Americans occupy Koblenz

On 8 December 1918 the first soldiers of the American Third Army entered Koblenz, the city at the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine. The British chronology of the war records the occupation of Koblenz by United States troops under this date. According to German studies of the city’s history, the first units arrived there on the afternoon of 8 December and the main body of the Third Army on 11 December. The Armistice of Compiègne had made Koblenz the centre of one of the three bridgeheads that the Allies were to occupy on the right bank of the Rhine. This bridgehead fell to the Americans.

General Joseph Dickman’s army crossed the German frontier on 1 December and reached Trier the same day. From there it marched along the Moselle, in cold and rain, on sodden roads. The Germans withdrew before it in accordance with the armistice timetable and, according to the American history of the occupation, completed the evacuation of Koblenz on 7 December, pulling back to the right bank of the Rhine. Dickman ordered his troops to reach the river by 11 December and wait there for orders. On 8 December cavalry patrols reached the Rhine at Remagen, found an undamaged railway bridge there and at once posted a guard on it. An American study of 1938 states more cautiously that the leading units of the Third Army reached the Rhine on 9 December.

The entry into Koblenz took place without ceremony. The American soldiers’ newspaper The Stars and Stripes wrote that there were no bands and no flags, and one of the generals said they had come in “just casually, like that”. The city, until then an important Prussian garrison and the seat of the provincial authorities of the Rhine Province, had been under the control of a local workers’ and soldiers’ council, set up during the November Revolution, since 8 November. The municipal authorities urged the inhabitants to receive the foreign soldiers with dignity, since only then could they expect to be treated with dignity themselves. Encounters with the Americans were generally peaceful. American officers remembered that the Germans looked at them with “indifferent curiosity”. According to the American study of 1938, there were no hostile incidents.

On 13 December units of the Third Army crossed the Rhine by the pontoon bridge at Koblenz and by the railway bridges at Engers and Remagen. On the right bank the bridgehead was occupied by III Corps with the 1st, 2nd and 32nd Divisions. The remaining divisions stayed on the left bank, around Mayen, Ahrweiler, Cochem, Trier and Wittlich. Under the armistice the bridgehead was to have a radius of 30 kilometres, but Marshal Ferdinand Foch gave its southern part to the French. On 15 December Third Army headquarters moved to Koblenz and occupied the Prussian government building on the Rhine. By the end of the year up to 17,000 Americans were stationed in the city of some 56,000 inhabitants. They were quartered in barracks, forts, public buildings and private homes.

Above Koblenz, on a rock on the other side of the Rhine, rises the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein. Dickman had the largest American flag that could be found hoisted on its highest mast as a sign of American authority over the area. The American flag flew over the fortress until 24 January 1923, and three days later the Americans handed their zone over to the French.

In the same days the French occupied Mainz. According to the city’s history, the last German soldier left on the morning of 8 December, and at noon General Victor Goybet’s French 65th Infantry Division marched in. Some studies give 9 December. On 11 December the commander of the Tenth Army, General Charles Mangin, who became commander of the French occupation troops there, arrived on the Rhine at Mainz, and the formal taking over of the city took place on 14 December. In the north the British had already occupied Cologne. So began the occupation of the Rhineland.