Shortly after joining the 86th, the battalion became
involved in another major bridging operation, this time
Company A began the treadway
over the Danube River.
bridge at Ingolstadt late at night on 26 April. The men
worked past midnight into the early hours of the morning.
All the while, heavy fire came from a barracks building
A sniper
about 200 feet in front of t h e landing site.
with a burp gun almost hit Colonel Fraser while he
With
supervised construction from the incomplete span.
the bridge only 40 feet from the far shore, the 300
desperate SS men who had barricaded themselves in the
building were finally driven out by a landing party from
the 86th.
At eight o'clock in the morning the 324-foot
treadway was across, just in time for the Germans, now
prisoners of war, to come across.
The battalion was lucky at Ingolstadt. There were no
men killed or wounded. Every commander realized that the
war was coming to an end and hoped to avoid casualties.
But, although the end was in sight, the war still was not
On 7 May, just one day before V-E Day, Sergeant
over.
Alex George was killed and T-5 William Schender injured
when a premature blast occurred while destroying unser-
viceable explosives.
The battalion stayed in Germany through the summer.
It joined in the first stages of the long and arduous
reconstruction task that faced victors and vanquished
alike in Europe, removing rubble from the Main River so
that commercial barge traffic could start anew. In a way
In July the
the 51st came full circle that summer.
battalion once again operated sawmills, this time for
peaceful uses rather than for troops on the march. In
On 16
early October, active service in E u r o p e ended.
October8 the battalion boarded the SS Eufaula Victory at
Marseille, France, and sailed the next morning. Ten days
later, at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, the 51st Engineer
Combat Battalion was inactivated. In existence for just
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