World War II: The Last Heroes

The Allies finally reach the River Rhine, the last obstacle between them and the German heartland and their ultimate goal: Berlin. Twenty-year-old Bill Ryan was crossing the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen when the Germans tried to blow it up: '...and it's just lucky the explosives didn't go off. Unfortunately when the bridge collapsed there were ambulances on it with wounded aboard and they all died.' Patrick Delaforce advanced to the village of Belsen: 'What we could see were rags all over the place, but they weren't rags; they were dead or dying bodies. Occasionally there'd be a little twitch, that person might not actually be dead. Of the 60,000, 16,000 died. There was nothing anybody could do for them.' As the Russian army advanced the Berlin, 19-year-old Jacov Krenin fired the fearsome Katyushas rockets: 'At first there was a hiss and it was getting stronger... More rockets joined in... and the noise was deafening. Long growling arrows flew, their tails flaming.' Knowing that the fight was over, Hitler committed suicide. Dreams of the 1000-year Reich had finally come to an end. These were the men who won that war.