Posted on 05/11/2018 5:30:09 AM PDT by C19fan
Every time a paratrooper in Britain’s airborne regiments goes to the stores to pick up his parachute as a prelude to going into action, it’s handed over with the same old corny gallows-humour banter — ‘Bring it back if it doesn’t work and we’ll exchange it.’
You could apply the same logic to the Parachute Regiment’s most famous World War II mission: the abortive attempt to capture from the Germans the bridge over the Rhine at the town of Arnhem in the north-east of the Netherlands in the autumn of 1944.
It spectacularly did not work — and, once it got under way, there was no chance of exchanging it for one that did.
In ten days of blood-letting battles along a 65-mile axis, thousands of men needlessly died, were wounded or taken prisoner, while afterwards, the Dutch people, who had aided the British, were savagely punished by their Nazi occupiers with summary executions and deliberate starvation of the entire population.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Monty was typical of most General Officers in WW II, but he had one more trait that many of the others did not have...Monty was an egotistical, stiff necked, vain prick.
Allied body count was nothing for him. He always knew there were more men that could be forced into the grinder.
I look forward to reading this book.
Some say Monty could be diagnosed as on the Aspergers Syndrome spectrum. Find it interesting you mention him having no concern about causalities. I read, except for Operaton Market-Garden, he was noted for being too slow making sure all the pieces were in place before he began a set piece battle to avoid causalities. The British would not tolerate another slaughter as they saw in WW I.
It was the same under British commander Haig in WWI. He kept feeding men into meat grinder charges that never accomplished a thing. The Somme and Passchendaele are two examples.
And Monty was an abject failure when it came to campaigns. Luckily for him, the Americans were there to clean up his messes.
British and French command decisions in WW1 bordered on criminal and should have been treated as such.
America’s view of Gen. Montgomery is colored by his unflattering portrayal in a lot of movies and books. In fact, he was a very skilled commander, well-liked and able, unless his ego got in the way, which it often did.
The same can be said of George Patton, whom we tend to idolize.
That said, Market Garden was as unmitigated a disaster for Montgomery as Gallipoli was for Churchill.
His books on Stalingrad and Berlin were riveting.
That is contrary to what I've read. The British were extremely conscious of casualties after their WWI experience and Monty was careful not to run up the butcher's bill. It's one reason he was so liked by his men.
I know British citizens who witnessed WWII up close and personal. Each have said that Montgomery was a pompous ass who needlessly got a lot of allied soldiers killed.
IMO, Monty’s desire for a spectacular mission to grab headlines (Market Garden) caused the Allied Leadership to take their eye off the real prize - Antwerp.
Antwerp proper fell in early September, IIRC, but the Scheldt Estuary wasn’t secured until November. All that while, Antwerp’s docks and facilities sat unusable, while the supplies and gasoline had to trucked hundreds of miles from Normandy.
There was a narrow window of time available in late August to secure the estuary before the Germans dug in on Walcheren. But all Monty could see was his “dagger thrust” into Germany.
Also, IMO, Eisenhower failed miserably when he let Monty do Market Garden, rather than focus on Antwerp. He should have been fired for it.
If the allies had that port in September, the war would have been over by Christmas, 1944.
Biggest problem for the British paratroopers was the staff work in planning for Market Garden.
By this point in the war, Matt Ridgway and his staff had executed two combat jump operations, and had learned a thing or two from Sicily (pretty much a mess) and Normandy (a mess in places, but much better execution).
So who got chosen to do the airborne ops planning for Market Garden? The British. That’s how 1 Para ended up with a drop zone six and half miles away from their primary objective. I don’t believe Ridgway, Gavin, and Taylor would have come up with that AT ALL. IIRC, Gavin’s response when first briefed on what 1 Para would do was, “Christ, they can’t be serious?” (concerning the drop zones)
For all the grief Americans give Monty, Market Garden was one of the most imaginative offensives planned by the Allies during WW II. But, as the book title runs, it was a bridge too far.
The chances for success for this operation were always bad. Firstly, the only approaches were on roads that were elevated to avoid the muddy conditions of the fields around them. This made tanks and vehicles traveling over those roads extremely vulnerable.
Next there were a number of bridges that would have to be seized and even one failure to take and hold one of those bridges would doom the entire operation. Even the destruction of one of those bridges would slow the advance enough for the Germans to counterattack.
Finally, there were numerous intelligence reports that far from being empty of troops, there were two SS Panzer divisions that had previously been grinded up resting and refitting and getting reinforcements right there. Sending lightly armed paratroopers up against heavy armor is an extremely bad idea.....so Monty just ignored those intelligence reports because he so badly wanted to go ahead with this operation....because it just so happened to place a lot of troops and supplies under his command rather than going to one of his rivals in another sector.
Eisenhower must bear a share of the blame here. This was a poor strategic choice from the start. The thing to do was obviously to focus allied efforts on clearing the Scheldt estuary to get the port of Antwerp in action so that the desperate Allied supply shortage could be relieved.
Correct. Ike even admits that he approved the Antwerp delay.
https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-58/CMH_Pub_70-58.pdf
Report by the Supreme Commander to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, p. 67
“The attractive possibility of quickly turning the German north flank led me to approve the temporary delay in freeing the vital port of Antwerp, the seaward approaches to which were still in German hands.”
Thanks C19fan. Monty was the cost the US had to pay to get the British to agree to a cross-channel invasion. within a couple of weeks of D-Day the US should have assassinated him and pinned it on the Germans, the war in the Europe would have been over by Christmas 1944. Market Garden wasn't typical thinking by Monty, and after its failure he went back to insisting on the wait-for-it-treat-on-the-dog's-nose approach that he'd used in the past and otherwise throughout his career.
That said, the problems in planning drop zones and so forth were one thing that had an impact on the mission. The big thing that wasn't taken into account, or was perhaps taken too much into account and caused timidity, was the persistent failure to heed the intel reports that the Germans had much more strength than was generally estimated. The Germans (as was their wont) had forces, tanks, field guns stashed all over the place, very diffuse, and under camo. The reports from recon flyers were suggestive of larger numbers and were ignored.
The Germans used a similar overall approach in WWI -- most of their strength was in the east, where the geography wasn't in their favor -- but in WWII were more mobile, more motorized, and even more refined. If the Germans had suffered the casualty rate in WWI that the Allies did, they wouldn't have been able to fight WWII.
Given the bloodbath that was WWI for the British, it's really understandable how they had a different attitude than the US did.
Operation Market Garden was the right move, with perhaps the wrong execution, along with the wrong commander, and ignored the fact that great plans of attack often get snared by the cold reality of poor judgment, mistakes, and mishaps. The fighting men who tried to carry it out nad nothing to be ashamed of, they were valiant and bold.
A great deal of “what ifs” exist to say WW II would have ended in 1944.
- The assassination attempt on Hitler. If that had succeeded, what would have gone down? Would the USSR really accept a separate peace with no Hitler around? And since it failed, did that not strengthen German resolve NOT to surrender?
- Intramural squabbling on the Allied side. British planning in this example was disastrous. Plus Monty, as others pointed out, could not bother to clear out the approaches to Antwerp. The British also had to combine some of their veteran divisions due to manpower shortages.
- General Horrocks of XXX Corps said this about his troops to 82d Airborne Division commander Gavin, as recorded in Gavin’s memoir: “If only I had a green division, Jim. A green division.”
Average soldiers figuring the end of the war was near were not about to take chances of dying.
None of this negates the plan of launching tanks down a single road, with limited maneuvering ability once off it.
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