Peeking at the Past: Operation Market-Garden - flawed from the start?

Was Operation Market-Garden, one of the largest airborne operations ever mounted, doomed to fail at the start?

Operation Market-Garden, along with the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, was one of the least well-conceived military operations carried out by the Allies in the Western Front.

It’s all a question of bridges…..

Market-Garden was the brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, who had won renown as the victor of the Second Battle of El Alamein (October 23-November 11, 1942), where he commanded the British Eighth Army. Known as “Monty” by his many admirers and detractors, in 1944 he was Britain’s most popular general due to his victories over Field Marshal Erwin “the Desert Fox” Rommel in North Africa, his successes in the ensuing invasions of Sicily and Italy, and for his handling of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, on June 6, 1944 and afterwards. A veteran of World War I, Monty was a firm believer in training, planning, and carefully planned “set-piece battles.” His troops, for the most part, loved him. So did the British press, and as a result, much of the British public.

Unfortunately, Montgomery was overly cautious on the offensive; he often lagged behind the enemy in a “pursuit” situation. He also had a tendency to make overly-optimistic estimates of success before launching an operation, then claim the end results were “part of the plan” even if they weren’t or if they came about due to someone else’s actions. Monty also was prickly, egotistical, and lacked tact, especially when he was dealing with his American counterparts.

Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery

Although Montgomery was a good general in many ways, he also was a hard man to get along with. Like Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., Monty had an exaggerated self-image as a military strategist and believed that his plan for defeating the German army in the West was better than that favored by his American superior, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

After the Allied breakout from the Normandy beaches, the invasion of southern France, and the liberation of Paris, Montgomery argued that the way to victory in Europe was to mass the British Second Army, the Canadian First Army, and the U.S. Ninth and First Armies under a single Ground Forces Commander, then drive in a east-northeasterly direction north of the Ardennes, across the Meuse and Rhine Rivers, and onto the North German Plain. This “single thrust” strategy would allow the Allies to capture the heavy industries of the Ruhr Valley and destroy Germany’s ability to support its war machine.

Moreover, Monty argued, this force could drive all the way to Berlin and end the war before the end of 1944. All Gen. Eisenhower had to do was name Monty as the commander of the ground forces, stop Patton’s Third Army and Gen. Jacob L. Devers’ Sixth Army Group and order them to dig in for the winter, and give their logistical support to his northern drive.

Monty’s single-thrust or “narrow” plan. (“Monty’s plan is simple,” Eisenhower once said. “Give him everything.”)

Eisenhower, who was the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, however, had other ideas. He favored a “broad front” strategy (which is really a fancy term for the principle of mutually-supporting parallel drives) in which the three army groups under his command (the Anglo-Canadian 21st, the mostly American 12th, and the Franco-American Sixth) would drive toward the German border from Switzerland to the North Sea.

The Western Front, showing the approximate positions of the Anglo-American army groups nearly two months after Market-Garden.

General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. In September of 1944, Ike held the rank of General, one rank below Monty’s.

Although it was not public knowledge in 1944, “Ike” and “Monty” did not get along well. Eisenhower was an affable and diplomatic man who tried hard to foster good relations within the Anglo-American command structure. He was a fine staff officer and one of Gen. George C. Marshall’s proteges, and his schooling at West Point (Class of 1915) and the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth (Class of 1926) had prepared him well.

But Ike, unlike Monty, had never led troops on the battlefield. This fact, as well as the lackluster performance of U.S. Army forces in the early stages of the North African campaign, led Montgomery to assess his American superior in this acerbic and succinct comment: “Nice chap. No soldier.”

Many British generals, including Monty’s mentor, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, agreed. Monty believed that he, and not Eisenhower, should be in command of the Allied Expeditionary Force and lead it to Berlin. (The British press, too, lionized Montgomery and often editorialized about changing the Allied command structure. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who knew this was politically impossible since the U.S. was providing the bulk of the ground forces in Europe, promoted Montgomery to Field Marshal on Sept. 1, 1944, the day in which Ike assumed command of the Allied ground forces on the Western front.)

This, then, is the background for the decision to launch Market-Garden in September of 1944. Monty conceived his plan as a way to prod Ike into approving his single thrust strategy - if it worked.

After the British 11th Armoured Division captured the Belgian port of Antwerp on September 4, 1944, Montgomery had two strategic choices to make. He could turn his 21st Army Group to the left and clear the Scheldt Estuary of German forces so Allied supply ships could use Europe’s largest port and ease the serious logistical problem of feeding, fueling, and equipping three army groups. That was the prudent and logical choice, even if it did not end the war before Christmas of ‘44.

Monty’s other choice was more daring: instead of clearing the Scheldt Estuary, he could use the First Allied Airborne Army, which was held in England as a reserve force under the aegis of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, to capture a series of bridges in German-occupied Holland. The airborne phase, code-named “Market,” required three and a half airborne divisions (the British First Airborne Division, the Polish First Airborne Brigade, and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. The land phase, code-named Garden, would then drive the 64 miles from the Dutch-Belgian border to the city of Arnhem, which had several bridges over the Neder Rijn (Lower Rhine), and relieve the lightly armed paratroopers along the way.

If Market-Garden (the largest airborne operation mounted up to that time) succeeded, then the 21st Army Group could, in theory, turn the Germans’ right flank along the Westwall and send Allied forces into the industrial heartland of the Third Reich. Monty also hoped to persuade Ike to push all the supplies, replacements, and vehicles to his northern drive - to the exclusion of the other, mostly American, armies.

Now, Ike had no intention of going along with Montgomery that far, but he was intrigued by the scheme to use the airborne army in a strategic fashion. Like his superior, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, Eisenhower was beguiled by the theory of vertical envelopment, i.e., the use of paratroopers and glider infantry deep in the enemy’s rear areas to support a combined arms frontal assault. As he later told his biographer Stephen E. Ambrose, “I not only approved Market-Garden, I insisted on it.”

Indeed, most of the American generals who were aware of the plan before its launch were impressed by its daring-but-risky concept. And those who were to command the American airborne divisions (James M. Gavin of the 82nd and Maxwell Taylor of the 101st) didn’t say, “Whoa, whoa there. This plan looks good on the map, but it sounds iffy. Let’s think about this, okay?”

The one - and most famous - comment that reflected some quibbles about the plan came from Lt. Gen. Frederick Browning, the guy in tactical command of Market-Garden. At the final conference in Monty’s headquarters one week before the operation, this exchange took place:

Browning: How long will it take the armor to reach us?

Montgomery: Two days.

Browning: We can hold it (the bridge at Arnhem) for four. But, sir, I think we might be going a bridge too far.

Reasons for Market-Garden’s Failure:

The Battle of Arnhem is to the British what the Alamo is to Americans

1. Poor planning. Although Market-Garden was based on an earlier plan code-named Comet (indeed, it was Operation Comet on steroids), it was planned and executed on the fly, with only one week between the first planning conference in England and Market-Garden’s D-Day on September 17, 1944. The final plan depended on everything going right for the Allies, with no room for error anywhere. The British XXX Corps had to reach the First Airborne Division (and the Polish brigade) in 48 hours…96 hours at most, per Browning’s estimates.
2. The terrain. The Netherlands (or Holland, if you like) is a lovely country, but it’s one of the worst places for armored combat. Much of the terrain is boggy, and tanks, Bren gun carriers, and other vehicles couldn’t simply go “off-road” on the sides of the single highway between Valkenswaard in the south to Arnhem in the north. XXX Corps (and the follow-on forces of the British Second Army) had to stick to the paved road, which was often “one-tank” wide in many places.
3. Shortage of transport aircraft. Believe it or not, the U.S. Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force had more airlift capability than the Germans, but they had a shortage of cargo aircraft, especially the C-47/Dakota (military version of the venerable Douglas DC-3). The Allies were advancing along a long front that ran from the Swiss border to the North Sea, and as long as Antwerp was not usable as a port, their main supplies were 400 miles behind the lines in Normandy. Many of the planes needed for Market-Garden were either busy ferrying fuel, food, and ammo to the other armies south of the Ardennes or needed to be serviced in order to participate in the operation. As a result, instead of dropping the 35,000 paratroopers on September 17 in one big lift, Market-Garden called for three drops over three consecutive days. Which brings us to….
4. The weather. Market-Garden was extremely dependent on the weather. There had to be good weather in England and on the Continent for three consecutive days so that the airlifts could be carried out on schedule. But as anyone familiar with Northwest Europe will tell you, the weather in late summer/early autumn is nothing but capricious. The first day’s weather was great; clear, sunny skies all over the place made the drops of the first airborne wave possible. However, fog, clouds, and rain in England and Belgium/Holland over the next few days affected the timing of the second and third lifts…badly. By the time all the airborne troops landed in Holland, the Germans had recovered from their initial surprise and reacted to the attack.
5. Overconfidence and poor intelligence. At the time of its inception, Market-Garden was seen as a “slam dunk” by most of the Allied high command, not just the egocentric Monty. The Germans in the West had been soundly beaten in France and Belgium. Most of their armor, heavy artillery, and thousands of horses were destroyed during the long and rapid withdrawal in the West, and most of the British, Canadian and American intelligence officers believed that Hitler could now only field old men and Hitler Youth to defend the Reich and what was left of its empire.

This is what the G-2s (intelligence officers) were expecting to encounter in Holland during Market-Garden

Unfortunately, the “war will be over soon, we’ve got them on the run” mentality colored most of the intelligence estimates used during the planning for Operations Comet and Market-Garden. No one paid attention to Dutch resistance reports that two SS Panzer divisions (the 9th and 10th) were resting and refitting around Arnhem.

And this is what they ran into instead.

Now, these SS divisions were nowhere near their full strength. The 9th and 10th SS Panzer had been mauled badly in Normandy and only had about a battalion’s worth of tanks, assault guns, and half-tracks. In fact, one of the divisions was disassembling its tanks so that they could be taken back to Germany by train for repairs on September 17, D-Day for Market-Garden. However, even a few tanks and enough motivated SS infantrymen could give the lightly-armed paratroopers a world of hurt.

Though this looks like an authentic World War II photo, it’s really a black-and-white still from 1977’s A Bridge Too Far. But it clearly shows what a mismatch an encounter between 1944-era paratroops and enemy armor could be, especially if the paras are unsupported by friendly armor.

The overconfidence of the Allied high command, especially in Monty’s part, as well as the failure of the intelligence officers to see that Holland was not garrisoned by sick old men or hastily trained Hitler Youth, led to the planning and execution of a flawed plan.

There were other factors that led to Market-Garden’s failure. These include:

• The failure of the 101st Airborne Division to capture the bridge that spanned the Wilhelmina Canal at Son (or Zon) intact on D-Day. The Germans blew it up just as elements of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment were about to seize it. The Screaming Eagles rigged a foot bridge of sorts soon afterwards, but a Bailey bridge was needed so tanks and other vehicles could cross over the canal. One was eventually built, but the Garden forces were 36 hours behind schedule.
• German resistance was stiffer than anticipated. At Eindhoven, on the “bottom” of the operation, the paratroopers had been told to expect the British armor to arrive two hours after the airborne drop (around 3 PM local time). The first tanks actually arrived early the next day, having been delayed by a sharp firefight with German forces at their start line on the Albert Canal. Worse, the wildly celebrating inhabitants slowed the tanks down. (But after four years of German occupation, you can’t blame the Dutch for wanting to have a party.)
• The British drop zones were too far from the bridges at Arnhem. Ideally, the British paras should have been dropped as close to the target as possible. In fact, the commander of the Glider Regiment, Col. Chatterton, suggested a coup de main using gliders that would land on both ends of the Arnhem highway bridge. Unfortunately, Chatterton’s colleagues protested, calling him a “bloody murderer” for suggesting such a plan. Alas, the bridge lies in a built-up part of the city, and most of the clear fields needed for airborne drop zones and glider landings nearby were too marshy. The RAF officers in charge of selecting DZs finally chose an area that was solid and clear enough, but lay eight miles away. (Another Quora answer says the distance was closer to 11 miles, but Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far says it’s just under eight miles.)

The nine-day Battle of Arnhem was an embarrassing fiasco. Although the two American airborne divisions achieved their objectives, the British and Polish paratroopers were not successful. Only one battalion of the First Airborne, commanded by Lt. Col. John Frost, reached the northern end of the bridge. The rest of the division couldn’t break through the defenses put up by II SS Panzer Corps; of the 10,005 British and Polish paras and glider pilots that dropped on Holland in Operation Market-Garden, 7,578 were killed, wounded, or captured. U.S. casualties (including paratroopers and air crew) were 3,974. British ground force casualties added up to 5.354.

In exchange for more than 17,000 casualties, the Allies got a 64 mile salient in the German lines that led nowhere.