The Ultimate Bridge

Six hundred and twenty nine lorries. I know; I had to count them.

Donald Bailey, a junior civil servant in England, had a hobby - he designed model bridges. Originally, with the commercial success of Erector sets and Tinker toys in mind, he produced a working model of an interlocking bridge. When war came, he submitted this to the War Office. It was accepted and, after many experiments and versions with the original concept and design unchanged, ready for service by the time the Allies reached the shores of Sicily two years later. General Eisenhower, among many others, considered the Bailey bridge as one of the three major reasons the Allies won World War II. Certainly, without it the Rhine and the Meuse and the innumerable rivers that run East and West from the Appenines would all have held up the Allies' advance into Europe for months. Bailey was deservedly knighted after the war and his bridge spanned thousands of streams, rivers and craters in that war and in those that followed.

Today, with hardly a modification, Bailey bridging forms part of every civilian emergency force. In 1983, a major U.S. Interstate Highway (95) bridge washaway was restored to traffic in two weeks - the permanent replacement took eight more months. After 9/11, a Bailey bridge-turned-ramp brought heavy equipment into Ground Zero. The versatility of the system seems endless - a Bailey bridge even gives access to the ice-bridge anchored in McMurdo Sound in frigid remote Antarctica.

For fourteen months, we had known that the mighty Po river lay across the Eighth Army's drive into Hitler's Festung Europa. The probable crossing point had already been chosen - Pontelagoscuro, where, six kilometres beyond the industrial city of Ferrara, Route 16 reached the banks of the river.