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On January 19th the Division withdrew to defensive positions along the Moder River for a well-earned rest before being attached to the US Ninth Army for 'Operation Grenade', the Rhine Crossing north of Strasbourg, which was made on March 24th. The Rhine-Herne Canal was forded on April 7th and the Division then advanced to the north bank of the Ruhr to face its final combat action clearing pockets of resistance in and around the German industrial heart-land of the Ruhr until April 13th, finally losing contact with the enemy on April 16th 1945.

Now the Division took on a patrolling and military governmental role until the surrender of all enemy forces in Europe on May 8th 1945, when the 79th received orders to relieve all Third Army units occupying parts of Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland. Between June and August 1945, the Division processed and discharged some 36,000 German POWs whilst its combat engineers began the task of rebuilding a shattered infrastructure. 79th combat medics also took responsibility for looking after some 94,000 liberated slave laborers, displaced persons and German Prisoners of War.

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It was during this period, that the first men of the 79th were transferred back to the United States though others, as the war in the Far East still raged, were kept in training for a possible assault on the islands of Japan itself.