What went wrong with Operation Market Garden?

As I was reading this thread, one thing caught my eye. Richard's post says it best and I definitely agree with him. The allies bit off more than they can chew. Bottom line, Market Garden failed because of a combination of all the following factors: a failure of intelligence, breakdown of communications, and narrow window of opportunity to reinforce and resupply for the allies.
As for the Germans, they were able to reinforce quickly with troops that they had successfully evacuated from an allied pocket and they had forces available at the right time and place.

 

I will have to lay the blame squarely on Gavin and his poorly thought out plan for Nijmegen. He seemed to have forgotten that the whole rationale for his divisions usage in this operation was to seize the bridge immediately.

He had plenty of chances to take it within the first couple of hours and frittered away his opportunity on a non-existent threat to the east.

Should he have done it (seize the bridge early on), the XXX corps would have made it to Arnhem by D+3 and the story of the battle would have been different. If I was Ike, I would have sent him packing back to the US for negligence.

As for Brereton, I see no reason why his transport pilots couldn't do two sorties per day. The bomber crews were used to 10 hour missions, so why should the transport crews be any different. I also judge him harshly. He should have been removed from command.

 

Today's hindsight always makes the mistakes made by generals from ww2 seem like negligence. However they did not have all the information, and alot of the time they had to anticipate the enemy's movements. Will he use a frontal attack or encirclement? Will the allies attack Calais or Normandy?

Although there are exceptions to this with certain commanders, I feel most of the commanders in ww2 did a good job with the information they had.

 

Tomcat, I agree. But sometimes you cant blame the outcome of a battle solely on bad luck. In this case, poor planning meant poor execution. And the generals primary job before the battle is to know its scope and what his men were expected to do and why and plan accordingly.

Gavin could have easily tasked a battalion to land on the north end of the bridge and seize it. With paratroopers, you have the advantage of surprise and seizing a bridge at both sides is easier. Didnt they teach him that at staff college? With the bridge in hand, his mission was essentially complete and he could reinforce the heights above the town just as fast as he did in reality.

Gavin was negligent and he knew it. Brereton had a chance to step up to the plate and contribute. He didnt.

 

Yes, I agree with your assessment of Gavin, at least partially. It's been a long time since I've read it, but I do remember reading some passages from a long forgotten book (by me) about some of General Gavin's own recollections of the battle at Nijmegan. Just a few items I can remember, but the two things that stick out in my mind was his decision to confront the threat of approaching German forces of unknown strength at the time, and his decision to use the 508th PIR in his first attempt to take the bridge instead of his premier regiment, the 504th PIR. The '08 was a good regiment, but the '04 in Gavin's terms was his 1st team and should have used them instead. I believe that the '04 was tied up and unable to make a go at the bridge at the time he sent the '08 to attack. As Tomcat pointed out, hindsight is 20/20, and as useless as Monday morning quarterbacking.

 

After reading some really great posts about what we called in grad school "Marshall Monty's Folly" I think I'll limit my reply to just a few comments. I personally think O.M.G. was FUBAR from the get-go. It was thrown together too fast, it suffered from poor intelligence (would it have made a difference if the planners had known about IISS Pz Cps, probably not) poorer logistics and an overall plan that was devised almost out of spite because Third Army and Gen. G.S. Patton jr.was tearing it's way across France and was knocking on Hitler's door and Monty was NOT going to stand for that.

On the other hand maybe General Browning was right...maybe they just went a Bridge Too Far.

Buzz

 

Market-Garden was a near-ran thing. Patton's attack would not lead to the Ruhr region but to Frankfurt and Kaiserlautern, neither of which were vital strategic targets. If Market-Garden was better planned, if XXX Corps pushed harder, if the Americans weren't minutes late for every bridge... who knows? But a successful Market-Garden would have bypassed the Siegfried Line! Think about that.

 

I'll add to my original post. Not only do I think O.M.G. was Ike's biggest mistake I think he was almost derilict in his duty. He put politics in front of strategy and look at the cost. If he had allowed 12th Army Group to continue his advance with Hodges 1st in the north toward Cologne and Patton's 3rd in the center and used Market Garden as a secondary/diversionary attack, it would have left OKW guessing and they would have had to pull forces from the center to support IISS Pz Cor. in Holland. Use 30th Corp and the Airborn to take Eindhoven and possible Nijmegen to tie up the forces in Holland. The Siegfried Line was close to being an empty shell by then and 12th A.G. could have punched through with 6th A.G. driving north in support of the southern flank. With IISS Pz.Cor. in Arnhem..O.M.G. wasn't bypassing anything. A joint attack of this magnitude would have made Hitler's Ardennes offensive almost impossible and the British 1st AB wouldn't have been nearly decimated. Ike was in favor of a thrust from Hodges and Patton which would have crossed the Rhine in two areas, but gave in to Montgomery's idea when he pouted to Ike that if 12th A.G. was supplied he wouldn't be able to reach the Ruhr. Even in war ego's can get in the way of normal thinking. Monty had devised Operation Comet first which would have been an even bigger disaster than O.M.G. Bad weather and intelligence on German troop levels caused him to cancel and plan M.G. If Ike had gone with his gut, the Rhine woud have been crossed by Oct. and German resistance would have been thrown into disarray, especially with a thrust towards Arnhem that would have threatened northern Germany and Denmark.

Buzz

 

i have not read ike,s memoirs for a long time,but how much political pressure if any,was he under to overrun the v1 and v2 launch sites in belgium and holland?.does anyone have info on this possibility?,cheers..

 

I've read the Americans told a double spy about Operation Market Garden, because they feared the British would get to Berlin first.

 

What bunk. And anyway, it was the British controlling all the double agents through MI5, SIS, ect. The US were "babes in the woods" in the espionage field, and they took forever to learn from the masters; the British.

 

The fact that all the other airborne regiments didn't watch band of brothers

 

A double agent working for the Allies and Germans...

And what is 'What bunk'

The spy was named 'King Kong'

Read about it here...

http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2691157
http://pistonian008.blogspot.com/2008/03/consequences-of-operation-market-garden.html

 

Buzz, it was logistics which doomed Market-Garden (they were two separate operations). Ike cut off the supplies to the other areas just to give Monty what he had thought he would need to accomplish the "bold, full-blooded" thrust.

(for) Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's scheme had to fit into the grand design dictated by his boss, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Indeed, Ike approved Market Garden because he believed it held great strategic merit and had the potential to solve several problems the Allies had created for themselves owing to the speed of their advance after the Battle of Normandy.

During the last week in August, German forces in the west were disintegrating, and the Allied armored spearheads streamed eastward. "We raced along," Capt. Robert Boscawen of the Coldstream Guards tank troop noted in his diary on August 31. "We charged down all the hills at a tremendous speed.…In front the Grenadiers had practically no opposition except shooting up an occasional convoy.…A wonderful day. We had advanced nearly sixty miles."

After the grind of Normandy, this bracing progress engendered a rush of optimism. The Combined Allied Intelligence Committee in London believed that "organized resistance under the control of the German High Command is unlikely to continue beyond 1 December 1944." But with supply lines for the advancing Allied troops now stretching 350 miles back to Normandy, neither the rate of advance nor the unbounded ­confidence could last. A great military opportunity remained for the Allies to exploit, but there was sharp disagreement over just how to do it.

See:

Operation Market Garden Reconsidered » HistoryNet

read the entire six page article, this post only contains a small section from page one. Taking Antwerp had proven easy, opening up the waterway leading to it was entirely a different matter. That should have been done before Market-Garden was launched. Then the logistics of supply wouldn't have been the impediment it became.

 

The Rooskies were going to get to Berlin first, by design. The design had Berlin in the Soviet Zone. That's what stopped us at the Elbe. No need to pay for real estate that was going to be given away.

 

The soviets only had East Berlin.

 

This is not correct, the USSR held all the territory well west of Berlin. About 100 miles if I remember correctly. The partition of Berlin had been agreed to at the Yalta meeting, and the Soviets allowing France to hold a section even though they weren't anywhere near the city either.

The catch was that the French section of Berlin was to come out of the American and British sectors, none from the Soviet sector.

 

It is correct, berlin was in soviet zone, but the USA,UK and the USSR both had sections in berlin with borders..

West Berlin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://blog.newsok.com/berlinwall/files/2009/11/Entering-the-American-Sector-768x1024.jpg

How do you come by that all of Berlin was in soviet hands? There are tons of movies,maps,pictures and books about 'West' and 'East' Berlin also, remember the Berlin wall or the 'Iron Curtain' ?

 

The Red Army surrounded and took Berlin without allied help from the west, the divison of Berlin had been set before it was taken. The Soviets "allowed" the west to occupy their agreed to zones post war and participate in a joint administration of the former capital using a land corridor and three air corridors from the west to the city. This held, for a while without fences or walls, just signs and checkpoints. They tried to force the west out with the Berlin Blockade when they closed the corridor to land traffic, and the river to barge traffic, but that failed to have the desired effect.

The wall didn't go up until Kennedy's time-frame fifteen some years post-war, and that was put up to staunch the hemorrhaging of the East German skilled and educated people fleeing the "worker's paradise".

I was born in 1949, the year after the Berlin Airlift had succeeded in opening the borders to commercial traffic again. I am quite aware of "when" the nation was split, when the city was divided, and when it was reunited. I do NOT count on movies for my history. Be that as it may, we are getting far, FAR away from the original topic.