In approving the plan, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower asserted that the objective was not only to clear the Saar-Palatinate but to establish bridgeheads with forces of the Sixth Army Group over the Rhine between Mainz and Mannheim.

In approving the plan, Eisenhower asserted that the objective was not only to clear the Saar-Palatinate but to establish bridgeheads with forces of the Sixth Army Group over the Rhine between Mainz and Mannheim.

Although Devers was briefly reluctant to endorse Third Army operations south of the Moselle lest the two forces become entangled with their converging thrusts, he too in the end approved the plan.

The Seventh Army numbered among its ranks several relatively inexperienced units but retained a flavoring of long-term veterans.

As the Seventh Army offensive began, the basic question was how stubbornly the Germans would defend before falling back on the Siegfried Line.

Only Milburn's XXI Corps—on the Seventh Army's left wing, near Saarbrücken—was fairly close to the Siegfried Line, while other units were as much as 32 km (20 mi) away.

Making the army's main effort in the center, Haislip's XV Corps faced what looked like a particularly troublesome obstacle in the town of Bitche.

At Saarbrücken, the left wing of General Knieß′[4] LXXXV Korps would receive a glancing blow from Milburn's XXI Corps.

One was on the left wing, where the 63rd Infantry Division (Maj. Gen. Louis E. Hibbs) sought to bypass Saarbrücken on the east and cut German escape routes from the city.

There an urban area closely backing the Moder River defensive line and flat ground affording superb fields of fire for dug-in automatic weapons accounted in large measure for the more difficult fighting.

Perhaps aided by the fact that they had done the same job before in December, they gained dominating positions on the fortified hills around the town, leaving no doubt that they would clear the entire objective in short order the next day, 16 March.

Although all four attacking divisions had to overcome the initial obstacle of a river, either the Moder or a tributary, they accomplished the job quickly with predawn assaults.

Having entered Uttenhoffen, northwest of Hagenau, the battalion encountered such intense small arms fire and shelling from self-propelled guns that the regimental commander authorized withdrawal.

When German infantry soon after nightfall counterattacked with support from four self-propelled pieces, the battalion pulled back another few hundred yards to better positions on the edge of a copse.

After making a one-man charge that carried a German strongpoint and took eight prisoners, Herrera and his platoon were pinned down by fire from a second position protected by a minefield.

Beginning the night of 16 March, commanders facing the U.S. XV Corps simply did the obvious, ordering their units to seek refuge in the Siegfried Line whenever American pressure grew so great that withdrawal or annihilation became the only alternatives.

That responsibility fell to those units, decimated and increasingly demoralized, which were opposing the onrush of U.S. Third Army troops from west and northwest into the German rear.

The natural difficulties posed by these twisting, poorly surfaced routes already had been heightened by a mass of wrecked vehicles as American fighter pilots relentlessly preyed on hapless targets.

Unfortunately for Foertsch's plan, the principal threat to the Kaiserslautern Gap came not from west or southwest but from northwest where Walker's XX Corps was pouring unchecked through General Walther Hahm's LXXXII Korps.

Patch seized on the situation to provide a boost for his army's main effort, the attack of the XV Corps through Zweibrücken toward the Kaiserslautern Gap.

"Scarcely a man-made thing exists in our wake; it is even difficult to find buildings suitable for CP's: this is the scorched earth."

Thousands of released slave laborers and German soldiers who had changed into civilian clothes complicated the issue for military government officials.

In the Seventh Army's original plan, the attached 3rd Algerian Division on the right wing of the VI Corps along the Rhine was to have been pinched out after it reached the Lauter River at the German frontier.

In the ensuing clash, elements of the German 257th Volksgrenadier and 905th Infantry Training Divisions were forced to retreat northward in fighting dominated by the forested terrain.

The adjustment meant that the Siegfried Line assault by the four American divisions of the VI Corps was to be concentrated in a zone less than 32 km (20 mi) wide.

Armee to plug the hole from the north alongside the Rhine, had hardly anything left to prevent the 12th Armored Division from driving southward from Ludwigshafen toward Speyer.

While the bridge at Germersheim continued to serve artillery and vehicles, foot troops began to evacuate the west bank at three ferry sites south of the town.

Although all divisions of the U.S. VI Corps achieved clear breakthroughs during 23 March, they came in contact only with rear guards and failed to affect the German evacuation materially.

Armee—for all the losses, conducted a skillful delaying action to the end in the face of overwhelming strength on the ground and in the air and never succumbed to wholesale encirclement, despite a higher command reluctant to sanction any withdrawal.

In preserving their forces, however, the Germans had to surrender the important industrial area around Saarbrücken as well as the readily defensible terrain of the Pfaelzer Forest.