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Cologne, fourth largest city of Germany, fell today to troops of the American 1st Army, while, to the south, armor of the 3d Army, breaking out from the Bitburg bridgehead over the Kyll River, swept more than 25 miles through the hills and forests north of the Moselle River to within 20 miles of the Rhine and about 25 miles of Coblenz. The 3d Army advanced 32 miles, an Associated Press dispatch said. When last pinpointed, spearheads of the 3d Army’s 4th Armored Division, which relieved the Bastogne pocket, were in the vicinity of Schonbach, l0 1/2 miles northwest of Kochen, on the Moselle. Corps Commander Taken There is little reason to suppose that this report, dating from shortly later than mid-afternoon, marks the farthest advance of the Allied armored thrust. In the course of the advance, Lieut.
Col. Creighton W. Abrams, of West Newton, Mass., commanding officer of the 4th Armored Division’s 37th Tank Battalion, received the surrender of Lieut. Gen Edwin Graf von Rothkirch und Trach, commanding general of the German 53d Corps, and some of his staff officers. In its sweep the 4th Armored Division overran a number of towns and villages, including Kyllburg, Steinborn, Meisburg, Salm and Oberstadtfeld.
Resistance was light and scattered, but some of the roads were poor and impeded progress.
As the Allied soldiers battered their way past piles of wreckage they were amazed to see German civilians displaying -apparent friendliness and relief at their arrival. Equally surprising was the ease with which Cologne was taken. It had been the consensus that the city would be bitterly defended and hard to crack. Instead of fighting from house-to-house the Nazis defended only key points, sometimes blocks apart. The 3d armored division of Lieut. Gen. Courtney H. Hodges’ U. S. 1st Army pushed into the city from the north, while the 104th Infantry fought in from the west through suburban Efferen and the Braunsfeld district.
Major Gen. Donald A. Stroh’s 8th Infantry on the south cleared the suburbs of Al-staden and Hermulheim and seized a big power station on the outskirts.
And that’s just a small slice of what happened, this March 7, 1945 as reported by the 6:00pm WEAF News from New York.
