. He cleaned out a machine gun nest that was set on the
bridge.
First Lieutenant Hugh Mott, Nashville, TN, platoon leader in Company
B. I do not have time to go through them all: Doorland, Reynolds,
Soumas, Windsor, Goodson, Grimball; Michael Chinchar, of Saddle River
Township, NJ; Joe Petrencsik, of Cleveland; Anthony Samele, of Bronx,
NY. I will put the story of this day the bridge over Remagan and what
the final German commander said who was trying to blow up the bridge
when he came back to see it months later. Every one of those men were
the bravest and should have gotten the Medal of Honor. They all did get
the Distinguished Service Cross.
(The document referred to is as follows:)
A Dictionary of Battles
(By David Eggenberger)
Rhineland (World War II), 1945. Before the last of the
German attackers had been driven out of the Ardennes bulge,
the Allies had resumed their offensive against the Siegfried
Line. Progress was so slow, however, that the large-scale
effort became necessary to effect a breakthrough to the Rhine
Valley.
On February 8 the Canadian First Army (Henry Crerar)
launched Operation Veritable, a major attack southeast from
Nijmegen, Holland, between the Meuse and the Rhine. The
latter was reached on February 14. A converging thrust by the
U.S. Ninth Army (William Simpson), called Operation Grenade,
crossed the Roer River on February 23. The two advances
linked up at Geldern, Germany, on March 3. Two days later the
Allies had pressed to the Rhine from opposite Dusseldorf
northward, leaving only a small German bridgehead at Xanten-
Wesel. The Canadians eliminated this pocket on March 10.
Meanwhile, to the south, the left wing of the U.S. First Army
(Courtney Hodges) attacked toward Cologne on February 23 to
cover the Ninth Army's right flank. This offensive swept
across the Rhine plain, while the U.S. Third Army of Gen.
George Patton punched its way through the Siegfried Line
north of the Mosselle River.
On the central front the rest of the First Army and the
Third Army, both under the group command of Gen. Omar
Bradley, launched a broad attack on March 5 toward the middle
Rhine (Operation Lumberjack). By March 10 the Americans had
closed to the river from Coblenz northward through Bonn and
Cologne (which fell March 7), to link up with the Canadians
at Wesel.
The rapid advance to the Rhine yielded a surprising and
rich dividend. On March 7 the U.S. 9th Armored Division
discovered the railroad bridge and Remagen still standing.
(It was the only Rhine bridge not demolished by the Germans.)
In a daring gamble, leading elements dashed across the Rhine
and seized a bridgehead on the east bank. Gen. Dwight
Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander in Europe, ordered the
new breakthrough hurriedly reinforced. Despite German
counterattacks and determined efforts to wreck the bridge,
Hodges rushed three corps (three, five, seven) across the
river by bridge, pontoon, and ferry. By March 21 the
bridgehead had grown to 20 miles long and 8 miles deep.
(The Remagen success caused the Allies to shift the main
axis of their attack from Field Marshal Sir Bernard
Montgomery's
[[Page H2783]] northern group of armies to Bradley's central
force.)
During the Remagen bridgehead build-up, the U.S. general
Jacob Devers' Sixth Army Group launched its own advance to
the Rhine (Operation Undertone). It took the form of a huge
pincers movement against SS Gen. Paul Hausser's Seventh and
First German armies. On March 15 the right wing of Patton's
Third Army attacked south across the Moselle River into the
Saar. Two days later Gen. Alexander Patch's U.S. Seventh Army
began hammering through the Siegfried Line, headed northeast.
By March 21 the joint U.S. offensive had crushed all German
opposition west of the Rhine except for a shrinking foothold
around Landau. Then on March 22 Patton's 5th Infantry
Division wheeled from south to east and plunged across the
Rhine at Oppenheim. Encouraged by light opposition in this
area, the eight Corps bridged the river at Boppard, 40 miles
to the north, on March 24. Germany's last natural defensive
barrier had now been breached in three places on Bradley's
front.
The Rhineland battle inflicted a major defeat on three Nazi
army groups--Johannes Blaskowitz in the north, Walther Model
in the center, Paul Hausser in the south. Some 60,000 Germans
were killed or wounded and almost 250,000 captured. This
heavy toll, plus the loss of much heavy equipment, ruined the
Nazi chances of holding the Allied armies at the Rhine.
Americans killed in action totaled 6,570; British and
Canadian deaths were markedly fewer.
____
The Bridge at Remagen--The Amazing Story of March 7, 1945--The Day the
Rhine River was Crossed
(By Ken Hechler)
The Significance of Remagen Bridge
For almost three weeks after the capture of the Remagen
Bridge, American troops fought bitterly in the woods and
gullies of the Westerwald. They inched forward, expanding the
bridgehead hour by hour, pushing laboriously to the east, to
the north and to the south. Not until March 16, when American
forces reached the Bonn-Limburg autobahn, seven miles east of
the Rhine, did they have the maneuver space in which to fan
out. For the infantry and tankmen who slugged it out in the
bridgehead, for the military police and anti-aircraft men who
were strafed at the Rhine crossings by attacking planes, and
for the engineers who struggled in the face of air and
artillery fire to build pontoon and treadway bridges over the
river, capture of the Remagen Bridge seemed to stiffen rather
than weaken enemy resistance. To many of these men, it did
not seem that crossing the bridge had accomplished much.
The capture of the Ludendorff Bridge materially hastened
the ending of the war. It was an electrifying development at
the moment, but it was followed a few weeks later by General
Patton's sneak crossing of the Rhine south of Remagen at
Oppenheim, and then by Field Marshal Montgomery's grand
assault across the river south of Arnhem after extensive
preparations and blasts on the trumpet.
One of Karl Timmermann's fellow townsmen from West Point,
Nebraska, rumbled across a Rhine pontoon bridge with gasoline
and supplies, several weeks after Timmermann's exploit. He
commented that the Rhine seemed little wider than the Elkhorn
back home and certainly not as wide as the Missouri River. He
confidently told his friends that to cross a bridge like that
was small potatoes. For years afterward, he spoke up in West
Point American Legion meetings, in all the local bars, and at
the corner drugstore, disparaging what Timmermann had done at
Remagen.
The Germans had a far different reaction. In his conference
with Field Marshal Kesselring two days after the capture of
the Ludendorff Bridge, Hitler told him bluntly that the
really vulnerable spot on the western front was Remagen, and
that it was urgent to ``restore'' the situation there. Hitler
took a personal hand in hurrying all available troops to
reduce the Remagen bridgehead. The 11th Panzer Division
wheeled southward from the Ruhr. The Panzer Lear and 9th
Panzer divisions followed, swallowing many gallons of
precious, high-priority gasoline. Many other divisions and
scraps of divisions joined in the frantic German fight to
contain the bridgehead.
Field Marshall Model's Chief of Staff, Major General Carl
Wagener, summed up the German view as follows: ``The Remagen
affair caused a great stir in the German Supreme Command.
Remagen should have been considered a basis for termination
of the war. Remagen created a dangerous and unpleasant
abscess within the last German defenses, and it provided an
ideal springboard for the coming offensive east of the Rhine.
The Remagen bridgehead made the other crossing of the Rhine a
much easier task for the enemy. Furthermore, it tired German
forces which should have been resting to withstand the next
major assault.''
The Remagen bridgehead was vital in helping to form the
southern and eastern pincers for the Allied troops that
surrounded and trapped 300,000 German soldiers in the Ruhr.
As sorely needed German troops were thrown against the
Remagen bridgehead, the resulting disorganization and
weakening of defenses made it much easier for other American
Rhine crossings to be made to the north and south of Remagen.
Just as the loss of the bridge was a blow to German morale,
so did it provide a strong boost to American and Allied
morale. Not only did it make the end of the war seem close at
hand, but it also emboldened the combat troops when they were
confronted with chances to exploit opportunities. It
underlined the fact that the German army's soft spots could
be found through aggressive attacks, thereby spurring
American forces to apply greater pressure.
After the war, General Eisenhower had this to say about the
significance of the seizure of Remagen Bridge: ``Broad
success in war is usually foreseen by days or weeks, with the
result that when it actually arrives higher commanders and
staffs have discounted it and are immersed in plans for the
future. This was completely unforeseen. We were across the
Rhine, on a permanent bridge; the traditional defensive
barrier to the heart of Germany was pierced. The final defeat
of the enemy, which we had long calculated would be
accomplished in the spring and summer campaigning of 1945,
was suddenly now, in our minds, just around the corner.''
General Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General
Walter Bedell Smith, termed the Remagen Bridge ``worth its
weight in gold.''
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with only six weeks to
live, shared the elation of the field commanders over the
significance of Remagen. The victorious Army Chief of Staff,
General George C. Marshall, had this appraisal to make: ``The
prompt seizure and exploitation of the crossing demonstrated
American initiative and adaptability at its best, from the
daring action of platoon leader to the Army commander who
quickly directed all his moving columns. * * * The bridgehead
provided a serious threat to the heart of Germany, a
diversion of incalculable value. It became a springboard for
the final offensive to come.''
War correspondents on the scene added their eyewitness
accounts on the significance of seeing American troops on the
east bank of the Rhine. The Associated Press cabled on March
8: ``The swift, sensational crossing was the biggest military
triumph since the Normandy landings, and was a battle feat
without parallel since Napoleon's conquering legions
crossed the Rhine early in the last century.'' Hal Boyle
wrote from the front that ``with the exception of the
great tank battle at El Alamein, probably no tank
engagement in World War II will be remembered longer than
the dashing coup which first put the American army across
the Rhine at Remagen.'' He added that the crossing of the
Rhine by the men ``who knew there was strong likelihood
the dynamite-laden bridge would blow up under them at any
moment has saved the American nation 5,000 dead and 10,000
wounded.
``It was a moment for history,'' stated Tine magazine.
The nation expressed its gratitude to the heroes of Remagen
in numerous ways. Both the United States Senate and the House
of representatives interrupted their deliberation to cheer
the news. In the House, a spirited debate took place as to
which state could claim the first man to cross. Congress
Brooks Hays of Arkansas declared philosophically: ``I am sure
there will be glory enough for all.''
All around the country, local civic and patriotic
organizations honored the men who had wrought the miracle of
Remagen. The feeling toward the Remagen heroes was perhaps
best expressed in an editorial in the March 10, 1945, New
York Sun, which concluded with these words: ``Great shifts in
history often do hang upon the developments of minutes.
Americans know, and the enemy has learned, that given the
least opportunity, American soldiers are quick to seize any
break and exploit it to the fullest. The men who in the face
of scattered fire and the great threat of the bridge blowing
up under them, raced across and cut the wires have materially
shortened a struggle in which every minute means lost lives.
To all who utilized that ten minutes so advantageously goes
the deepest gratitude this country can bestow.''
Captain Karl Friesenhahn, the little German engineer who
was in charge of the engineer company at Remagen in 1945,
returned to Remagen in 1954. I saw him gaze over the ruins of
the bridge and he quietly asked what awards the American Army
had give to Lieutenant Karl Timmermann, Sergeant Drabik,
Lieutenant Mott and the other first Americans who crossed.
When I told him that they had received Distinguished Service
Crosses, Captain Friesenhahn replied with some feeling:
``They deserved them--and then some. They saw us trying to
blow that bridge and by all odds it should have blown up
while they were crossing it. In my mind they were the
greatest heroes in the whole war.''
____
Individual Awards
DISTINGUISHED SERVICE CROSS
The Distinguished Service Cross is the highest award which
is conferred only on members of the U.S. Army. It is second
only to the Medal of Honor, which is also awarded to members
of other branches of the service. The following officers and
men of the 9th Armored Division were awarded Distinguished
Service Crosses for their heroism at Remagen:
Sergeant Alex A. Drabik of Holland (Toledo), Ohio, squad
leader of 3d platoon, Company A, 27th Armored Infantry
Battalion. First man over the bridge.
Second Lieutenant Karl H. Timmermann of West Point,
Nebraska, company commander of Company A, 27th Armored
Infantry Battalion. First officer over the bridge.
Sergeant Joseph DeLisio of Bronx, New York, platoon leader
of 3d platoon, Company
[[Page H2784]] A, 27th Armored Infantry Battalion. Cleaned
out machine gun nest on bridge.
First Lieutenant Hugh B. Mott of Nashville, Tennessee,
platoon leader in Company B, 9th Armored Engineer Battalion.
Led engineers who ripped out demolition wires and cleared the
bridge of explosives.
Sergeant Eugene Dorland of Manhattan, Kansas, Company B,
9th Armored Engineer Battalion. One of engineers who helped
clear the bridge of explosives.
Sergeant John A. Reynolds of Lincolnton, North Carolina,
Company B, 9th Armored Engineer Battalion. One of engineers
who helped clear the bridge of explosives.
Captain George P. Soumas of Perry, Iowa, company commander
of Company A, 14th Tank Battalion, the first tank company to
cross the bridge.
First Lieutenant C. Windsor Miller of Silver Spring, Md.,
platoon leader in Company A, 14th Tank Battalion, the first
tank platoon to cross the bridge.
Sergeant William J. Goodson of Pendleton, Indiana, Company
A, 14th Tank Battalion. Tank commander of the first tank
which crossed Remagen Bridge.
1st Lieutenant John Grimball of Columbia, South Carolina,
platoon leader in Company A, 14th Tank Battalion. Head of
first tank platoon to reach the bridge.
Sergeant Michael Chinchar of Saddle River Township, New
Jersey, platoon leader of 1st platoon, Company A, 27th
Armored Infantry Battalion. One of first group of infantrymen
across the bridge.
Sergeant Joseph S. Petrencsik of Cleveland, Ohio, assistant
squad leader in 3d platoon, Company A, 27th Armored Infantry
Battalion. One of first group of infantrymen across the
bridge.
Sergeant Anthony Samele of Bronx, New York, squad leader in
1st platoon, Company A, 27th Armored Infantry Battalion.
Third man across the bridge.
The following is a sample of the citation for the
Distinguished Service Cross:
____________________