In fact, German radio reported on the night of March 23, 1945, that Montgomery had launched an offensive along a 100-kilometre line from Arnhem in the Netherlands to the German industrial centre of Dusseldorf.
The smokescreen behind which preparations for battle were being made was something of a metaphor for a censorship screen that had been imposed all along the British front in the closing days of the Second World War. A front-page picture of the smokescreen in The Globe and Mail on March 23 noted imprecisely that "a cloud with steel lining" was being laid "on a German frontier town." All that correspondents with the troops were allowed to write was that the buildup was the largest since the D-Day invasion of Normandy the previous June.
Indeed, more than 1.2 million British, Canadian and U.S. soldiers were under Montgomery's command. He also had more than 5,000 artillery pieces and anti-tank guns and the British 2nd Army alone had amassed 120,000 tonnes of ammunition.
It was the U.S. 3rd Army, under General George Patton, that first crossed the Rhine in great numbers, however. Reports said the Americans crossed the river in boats near Mainz on March 22, catching German troops flat-footed.
The next day, the British 2nd Army, with 1st Canadian Army units, crossed the Rhine farther north, near the town of Wesel, which had been reduced to rubble by days of intense bombing. Subsequently, 21,000 Allied airborne troops dropped down further inland and captured six bridges along the Issel River, while sustaining heavy losses.
The first soldier across the river -- crossing in just 3½ minutes -- was Lieutenant Hugh Campbell of Trenton, Ont., who was on loan to the British Army.
Globe correspondent Ralph Allen noted that the Canadians had renewed their violent feud with the German soldiers they had faced weeks earlier in the Hochwald Forest.
The Canadians fighting were all D-Day veterans and were, as Mr. Allen wrote, up to the task of inching "laboriously for elbow room inside a stiffening ring of German trench positions and mobile guns.
"The going wasn't easy anywhere," he wrote in a March 25 dispatch. "The enemy paratroopers, who had given up the river's banks virtually without a struggle, reacted strongly when Montgomery's forces drove ahead for control of the roads."
A Canadian commander put it more succinctly. The Germans, he said, were "fighting like madmen."
Montgomery's crossing had been meticulously prepared with every unit playing a well-defined role. The Highland Light Infantry, from what is now Cambridge, Ont., were ferried over the river before dawn. The Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders from Eastern Ontario entered the fray that evening. Later, the North Nova Scotia Highlanders passed through their ranks to take a vital village. The North Shore Regiment from New Brunswick was also involved.
The Canadians were driving northward to clear the northeastern part of the Netherlands. The assault was made easier because of the work of the RCAF City of Toronto reconnaissance squadron. Pilots, flying in unarmed, super-speed Spitfires at high altitudes, had photo-mapped 1,486 square metres of Germany with the aim of identifying every new gun battery. Flight Lieutenant Ernie Griffin of Guelph, Ont., using a stereoscope camera, provided pictures that allowed analysts to estimate the height of the riverbank at bridging points.
The crossings by Montgomery and Patton now gave the Allies three bridgeheads on the east bank of the Rhine. Within days, U.S. troops on the southern flank of the front had advanced 140 kilometres past the river, prompting the leader of an airborne army unit to say there was nothing to halt the drive to Berlin about 400 kilometres away.
