Yesterday Sarah Kay Bierle looked at the ancient uses of pontoon bridges and its perspectives on the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg. While she addressed the difficulties of bridging rivers, I would like to look at the other side of the coin: the most successful river crossings in the past 155 years.

Students of the Civil War are no doubt familiar with the 1864 Overland Campaign and its bloody battles between the Federal forces under U.S. Grant and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. But one aspect sometimes gets overlooked: the Federal crossing of the James River by ferry and bridge between June 13 and 17, 1864. The movement involved over 100,000 men, 5,000 vehicles, and 58,000 animals. Some moved by steamer and ferry, while two corps and the support elements of Grant’s forces crossed via a 2,200-foot pontoon bridge over the James, which is tidal at that point. This crossing was a triumph of logistics; the bridge over the James ranks as the longest pontoon bridge in military history.

This last statement may strike some as erroneous – the British bridge over Burma’s Chindwin River in December 1944 is often billed as the longest in military history. But that Bailey Bridge totaled only 1,600 feet including approaches; it was the longest Bailey Bridge built up to that time and was so reported in the press.

But even the Chindwin bridge wasn’t the longest Bailey Bridge in history. That honor goes to the 1,800-foot crossing of the Rhine built by Canadian and American engineers in March 1945.

Honorable mention must go to Sir William Slim’s Fourteenth Army with its crossing of Burma’s Irrawaddy River in February-March 1945. Too deep and swift to bridge, and ranging in width from 1.5 to 3.2 miles, the British and Indian troops used ferry operations and airlift to get across and press toward Mandalay.

These comparison cases from World War II only serve to highlight the Federal achievement of 1864 – an insufficiently-heralded moment in military history.

Top Image: Grant watches the crossing of the James, 1864.

Upper Middle: The Chindwin River Bridge, 1944.

Lower Middle: The Rhine River Bridge, March 1945.

Below: VIPs cross the Rhine Bridge, March 28, 1945. Left to right: Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, CIGS; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, commander of 21 Army Group; and Lieutenant General William H. Simpson, commander of U.S. Ninth Army.

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