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Confusion or Collapse? The Nazi fumble at Remagen was a sign of German confusion, but it was not necessarily a mark of collapse. The Remagen "accident," as Berlin angrily called it, was in sharp contrast with the well-handled withdrawal at Wesel. Resurgent Allied optimists who now predicted the war's end in a few weeks might possibly be right—but in the meantime it was well to remember that the Wehrmacht had been routed and broken last summer in White Russia and in France. It had recovered from both routs.
The slowness and weakness of the first Nazi counterattacks at Remagen probably reflected a shortage of transport and fuel —and certainly they reflected the massive Allied air campaign against the German rail net which last week roared into its fourth week without a single day's interruption. Field Marshal von Rundstedt must have been thrown badly off balance. He had no doubt counted on plenty of time to regroup his forces, while Eisenhower prepared for the "naval operation" of crossing a bridgeless Rhine.
Now Rundstedt had to pull men and arms from the north to meet the Remagen threat, yet he still had to man 150 miles of the Rhine and be ready to fight a crossing anywhere. It was this harsh stretching of Rundstedt's already paper-thin manpower that led some experts in Washington to say that Remagen had shortened the war by six to eight weeks.
Weakness v. Strength. The German High Command also had to watch Germany's north coast. At Yalta, the Big Three had promised blows on the Reich from "east, west, north and south." Last week in the U.S., an editorial in the Army and Navy Journal said that "the details and the preparations for execution [of an amphibious invasion of Germany] have been worked out," and speculated that the operation might be commanded by Field Marshal Montgomery, with Monty's armies in the west passing to the command of Lieut. General Omar Bradley.
Allied airmen last week reported that the Germans were moving troops eastward in The Netherlands, north of the Lek (northern branch of the lower Rhine). This might foretell a Nazi evacuation of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague. It might mean that the Germans were afraid of being cut off in the western Netherlands by an Allied push to the Zuider Zee. More probably, it meant that they needed the Dutch garrison to help man the Rhine. As against 70 or 80 divisions in December, Rundstedt was now estimated to have no more than 40 or 50 in the west. Since Dday, the Germans had lost over a million prisoners, plus a probable 500,000 in dead and permanently disabled, in the west.
General Eisenhower, on the other hand, had never been stronger. Last week he announced his long-rumored new army, the U.S. Fifteenth. Two facts were disclosed about the Fifteenth: 1) that it was attached to Bradley's Twelfth Army Group; 2) that it was commanded by Lieut. General Leonard T. Gerow, brilliant former commander of the V Corps. The Germans were left to guess the rest. They might plausibly guess that the Fifteenth would be poured over the Remagen crossing, as soon as the defenders were pushed beyond artillery range.