REVIEW BY STAS MARGARONIS
The failure of the Allied Market Garden invasion of the German-occupied Netherlands in September,1944 undermined what had been a successful Allied advance after the Normandy landings in June, 1944.
The defeat was often advertised by its British architects as 90% successful or a “Bridge Too Far” (the title of the Cornelius Ryan history and the subsequent movie).
In Antony Beevor’s history “Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944,” Market Garden is portrayed as a plan that should have been dead on arrival:
“Many historians, with an ‘if only’ approach on the British defeat, have focused so much on different aspects of the Operation Market Garden which went wrong that they have tended to overlook the central element. It was quite simply a very bad plan right from the start and right from the top. Every other problem stemmed from that. Montgomery had not shown any interest in the practical problems surrounding airborne operations. He had not taken any time to study the often chaotic experiences of North Africa, Sicily and the drop on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy. Montgomery’s intelligence chief brigadier Bill Williams, also pointed to the way that ‘Arnhem depended on a study of the ground (which) Monty had not made when he decided on it.’ In fact he obstinately refused to listen to the Dutch commander-in-chief Prince Bernhard, who had warned him about the impossibility of deploying armored vehicles off the single raised road on to the low-lying polderland flood plain.” [1]
Beevor also writes about the human devastation the Dutch people suffered when the attack failed and the Germans retaliated against those who had cheered the advance. The Germans executed resistance members, destroyed port facilities and deliberately denied food. The cities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague suffered the most: 80% of the starvation deaths occurred in those three cities. Men of military age disappeared. They went into hiding or were sent to forced labor camps. The women, children and elderly who were left behind struggled to survive. Those conditions continued until Germany’s surrender in May 1945. [2]
By September 1944, the U.S. British and Canadian Allies were driving the German Army back from Normandy toward the German border.
It was then, Beevor describes, that British field marshal Bernard Montgomery persuaded Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to agree to the poorly planned paratroop-driven assault on Dutch bridges in order to pave the way for the planned military advance that would take place across the Rhine River and into Germany at Arnhem.
It was an advance that Prince Bernhard and Dutch army advisors strongly warned the allies against.
A critically flawed assumption was that paratroopers could be dropped far behind German lines in the Netherlands and hold a string of bridges culminating at Arnhem and the bridge across the Rhine.
A disregard for Dutch intelligence led to British and American paratroopers, including the British 1st Airborne and the U.S. 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne, landing in Holland to discover that, instead of assurances of mild German resistance, they were fighting German infantry and tanks which ultimately led to the massacre of British paratroopers at Arnhem.
Beevor explains part of the rationale for sending in the 1st British Airborne Division:
“The British brigade commanders were not nearly so critical of the plan, mainly because the 1st Airborne simply could not face another cancellation. They just wanted to get on with it. And in the view of Brigadier Philip Hicks, who commanded the 1st Airlanding Brigade, Market Garden at least seemed to stand a better chance of success than several of the previous plans. ’Some of them were absolutely insane.’ he said.”[3]
Montgomery’s actions delayed the essential clearing of German troops from the Scheldt Estuary to open up the port of Antwerp. This was vital to shorten the Allies supply chain that included gasoline necessary to maintain the momentum of Allied tanks and trucks.
By September 6th, 1944 the fuel supply crisis was slowing the movement of British forces headed by Montgomery and American forces head by General Omar Bradley:
“By the end of the first week in September, the fuel shortage had really started to affect both Montgomery’s 21st Army Group and Bradley’s 12th Army Group . Bradley’s aide Hansen wrote on 6 September that even corps commanders ‘were forced to go borrowing cans of gas to keep their cars fueled’. With none of the Channel ports yet open, supplies had to be brought all the way from western Normandy in a constant shuttle, known as the ‘Red Ball Express’, with thousands of trucks driven by African-American soldiers.”[4]
On September 11th, British Royal Navy Admiral Bertram Ramsay visited General Eisenhower to enlist his support to require Montgomery to attack German army units occupying Scheldt Estuary and threatening Allied ships sailing to the Belgian Port of Antwerp. Ramsay argued that clearing the estuary would shorten supply lines. This would jump start the slowing Allied advance with supplies that could be delivered from nearby Antwerp: a much shorter route to supply troops advancing into Belgium and the Netherlands than from Normandy. Ramsay understood the vital role of securing Antwerp and its maritime approaches so as to shorten the supply chain.[5]
Montgomery either did not understand or did not care:
“Over the next few days Ramsay kept trying to have a meeting with Montgomery about the Scheldt Estuary to open the great port of Antwerp. The field marshal would not see him. As far as he was concerned, Antwerp had been settled as an objective for the First Canadian Army. But his obsessively tidy mind had insisted on a geographical progression. The Canadians should continue advancing up the coast to capture and open the much smaller and more damaged Channel ports first. In any case Montgomery clearly believed that if he could get across the Rhine, then Antwerp could be dealt with later.”[6]
Beevor relates that Montgomery treated Eisenhower as an inferior and had little respect for his military judgement. In a controversial decision, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had made Montgomery a field marshal and so he outranked Eisenhower who was only a general.
Beevor notes that there was only one obstacle to Montgomery’s plans:
“There was only one cloud on the field marshal’s horizon, but for him it was a dark one. Eisenhower, he discovered, was allowing Bradley and Patton to advance into the Saar, south – east of Luxembourg. The supreme commander (Eisenhower) was not according full priority to his Northern Group of Armies, as he thought had been promised.”[7]
Montgomery resolved his problem with Bradley and Patton in a meeting with Eisenhower in Brussels. Montgomery insisted that the advance by Patton’s U.S. 3rd Army, under General Bradley’s command, be stopped. Montgomery demanded he be given U.S. military units and supplies. The effect would prevent his U.S. Army rivals from driving into Germany ahead of Montgomery.
And so, we learn that the disaster that was to follow was partly motivated by Montgomery’s continued feud with U.S. tank commander General George S. Patton. The feud began when the American general and Montgomery clashed during the invasion of Sicily: Patton took Palermo, the capital, and Messina, the port city ahead of Montgomery.
A History.net analysis explains:
“Much to Patton’s frustration, his role in the invasion of Sicily on July 10, 1943, was to command Seventh Army in support of Montgomery’s left flank as his Eighth Army thrust up the east coast to Messina to cut off Axis forces attempting to retreat to the Italian mainland. The position would turn to Patton’s advantage—and skyrocket him to fame back in the United States—on July 20, when he launched an unauthorized end run up Sicily’s west coast and captured Palermo. Patton next drove eastward toward Messina and, with Montgomery’s troops bogged down on the east coast by strong opposition, his thrust became the main Allied effort to capture Messina. Nevertheless, the Germans waged a skillful step-by-step defense and, untroubled by any energetic pursuit on the part of the Allies, withdrew to the Italian mainland in good order and with all of their heavy equipment by August 17.”[8]
Beevor explains what happened at the Eisenhower Montgomery meeting:
“Montgomery pulled from his pocket a sheet of telegrams.’ ‘Did you send me these?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Eisenhower replied. ‘Why?’
‘Well, they’re nothing but balls, sheer balls, rubbish.’ After letting him run on for a short time, Eisenhower leaned forward, put his hand on Montgomery’s knee and said:
‘Monty, you can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.’
Halted in his harangue, Montgomery could only mumble an apology. But, he still insisted that Patton must be stopped…” [9]
And so, Montgomery won Eisenhower’s concurrence for Market Garden at the Brussels meeting and thus was able to re-direct Allied resources into the attack on the Dutch bridges – where he lost.
Footnotes
[1] Beevor, p.36
[2] Beevor, p. 372-373
[3] Beevor, p.43
[4] Beevor, pp. 14-16
[5] Beevor, p.37
[6] Beevor, p.37
[7] Beevor, p.29
[8] https://www.historynet.com/patton-the-german-view.htm
[9] Beevor, p.30
MY THOUGHTS ON ARNHEM: BATTLE OF THE BRIDGES, 1944
By Kevin Policarpo
Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944, by Antony Beevor was a remarkably interesting read for me. In his book, Beevor highlights how practically every step of the planning of Market Garden was wrong. From the over exaggeration of the number of German AA positions (which made the paratroopers drop further away and thus gave the Germans more time to prepare to combat them), to not understanding the logistical nightmare that was due to the lack of planes to bring in paratroopers and supplies, to the British radios failing to work due to both distance and terrain. It also didn’t help that Allied commanders such as Bernard Montgomery ignored intelligence from the Dutch Resistance (this was due to Britain’s spy network in the Netherlands being compromised earlier in the year) about the position of German units (including the recently arrived 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions and their locations close to Arnhem and Eindhoven).
Not helping the fact was that Allied planners were overly optimistic in the Airborne Divisions being capable of taking all of the bridges and XXX Corps’s push being successful on the one road the bridges were located on (which the Germans took advantage of to slow them down). In addition, bad weather conditions caused the following waves of paratroopers and glider infantry to be delayed. The efforts that German Field Marshall Walter Model put into the defense made any push from the Allies in Holland beyond bloody and time-consuming. It was also both aggravating and saddening learning about the Polish paratroopers and the position they were put in. The fact that General Stanislaw Sosabowski was made into a scapegoat for the Operation’s failure was idiotic in addition to the feelings of the Poles upon hearing that the Soviets were pushing through Poland after the failure of the Warsaw Uprising.
Learning about some of the small stories of Allied and German troopers was a neat addition. Hearing about what they had gone through, the injures some had taken, and the viciousness of the fighting made my imagination wonder. Heck, hearing that one group of American paratroopers actually had the head of a German soldier on the front of their Jeep was a serious ‘what the heck’ moment for me.
Bad decisions, missed opportunities, and the plans of the operation falling into German hands meant that Market Garden was doomed to fail from the start. While Montgomery had claimed that the operation was 90% successful, it ended up causing hardship not only for the people of Holland during the Winter of 1944-1945, but it also slowed the advance of other Allied Armies on the Western Front due to the allocation of supplies to Market Garden, dragging the war on for several more months.