The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

126 – To the Rhine


The French made it to the stretch of the Rhine between Bonn and Koblenz in time with the 7th Armored Division having fought through refugee traffic to get to the western side of the river. Their tanks, armoured vehicles and infantry, plus also plenty of heavy guns, positioned themselves back behind the West Germans who were close to the water. The French were ready to counterattack a crossing of the Rhine and drive the Soviets back. This arrival of such a strong reinforcement came after nine o’clock on the Monday night. It had involved the French taking significant detours on the way to get around the hordes of fleeing civilians – whom the West German authorities were helpless in the face of – and thus arriving later than they had hoped to. Even if they hadn’t been so delayed, they could have done nothing to reverse the situation on the other side of the river, over in the Westerwald. The hills and woodland there were full of what remained of their own fellow French I Corps soldiers where the last of the 1st Armored Division was wiped out after being so thoroughly run-through earlier in the day. Should this second division had reached here long before it did, going over the Rhine wasn’t an option: that side of the water had already been unofficially surrendered to the approaching enemy. Here where there was hope of putting a stop to the Soviets, the French moved in behind West German Territorials and also their fallschirmjager. The Rhine was to be held here at all costs. The arriving corps headquarters took command of all of those West Germans and also Belgium’s Para–Commando Regiment (two-thirds of the unit; the other third was on pre-war exercise in Canada and currently in transit back to Europe) that arrived by truck too. There were a lot of men and a lot of intent to make a successful stand here.

A trio of tank divisions approached as First Guards Tank Army came close to the Rhine in the hour before midnight. Almost a thousand tanks, many more infantry carriers and (when non-divisional supporting units were counted too) eight hundred plus artillery pieces were involved. Going over that river tonight was the mission, given to the army commander: regardless of who was in the way and what they tried, he was to cross the Rhine here. Eighth Guards Army units had cleared the way ahead and on went all of those tanks. Given the assistance of the 39th Landing–assault Brigade to help, the First Guards Tank Army did as ordered. They got over the river. What a feat it was. What a battle that involved. Many of the helicopters involved in bringing the DShV airmobile troops into the fight were engaged when Belgian Mirage-5s on a ground attack mission discarded their bombs and opened fire with cannons & Sidewinders against defenceless transports laden with men. The surviving helicopters, scattered about all over the place, dropped off their human cargoes in the wrong places and they did little to help the fight overall. BMP-1 & -2 infantry carriers from the tank division’s motor rifle regiments, the main assault force for each of the crossing points to come in behind the airmobile landings, faced attack long before they could reach the water’s edge. What ones didn’t explode or burn when hit unloaded their riflemen into a battlefield where the NATO units over the other side were unleashing waves of artillery. Other attacking aircraft targeted those motor rifle units plus the tanks rolling behind them. Yet, in the face of all of this, onwards the First Guards Tank Army pushed. The attacking units got men to the Rhine and then went over it. Bridging engineers started their work under furious fire and allowed for the crossing operations to commence. In the darkness, punctuated by seemingly a million bright flashes of explosions as the Monday turned into the Tuesday, the crossings were forced.

At Konigswinter, the 25th Tank Division made the attack. Their motor rifle regiment had a torrid time with huge casualties inflicted. The ruins of their BMP-1s would be found in the high ground to the east, down in the town, floating downstream or caught along the banks of the river and on the western side in the smaller town of Bad Godesberg. Dead riflemen were all around these knocked out vehicles too. West German M-113s armoured personal carriers and M-48 tanks also littered the battlefield, though only on the western side. The bodies of so many of the reservists from the 53rd Territorial Brigade were here too. Civilians who had been unable to get away from the towns along the Rhine suffered just as gravely as well. The Belgians had joined in too, also dying here. Their British-built Scorpion light tanks had been unable to help turn the tide nor had their determined paratroopers. Once the crossing was made, despite the near destruction of the majority of that lead regiment, the 25th Division started moving over its tank regiments. T-64s came over the Rhine. They engaged what few M-48s were left operational and also West German blocking points leading out of Bad Godesberg. The Soviets could have gone west or south from here. They went north though. In that direction, just up the road, lay the small city of Bonn: west Germany’s capital. It was undefended but that wasn’t known to those soldiers of the 25th Division who drove towards it expecting a fight. They rolled into Bonn in the early hours and captured it. Bonn had long been abandoned by the West German government and many citizens had left too when missile attacks had come. Important buildings were soon secured as the Soviets seemingly played tourist. They had orders to do this though because there were incoming media teams who would be busy come first light to soon be broadcasting around the world the propaganda value of taking Bonn.

There was no railway or highway bridge at Remagen built to replace the one made famous by its capture by the Americans back in 1945. Forty-two years later, the only crossing over the Rhine here would be made by a ferry link. That was before the Soviet Army’s bridging engineers got here and threw crossings over the river. The 11th Guards Tank Division came across. It cost them their motor rifle regiment and one of the tank regiments too. West German reservists with their 74th Territorial Regiment (no tanks nor armoured vehicles assigned) engaged them but it was the French, committed here in the centre of where the First Guards Tank Army struck, that inflicted the majority of those losses. Their AMX-30s fought with T-80s that came over the Rhine. As the tanks duelled, infantry, engineers & gunners were also involved in the fighting. It was the tank battles which defined the fight though. There were close to two hundred French tanks facing three hundred Soviet ones. Few of them fought near the water’s edge but instead back from the Rhine on the western side. The French made repeated efforts to drive the 11th Guards Division back before they could then turn to the other crossing sites. They couldn’t do it though. The Soviets kept on attacking, even if this fight cost them as much as it did. In came aircraft and helicopters on attack missions from both opposing sides and there was also the employment of nerve gas by the Soviets too. Those inside NBC-sealed tanks fought in regardless. It was three o’clock in the morning before the battle was decided. The French made a retreat to the south, towards Sinzig and protected their withdrawal by going over the lowest stretch of the Ahr River (a tributary of the Rhine which fed into it here) and blowing up their crossing points behind them. The Soviets didn’t give chase. They couldn’t at this stage, not after the major fight that the 11th Guards Division had just faced.

Downstream where the West German’s 26th Airborne & 64th Territorial Brigades fought the Soviet’s 9th Tank Division at the Neuwied-Andernach crossing site, for most of the fight it looked like a NATO victory here was assured. Those fallschirmjager and reservists stopped the Soviets from getting into Andernach with their first and second attempts. Counter shelling into Soviet positions over in Neuwied was done though in a limited fashion because there remained friendly civilians there who hadn’t gotten away in time. The third Soviet attempt was one that the West Germans couldn’t stop. Soviet external fire support had already been significant and the West Germans had fought through that to eliminate the few men who’d gotten over the river, but Andernach suddenly topped the target list of seemingly every Soviet strike weapon within hundreds of miles. There were missiles, rockets, shells and heavy mortars (the latter massive 240mm shells!). Jets and attack helicopters swept in. A series of almighty blasts occurred in the early hours when thermobaric bombs were used. The initial battlefields had been the industrial areas of Andernach alongside the Rhine opposite the bigger town of Neuwied. Those big blasts alongside much of the rest of the fire support was directed elsewhere though, just a little to the south. The imposing Raiffeisenbrücke bridge linking Neuwied to Weissenthurm had been brought down on the Monday evening in a fantastic set of demolition explosions but there was an island in the Rhine which sat below where the bridge had once been. That was used by the Soviets as a helpful stepping stone to get across the river during their third attempt. Braving the immense barrage which kept on coming, the fallschirmjager rushed forwards to head them off. They were cut down. The Soviets were across the Rhine now and reinforcements of so many T-80 tanks joined the riflemen out front. Those reservists with the 64th Brigade responded to instructions from the French I Corps to make a withdrawal and started heading northwards. They got out of Andernach to link up with what was left of the 7th Armored Division and keep on fighting. Behind the Rhine here lay the Eifel region: a defender’s paradise which further Belgian and French forces were already rolling into. The Rhine as a defensive line was lost but the Rhineland would still be a battlefield of NATO resistance. Left behind, West Germany’s paratroopers fought to the very end and died here in what was a heroic but, ultimately, foolish last stand.


In northern Baden–Wurttemberg, three divisions of the Soviet Thirty–Eighth Army were also moving on to the Rhine as well. It wasn’t somewhere they were going to reach though: the Eighth Tank Army would be the ones to get that far and that would have to be done tomorrow by those troops which had come far from their Hungarian garrisons. The Soviet troops out of Czechoslovakia, this field army out front, was still fighting some distance back from the river. They were pushing towards it as a set objective regardless: the commander of the Second Western Front had no intention of telling them to ease up and let someone else take over when the Thirty–Eighth Army could still fight. Tonight, the fight was for the Neckar River. Along its course lay Heidelberg, Heilbronn and Stuttgart. Taking those cities directly wasn’t what the Thirty–Eighth Army was to do. Neither were the NATO military facilities around them, important sites that they were, the aim here. It was getting to and over the Neckar that was sought to be done because that was the last physical blockage ahead of the Rhine beyond.

Now attached to the attacking Soviets was a brigade of Czechoslovaks. The 22nd Special Purpose Airborne Brigade was a good unit with well-trained men. It was employed by the Soviets almost in disdain: dispatched to the front to get in the way of an incoming attack coming from the flank. The Czechoslovaks were sent to Bad Friedrichshall to die. There was a brigade of West German regulars – the 34th Panzer Brigade detached from the 12th Panzer Division, troops still pretty close to the Inner-German Border – racing in a southwestern direction to hit the Thirty–Eighth Army on the flank. The 22nd Brigade was to get in the way and the hopes of them holding out for that long weren’t thought to be great. By then, the Soviet’s 31st Tank Division was supposed to be in a position to handle the threat. At Bad Friedrichshall, the Czechoslovaks did die but they also fought. The West Germans were blocked from coming in from the flank. There was contact on the ground made with the survivors of one of those VDV armoured columns – Column #5, the one which Canadian air power had brought to a halt – where the paratroopers from there had abandoned their stalled vehicles and were out of contact with higher headquarters while on the move in the countryside. The 34th Brigade thus couldn’t get to Heilbronn before the Soviets got there and crossed the Neckar in the face of opposition from West German Territorials. Onwards the tanks of the 31st Division went afterwards, coming up towards Heidelberg from what NATO would consider ‘behind’: that being the western side of the Neckar. As was the way of things, no credit was given to the Czechoslovaks afterwards by the Soviet Army for what they had done here (little mention was made of the 51st Guards Parachute Regiment too) as their own tankers wanted all the plaudits that would come with getting as far as they did.

American and French troops fought both the 15th Guards Tank & 30th Guards Motor Rifle Divisions as the two of them went over the Neckar north of where Stuttgart was. The river line was forced though it was rear-guards who were engaged here: West Germans who’d stayed behind while their allies made a strategic withdrawal. NATO didn’t consider the Neckar in the same manner that the Soviets did and believed that they could do more damage to the enemy away from such a fixed point which the invaders could – and did – target with tremendous amounts of firepower to eliminate defenders of such a narrow waterway. The NATO retreat was something that the Soviets sought to stop from being successful and part of the 30th Guards Division was unleashed. It went up the valley of the Enz River in the direction of Pforzheim. Too fast the tanks and infantry carriers advanced, going beyond their effective anti-air cover and relying upon the darkness to conceal them. This was a grave error. Once spotted racing ahead like they were, retreating NATO ground troops got out of the way and the skies filled with aircraft. Again and again, in came aircraft on bomb runs: this included Canadian F-118 Hornets making their last flight from CFB Baden–Soellingen before that facility was evacuated and the Canadians withdrew across the Rhine into France. There was care taken not to hit civilians in the small towns down the Enz valley though that was difficult to do. Hundreds would become casualties from falling NATO bombs. The Soviets took more casualties though and their mad dash forward came to a halt. A whole regiment from the 30th Guards Division was lost for no good purpose.

In the early hours, other large air attacks took place throughout Baden–Wurttemberg against the Thirty–Eighth Army. The Soviets had overrun large portions of this West German state and were closing up on the Rhine here. They weren’t going southwards – leaving NATO forces still in Bavaria not yet directly cut off – only west. The NATO effort in the skies couldn’t stop the Soviets below them but it did make sure that this would be as far as this targeted army below them would come. It would have to be the Eighth Tank Army that would need to be used to continue the advance. The attacks also covered their own withdrawal out of the area too (CFB Baden–Soellingen would only fall the next day but other bases were already lost). What attention turned to next was what to do with the forward positions still held south of where there had been withdrawals from and all those NATO troops there… some of whom were still on the Danube as the Rhine now became the frontline! And, of course, other NATO attention, especially French concern, was on what to do now that the Rhine had been successfully crossed. Was it going to be a bucket of sunshine breakfast for the Soviet Army tomorrow morning?