Operation Market Garden

John Buckley, Peter Preston-Hough, John Buckley, Peter Preston-Hough

• Publisher: Helion and Company
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781911096894
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

In September 1944 the Western Allies mounted an audacious attempt to seize a crossing over the Rhine into Germany in a bid to end the Second World War quickly. Yet despite the deployment of thousands of American, British and Polish airborne troops, in conjunction with the efforts of ground forces to link up with them, ultimately at Arnhem in the Netherlands, the plan failed spectacularly and the war continued well into 1945. Famously depicted in the blockbuster film A Bridge Too Far (1977) the operation, code named Market Garden, has attained iconic status and is the subject of countless books, documentaries and articles, and is subjected to more speculation than almost any other Allied operation of the war.After 70 years it is time to reevaluate the importance, impact and outcome of Market Garden, alongside a wider reappraisal of the fighting in the Low Countries in the autumn of 1944. This collection of essays addresses such questions as:
• Why did Market Garden take place?
• Why did it fail?
• What were the consequences of the operation?
• How did it impact on the experience of war in the Low Countries in 1944?
• How and why has it been depicted, studied and commemorated in the years since 1944?
• How did Market Garden fit into the overall campaign in the Low Countries in the autumn of 1944?Operation Market Garden: The Campaign for the Low Countries, Autumn 1944: Seventy Years On is the result of a major international conference held at the University of Wolverhampton in September 2014. The contributors are drawn from a body of historians, military professionals and researchers who met to reevaluate these questions after the passage of 70 years. It highlights many new areas of interest and forces us to rethink our understanding of this pivotal period of the Second World War.

1

Learning to Lose?
Airborne Lessons and the Failure of Operation Market Garden

Sebastian Ritchie

On 10 September 1944, the commander of 21st Army Group, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, convened a meeting at his tactical headquarters in Belgium to finalise Second (British) Army’s plans to cross the River Rhine, the last major natural barrier protecting the western frontier of Hitler’s Germany. In attendance was the Second Army Commander, Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey, and the Deputy Commander of First Allied Airborne Army, Lieutenant General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning. Operation Comet, envisaging a crossing via the Neder Rhine Bridge at Arnhem by XXX Corps with the support of the British First Airborne Division and the Polish Parachute Brigade, had been halted the previous day because of intelligence suggesting that German forces in the Arnhem and Nijmegen area were being significantly strengthened. On this basis, Dempsey believed there was a strong case for redirecting the operation against a more southerly Rhine crossing point – Wesel.

Nevertheless, Montgomery continued to favour the northern axis of advance, and received crucial support from the British Chiefs of Staff in the form of a signal urging him to strike north to cut the supply lines bringing V2 missiles from Germany to their launch sites along the Dutch coast. And so Arnhem was retained as the objective. To deal with the enlarged German presence in the area, the airborne component within the plan was expanded by a further two divisions, the American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions.¹ Within hours, the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had approved the plan. Such was the genesis of Operation Market Garden.

There are many differing assessments of the decision to launch Market Garden; praised as a bold gamble in some quarters, the operation has been dismissed as reckless folly in others. Much depends on the criteria employed. But there is one potential basis of assessment that has not yet received much attention from historians. By the summer of 1944, the airborne medium was no longer the novelty it had been when Germany invaded France and the Low Countries; the Allies had staged several landings in the European and North African theatres. How far, then, did the Arnhem plan exploit this past experience? It is curious that this elementary issue should have been ignored for so long, given the scale of the literature on Market Garden and the fact that the earlier operations gave rise to numerous lessons documents, after-action reports and doctrine papers.

Yet the question is surely worth asking, for the lessons process is a key component within the broader field of information exploitation, which is fundamental to the success of all military undertakings.² Indeed, it has long been accepted that learning is vital not only to avoid past mistakes, but also to increase the likelihood that success will be repeated. This is why military organisations attach so much importance to the operational recording and reporting functions. This study will therefore seek to identify the principal lessons drawn from the development of airborne warfare between 1942 and 1944, and assess the extent to which they influenced the Market Garden plan. Additionally, to provide a further valuable insight into the more prominent themes, the exploitation of airborne lessons between Market Garden and Operation Varsity, in March 1945, will be considered.

While the end result is primarily an essay in military history, the issues addressed here might well offer some food for thought to the modern defence community. There is, to this day, an awareness that the military lessons process does not always function as it should. Significant efforts are consistently assigned to lessons gathering, but the mere identification of a lesson does not always mean that it will subsequently be exploited. Moreover, there is a marked variation in this regard at the different levels of warfare; broadly speaking, it appears easier to exploit tactical lessons than operational ones.³ The following analysis primarily focuses on the operational level, with the aim of providing at least some insight into why this should be so.

Early in the Second World War, the Germans led the way in the development of the airborne medium. The Allied airborne forces were created in response at very short notice, and in great haste. At every level, the task was rendered all the more difficult by a near-total lack of experience, expertise and doctrine. The Allies sought to study and learn from German experience, but their new airborne forces were ultimately designed for a very different purpose. They were created to support the opening of the Second Front – effectively, to facilitate amphibious landings. The basic principle was spelled out by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1942:

We are all agreed that for the defeat of Germany it will sooner or later be necessary for our armies to invade the Continent. To do this we shall first be confronted with the attack of strongly defended beaches. The employment of the Airborne Division in the rear may offer the only means of obtaining a footing on these beaches.⁴

This approach had direct tactical implications. British amphibious doctrine was based on the principle of surprise, with landing forces being moved under cover of darkness and put ashore just after daybreak. If airborne troops were to support dawn amphibious landings, they would have to be infiltrated some hours earlier, to give them sufficient time for assembly and deployment. In short, they would have to land during the night. This was in stark contrast to German doctrine, which had ruled out night airborne operations at an early stage.⁵

From this, it will be noted that Market Garden did not align with the original Allied airborne concept. It was launched after the amphibious phase of Operation Overlord and in broad daylight; effectively, it was an operation that emerged out of a search for a very different type of airborne mission. And yet this was not, in fact, a new situation. The Allies had been confronted by a similar scenario at the end of 1942, albeit on a far smaller scale. In Operation Torch, in Tunisia, airborne troops had been employed at the time of the initial landings, and the Allies had then been compelled to find alternative uses for them. The result was a series of short-notice battalion-scale deployments in support of the ground offensive, in a forward reconnaissance role, targeting airfields like Bone and Youks les Bains.

As these missions were mounted almost without warning, they were preceded by only minimal planning and preparation, with all the risks that this entailed. Fortunately, for the first three, this was of little consequence as they were unopposed.⁶ The fourth mission, targeting enemy airfields at Depienne and Oudna, went catastrophically wrong, the battalion concerned suffering very heavy casualties during a protracted fighting withdrawal across 50 miles of desert. That battalion was none other than 2 PARA, under its new commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost.⁷

The post-operation lessons process was not, at this stage, especially searching. However, the subsequent reports correctly identified the key issue, which was the lack of integrated command and control – the absence of airborne and air transport expertise and input at higher command levels. From this had stemmed a number of planning errors, the worst being the cancellation of the ground offensive that was supposed to link up with 2 PARA after they had dropped at Depienne. Problems had also resulted directly from the launch of consecutive missions at very short notice. Adequate mapping and intelligence briefing material had rarely been made available; at Depienne, many 2 PARA troops had been so poorly prepared that they did not even know where they were going to drop. The other subject that received close attention in the post-operation reports was the airlift, but it was difficult at this stage to draw meaningful conclusions due to the prevailing lack of experience and doctrine.⁸

These four issues – command and control, the link-up with ground forces, the need for sufficient lead time and the airlift – would become recurring airborne learning themes throughout the Second World War, and had already surfaced in German airborne lessons documents, based on their experiences in the Low Countries and Crete. There was, however, one important difference between the Allied and German perspectives at this stage. After sustaining very heavy losses in the assault on Crete, the Germans had acquired a far greater respect for their adversaries and were more prepared to accept that airborne planners must factor the enemy into their calculations realistically.⁹ Ultimately, to employ modern military parlance, the enemy has a vote. By contrast, despite 2 PARA’s misfortunes, the Allies were as yet less inclined to moderate their confidence in the notion of airborne invincibility. Browning complained that a great opportunity had been missed to use airborne troops in an assault on Tunis, acting ‘in a semi-independent role’, although, in all probability, the result would have been another costly failure.¹⁰

It was one thing to identify lessons; it would prove far more difficult to ensure that they were exploited. In their next operation – Operation Husky, in Sicily in July 1943 – the Allies reverted to concept and employed airborne troops to support a dawn amphibious landing; subsequent lifts were also scheduled at night because of the perceived threat posed by enemy air defences in daylight. The airborne missions were enlarged to brigade scale, the operation was planned as a set-piece affair, and it involved the first large-scale use of assault gliders.

From an airborne perspective, Husky went disastrously wrong because the Allies completely failed to grasp the difficulties involved in mounting night airlifts at brigade scale, at long range, with an extended approach over water, in live operational conditions. Only a small minority of airborne personnel were delivered accurately to their objectives; the landings were otherwise widely dispersed, and many gliders came down in the sea.¹¹ The operation was followed by the most extensive and rigorous airborne lessons exercise of the Second World War, involving the British and the Americans, separately and jointly, and also the different armed services and the government departments responsible for them – the War Office and Air Ministry in the British case. Prominent issues again included command and control, on broadly the same grounds as in North Africa, and the need for more planning and preparation time. The critical importance of the link-up between airborne and ground forces was also stressed, and it was acknowledged that, when the airborne had prevailed, they had faced only limited opposition. Future operations in the Northern European theatre were likely to be confronted by far stronger enemy forces. But the major focus, predictably, was the air, and the key lesson identified was the need for better air preparation and, especially, aircrew training.¹²

It is easy to see why the Allies reached this conclusion but, ultimately, it was the wrong lesson. The fundamental problem was only partly related to the standard of aircrew. More important was the basic Allied airborne concept itself. In truth, there was not an air force in the world that could have executed the Husky lifts successfully in the summer of 1943, which is not so very different from saying that, judged by the standards of the time, they were impossible. Mission success would have required a level of aircrew proficiency far beyond anything that could be reconciled with the parallel requirement to deliver the airborne forces en masse. Given the prevailing time and resource constraints, and the fact that aircrew took far longer to train than airborne soldiers, greater mass was always likely to translate into a lower average aircrew training standard, and hence difficulties executing anything more than a simple lift plan.

The real lesson of Husky was that the airlift plan must be matched to the average ability of the aircrew available. Indeed, in many ways, this was the critical path in any airborne operation, and the fundamental basis of success or failure. Yet any such conclusion would have been at odds with the elementary Allied concept of using the airborne in support of amphibious operations – something that was always likely to involve complex night lift plans that had to be moulde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Learning to Lose? Airborne Lessons and the Failure of Operation Market Garden
• Chapter 2: Market Garden and the Strategy of the Northwest European Campaign
• Chapter 3: Operation MARKET GARDEN: The Manpower Factor
• Chapter 4: A Week Too Late?
• Chapter 5: Allied Close Air Support during Operation Market Garden: A Lesson in Planning
• Chapter 6: Mission Impossible? The Mobilization of the German Replacement Army and its Role in the Thwarting of Operation ‘Market Garden’, 17-18 September 1944
• Chapter 7: “Dangerously Overexposed?” – Divisional Operations on the flanks of MARKET GARDEN, September to December 1944
• Chapter 8: The Viktor Graebner Assault, 0900 hrs Monday 18th September 1944
• Chapter 9: Taking the Nijmegen Bridges: Personal Stories from the Cornelius Ryan Collection
• Chapter 10: The Defence of the Most High: The Role of Chaplains in the Battle of Arnhem
• Chapter 11: A Medical Bridge Too Far: Medical Support to Operation Market-Garden, September 17-26, 1944
• Chapter 12: Exploiting “Market-Garden”? Operation “Gatwick” – The Offensive That Never Was
• Chapter 13: Starvation and Sacrifice: The Reality of MARKET GARDEN
• Chapter 14: Crossing Water Obstacles in the Low Countries: The First Polish Armoured Division’s Forcing of the Axel-Hulst Canal 16-19 September 1944
• Chapter 15: Command, Control, Co-Ordination and Communication at Westkapelle in November 1944 – Operation Infatuate II
• Chapter 16: A Return to Static Warfare: The New Brunswick Rangers and the Breskens Pocket
• Chapter 17: Shadows of Arnhem: British Airborne Forces and the Aftermath of Operation Market Garden