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00:00In 1944, World War II was reaching its dramatic climax.
00:10Rocket ships firing, aircraft flying overhead.
00:14As the Allies waged total war to liberate occupied Europe.
00:19This was a war in which all sides were learning as they went.
00:23From the beaches of Normandy...
00:26The water was full of blood. The water was bright red.
00:30...to the forests of Germany.
00:36Both sides deployed weapons of ever greater power and sophistication.
00:41And this tank suddenly gives the American a real big advantage.
00:45It's a very effective beast.
00:47This is the story of the Western Allies' final campaign.
00:51Told by the men on both sides who were there.
00:55You did what you did. You fire and you maneuver.
01:00He was my brother.
01:02March 1945.
01:13Nine months on from D-Day, the Western Allies had reached the last great natural barrier between them and the German heartland.
01:21The Rhine River.
01:23Psychologically, it was very important.
01:26The die is rarely cast.
01:28We're now getting into the heartland of the Third Reich.
01:32This was where the Wehrmacht planned to make its last great stand in the West.
01:38It's all together. It's a mix.
01:41It's a mix of fatherland,
01:44it's pride,
01:45it's consciousness,
01:46it's a powerhouse,
01:47it's a powerhouse,
01:48it's a powerhouse,
01:49it's a powerhouse.
01:51While Allied soldiers lived in desperate fear of being killed,
01:55with the end in sight.
01:57You knew you had to still be prepared to lay down your life,
02:01but you weren't quite so keen to do it as you hadn't been earlier on,
02:06because the war wasn't going to be over.
02:08This is the story of the Battle for the Rhine.
02:20In January 1945,
02:22Hitler's last offensive in the West,
02:24known as the Battle of the Bulge,
02:26had ended in catastrophic defeat.
02:29In its wake,
02:31the Allies were able to fight their way through the Siegfried Line fortifications
02:36that defended Germany's frontier from invasion.
02:40In the East,
02:41Stalin's Red Army was just 50 miles from Berlin.
02:45To most,
02:46Nazi Germany's defeat seemed inevitable,
02:49merely a matter of time.
02:52But not all Germans were ready to give up.
02:56They're now fighting on German soil.
02:58So they're defending their own homes,
03:01their families,
03:02their own territory against the invader.
03:04Another reason is fanaticism,
03:07particularly amongst the younger ones
03:09that are now getting drafted into the army,
03:11so the 16-, 17-year-olds.
03:14Of course, these are people,
03:15or young people,
03:16who've only known the Nazi state,
03:18who've only known Nazi propaganda.
03:20So to them,
03:21slogans like,
03:22Germany must live even if we die,
03:25you are nothing,
03:26your people is everything,
03:27actually do mean something.
03:29So they are quite willing to sacrifice themselves.
03:32Adolf Hitler hoped that the river Rhine,
03:38the last great natural barrier
03:40between the Western allies and the German heartland,
03:43could be used to inflict a crushing defeat
03:46on British and American forces,
03:48transforming the strategic situation.
03:51Hitler's still fighting on out of a mixture of calculation and delusion.
03:58The calculation is that if the Germans can hold the Western allies at the Rhine,
04:04they can potentially split apart this kind of awkward alliance
04:08between the Western democracies and the Soviet communists.
04:11But there's also a strong sense of delusion in what Hitler's thinking.
04:16He's fantasizing about units that got destroyed months ago.
04:20He's trying to organize things that simply aren't going to work.
04:23He's refusing any kind of thought about surrender or about peace.
04:28The Allied supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
04:33knew full well that the Germans would mount fierce resistance along the Rhine,
04:38not just a formidable natural barrier,
04:41but a hugely important symbolic frontier for the German people.
04:45In the spring of 1945, Eisenhower commanded one of the most powerful armies ever assembled.
05:15By March, its three army groups had entered Germany and reached the banks of the Rhine.
05:21All were now vying with each other to be the first across.
05:25In the north was 21st Army Group under British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery,
05:31comprising 1st Canadian Army, British 2nd Army and US 9th Army.
05:36In the center, US General Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group with US 1st and 3rd Armies.
05:43And further south, General Dever's 6th Army Group with US 7th and French 1st Army.
05:50Since the breakout from Normandy, Eisenhower had wrestled with two competing strategic options.
05:58One of them was what was called the narrow front or knife thrust approach,
06:02which was to pour all the resources he had into a very narrow assault towards Germany and towards the Rhine River.
06:10The other was what was called the broad front strategy,
06:13which was to parcel out his resources and men among all of his armies and all of his units,
06:19and advance in an extremely broad front across the whole of Western Europe towards Germany.
06:26Eisenhower ended up choosing the broad front and having everybody advance at the same time.
06:32Sometimes not to the liking of his best generals.
06:35Both Patton and Montgomery were very strongly in favor of a knife thrust,
06:39although they differed unsurprisingly about who should be the one to carry that out.
06:44Each Army Group was given the freedom to organize and pursue its own approach to crossing the Rhine,
06:51and did so according to form.
06:53Montgomery began planning a giant set-piece operation to get 21st Army Group across the river,
07:01involving airborne drops and huge amounts of artillery and engineering support.
07:06Further south, Patton would rely on speed and initiative to get 3rd Army across wherever an opportunity arose.
07:16The Allied dream was to capture a major bridge over the Rhine intact,
07:22but it was thought to be a huge long shot.
07:25The Germans could be relied on to blow every bridge as soon as they'd retreated across the river.
07:31The Germans were desperate to destroy the bridges over the Rhine,
07:36because once the Allies crossed the Rhine, it would be very, very hard to stop them,
07:41because the Allies would be able to use the still-existent and still-usable infrastructure
07:46that the Germans had, including, for example, the motorways, the Autobahn.
07:50So this really was the last line of defense that the Germans could expect, perhaps,
07:56to hold against the Allies in the West.
07:59But a bit of luck and American improvisation was about to hand Bradley's 12th Army Group
08:06one of the greatest opportunities of the war, at a town called Reymargen.
08:12On the 7th of March, scouts of the US 9th Armored Division arrived on a hill overlooking Reymargen.
08:19They were stunned to see the 350-meter-long Ludendorff Bridge still intact.
08:25Here was a chance for the Allies to leap the Rhine in a single bound.
08:32But the town of Reymargen and the bridge itself was crowded with retreating German soldiers, refugees and vehicles.
08:40And I can remember seeing people running, soldiers and civilians, going across the bridge.
08:47German soldiers and German civilians crossing the bridge.
08:50And at the other side of it, it was a high hill and the railroad track went through a tunnel.
08:56And so it was a good view of that from where we were over there.
09:00General William Hogue, commander of Combat Command B of the 9th Armored Division, arrived on the scene.
09:07An experienced engineer officer, veteran of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge,
09:13he quickly took charge of the operation to seize Reymargen and rush the Ludendorff Bridge before the Germans could destroy it.
09:20Fortunately, his division could call on the newest model of American tank,
09:27a much-needed replacement for the iconic but vulnerable M4 Sherman.
09:35The M26 Pershing tank is one of those what might have been stories of World War II.
09:41As soon as the Sherman tank went into production, the American military starts designing a replacement vehicle.
09:49But the Americans fighting in Europe have a major set of issues.
09:54If they start importing different tanks to Europe, bigger tanks, there's going to be transport and logistics issues.
10:02So the Pershing actually only gets into production later in 1944.
10:08Twenty of them are rushed across to Europe as something called the Zebra mission.
10:13They're almost being tested out in combat.
10:15And this tank suddenly gives the American a real big advantage.
10:19It's got this massive 90mm gun on it.
10:22The firepower of this is better even than that on the King Tiger.
10:27It's got a powerful new engine.
10:29It's got wider tracks and thicker armour at the front, so the crews feel safer when they're going into combat.
10:36With Pershing tanks quickly silencing enemy opposition, Rehmagen was soon taken,
10:42and the Americans turned their attention to the bridge.
10:45Unknown to the Americans, the Germans had already tried to blow the bridge once.
10:51But the explosives had failed to detonate.
10:56A second attempt had only damaged it due to a lack of the right explosives.
11:02They asked for 600 kilograms of explosives, but they're only given 300.
11:08And they do find out that these 300 are actually of a lower quality than the normal explosive they would have expected.
11:14These were from mines, so we used to blow mines rather than blow up bridges.
11:21That's the only bit that explodes and it leaves the bridge intact.
11:27In the aftermath of the explosion, an American infantry company was ordered forward to take the bridge.
11:33And suddenly, a American soldier came from the last street, which is still today, in Rehmagen, in Richtung BrĂŒcke.
11:40And he went with his gun, with his weapon, in half an attack, on a wall,
11:47Schritt for Schritt, sichert, 200, 250 m, and nothing happened.
11:54A Pershing tank helped to clear a path for the infantry.
12:11The infantry come under fire from machine gun nests that are positioned in the towers either side of the bridge.
12:17The Pershing tanks fired back at those towers, knocking out the machine gun positions.
12:23US soldiers venturing onto the bridge knew the Germans might try to blow it again at any minute, and this time succeed.
12:32They were joined by three army engineers, led by Lieutenant Hugh Mott.
12:37He was later interviewed for Allied newsreels.
12:40After the infantry had taken the town of Rehmagen, the task force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Engelmann,
12:47called me up and ordered me out on the bridge to do some reconnaissance.
12:52I was to find out what demolitions were on the bridge, and if the bridge would take traffic, and if not, how long it would take to repair the bridge for traffic.
13:03Later in life, Mott recalled his feelings, walking onto a bridge that might be blown sky high at any minute.
13:11There wasn't a whole lot of firefighting, really, that first afternoon there.
13:18In fact, the firing was a little firing here and there, and you was asking about a feeling you had.
13:26When you went out on that bridge, it just felt like they were just laying back there in the shadows saying,
13:32Come on, come on baby, come on across here, and we'll get you and the bridge both at the same time.
13:38You know, that's the kind of feeling that you had.
13:41Under nothing more than sporadic sniper fire, the first American squad reached the end of the bridge without a single casualty.
13:50Along the way, they and the engineers disabled as many charges as possible.
13:56Some of our friendly engineers from the 9th Armored Division running along the bridge, and when they see a wire, they reach down and pull it out.
14:069th Armored Division had crossed the Rhine. Reinforcements were soon on their way.
14:15I received orders to cross the bridge as rapidly as possible.
14:19We had some of our infantry across before us, but I was the first complete allied or friendly company across because I had my cooks with me.
14:29The infantry who were with us had their cooks back with the battalion trains behind us,
14:34so my company cooked the first hot meal on the far side of the Rhine.
14:42Just 24 hours after the capture of the bridge, local commanders, with Eisenhower's support,
14:48had got 8,000 troops across the river.
14:52But engineer Frank Kam had concerns about how long the bridge would stay up.
14:59The bridge was obviously damaged. As we went across, there were holes in the bridge,
15:05and we dodged around them driving across.
15:09And also as we crossed, I looked up on the right and I saw on the truss there was a big break in the truss that the Germans had exploded.
15:17And I could tell that if that truss were to go all the way, the bridge would collapse.
15:22So as soon as we got across the river, I went up to the colonel of the regiment I was supporting,
15:28and I said, sir, that bridge needs engineer work on it.
15:32Do you want me to have my company stay back and work on that bridge?
15:36Or do you want me to support our infantry that are forward up here?
15:39He said, stay with us. And I said, that's a good, I felt safer that way.
15:44While American troops fought to enlarge their bridgehead across the Rhine,
15:49behind them, engineers worked round the clock to shore up the damaged Ludendorff Bridge.
15:55They also set up more crossing points, using landing craft, boats, and pontoon bridges,
16:02to get more troops across the Rhine as quickly as possible.
16:06Hitler was furious when he heard that the Allies had captured a Rhine bridge intact.
16:15He immediately ordered reinforcements be sent to wipe out the American bridgehead,
16:20and the bridge be destroyed at all costs.
16:23He also demanded that the officer responsible for it falling into Allied hands was shot.
16:29The man held responsible for the loss of the bridge was Major Hans Scheller.
16:54His wife remembers the moment she learned of his fate.
16:59Mittags um zwei bei den Nachrichten, den MilitÀrnachrichten.
17:04Da wurde es gesagt, dass er wegen Feigheit vor dem Feind und Dienstverweigerung
17:18hingerichtet worden wÀre verurteilt und hingerichtet worden,
17:20das Urteil wÀre bereits vollstreckt.
17:25The Germans were much more aggressive
17:30about punishing their own soldiers very harshly.
17:34They shot tens of thousands of their own men
17:37during the course of World War II,
17:39the majority on the Eastern Front,
17:41but thousands on the Western Front as well,
17:44for offenses ranging from desertion to stealing
17:48to rape to cowardice, for all sorts of things.
17:52But in comparison to the Allied armies where only a few,
17:57if any, soldiers were executed for crimes of any sort,
18:03the Germans were quite willing to shoot their own men
18:06and did it tens of thousands of times.
18:09One officer who was not shot but only sacked
18:12was the German commander in the West,
18:14Field Marshal von Rundstedt,
18:16a convenient scapegoat for the blunder at Rehmagen.
18:21He was replaced by a defensive specialist
18:24with a brilliant record in Italy.
18:29Albert Kesselring was a Luftwaffe general
18:32who'd won a reputation as a skilled commander
18:34of both air and ground troops.
18:37His masterful defense of Italy against two Allied armies
18:40prompted Hitler to bring him back to Germany
18:43to organize its defense against the Western Allies.
18:46Able though he was, Kesselring now faced an impossible
18:51strategic situation.
18:57To try to hold the Allies at the Rhine,
18:59Kesselring had at his disposal Army Group H in the Netherlands
19:04under General Blazkowicz,
19:06Field Marshal Modell's Army Group B,
19:09and Army Group G in the southwest,
19:12under General Hauser.
19:16It was a fundamental issue because a lot of the troops
19:19that were fighting now on the Western Front
19:21were either very old men who hadn't been drafted
19:24into the army beforehand or extremely young people
19:26who had now just been drafted out of the Hitler Youth.
19:29The core of the German army,
19:32the very experienced non-commissioned officers
19:34and also officers,
19:36most of them had by that stage disappeared.
19:39So the army as a fighting organization
19:41is actually not performing particularly well
19:44because they don't have the right manpower,
19:46they don't have the right training,
19:48and also they don't have enough of the needed material
19:51and the equipment.
19:54Kesselring's first priority was to eradicate
19:56the American toehold across the Rhine at Rehmagen.
20:01The Americans had moved thousands of reinforcements
20:04into the bridgehead,
20:05using the Ludendorff Bridge itself,
20:07as well as pontoon bridges their engineers
20:10had built alongside it.
20:12The Germans now mounted a series
20:14of increasingly daring attempts to destroy them.
20:19Everything they had, they threw at it,
20:21trying to bring the bridge down.
20:23They used air power,
20:25and they used some of the very latest planes
20:28that they have.
20:30These included the world's first operational jet bomber,
20:33the Arado 234 Blitz.
20:37With a top speed around 460 miles per hour,
20:40the Blitz could outrun allied fighters
20:42and ground fire to deliver its one-and-a-half-ton payload.
20:46The jets flew nine sorties over six days,
20:50but never hit their target.
20:52To protect their prized crossings,
20:56U.S. First Army assembled the greatest concentration
20:59of anti-aircraft guns seen in the entire war.
21:04Nearly 700, as well as fighter cover.
21:08U.S. forces claimed to shoot down
21:10more than 200 of the 367 aircraft sent to attack the bridge.
21:15With the Luftwaffe unable to get through,
21:20the Germans brought up a Karl Gereit 540-millimeter mortar,
21:24of a type seen here, to shell the bridge.
21:28It missed its target 14 times before breaking down.
21:34So it was time to unleash one of Hitler's terrifying new wonder weapons.
21:46Hitler then orders the rocket V2 to be launched and fired at the bridge,
21:51which really concerns and surprises a lot of the German military,
21:55because they know that the accuracy is quite low.
21:58So they fire 11 of them in total.
22:01Now, they all miss.
22:02The only thing they do hit is the number of German towns killing German civilians.
22:05But again, the bridge remains intact.
22:09Finally, Otto Skorzeny,
22:11the legendary head of a shadowy SS Special Forces unit,
22:16dispatched seven Waffen-SS frogmen downriver with explosives
22:20to blow up one of the pontoon bridges.
22:24But the Allies had a secret weapon of their own.
22:28This is the canal defense light.
22:31It was given that name because it was a secret project.
22:34The idea was that in a barbette or like a turret on the top there,
22:39there would be a carbon arc light in there,
22:41which puts out about 13 million candle power.
22:46And they could actually set off a shutter
22:48that would flash across the light once or twice every second.
22:52And that would lead to almost blinding the person
22:55who was looking back at it.
22:59The canal defense light on the American side
23:01did play a very important role in preventing the bridge from being blown up,
23:06because they spotted the frogmen as they were approaching.
23:10Having said that, it's a combination of factors, really,
23:12that resulted in the frogmen not being successful.
23:16And in addition to the searchlights,
23:17it's also the simple fact that these frogmen were exhausted and extremely cold,
23:22so not really able to react particularly rapidly to new situations
23:26and to being caught in the searchlight.
23:29The SS frogmen never stood a chance in the freezing river.
23:33All were either killed or captured.
23:35Ten days after its capture, in the middle of the afternoon on the 17th of March,
23:43Ludendorff Bridge collapsed.
23:46The German demolition charges, the strain of constant use by heavy vehicles,
23:51and near misses from German bombs and shells had finally taken their toll.
23:56Twenty-eight U.S. Army engineers were killed in the collapse.
24:00Men who had been working on the bridge to make it safe until the last minute.
24:05Dozens more had to be pulled from the river, many with serious injuries.
24:13By the time the bridge collapsed,
24:16the Americans had got 25,000 men over the Rhine at Rehmagen,
24:21using the Ludendorff Bridge, pontoon bridges, ferries and landing craft.
24:25And on the far shore, they'd carved out a bridge head 25 miles wide and 8 miles deep.
24:33But to bring their full might to bear on Germany's defences,
24:38the Allies would have to find more places to cross the Rhine.
24:42It was one bridge, and the Allies couldn't get all of their forces
24:47across a single span over the Rhine.
24:49With the broad-front strategy that Eisenhower was following,
24:53the Allies didn't need just one bridge.
24:55They needed lots of bridges and lots of ways across the Rhine
24:59to get all of their forces over.
25:01About 80 miles north of Rehmagen,
25:04the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Montgomery
25:08was preparing its own Rhine crossing near Fiesel.
25:11But here, the Germans had successfully blown up rail and road bridges in time.
25:18So, Monty had come up with Operation Plunder,
25:22the largest British-led operation since D-Day,
25:25involving more than 1.2 million men.
25:30While Monty didn't have a bridge,
25:33he did have a very powerful and experienced force.
25:36The Rhine crossing would be led by the British 2nd Army,
25:40the strongest army Britain had ever put in the field,
25:43alongside 1st Canadian Army,
25:46U.S. 9th Army,
25:48and the U.S. 18th Airborne Corps.
25:53This was very much a Montgomery-style battle,
25:56in that he provided as much firepower to cover the assault as possible,
26:02and, in addition, a further airborne drop.
26:06The lesson of Market Garden,
26:09which perhaps hadn't needed to be learned,
26:11was that airborne forces functioned best
26:14when they could link up with ground forces as rapidly as possible.
26:19Operation Plunder,
26:21and its airborne element, Operation Varsity,
26:24was a vast undertaking,
26:26requiring 60,000 tons of ammunition,
26:2859,000 engineers,
26:31and 30,000 tons of engineering supplies,
26:34as well as the transport of hundreds of landing craft
26:38and amphibious vehicles,
26:40to get the assault troops across the Rhine.
26:42To Monty's great irritation,
26:45a few hours before Plunder was launched,
26:48he got news that his arch-rival, General Patton,
26:51had beaten him across the Rhine.
26:53In the south, near Mainz,
26:56his 5th Infantry Division had made an improvised crossing
27:00in a mix of assault boats, landing craft, and amphibious vehicles.
27:04They'd required no assistance from artillery, bombers,
27:08or airborne troops,
27:10all of which Patton's boss, General Bradley,
27:13was keen to point out in his communique.
27:15But Monty was not to be distracted,
27:20not even by a visit from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill,
27:25who was determined to witness the historic crossing of the Rhine in person.
27:31At dusk on the 23rd of March,
27:343,500 Allied guns began blasting German positions on the far bank of the Rhine.
27:39Three hours later, Operation Plunder got underway,
27:46as troops of the 51st Highland Division plunged into the river
27:50aboard their Buffalo amphibious armored transports.
27:56The idea is that this Buffalo would be capable of carrying, as I say,
28:0236 infantry or a load of supplies.
28:04With a three-man crew, we were able to use these quite effectively.
28:10The idea being that if you're on a river with a flash-flowing current,
28:15you have to aim for the opposite bank at an angle of about 45 degrees,
28:19so that when the current catches you,
28:21it takes the rear end down with the flow of water,
28:24and you are then at right angles to the bank.
28:27One of these pioneering amphibious vehicles
28:30is today housed at the UK's Tank Museum.
28:36The Buffalo could take 30 soldiers under some form of protection
28:40down the steep banks of the Rhine
28:43into that fast-flowing wither that's sweeping off towards the sea.
28:47It powers them across,
28:49and on the far side of the bank,
28:51it can release its ramp at the rear
28:53and let those soldiers off into the attack.
28:56So, the attack went in first thing in the morning.
29:00600 buffalos were used to take about 30 soldiers per trip
29:05across the Rhine, up the other side,
29:07and some of them sat there
29:09and gave covering fire with their Polston cannons.
29:12As we approached the river in these buffalos,
29:16we were all very cheerful.
29:18And as we got near to the river,
29:21the buffalo was bumping us about a little bit,
29:25but it was all prepared and everything was organised,
29:29everything was under control.
29:30We got to the river, and then the buffalo
29:36reared up in the air,
29:38nose-dived down into the river,
29:41and deep into the river with a small draught separating us.
29:48And all of a sudden, everything went quiet.
29:50And then David Reed started to play his mouth organ.
29:54And then the next thing, the boys in the buffalo started to sing.
30:02And the cheerful atmosphere, feeling, returned,
30:07and we went across the Rhine
30:09through the accompaniment of the mouth organ
30:11and everybody singing, in good heart, in good spirits.
30:14As British and American infantry crossed the Rhine
30:18in the early morning of the 24th of March,
30:21Allied tracer fire and shells streamed overhead
30:25to keep German heads down
30:27and to mark out landing spots.
30:29Trooper Peter Davis was driving one of the buffalos across the Rhine.
30:34Monty had put down such a tremendous barrage with artillery,
30:37as he did with most major attacks,
30:39and the barrage over the Rhine was tremendous.
30:41And then, of course, the smoke screen was put down,
30:46and we were given the order to go.
30:48And we were loaded up with infantry.
30:50We got to the other side.
30:52We took the first load straight in
30:55and got them out of the bank.
30:58German defenders were outnumbered and outgunned
31:02and put up only sporadic resistance
31:05in the face of the Allied onslaught.
31:06The man responsible for coordinating German defences
31:15along this stretch of the Rhine
31:17was General Johannes Blazkowicz,
31:20commander of Army Group H.
31:22He initially had a promising career,
31:25but after speaking out against SS atrocities in Poland,
31:29he was sidelined for four years,
31:31finally being given command of German forces in southern France in 1944.
31:37An experienced and capable commander,
31:40he knew full well that he faced a nearly hopeless task
31:44in defending the Rhine frontier.
31:45Blazkowicz's Army Group H looked impressive on paper,
31:51but most of its divisions were only 3,000 to 4,000 strong,
31:55compared to a typical Allied divisional strength of 16,000 men.
32:00What's more, his troops were desperately short of artillery and tank support.
32:06The entire Army Group could muster barely 200 tanks and assault guns,
32:12against the might of five Allied armoured divisions
32:16with more than 1,000 tanks.
32:18Most of them had very little in the way of equipment or tanks or vehicles left.
32:23German industry had been destroyed, for the large part,
32:27either by occupation or by the strategic bombing.
32:30And so the German Army in 1945 is really a shadow of its former self,
32:36fighting more out of habit, more out of loyalty,
32:41more out of a lack of anything else useful to do,
32:45and in the desperate hope that maybe Hitler would come up with a wonder weapon
32:48that would transform the war,
32:51that maybe they could preserve their families and their home societies,
32:55but with no real strong hope for the future.
32:59Few German soldiers wanted to die when the end of the war was clearly in sight.
33:04We had no hope, but we had no hope, let's say.
33:15Everyone had hoped that he would come back home,
33:19and that there would be nothing more happened.
33:22And that's how we had it.
33:24We were no fighters.
33:27With German industry in ruins,
33:29priority was given to a cheap, easy-to-produce weapon for taking on Allied tanks.
33:36At the same time as Germany was developing massive tanks like this Jagdtiger,
33:42they also developed and produced a number of much simpler weapons,
33:46one of which is this Panzerfaust.
33:49The idea of the Panzerfaust is it's a hollow-charged weapon that they could mass-produce.
33:54And the idea of a hollow-charged weapon, there is a cone of explosive in this head lined with copper.
34:01By having a blast charge inside this tube, you aim at an enemy tank about maybe 60 metres away,
34:09you press down the ignition charge.
34:12That forces this projectile towards the enemy tank.
34:17It's a very simple principle.
34:21When it hits armour, it explodes and it melts a copper lining that will jet through metal.
34:28It tends to leave on armour plate about a two-and-a-quarter-inch hole,
34:33and that copper jet goes inside the vehicle and quite often ignites a fire inside.
34:37So as a simple weapon, they could mass-produce this.
34:42By late in 1944, they were making 300,000 of these a month.
34:48And the simplicity of it meant they could issue it to Home Guard units, Hitler Youth,
34:55all sorts of people could use something as simple as a Panzerfaust.
34:58But despite its crude effectiveness, the Panzerfaust wasn't enough to halt the overwhelming might of the Allied attack.
35:08If you had seen the Americans with what kind of material they came with,
35:15it was like if a rich man,
35:19against a half-year-old or six-year-old in the prison,
35:25a half-year-old in the prison.
35:30Against scattered, demoralized defences,
35:3321st Army Group's crossings went like clockwork.
35:37Casualties were late.
35:39Some units lost more men to friendly fire than to the enemy.
35:46As the morning progressed,
35:48the Allies launched more amphibious vehicles and landing craft across the Rhine.
35:53By 10 a.m., it was clear to Monty that the landings were going better than anyone could have dared to hope.
36:00But the next stage of his plan was the most risky,
36:05the massive airborne drop behind German lines, codenamed Operation Varsity.
36:11It would be the last and largest airborne operation of the war,
36:17bigger than D-Day or Market Garden.
36:19The aerial armada would consist of nearly 4,000 transports and gliders,
36:30escorted by nearly 900 fighters,
36:33and carrying almost 22,000 airborne infantry.
36:36At 9.45, Allied artillery fell silent to avoid hitting their own aircraft,
36:51and all eyes strained skyward.
36:53It was daytime, 10 o'clock in the morning.
37:00That was the H-hour.
37:02I was a company commander by that time.
37:05I had been given command of B Company in the 1st Battalion.
37:10And the ride was, again, pretty much like the Normandy ride.
37:15People were probably even more confident than they were on the Normandy show.
37:22At first, ground fire from the Germans was light.
37:26But as they realized what was happening, more and more guns opened fire.
37:33The approaching Allied aircraft were easy targets,
37:37slow moving, flying low, unable to take evasive action during their drop run.
37:43The Americans were also about to discover a deadly flaw
37:48in the design of their new transport aircraft.
37:51During the actual drop, not in my resume,
37:54but the sister regiment, jump regiment 513th,
38:01lost quite a few flamers,
38:04and they were jumping the C-46 that had two doors, one on each side.
38:10They were jumping both doors out of there.
38:13It had fuel systems in it that were much more vulnerable than the C-47.
38:19When punctured, the fuel tanks of the C-46 leaked back into the fuselage,
38:26turning some into fireballs.
38:29After the paratroopers came the gliders,
38:33slower, lower, and even more vulnerable on their approach.
38:36In all, nearly 100 Allied transport and glider aircraft were destroyed.
38:43Airborne soldiers who made it to the ground scrambled to untangle themselves from parachutes or wrecked gliders, often under fire.
38:53The elite airborne units quickly got organized and started to fight back.
39:02Within hours, they had seized most of their objectives and were linking up with ground forces who'd crossed the river that morning.
39:09The 6th Airborne Division, they'd landed deep on the gun lines, and I remember joining up with them at about 10 in the morning.
39:18But their glider-borne people had terrible casualties.
39:23I mean, I don't know how many gliders were shot down in that operation and an enormous number of men killed.
39:30But the rest of the operation went pretty well.
39:33For all its horrors, the airborne drop had been less costly than anticipated, while the river crossings had proved a stunning success.
39:44Monte had parts of four infantry divisions, as well as amphibious tanks, and two airborne divisions across the Rhine.
39:53General Blazkowicz, now alert to the scale of the Allied operation, committed his only reserves in a desperate battle to save the Reich.
40:04The 15th Panzer Grenadier Division counterattacked at Rhys, while the 116th Panzer Division was ordered to seize back control of the Isel river crossings from Allied paratroopers.
40:20But with roving Allied fighter-bombers hitting the German build-up at Isel, as well as fire support from Allied guns on the west bank of the Rhine,
40:29the German counterattacks were over almost as soon as they'd begun.
40:34Blazkowicz had played his last hand, and all it had achieved was to hold up the Allies for a few hours.
40:43Meanwhile, Allied engineers got to work building bridges over the Rhine.
40:49The engineers would build first a bridge that could take individual infantrymen across it, and then they would slowly build it out from there, using pontoons, using steel segments, using all sorts of different equipment to put the bridge together.
41:07And so this quite remarkable engineering achievement has kind of been left in the historical shadow, but it was just as critical as the capture at Remagen to how the Allies got across the Rhine river.
41:21When Churchill met Eisenhower on the 25th of March, there was plenty of cause for optimism.
41:31The British Prime Minister even crossed the Rhine himself at a quiet sector, spending 30 minutes on the far shore before returning.
41:40By the following day, 21st Army Group had 12 bridges in place over the Rhine, and Allied units were beginning to make serious inroads into German territory.
41:53German divisions facing the Allied crossing had either been destroyed or were now abandoning their positions to escape the Allied onslaught.
42:02We just went through Germany.
42:04We just went through Germany.
42:05That was gone like a coach trip, really, because there weren't no one there.
42:10They were just gone.
42:12They knew they'd lost the war, and they just retreated.
42:16Their fighting spirit broken at last.
42:19German soldiers began to surrender in ever-increasing numbers.
42:23And we started advancing about eight to ten miles a day, capturing hundreds of Germans every day.
42:33In fact, there were so many of them that our soldiers would just wave them on the roads and have them go back the roads without guards sometimes.
42:43I remember one time when we were over the Rhine, and I saw this group of prisoners here, same as everybody else did.
42:50There was about 200 of them coming down.
42:53They were running, running like hell.
42:55And I thought, cool, that's good.
42:57And then when they got past us, we realized the person driving them on was our little Sergeant Major.
43:05And he was going, come on, you buggers, come on, you buggers.
43:09But there were also still many die-hards willing to fight to the end for Hitler's Germany.
43:16Some were only boys.
43:18There was one young boy, 14-year-old.
43:22He held us up.
43:25And when they found him, well, they couldn't do nothing to him, he's only 14.
43:30But he was holding, he held a whole battalion up, that boy.
43:34He got some machine gun or something.
43:37He was firing all over the place.
43:39We daren't go through.
43:40In the end, they found him.
43:42And he got this machine gun, and he was just firing it anyway.
43:46In just three weeks, a mix of American improvisation and Monty's cautious, methodical approach had allowed the Allies to break through Germany's last great natural barrier on a 200-mile front.
44:00More crossings of the Rhine quickly followed, from Strasbourg to the Netherlands.
44:07Soon, some Allied units were advancing 50 miles a day, infantry catching rides on tanks.
44:14German towns decked out in white linen to signify surrender.
44:22Eisenhower, to Monty's fury, decided to leave Berlin to the Soviets.
44:29But the Nazi empire was fast crumbling.
44:36As Allied units made massive inroads into the German heartland, they uncovered the horrifying crimes committed by the Nazi regime.
44:46British troops, liberating the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, found scenes of unimaginable suffering.
45:00We didn't know anything about concentration camps.
45:02Never heard of them.
45:03Nobody did ever heard of them.
45:09What we didn't realize is that on one side was the male concentration camp.
45:14On the left was the female.
45:17That there were a total of 60,000 there.
45:20That what we could smell and see were rags all over the place.
45:27Rags.
45:28A wet rag.
45:29They were dead bodies.
45:30Or dying bodies.
45:32And the smell was appalling.
45:34And if you concentrated on anything, you'd see that tree there at the bottom of it, or something.
45:42Occasionally there'd be a little twitch.
45:44That person might not actually be dead.
45:49As Allied soldiers fanned out across Germany, they sometimes came across the palatial homes of Nazi leaders.
45:57Mönchengladbach turned out to house the home of Paul Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister under Adolf Hitler.
46:08We captured this area and didn't really know whose it was, except there was a lot of wine and cameras.
46:17Goebbels was apparently a big camera and wine collector.
46:19For Jewish soldiers of the 29th Division, an opportunity to celebrate Passover at Goebbels' mansion with survivors of the camps became an act of defiance.
46:32They wanted to go back to that service because that Passover service in the Jewish faith, the story of the Israelites' freedom from Egyptian slavery 3,000 years ago.
46:45They were just liberated from their own slavery in modern times under Nazi Germany.
46:51During the Passover service, the Chaplain Plyakov was moved by the presence of what he saw in his congregation there.
47:04Not just American soldiers, but the folks who were in concentration camps who had survived and who were there in pitiful condition.
47:16Many of whom actually, when we were trying to take them back afterwards, several died on the way.
47:25We didn't have a chance to do anything except let them do what they begged to have done, to be there at the Passover service.
47:35Six weeks after the Rhine crossings, the Soviets were masters of Berlin and Hitler was dead.
47:42Eight days later, on the 8th of May 1945, the war in Europe ended, following the unconditional surrender of Germany.
47:54I was arrested for a while.
47:55I was arrested for a while.
47:57I was arrested for a while.
47:58I was arrested for a while and a half years ago, until the things were left out, the happened, Holocaust and so on.
48:08And then came the total return of the outbreak of the situation.
48:12Also, I was in the opinion of how unfair that was and how bad that was all.
48:17But first, I felt not free from here.
48:21I don't know. Many people with safety, but I don't know.
48:51and experiences that would stay with them forever.
48:55When it was over, well, what now?
48:58Kind of a flat feeling.
49:01I'm going to miss the comradeship of all those guys
49:06and how they got the job done, I don't know.
49:10I don't know. But I'm very proud.
49:21To observe with those guys.
49:26We knew each other better than most people know their own family.
49:31Because we went through hardships together and we helped each other survive.
49:37The war is over. We have survived. That was the basis.
49:43So, when I think about it, the Americans came here to Leubsdorf.
49:50That was the basis.
49:53The war is at the end, thank you.
49:56The whole debate, were we defeated?
50:00Were we freed?
50:02For these thoughts, it was time when everything was over.
50:06I opened the front door, because my mother always left the front door open.
50:10And I walked, and I said, hi, Mom.
50:13And she blew up. She just, you know, I was home.
50:18That's my story.
50:20There was one of my sisters that was on the front porch,
50:24and she saw me top of that rise and recognized me immediately.
50:30And she let out a scream, and I can hear all the way back in Virginia even now,
50:35that Harley's home.
50:39Getting off that train, and all these people were cheering and hollering and clapping,
50:56and so glad to see me.
50:58I didn't know half, you know, I knew a lot of them.
51:00But, and my mother was crying, and I think I was crying.
51:05I knew how short life was.
51:08And to live through something like that shows you that life is important.
51:15Now that I've been in it and through it for five years and three months,
51:22I'm happy that the Lord let me live through this.
51:27I'm happy that the Lord is not being on the side of the floor.
51:28And thank you for the Lord.
51:29And of course, I thought about it as the Lord has to be in it.
51:30I'm happy to have you.
51:32But my heart is even better.
51:33And of course, I think I was crying.
51:34And I think I'm happy to have you.
51:35You can just, as the Lord has to be in it.
51:36And of course, nothing.
51:38We'll be here.
51:40You can get out of it.
51:41If you haven't done anything.
51:43You can make it.
51:46And that I'm happy with that.