The World at War Episode 19 - Pincers (August 1944 - March 1945)
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00:00August the 25th, 1944, Paris was liberated.
00:27That same day, to the east, Romania changed sides, and with her defection went Hitler's
00:37only natural oil supply.
00:40Bulgaria had already quit the Axis, and Finland, too, began negotiating with the Russians for
00:44an armistice.
00:50General de Gaulle, the free French leader, enters his capital.
00:56For four years before, he had left a comparatively unknown soldier.
01:00Now he was being greeted as the very soul of France.
01:07For Parisians, the dark years of German occupation were over.
01:13Could it be long before the rest of Europe was freed, too?
02:26August the 15th, 1944, Operation Anvil, the Allied invasion of southern France.
02:42With the breakout from the Normandy beachhead underway to the north, Anvil was meant to
02:47begin the pincer movement on Hitler's Germany from all sides, the pincer movement that was
02:52to squeeze the Third Reich dry.
02:58We leapt into the sand near Saint-Tropez, and I said, this is it, they're going to open
03:01up any minute.
03:02And suddenly, out through the mists, on our particular stretch of beach, there came a
03:06Frenchman, and he carried a tray of champagne glasses.
03:10And we all stopped.
03:11I mean, quite clearly, this is utterly unexpected, and he smiled and turned to me and said,
03:16Welcome, but if I venture a little criticism, you are somewhat late.
03:22And from there on, it was known to the troops as the Champagne Campaign.
03:27Everywhere, during those mad, joyful weeks of August 1944, the Germans were being driven
03:35back towards the borders of their own country.
03:41Those Frenchmen, who had collaborated with the hated Bosch, became ever more desperate.
04:02Those French women, who had consorted with their conquerors, were now singled out for
04:07special treatment.
04:10Thousands upon thousands of sullen, bewildered Germans were taken prisoner.
04:40Sometimes whole divisions at a time.
04:44Approximately 20,000 German troops are surrendered by their commander, Major General Erich Elster.
04:50General Elster hands over his pistol as a token of surrender.
04:56General Elster commanded the Biarritz area from the Pyrenees Mountains to the Bay of Biscay.
05:10To many in the Allied camp, the war seemed as good as over.
05:17Indeed, there was talk of being back home for Christmas.
05:21But the top brass didn't always see eye to eye on just how the final victory was to be won.
05:26Montgomery argued that the Germans had had a very heavy defeat in Normandy.
05:33They'd lost approximately 500,000 troops.
05:3743 divisions had been smashed and 2,000 tanks.
05:42This was the moment to really hit them.
05:45And what he advocated was a strong drive up the coastal plain with the right on the Ardennes
05:52and the left probably almost on the coastline.
05:56Day and night, never letting up, never giving them time to recover.
06:01And of course he would be in command of this.
06:04We'd go right through, bounce the crossing of the Rhine, come around behind the Royal Cup
06:09and the war would be over in 1944. That's what he said.
06:12Eisenhower said, no, I don't like this. It's a pencil-like thrust.
06:17You're not touching a lot of the troops which are in France.
06:20I propose to advance on a broad front right up to the Rhine
06:24and then do a crossing of the Rhine and finish the war there.
06:29But that was perhaps safer.
06:32But it meant that the war couldn't be finished in 1944.
06:36I think the British were very slow to realise that the main effort for war in Europe
06:43lay with the Americans.
06:45I think the British press was probably slow as well.
06:49I think people forgot that the great weight of divisions and supplies and so on were American.
07:00After we broke out from the bridgehead, supply for a very long time had to come over the beaches
07:06or be carried by air.
07:08Army groups found often that they couldn't do what they wanted to from lack of supplies,
07:13particularly petrol.
07:16BATTLE FOR NORMANDY
07:28Each tank used a gallon of petrol a mile.
07:33The trucks carrying the stuff stretched back 250 miles to the Normandy beaches.
07:40Such had been the speed of the Allied breakout
07:43and the pockets of German troops had been left behind
07:46and so the road convoys had often to run a gauntlet of enemy sniping along the way.
07:54The lorry drivers had nicknamed the area between Paris and the front line
07:58Injun country.
08:13The hardest fighting of all was along the coast.
08:16Every port had been garrisoned by Hitler with orders to fight to the proverbial last round.
08:22Le Havre, Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk
08:27had all to be assaulted in turn by separate set-piece battle.
08:34Hitler knew supply would be the Allies' main headache,
08:37hence his determination to hang on to the channel ports as long as possible
08:41and then finally yielded to see they were destroyed utterly.
08:54One third of Montgomery's forces were engaged in clearing the Germans from the channel ports
08:59while the rest pushed on into Belgium.
09:04My really big moment was when we crossed the front chain
09:09because, you see, I had commanded the rear guard during the withdrawal to Dunkirk.
09:15I was then a battalion commander
09:18and I'd been doing flank guard and rear guard to the 3rd Division
09:22commanded by a certain Field Marshal Montgomery, who was then a general.
09:26And I was very ashamed of myself.
09:29And I was very ashamed of myself.
09:32We'd advanced up to the chairs of the Belgian people
09:35and now a few days later, back we were going through these ashen-faced crowds,
09:41terribly despondent, they knew they were going to be occupied again by the Germans.
09:46And I kept on saying, don't worry, we'll come back.
09:50And as we crossed the front chain, we had come back.
09:54And a young man, I suppose you saw the red around my hat, you know,
09:59and he ran across to my tank.
10:03There were tears pouring down his face.
10:06And he held out his hand like this and he said,
10:09I knew you'd come back, I knew you'd come back.
10:24Now, a friend of mine in Brussels told me that he heard the sound of tanks,
10:28but they were quite used to that.
10:30And he looked out of the window and he said to himself,
10:33those are rather different, they don't seem to be German.
10:36And he opened the window and leant out and somebody waved to him.
10:40And he said, they're British.
10:42And he tore down into the street and so did everybody else in Brussels.
10:48There has never been such a scene as when we liberated Brussels, never.
10:53And some of the really tough old XXX Corps veterans
10:56still blush to think of the things that happened.
10:59MUSIC PLAYS
11:20So far, so good.
11:22Now we come to the mistakes.
11:24We were ordered to halt.
11:27The reason was that we were outrunning our supply.
11:30Now, this was wrong,
11:32because we had 100km worth of petrol with our vehicles
11:37and another 100km within about 24 hours' reach.
11:42And they should, in my opinion, have taken a chance.
11:45Because that day that we were altered,
11:48the only thing between us and the Rhine
11:52was one division of very old gentlemen.
11:56We called them the Stomach Divisions,
11:58because they were sort of my age
12:00and they all had things wrong with their tummies.
12:02They'd been guarding the coast of Holland,
12:04they'd never seen a shot fired at anchor
12:06and they'd have been delighted to move peacefully
12:08into our prisoner of war camps
12:10without having to indulge in this horrid war.
12:12That was the sort of mentality.
12:14Plus one Dutch SS battalion, nothing.
12:17We could have brushed straight through them,
12:19gone on, bounced the crossings of the Rhine
12:22and cut all the Germans in Holland off from the Ruhr
12:26and then got round behind the Ruhr.
12:28Unquestionably.
12:30It was, to my mind, a very bad mistake.
12:32We should have taken a risk.
12:34When we were allowed to advance, which was 7th September,
12:38we made 10 miles in four days.
12:42We had previously done 250 miles in seven days.
12:47We were no longer pursuing.
12:49We were now fighting again.
12:57Then, on the 11th of September,
13:01I got my orders for arming.
13:03The three main waterways of the Rhine Delta
13:06lay between the Allied spearheads and Germany proper,
13:09the Maas, the Waal and the Neder Rhine.
13:13Montgomery's plan
13:15was to lay an airborne carpet across these waterways,
13:18capture the bridges and rush a mobile force
13:21round the left flank of the Siegfried Line
13:23to cut off the Ruhr
13:25and so end German resistance before Christmas 1944.
13:45CINEMATIC MUSIC
13:59RADIO CHATTER
14:15I've got it, there's an obstacle right in front of me now.
14:46Many people will tell you that the plan was wrong,
14:51there were too many objectives,
14:53or the parachuters were not landed in proper places and so on.
14:58The weather, of course, was not good and it interrupted.
15:01But I think that if more attention had been paid
15:04to what you might call the enemy's dispositions,
15:07then I think the plan would have been all right.
15:15GUNFIRE
15:33The airborne troops who landed at Arnhem
15:36suddenly found themselves up against some German armoured units
15:40that were refitting there,
15:42and it just happened to be there at the time.
15:57Among the first officers who had landed among the parachuters,
16:02the Germans found a complete copy of our plan.
16:07And this was switched off to the German commander on the spot,
16:11and of course from then on he had all the information
16:14of what we were trying to do.
16:41It's anyone's guess whether, having got the bridgehead over the Rhine,
16:45at that time of the year, with the bad weather setting in,
16:48whether we'd have been able to maintain that
16:51for several months during the winter.
16:53Because one knew from experience
16:55how magnificent the Germans were at retrieving critical situations.
17:03The battle went on for three or four days
17:07and we couldn't really make any progress.
17:11Eventually Montgomery decided that he couldn't go on
17:16and that the operation was to be called off
17:20and get as many people back across the Rhine as possible,
17:23which he did. We lost quite a lot.
17:26But I think one's got to be quite honest
17:28and say that it failed in its object,
17:31it achieved partial success,
17:34and I always hate using that expression of glorious failures.
17:38I wouldn't call it that, but it was a failure up to a point.
17:43The failure at Arnhem meant the war
17:46would now definitely not be over by Christmas 1944.
17:51It meant, too, that the initiative for the moment
17:55had been lost by the Western Allies.
17:58But on the Eastern Front it was a vastly different story.
18:02There the Red Army was advancing everywhere,
18:05in the centre 100,000 Germans had been surrounded at Minsk,
18:09in the north Finland had been knocked out of the war,
18:12Estonia recaptured, Latvia and Lithuania cleared of German troops,
18:17and the borders of East Prussia reached.
18:20In the south the Ukraine had been freed,
18:24Romania had capitulated,
18:26Bulgaria had been overrun, Greece cut off,
18:30and a link-up affected with Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia.
18:34It was a story of gigantic triumph,
18:37of overwhelming success everywhere in the east,
18:41save in one near-forgotten city
18:44where the war had first begun five years before,
18:47Poland's capital, Warsaw.
18:50By July 1944 the Red Army occupied the eastern half of Poland,
18:55that half allocated to them in the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939.
19:01The exiled Polish government in London was anxious to assert itself
19:05before the Russians overran the rest of their country,
19:08otherwise, in their eyes, it would merely be an exchange of occupiers
19:12rather than true liberation.
19:14As the Red Army approached Warsaw,
19:17the German garrison seemed ready to leave.
19:32On July 29th, a Russian broadcast talked of Warsaw's impending liberation
19:37and urged the workers of the resistance to rise against the retreating Germans.
19:42On August 1st, the Polish underground army inside Warsaw did rise,
19:47though they did not all support the London government.
19:50However, the aim of those who did was to fly in the government in exile
19:55once they controlled the city
19:57and set up a legitimate regime before the Russians arrived.
20:01But the uprising coincided with the Russian offensive running out of steam,
20:06a coincidence that nevertheless suited Stalin's book.
20:10Stalin was very suspicious of the underground,
20:14but it was utterly cruel that he wouldn't even try to get supplies in.
20:18He refused to let our aeroplanes fly and try to drop supplies for several weeks,
20:23and that was a shock to all of us,
20:25and a shock overall in all of our minds as to the heartlessness of the Russians.
20:34We had a very strong underground organisation
20:37with a civilian government and all the military commands,
20:42and that was organised during the four years of the German occupation,
20:48and it just surfaced and took its functions.
20:52The postal service, which was run by scouts,
20:55was the only means of communications between the various districts of Warsaw
20:59which were completely cut off by enemy fire.
21:02The scouts, to get from one district to another,
21:05had sometimes to go through sewers or under the enemy fire.
21:17At the very beginning of the uprising,
21:19we produced ammunition for only, I think, 10 or 12 days,
21:22and then we had to rely on the ammunition taken from the Germans,
21:27or there were factories of ammunition and arms in Warsaw going on
21:33and they were producing their own ammunition.
21:50There is something in Polish national character, you know,
21:53which is optimistic and we do not give up so easily.
21:56I would have given, you know, half of my life
21:58for the privilege of participating in Warsaw insurrection, you know.
22:01There was a tremendous intensification, you know,
22:04of moral life, intellectual life, emotional life,
22:08you know, the best sides of people coming to foreground.
22:20We had lots of recitals throughout Warsaw insurrection.
22:33There were people who took single-handed actions against the tanks,
22:40the people who threw themselves at enemy machine guns,
22:45and things like that.
22:46There was plenty of individual heroism.
22:49The London polls almost pulled it off,
22:52for by the end of the first week they controlled most of the city
22:55and the RAF was set to fly in the Polish government in exile.
22:59But then Hitler, realising Stalin was going to do nothing,
23:03ordered the SS to crush the uprising,
23:06which they proceeded to do with great relish and with great ruthlessness.
23:11...and with great ruthlessness.
23:33The bombing was very bad without interruption, practically.
23:36Not only bombing, we had artillery also.
23:39artillery also. We would cover all that with newspapers. This was the first thing always,
23:45you see, before the funeral, you see, in order not to spoil the morale.
23:56During the last days of the uprising where only one district was left unoccupied by the Germans,
24:02there were three to four or perhaps five thousand people. There were sometimes 30 or 40 people
24:07sleeping in one room. Now the Germans were bombarding us with their dive bombers.
24:26We had less and less food, you know. We had some starches, we didn't have bread,
24:31we had spaghetti, things of that sort. And at the end, you know,
24:35we would kill horses, you see, and eat horse meat, you know, and dogs were eaten also.
24:47The London Poles became ever more frantic in their hopelessness
24:51and blamed the British for their plight. But the RAF couldn't fly in much supplies
24:57as long as Stalin refused to let them refuel in Soviet-held territory.
25:01By the time he'd been persuaded to relent, so little was left of Warsaw that the supplies
25:07dropped fell, more often than not, into German hands. We were terribly disappointed.
25:14The whole world forgot about us. I feel that Poland was betrayed by allies, you see.
25:20Towards the end, we felt that there was absolutely no hope for us. We won't get any help from the
25:26Russians. The Germans were set on absolutely annihilating us, and therefore I didn't bother
25:35to duck when I was going under the fire. I just had the feeling that I should die sooner or later,
25:43sooner, better. The Germans even brought up their biggest siege guns, the dreaded giant mortar
25:53nicknamed Thor, each of whose shells weighed more than two tons. It was a hopeless battle now
26:03that had been going on for 10 long weeks and had already cost the lives of more than 200,000 Poles.
26:10The time had come to call a halt.
26:23Surprisingly, the Germans allowed the Poles to surrender honorably and treated them not as
26:36partisans fit for immediate execution, but as enlisted combatants due the rights of prisoners
26:41of war under the Geneva Convention. Clearly, some of the German generals already had their eyes on
26:47possible war crimes trials after the war.
26:52So
27:13once the remaining citizens had been driven from the city,
27:16Warsaw was systematically razed to the ground.
27:22So
27:46Hitler was determined it should never rise again.
27:52So
28:06Thus ended one of the war's most tragic episodes.
28:22So
28:32Despite the bombing and despite the privations, the morale of the German people that autumn of 1944
28:37was surprisingly high. They responded well to every propaganda call Hitler made.
28:43This one was for collecting winter clothing for the Eastern Front.
28:52Hitler reduced the call-up age that autumn to 16 and a half and raked in those who had so far
28:58escaped it on grounds of essential work. Some 700,000 new recruits were raised,
29:04partly for the Volkssturm, sort of home guard, and partly to replace his terrible losses in both
29:10East and West. But he also had in mind a more daring use for his new recruits.
29:17Ever since his defeat in Normandy, Hitler had been planning a major counter-attack,
29:21hoping not just to halt the Allies before they reached the Rhine, but rather to turn them back
29:26so decisively that they would want a soup of peace, a peace that would give him a breathing
29:30space in which to stem the Russian advance before it got too close to Berlin.
29:37Such was his fantasy. To that end, too, he'd been conserving his panzers,
29:44re-equipping them after their mauling in Normandy. But where to strike?
29:54That autumn of 1944, the Allies in the West had closed up to the German border along a thousand
29:59mile front and had even penetrated the Siegfried Line in one or two places.
30:04But supplies still remained a problem, for Antwerp was not yet open. To the north of Antwerp lay
30:10the bulk of the British forces. If, by a daring blow, Hitler could capture Antwerp and reach the
30:16sea, he would not only eliminate the Allies' main supply port, he would also have split the Allies
30:21in two and the British might once again have to contemplate a Dunkirk. Eisenhower, in manning
30:28his thousand mile front, had had to spread his forces thinly in places. One such place was just
30:34125 miles from Antwerp, the Ardennes, of 1940 magical, mystical memory for Hitler.
30:42If only history could repeat itself for him.
30:50In war, one must remember that you can't be strong everywhere. The 12th Army Group,
30:56Bradley's Army Group, were given certain tasks and therefore he had to decide where he was going
31:04to be strong and where he was going to be weak. And he assessed the situation
31:09and decided he'd thin out on the Ardennes sector.
31:11We were told by some of the men who were in the houses that we took over that it was a very quiet
31:32sector. Nothing happened. Once in a while a patrol was sent out. They would hear sometimes the
31:39crackling of a gun in the distance and, well, there was nothing to it. I was not exactly green
32:02but there weren't too many in our particular unit that had had much in the way of any
32:07combat experience. On the 24th of October I was ordered to come to Hitler with headquarters in
32:27East Prussia. And he developed me and General Krebs, the chief of the Army Group in the centre,
32:37who accompanied me, that we would get end of November or beginning of December strong
32:45reinforcements. He named 20 infantry divisions, 10 armour divisions and a lot of other special
32:55troops. And he promised it would be supported by the Air Force with about 3,000 planes.
33:06But we were totally surprised. He explained that the objectives, Antwerp and Brussels,
33:15were something of a risk and might seem beyond the capacity of the forces available
33:22and their conditions. Nevertheless, he had decided to take everything on one cart
33:30because Germany needed a bracing space. A defence struggle, he said,
33:36could only postpone the decision and not change the general situation for Germany.
33:41For his attack in the Ardennes, Hitler, unknown to the Allies, had assembled more than half a million troops.
33:54Opposing them were just 80,000 ill-equipped, inexperienced Americans.
33:59It seemed like May 1940 all over again.
34:02The morale of the German attacking forces was high and this compensated, in my opinion,
34:16for a comparative weakness in weapon and in manpower. We saw this build-up of forces,
34:24tanks and a great number, more tanks than we had seen in the last two years.
34:31We even saw aircraft and then we saw that the preparation were well kept in secrecy.
34:41Null day, zero day, December the 16th arrived.
34:53The barrage lasted an hour and gave the Allies a taste of what they had themselves
35:14meted out a casino some months and at El Alamein some years before.
35:24The last great attack of the Germans in the West had begun. Hitler's most desperate gamble was on.
35:36As a simple soldier, everything is on the road and you think these are more division than they are.
35:42Therefore, we had the feeling that this build-up of force might enable us to reach the final goal,
35:51which was Antwerp. The weather was foggy. The American and British air superiority
36:01didn't matter in that type of weather and therefore we believed that we would be successful.
36:07Surprise was total. It was the beginning of a day of monumental confusion for the
36:22Allies, the worst they experienced in the whole European war.
36:25Even as the first Wehrmacht waves were overrunning the American positions along the Ardennes,
36:31talk at Allied headquarters back at Versailles was focused more on the news of band leader
36:36Glenn Miller's death than of the possibility of the biggest German offensive in the West since 1940.
36:43It was the day Eisenhower was promoted five-star general.
36:47And the day Field Marshal Montgomery happened to apply for leave to go home to England for Christmas.
36:53Ike was, in fact, attending his chauffeur's wedding that morning while Monty was playing golf.
36:59As the day wore on, the resemblances to May 1940 grew. The overwhelming German might,
37:06their relentless speed, above all the chaos in the air, the sheer number of German airmen,
37:12the overwhelming German might, their relentless speed, above all the chaos in the Allied rear,
37:18as bewildered untried troops dashed for safety, clogging the roads and preventing reinforcements
37:23reaching the front. A rumor was spread that the Americans would hand over part of the
37:30prisoners of war to the Russians, and that helped to build up morale and the will to fight.
37:427,000 Americans surrendered in one go, the biggest mass surrender of American
37:47arms in the European campaign.
37:56German newsreel cameramen had a field day.
38:18The fog was lifting a little bit in the area where we were, but by about 12 o'clock we
38:26found that we couldn't go any further, that it was just a question of surrendering.
38:36The lieutenant went down and made arrangements with the German officer in charge and came back
38:42up and told us that we had one hour to dismantle and destroy our weapons or dig holes and bury
38:53whatever we wanted to bury and be ready to come off that hill within one hour.
39:04The first American prisoners didn't know what was going on. They came to us, they were asking for
39:10bread and we had bread enough, so we gave them bread and they gave us chocolate.
39:40After two or three days, we already saw that the resistance of the American troop was stronger than we had believed.
40:11The reason they had been able to break through in the first place was that we could get no
40:19fighter bomber support. The weather was sitting right on the treetops and we couldn't pick up
40:25any of their moving troops from the air, but on Christmas Eve, the clouds lifted.
40:32And thereafter, the fighter bombers came in and they simply destroyed the German armour.
40:41Manteuffel's panzers had run out of petrol, still some 70 miles short of Antwerp.
40:48Motionless, they were sitting ducks for the Allied planes.
41:11It was a great slaughter, the American divisional commander wrote in his report.
41:18For Hitler, it was more than the beginning of the end.
41:25The failure of this offensive affected the morale and therefore the behaviour of the soldiers and
41:31the civilians alike, and thus we have contributed to speeding the end of the war.
41:40With the German offensive definitely halted, the Americans from the south and the British from the north pressed down on the bulge that had been formed within the Ardennes front,
41:49the bulge that gave this particular battle its popular name.
41:54They met in mid-January 1945, by which time the German army was in total disarray, but the Russian
42:02winter offensive had begun four days before. Now, Hitler's gamble in the west was seen to be supreme folly.
42:10For to do it, he had denuded his defences in the east.
42:23With its carefully hoarded reserves of fuel and equipment, and of course of men too, gone,
42:28the German war machine began to disintegrate.
43:11I would say that Hitler's attack in the bulge brought the war to an end perhaps six months earlier than it would otherwise have ended,
43:21because the Germans could have fallen back to the Rhine, which was a real obstacle,
43:27but they had nothing with which to hold the Rhine, because essentially the German army,
43:31the reserves of the German army, the mobile troops in the reserves of the German army,
43:35were destroyed in the Battle of the Bulge.
43:37The German soldier was exhausted, and he had only one desire, to end the war,
43:46but he was willing to fight on, to cover the rear of the eastern front.
43:57On January the 20th, 1945, Zhukov's tanks entered Germany proper for the first time,
44:03a mere hundred miles from Berlin,
44:06the occasion being celebrated by a particularly savage sacking of every village in sight.
44:25Soon, thousands upon thousands of German civilians took to the roads westwards,
44:29away from the dreaded Russians, producing scenes reminiscent of those
44:33long lines of French and Belgian refugees five years before.
44:39As the Allied bombing intensified, more and more German cities were reduced to rubble.
45:00In Mannkampf, Hitler had written,
45:03Even if we cannot conquer, we shall drag the world into destruction with us.
45:21All during March, the Russian guns could be heard in Berlin.
45:33So
45:53then they came to me and they said, do you want the town of Cleve taking out?
45:57By taking out, they meant the whole of the heavy bombers putting on to Cleve.
46:01Now, I knew that Cleve was a fine old historical German town.
46:07Anne of Cleve, one of Henry VIII's wives came from there.
46:12I knew that there were a lot of civilians in Cleve, men, women and children.
46:17If I said no, they would live.
46:19If I said yes, they would die.
46:21Terrible decision you've got to take.
46:23But everything depended on getting a high piece of ground at Nutterton.
46:30The German reserves would have to come through Cleve,
46:33and we would have to breach the Siegfried line and get there.
46:37And your own lives, your own troops must come first.
46:39So I said, yes, I did want it taken out.
46:43But when all those bombers went over the night just before zero hour to take out Cleve,
46:51I felt a merger.
46:53And after the war, I had an awful lot of nightmares.
46:56It was always Cleve.
47:00And
47:24after another, the cities west of the Rhine were cleared of German troops.
47:28Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz and, of course, Cologne.
48:29By March the 22nd, no German soldier fought west of the Rhine.
48:40Only the Rhine now lay between the Western Allies and the heartland of Hitler's Germany.
49:00And preparations began straightaway to cross it.
49:10So
50:40I, at nine o'clock in the evening, I remember waiting, sitting in a command post.
51:05Then the news came through that the Black Watch were over the Rhine.
51:10Rather historic in a way, they were over the Rhine.