[SAMWolf]

Normandy

The great moment for the Allied airborne forces came with Operation Overlord in June 1944. Their contribution to that effort alone more than justified the considerable resources that both the British and U.S. armies had poured into development of airborne tactics and training.



At the end of 1943, the Allies made a major command shift. The team that had been running the war in the Mediterranean was brought to the British Isles to plan and execute the great invasion of France. Eisenhower became the supreme Allied commander, with British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as his deputy. Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery returned from the Mediterranean as well, to assume control of the initial phase of ground operations.

When they arrived in England, Eisenhower and his deputies inherited a scheme that was largely driven by what were thought to be the available resources. The initial plan for the invasion called for a three-division amphibious landing, supported by the drop of one airborne division. Both Eisenhower and Montgomery found the planning assumption of a four-division attack completely unacceptable. They even implied that they were not willing to command the invasion unless those numbers were substantially increased. They got their way. The Combined Chiefs of Staff found the logistical and amphibious resources to increase the invasion force to a six-division landing force -- three American, two British and one Canadian -- supported by a drop of three airborne divisions.



The proposal for a three-division airborne drop almost immediately resulted in a considerable fight between the overall commanders of Allied operations in support of the invasion, with Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory on one side and Montgomery and Eisenhower on the other. Leigh-Mallory argued, not very tactfully, that the paratroopers were going to be slaughtered by the Germans. According to him they would suffer upward of 95 percent casualties.

Eisenhower countered with his belief that the airborne assault at night would not suffer such a high casualty rate, but that it did not matter what the casualty rate was so long as the airborne troops accomplished their mission. As the supreme Allied commander, he got his way. But that argument brought a special poignancy to his visit to the members of the 101st Airborne Division on June 5, 1944. As he talked to the young paratroopers, Eisenhower was well aware that he might be sending all those men to their deaths.



What exactly was to be the mission of the American 82nd and 101st Airborne and the British 6th Airborne? The British airborne troops had perhaps the most crucial mission in terms of Normandy's geography. They were to seize the solid ground on the east side of the Orne River, while a specially trained gliderborne force was to seize the bridges over the Caen Canal and Orne at Benouville to achieve a linkup with the amphibious landings. The control of that ground, because of the swamps and marshy terrain lying farther east, would mean that the Germans could attack the British and Canadian beaches from the south, but not from the east. And that one direction -- to the south -- was more than enough to keep the Canadians busy when the murderous juvenile delinquents of the 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitlerjügend" arrived. The task of the American paratroopers was similar to that of the British: They were to keep the Germans off the backs of the soldiers making the Utah Beach landing and disrupt German communications throughout western Normandy.

The drops more than accomplished their mission and -- to use that dreadful military euphemism -- at "an acceptable cost." The British were luckier in that their drops were more concentrated, while the glider attack on the Caen Canal Bridge -- remembered forever afterward as "Pegasus Bridge" -- and the Orne River Bridge succeeded beyond the planners' wildest expectations. By late morning the commandos of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, had linked up with the 6th Airborne and the hard ground on the east side of the Orne was relatively secure.



The American paratroopers were less lucky in that, due to weather, bad navigation and German anti-aircraft fire, the troop carrier pilots dropped them all over Normandy. While that may have had a direct impact on their cohesion as fighting forces, the small groups of paratroopers spread havoc and confusion throughout the Norman countryside. In particular, their actions distracted the attention of German commanders away from the landings, including that on Omaha Beach. Moreover, enough paratroopers landed near where they were supposed to that the airborne was able to accomplish its basic missions -- Lieutenant Dick Winters' assault on the German battery at Brécourt Manor near the Utah Beach landing site being a notable example.

Once they had accomplished their mission, the paratroopers were supposed to be withdrawn in preparation for their next mission. They were not. The two American divisions stayed on line well into June and took terrible casualties. The British 6th Airborne Division remained even longer, suffering so many losses that it was not available in September for the Holland operation.

Additional Sources:

www.go2war2.nl
www.2worldwar2.com
perso.wanadoo.fr
www.military-art.com
en.wikipedia.org
www.nzhistory.net.nz
www.dod-g.com
www.army.mil
www.usd230.k12.ks.us

[SAMWolf]

Market-Garden

Operation Market-Garden, the failed attempt to liberate much of the Netherlands and seize a direct route into northern Germany, was the greatest airborne operation in history. But it was an ill-fated undertaking from the outset. The planning began just after Montgomery had stopped the advance of the XXX Corps north of Antwerp. An advance of just another 10 kilometers would have put the whole of the German Fifteenth Army in the bag and prevented most of that army's participation in the late September battles. As early as September 5 and 6, Ultra decrypts had uncovered the fact that the Germans were planning to redeploy the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions in the Arnhem area for rest and refit -- a fact that the Dutch underground and aerial reconnaissance confirmed during the week immediately before the operation was to begin.



The final ingredient in the recipe for disaster was the appointment of Lt. Gen. Frederick "Boy" Browning, the worst kind of supercilious British officer, to overall command of the operation. Browning received the appointment over the far more experienced American Maj. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, one of the war's great divisional commanders, for reasons that to this day are not clear. Browning's position in the British army was largely due to British prejudice based on tradition and prestige: Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, apparently felt the need to appoint a Guardsman to a corps command.

As the countdown to the start date of September 17, 1944, continued, the Allies seemed to provide their own obstacles to success. The more experienced American 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions were assigned easier roles in seizing the bridges on the way to Arnhem, and the most difficult task was left to the British 1st Airborne Division, which had no combat experience. Planners for the 1st Airborne Division then let the RAF air transport commander talk them out of using the fields immediately south of Arnhem as the main drop zone, because of German anti-aircraft gun concentrations. Instead the 1st Airborne dropped into areas that were six miles from their target. General Gavin later commented that if he had been in charge of the Arnhem drop, he would have taken the RAF's refusal to drop the troops closer all the way to Eisenhower. Moreover, there was not enough air transport to carry the whole division, so it was decided that only half would drop the first day and half the second day. The lack of sufficient airlift was made even worse by Browning's decision that he and his headquarters would fly in by glider on the first day and would require no fewer than 34 gliders, all of which came out of the hide of the combat forces. Finally, annoyed at one of his intelligence officers for squawking about the possibility that the German armor might be present in force in the Arnhem area, Browning fired the offending officer and then failed to pass along his warning to the 1st Airborne, which might at least have taken along more anti-tank mines as a precaution if it had been notified of that threat.



The errors continued when the jump was made on the 17th. One of the German commanders in the immediate area was General Kurt Student, the German airborne pioneer, who quickly recognized what the Allies were up to. His Fingerspitzengefuhl (hunch) was soon reinforced when German troops recovered the plans for the operation that an American lieutenant colonel (probably part of Browning's headquarters) had carried with him on a glider that crashed. None of the British radios worked on landing, and Maj. Gen. Roy Urquhart, the British 1st Airborne's commander, got trapped in Arnhem while his colonels argued about who should be in charge.

Despite all the command failures and mishaps, the performance of the airborne troops was magnificent. Two moments in the fighting stand out in my mind: the holding of the north end of the Arnhem bridge by Colonel John Frost's 2nd Parachute Battalion of the 1st Airborne and the seizure of the main bridge over the Waal River at Nijmegen by the 82nd Airborne's 504th Parachute Infantry.



However, there was not much that fighting skill could do to overcome the effects of planning incompetence and bad luck. The troops from the German Fifteenth Army caused nothing but headaches as the British XXX Corps drove north to link up with the isolated airborne divisions and secure the land route over the Rhine. British armor simply did not move with the requisite speed. As always, the Germans reacted with the audacity and ruthlessness that their doctrine called for. By the time that the Guards Armored Division reached Arnhem, all that could be done was to pull out the remnants of the British 1st Airborne Division, which had suffered more than 8,000 casualties, a stark contrast to the 1,500 casualties that XXX Corps had suffered in its too leisurely drive north.

As Allan Millett and I have suggested in our book, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945, "Market-Garden's dismal showing reflected the systemic and conceptual mistakes of Allied leaders, their inability to grasp war on the operational level, and the inherent difficulties of the Western Front in September 1944. In the largest sense Montgomery's strategy was territorial in nature, aimed at gaining a bridgehead over the Rhine and then fighting a battle on the north German plain. But there was no discernable operational objective...."

The Final Jump

The Allied airborne divisions were to experience considerable fighting over the remainder of the war, but with the exception of the great airborne drop in support of Montgomery's crossing of the Rhine against negligible resistance, those battles did not involve airborne operations. The one great battle that did not occur was the grudge football match between the 101st and the 82nd, which was scheduled for late December, but was called off for the obvious reason that the divisions were the only reserves available to the Allies when the Germans attacked in the Ardennes on December 16, 1944. So what did the airborne forces achieve in World War II? From the German point of view, airborne troops were a cheap investment that yielded significant dividends, particularly in a psychological sense. Their military role in the 1940 campaigns was impressive. The 1941 Crete invasion was costly, but it was of considerable strategic importance. The operation denied the British the use of a very important base from which they could have attacked the Romanian oil fields. On the Allied side, the resources expended on the development of airborne forces were considerable -- but then the Americans had plenty of resources to expend. The airborne's contribution to the success of the Normandy landing was impressive and important. For the first two days it provided a shield that allowed the reinforcement and expansion of the beachheads to go forward with very little interference from the Germans.



But in the largest sense the spirit of the airborne represented the determination of the American and British people not to allow tyranny to hold sway over the great cities and homes of European civilization. And as we stand at the dawn of the 21st century, we should not forget the cost that those young men paid to guarantee our freedom. For some their reward was a burial plot in a far-off land; for others it was the burden of terrible memories and the pain of never-healed wounds; for still others it was the pain of losing friends and family members. Those "bands of brothers" paid a price for us that is our burden and our children's burden. Let us never forget.