Hey all! Time stamps 00:00 Intro 01:07 Browning's Life 12:44 Frustration 17:57 Market Garden 28:52 Criticisms of Browning 29:28 Criticism 1 31:06 Criticism 2 32:30 Criticism 3 33:33 Criticism 4 35:36 Criticism 5 38:24 Browning's Defence is Flawed 43:45 Decision Bibliography (Sources) Brereton, L. The Brereton Diaries: The War in the Air in the Pacific, Middle East and Europe, 3 October 1941-8 May 1945. Kindle, 2014. John Frost, A Drop Too Many. 2009. Max Hastings, Armageddon. London, 2004. Robert J. Kershaw, It Never Snows in September. Surry, 2007. Mead, R. General Boy: The Life of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning. Kindle, 2010. Martin Middlebrook, Arnhem 1944: The Airborne Battle, 17-29 September. 2009. Robert Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine 1944. UK, 2014. Poulussen, R.G. Lost at Nijmegen. 2011. Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far. USA, 1974 Major General R E Urquhart, Arnhem. 1958. Major General S Sosabowski, Freely I Served. Great Britain, 1982.
To blame the poles who weren’t there until the battle was basically lost is ridiculous. It’s like having a platoon armed only with rifles attempt to stop an armored division and then blame the failure on them being lousy shots
If the rumors of the tanks in the Reichwald were true, putting everyone on the heights wouldn’t have mattered. They took the decision that guaranteed failure no Matter the outcome
Well said ! The accusation was so blatantly ridiculous, it is a scandal that it was obviously believed as it led to the end of Sosabowski's distinguished career. I am glad that the Dutch at least had the decency to put the record right, by honouring the general posthumously. Sosabowski joined the hallowed ranks of unfairly treated officers in British military history, from Dowding to Park, from Harris to himself, to mention just a few.
@@SNP-1999 Sosabowski had already been made an Honourary Commander of the British Empire during his lifetime. Montgomery criticized the work of the Poles during Market Garden. He did not blame them for Arnhem not being taken.
Its not like the Germans were hiding from British intel gathering. Germans by that time knew the British high command incompetence would defeat or seriously hamper their own plans. So no need to hide in the bushes.
Amazing ain't how quick people are to not even give much thought that just maybe the reason why the plan failed was due to the enemy actually reacting in a effective manner.
Damn Germans... Their divisions were like zombie units that could be cut to pieces but the remains would reassemble themselves into coherent, effective combat forces that would almost instantly go back into action, regardless of how much time the soldiers in these 'Kampfgruppe' had been working together before that time. Before I did any research at all into these 'Kampfgruppe,' I thought they were like small armygroups or batallions because they were so effective during the fighting at Arnhem and Nijmegen. Now, after having a little research (emphasis on a little), I think German Colonels and Captains were like: what, your unit got destroyed? You still got a few machineguns, do you? Hey you overthere, know how to fire a Panzerfaust? Sure you do, soon every mother and grandfather in Germany will know how to use them. Fine go with them, follow, don't rush ahead and keep your heads low!
@@RomanHistoryFan476AD That is the point of being a warrior. To expect that your enemy is capable of defeating you if you don't have your ducks in a row. That is the point of criticisms by all the comments, that the British Commanders had assumed the inferiority of the Wrmach High Command and unit commanders. The failure was born from sheer arrogance. Just another charge of the Light Brigade
i wrote my dissertation on 'Market Garden' at university 10 years ago! i am so pleased that many of the key points that i raised were bought up in this video especially that about Gavin and the 82nd prioritising the heights over the main bridge! i feel vindicated in my conclusion! fantastic video and i will be watching more of them!
Gavin initially did not prioritized the Heights over the bridge giving them equal priority. Lindquist, head of the 508 of the 82nd, was to move to the bridge via the Heights, which are on the way to the bridge, secure the Heights then move a battalion to the bridge immediately. No one was at the Heights, so Lindquist could send a battalion to continue to the bridge immediately without stopping at the Heights. It was when Lindquist of the 508 82nd missed the boat, expecting Gavin to tell him to move to the bridge, allowing the Germans to reinforce the bridge, that Gavin changed priority. He took all his men out of Nijmegen town giving it back to the Germans, sending them back to the Heights and the DZ.
OK. So if the 82nd had taken Nijmegen, does that automatically mean the british armor could have reached Arnhem in time? I don't think so. Whatever, it was Monty's flawed plan, since he lost his mind when he was, as planned, no longer going to be CIC of ground forces.
Had Nijmegen bridge been secured and defended 30 Corps, in my opinion, would have reached the south side of Arnhem bridge by the end of day 3. This is assuming that the Germans try to retake the bridge at Nijmegen and do not give up on that axis and concentrate on 1 ABD. To sum up 30 Corps would have been in time, but they might still have been too late.
@@tomasdawe9379 It is an interesting scenario, if the 82nd had directly taken the Nijmegen bridge, then been met on the north side by the 9th SS Recon battalion, 10 SS infantry battalion, and the next day the Eulling battalion. The great unknown is what other forces the germans would have sent to Nijmegen to stop an advance on Arnhem. I assume they would have sent quite a bit, diverting some of the units they had instead used further south to attack the single road allied supply line. It was good defensive ground north of Nijmegen, especially on the main road. To the west there was more maneuver room, but hardly ideal with all the canals and dikes.
@@majorintel9623 good point, also if the recon battalion had been mauled by the 82nd, Frost's battalion would not used so much AT firepower at the start of day 2 potentially allowing them to hold out longer. It really would depend on how the Germans react to the fall of the bridge at Nijmegen along with the result of any counter attacks there. It is one of the reasons I enjoy thinking on the operation, so many variables, what would have happened if any one of them changed?
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Your videos are the best, most carefully researched, and thoughtfully presented lectures on the subjects you choose I’ve ever seen. Better than any documentary on TV. I’ve read much of the source material and after watching you I come away informed. Everything else seems like mindless propaganda. Please keep up the work. I don’t know what you do for your day job, but not devoting your time to this work full time would be to deny us the work of the best military historian of our time.
Wow, thank you! No, seriously, thank you. I actually just took a screenshot of your comment and shared it with some friends and family. It's great to hear these videos are really appreciated and are (at least) getting people interested, if not contributing to the overall discussion. Sadly, my day job has nothing to do with history, and I don't enjoy it in the slightest :(
I can add to that! I am getting almost all of my "TV" content from RUclips where "amateur" historians are providing the most amazing content, and TIK is one of the best examples.
Are you american ? ?.......please go to a real school : Our host is just giving a competent Bachelor or Master's paper, on a little history ...... When you go to a real School .... do a Masters' paper in Hard Science or Engineering, you'll learn what a actual brain does ............. You'll thank me later, Jethro.......................... [ and keep the Good Work, TIK :]
Just bad leadership if your subordinates are afraid to question your decisions. The Snobbery and hardheadedness of both the British and American Generals makes me wonder how we won the Wester Front. The only time they worked together was to blame the poor Polish officer.
Typical careerism. It happens in civilian life but it particularly prevalent in the military. In civilian life you can go work elsewhere, no so easy in the military. You don’t get to the top by ruffling feathers. I am always a bit disappointed when I read about behind the scenes of WWII general staff.
Someone has to make a decision somewhere (not just in the military, but in politics or business etc), and everyone's lives are reliant of those above making the right decisions. Then you see that those above you are just as flawed as everyone else, and it's about that point that you realise just how completely your life is in the hands of a bunch of idiots.
@@TheImperatorKnight I would say that 'bunch of idiots' is unreasonable. It's more that given the high profile of these decisions, they have been put under the microscope for almost 80 years. They may have been well above average, but few people and decisions will look good with this level of scrutiny. If you look at 1940 and the Fall of France, Guderian, Rommel, etc., made some very questionable decisions, but they were lucky so are lauded as heroes, but a couple of bridges blown by the French and they would have been seen as idiots too. Hindsight is pretty amazing. In this case the options were: not launch Market Garden, war lasts into 1945; launch Market Garden, fails, war lasts into 1945; launch Market Garden, works, war ends in 1944. Given those options, launching Market Garden was not necessarily a bad option. The brutal reality is also that the operation resulted in many Allied deaths, but if it had worked, saved lives overall, Allied, German, Russian and Dutch.
I had two relatives in Market Garden, Major William Conran RE, a road construction expert seconded to XXX Corps staff for Comet and MG. The other was Major Brian Urquhart of Brownings Staff. I knew both growing up and keen as I was on a military career I badgered them both for advice and stories. Bill was British Army from birth, he like all regulars was a product of his class, times and the slaughter of WWI, the highest form of criticism he could make of a fellow officer was 'maybe there was another option'. Brian was a hostilities-only idealist, who later became an advocate for the UN, he thought the UN should hold all nuclear weapons and control its own army. He could criticise senior officers, but, and I respect him enormously, post war he had a few political axes to grind and his story needs to be seen through those goggles. Something I've heard from both (they were unknown to each other until the 70s) is the success of market garden, the genuine opinion of German Panzer reserves and real reason the operation was launched. Both told me independently, so it was well understood by anyone who could read a map - "If it was only a quick right turn from Arnhem to the Ruhr, then it was only a quick left turn from the Ruhr to Arnhem!" The Ruhr had to be host to the best reserves on the Western Front, possibly the whole of Germany. The 2-3 day time limit on getting to Arnhem was forced on XXX Corps by the proximity of those reserves nothing else. This is where your 1,000 tanks could come from, but a tad higher north, across two rivers, and a few days late. This could be where Brig Hackett got his belief, shared with his officers pre-launch, that Arnhem was an interesting way to commit suicide. Gen Gale summed up its chances as worthy of resignation. Anyone trained to read a map and work out train time tables would have laid poor odds on survival at Arnhem beyond 36hours, without need for intel, photos or ULTRA. The Panzer fear at Arnhem was understood, genuine and obvious, but the hope was XXX Corps could get there first. And in fairness the majority of the German armour wasn't present on day one or even two. On Day 1, the 1st Airborne was held up more by snipers from Krafts force and MGs around Den Brink and the hospital. Only 3 Para met one SP gun en-route to Arnhem. Hardly a significant threat. If Son and Nijmegen had been taken on time, its not unreasonable given XXX Corps timetable they could've made it. Certainly the medium artillery would have got to the 1st Airborne's perimeter before the King Tigers came from the Czech border on Blitztransport. Regarding Brian's famous Panzer photos, I remember him telling me straight, the film was rubbish: He didn't brief Browning direct; he didn't argue with Browning, Majors don't do that with Lt Generals. He laid out ALL the intelligence he COULD to the Chief of Staff, a Brigadier, this Brigadier took it to Browning, this Brigadier told Brian to stop with the Panzer scare stories. Brian also wasn't sent on leave prior to take-off, he was never going to fly in. The reason had nothing to do with politics, stress or his earlier injury. We wouldn't know this until well into the 80s but he was the Airborne Corps ULTRA officer and wouldn't be risked in the mission. He was always going to be following up in the sea tail. Not long after Market Garden Brian was promoted to Lt Col and given a plum intel job rounding up German scientists. Hardly a censure from the top brass. He claimed he had photos of tanks, but these pictures have remained elusive to researchers. I admit we never discussed this (his brother was MI6, his cousins (my grandfather and his brother) were both SOE and war office we didn't talk about details in our family) but I think he lied to Cornelius Ryan. He said he had photos. We now know he had ULTRA, in the late 50s he could not tell Ryan that. I think the photos were a cover story. It also means Brian couldn't tell the Brigadier, Johnny Frost or anyone else what he knew and how he came by it. This has always been one of the problems of really good intel; how to share it. Divisions and Convoys had been sacrificed to secure ULTRA before Arnhem. Now for the true purpose of Market Garden, and why Montgomery was given all those resources. The single biggest issue for the Western Allies in September 1944 was opening the port of Antwerp. For this the whole of the Southern Netherlands had to be taken. I can remember Bill hanging his fingers over a map, along the Rhine, Maas and Scheldt so they formed a grabbing motion over the Antwerp approaches. You had to clear each river as far as the Southern ramp of Arnhem to secure Antwerp. This was Eisenhowers plan. The Northern ramp of Arnhem was unnecessary for this objective. Montgomery wanted Arnhem because that was his springboard into Germany. His longed for narrow thrust. Eisenhower wanted Antwerp to supply his wide front. This was the root of the blazing row between the two just before this battle. Yet everything up to the island between Nijmegen and Arnhem HAD to be taken if the Allies were to advance anywhere, anyhow in 1944/45. So Market Garden did achieve vital aims for the loss of two light infantry brigades. This is not a disaster. Both Bill and Brian said that part of the operation HAD to take place and HAD to be successful. The losses were less than some of the positional battles around Caen, less than British attempts to hold Greece, take Sicily, breakout of Anzio or destroy Monte Casino. These were harsh times, casualties were to be expected, the transport planes rated higher among the brass than the idle airborne in the UK. But did they have to go so far, was it vanity to send the British over the Rhine? Bill grudgingly agreed there might have been a better option than the springboard into Germany through Arnhem idea. Thats British Army for Monty was wrong. Brian's post-war opinions on the mission are well recorded. Brownings alleged 'Bridge too far' quote might have its roots in this conflict of objectives and may account for his tussles with Brereton. It may also explain what he was doing flying in on day 1. If his part of the Airborne Army was going to be sacrificed in a temper tantrum between his bosses he would have wanted to go down with it. Given a plan from Britains pre-eminent Field Marshall, a differing mission from Europe's Supreme Commander and unworkable boundaries by his immediate superior. I'm not convinced Browning didn't fly in with the sure fire intent of getting killed in action. It was a shit detail and he was a solider, what was he supposed to do? And still had the 101st and 82nd done ALL their jobs on day 1, the crazy British plan may just have worked. But I would bet all the money in my pockets Eisenhower would have cut Monty's supplies as soon as XXX Corps made it to Arnhem: on day 2 or day 9.
@David Rendall interesting perspective you have on the operation, coming from someone (Brian Urguhart) who had first hand knowledge of the intelligence gathered prior to the operation. It's well known now the RAF Squadron 26 flew low level tactical recon and were the ones that took the pictures showing German Armor in the Arnhem area. It's quite possible he did have the photos. My question is, has anyone ever looked into their unit history to see if they also have pictures?
There has been a lot of effort trying to find those pictures. The archives are empty but the majority of PR pictures were destroyed post war (there were a lot of them). I can't believe such important pictures wouldn't have gone into the keep pile. But what can you do? Most PR ops at this time went through RAF Benson, a few amateur historians have gone through their files and found no low-level flights scheduled for Arnhem. They came to the conclusion Brian was lying, without giving motive or reason. I think it much more likely they were destroyed or they were a cover for ULTRA. What I remember most talking to Both Brian and Bill is the true significance of this battle. Neither believed for one moment the Germans were finished before Christmas, it would have ben good to win everything, but what it achieved (opening Antwerp) was necessary. The movie was huge when I was young, on telly a couple of times a year. I read the book and would badger them for details as "It was the biggest operation of the war!" Both would gently remind me of the many operations prior to and post Arnhem. Bill's great moment was Dunkirk where he constructed breakwaters with abandoned vehicles to aid loading on the beaches. Brian's big story was the forcible return of the cossacks to Stalin which he was ordered to assist. I think that formed his post war career and distrust of authority. They both tried to warn me of the perils of taking orders and what supermassive events wars become. Bill showed be an example of staff work once: he had to assess how the single road to Arnhem would stand up to repeated tracked vehicle usage. Would it crumble? He worked out from maps and pictures where the faults were most likely be found. He worked out how to shore them up, where the sandbags would be found and how they would be transported forward. Where would the aggregate be found to fill them? Where would the men be found to fill them? Where would they sleep, eat, get into position? Where would you place all this stuff in the road plan so it wasn't buried behind the 25pdr shells, petrol, ambulances and boats. All had to be worked out if anyone was going to be a hero. We tend to forget this was but one mission in a long war. The hyperbole and sacrifice overwhelms the diligence and boring detail. Bill went on to work tirelessly over the next few months opening up Antwerp. That was a far bigger deal than Arnhem. Brian went on to scour Germany for SS on the run and top scientists. Both had fought elsewhere and Bill would stay in the army until the early 60s doing loads more fascinating things. 1st Airborne's 1,600 dead and 6,500 captured is a lot. few divisions took such losses in such a short time. But compared to Crete, Singapore, Sicily, Anzio, Goodwood, Epsom, these were equally destructive. and equally limited in success.
@@davidrendall2461 'Crete, Singapore, Sicily, Anzio, Goodwood, Epsom'. Surely better comparisons with Arnhem would be Aachen, The Hurtgen Forest and Metz?
@John Cornell it is your opinion. He built the brigade. He designed the training and he had first had experience fighting Germans in 1939. It was personality clash. He also jumped with his men and fought side by side with them.
@John Cornell It is a clash of cultures. The English and Germans have superiority complex. They will never ever think of Poles as equal to them. It is a fact that I encounter numerous times. This blows up the minute I criticize idiotic ideas and I prove them wrong. You also forget one critical fact about 1st Polish Brigade. It was formed to use it in Poland to aid the Home Army. The brigade was dropped in Sept. 1944 and it was clear to all Polish forces that they had been f... by the allies. The Warsa Uprising was at its last legs. These soldiers and Sosabowski had to agonize since August. It is written all over how they suffer emotionally. They saw their city being ravaged and they knew they will never see the city again. Keep in mind that Warsaw was Sosabowski's home garrison before WW II. His son was fighting in Warsaw Uprising. He lost his eyesight during the fight. You have no idea what toll it takes on you. His son was a true hero and a legend equal to his father. So, yes, you are wrong because you do not know full story. Here is a documentary which explains some of it: ruclips.net/video/b9em1kEg8C0/видео.html
@John Cornell Again chcek the facts. The banner of the brigade was made in 1942 in occupied Warsaw and smuggled into England. I spoke to many veterans from the brigade and all of them said one thing. They would have rather die in Warsaw Uprising than fightin in Arnhem. The fact is that the brigade was formed to aid the Home Army.
@John Cornell One route was thrught Italy. The Home Army had a special section that built field airstrips around Warsaw. Polish airforce was ready for such a dropp. It was possible to do it. There was also a plan to move fighter planes into Poland. The whole plan was not as crazy as you may think.
I have been watching your video's for the last two weeks now. They are so clear and well brought that I would like to compliment you... They have become a must see for me! Keep up the good work. Greetings from the Netherlands.
I don't buy the 1000 panzer argument. If they had really thought that there were 10 panzer divisions worth of armor in a small forrest, any sane commander would have leveled the forest with heavy bombing, as this would have represented a significant chunk of all tanks on the western front. And why they didn't scout it, I have no idea.
Agreed I think this story is a smokescreen for serious disagreements between allied commanders that has either been made unavailable or was never recorded. 1000 tanks in the forest is clearly nonsense, and Gavin claiming that he cannot move on the bridge on the 1st day because of that is equally nonsensical. I think the Americans were unhappy with the operation from the outset. They didn't think it was the right thing to do and didn't like that the British 1st Airborne was sent into Arnhem. For whatever reason 82nd Airborne basically sat on their arse on the first day and didn't move to send anyone to take the bridge. That doomed the operation. Yes there were plenty of other mistakes, misteps and contingencies but nothing that would have caused the failure of Market Garden. The failure of the 82nd Airborne under General Gavin to take Nijmegen Bridge doomed the operation. But in an era where "band of brothers" single handedly won the war in the West stating the obvious wouldn't go down well.
@@ellisjames7192 The Germans could not have mustered 1000 tanks into a single attacking force in 1942 or 1943 and even during Kursk had at most around 2700 tanks on the whole Eastern front in that time. At the battle of Prokorovka, the great Tank confrontation at Kursk, involved around 800 German tanks in one of the greatest Tank confrontations in history surpassed only by 1941 Barbarossa and later the Yom Kippur war 1973. The idea there were was an Army group of 1000 tanks on the western front is as absurd as the idea Gavin could have defended the grosbeak heights from such a force with 1 airborne division even if such a German force existed. It was clear the war was already in its final months by the time of operation market garden. Germany had been defeated by Soviet forces in the East who were rapidly advancing across Poland, and with the Balkans overrun, the Red Army was about to pounce on Eastern Germany in the Months ahead. This is nonsense on stilts. The question remains why Gavin made the reports that he did and why Browning didn't call this out. I think TIK explains that. Browning's CO was an American who had already threatened to remove him. As to Gavin's actions having elite troops trained for rapid movement and action sat on their hands for the first day in a stale defensive position where everyone from Private up to and including Montgomery's tennis partners knew speed was critical suggests more than incompetence. This was a British operation that would have been quite stunning had it come off. It would have allowed the British to advance across the low countries and provide a bridgehead to launch 30 Corps into Northern Germany. All while the Americans are bogged down in the south. Allowing the operation to wither and fall back after some gallant heroics was preferable from an American viewpoint. We often forget the politics and maneuvering when looking at these events seeing only heroic individuals doing their best is often a very naïve assumption. Yes I think Gavin was told to hold rather than move on Nijmegen in the full knowledge that would lead to a withdrawal of troops from Arnhem and the failure of the operation. Hence the bullshit story about the 1000 German tanks as a reason had to be found for holding an entire airborne division in place. Throw in the usual "it was confusing, and we were unsure what German forces were bearing down on us from the forest" and the question becomes a what if. The simplest explanation is that the Americans didn't want a stunning and extraordinary British led operation to be successful and allow British forces to capture the low countries and invade Germany before they did. The British forces could have got to Stettin and occupied the entire Ruhr before the end of the year. It might even have been the catalyst that precipitated and early German surrender to the British.
@@myroseaccount Adolf PROMISED his western generals "a thousand tanks" and Bletchley Park found out about his assurance. German war production in 1944 totally eclipsed all that had gone before. So DON'T use 1941 metrics -- or even 1943 metrics. Speer had the numbers going through the roof -- right up until SEPTEMBER 1944. Yeah, the Krauts were building as many tanks in a month has they had in six-months earlier in the war. Next, the real worry for any parachute commander is not tanks -- it's HALF-TRACKS. They sport more machine guns... and their crews will have their heads on a swivel. Infantry HATE, HATE, HATE, attacking half-tracks for this reason. Adolf could've easily had 1,000 half-tracks sent to the fighting... given enough lead time. What Bletchley had picked up on was Adolf's pitch about his grand November counter-offensive against VIII Corps in the woods. He had visions of 1940 on his syphilitic brain. Lost in all of the posts: the ONLY terrain that could support tanks was where Gavin focused his attention. His PRIMARY mission was to protect Browning -- his hero. If an Allied 3-star ARMY COMMANDER had been lost to the enemy -- that would've been the end of Gavin's career. Due to his rank, he was able to be read-in-on Ultra. No-one else was. So the 1,000 tank tale HAD to have come from Bletchley and HAD to have become knowledge via Browning to Gavin. Gavin's account was spewed out to protect Browning's reputation AND the existence of Ultra. Plainly, Browning let Gavin in on the Big Secret. And, since you're asking: YES, Adolf DID promise his generals that they had priority #1 and that 1,000 tanks were to be given to them for the up coming counter-offensive. So Bletchley was not really wrong. They did not have a date-certain to go along with Adolf's pledge. He also pledged some crazy amount of fighter-cover, too. The counter-offensive was supposed to occur in November. In the event, it was launched in mid-December. The delay was primarily about GASOLINE. And yes, panzer production was insufficient to properly equip his attack force. For example the 12SS was never brought back up to strength. Elsewhere on YT there is a whole lecture on its problems. They were vast. The 12SS had been gutted by the Canadians and the fiasco of Falaise. Browning was in charge NOT Gavin. It was HE who had received the estimate from Bletchley -- and Bletchley's track record was towering at this point. The reason that Gavin was not so concerned about the magic bridge is because he believed British intelligence estimates -- and reasoned that 1st Airborne would entirely prevent German reinforcements from coming down from Arnhem. BTW, the solid ground was GERMAN ground. He, Gavin, had no Dutch spies telling him what was up in Germany, proper. He also figured that since this turf was the FIRST German soil to be occupied by any Allied force, that a stiff reaction just had to be in the cards. In this he was RIGHT. It's just that the Krauts couldn't do a very good job with an instant-outfit.
A quick note - Browning may not have actually said 'I think we might be going a bridge too far' at all, which is why I said "supposedly". It is disputed, and apparently the evidence for it came after the battle, which is why it probably wasn't said. However, it is a cool phrase.
I always find it interesting that phrases attributed to various people are often difficult to prove due to lack of direct witness. It makes you wonder was this or that said by these various people or was it said by someone else after the fact or maybe a complete miss quote of what was actually said. Alas only the fly on the wall knows for sure.
It is simple human psychology that someone who failed would attempt to make an exculpatory statement about events that he, Browning, was a major player in. In other words, "it wasn't me, it was the plan and the decisions taken at HQ by e.g Bretherton therefore, if you want someone to blame, blame someone else, I wasn't there in terms of command, tactics or strategy" I am grateful, TIK, for your comments about Sosabowski and his brave Poles who were made scapegoats for others failings- the comments here and on your main video indicate many others denigrate the Poles, even to the point of alleged cowardice[see my correspondence with John Burns, where I prevailed against him]
I find this amusing too. The US 1st Infantry Division has been trying for years to claim credit to a senior divisional officer making the statement on OMAHA beach to the effect of "2 kinds of soldiers on this beach, those who are dead and those who are going to be dead" or words to that effect. The officer in question never came forward to claim to have said those words so the division has claimed that he was KIA. Those words have been repeated in movies too. I served 4 hitches with the 1st division between 74 and 96. I recall being told at least 5 different officers credited with saying that!
It's seems ridiculous to me that in an operation framed around capturing a bridge over the Rhine anyone would think that bridge "one too far". It's the entire point of the operation.
"Sosabowski and his brave Poles who were made scapegoats for others failings" - I'm not convinced they were. I think this is yet another misquote of history. I've never seen anything specific from any of the Allied commanders blaming The Poles for anything
I find both Gavin and Browning responsible for the Nijmegen cock-up. (which to my mind ultimately cost the succsess of Market Garden) However I do not think for a second they believed there were 1000 enemy vehicles near Nijmegen. They would have assumed the report grossly exaggerated. But even if it was a thenth of the reported vehicles, that would be 100 enemy AFV's, - A threat indeed. However as stated in the video, both of them (instigated by Gavin) neglected to carry out the crucial task of taking the bridge immediately.
Wow. I didn't expect you to produce a 50-minute video so quickly. I thought your excellent Monday videos would be primarily 5-10 minute nuggets of history and enlightenment. Your ability to produce marvelous results so rapidly is Rommel-like. ;)
They will primarily be 5-10 minute videos, but with the occasional longer video popped in. I'll be honest though, it took a lot of effort to get this done in time, which is why there's no music in the video. I simply ran out of time!
Have read many accounts of Market Garden and this by far the best explanation for its failure. Your conclusion about Gavin and Browning makes complete sense and how experienced commanders could really believe there were 1,000 Panzers parked in a forest at this stage of the war is inexplicable. It also baffles me how airborne troops could be expected to defend any area from any large force of German armour. That is not what airborne does, no matter how good the quality of the men and the American and UK airborne were some of the best troops of the whole conflict. Thank you very much for your analysis and taking the time to produce this history lesson.
My Father was in 12th Devons 6th Airborne. He was a pegasus bridge and Arnham. He was one of A company who went in by glider to the bridge .He was injured at pegasus bridge in Ranville while recovering injuries, he qualified as a sniper a number one shot. He was then sent to Arnham. He told me that he was one of the men who laid the tape to the river when they withdrew. His name was Alfred Patrick Secker A company 12th Devons
Thanks for sharing your family story. They were a different bred. What they achieved and the cost of that are both hard to properly appreciate, other than never forgetting their sacrifices.
@Alice_Long because the 6th Airborne Division didn't go to Arnhem. The 1st Airborne Division went to Arnhem in September 1944. The 12 Devonshire was part of The 6th Airborne Division
How about we finally tell the truth after 70 years. The real enemy was the dutch german citizen, drafted into the defence of arnhem after the liberation of Eindhoven. German families seeing the ultimate fate of prosecution combined with the admiration of the female masses. A dangerous combination often seen in history as detrimental. A moral superiority was not achieved as is evident in the prosecution of german collaborateurs. The ultimate defeat prompted by this invasion threatning all of the german country ment there was no backing down, as many tacticians and history tells us. Threaten evrything with 1 move and tragedy befalls you. Even sun tzu knew this, wich is why one must always leave an opening for retreat otherwise one will always fight to the death. I dont want to defend nazi germany nor the hatred they perhaps rightiously deserved. However to dismiss german documentation and the literal testimony's of german soldiers literally testifying to drafted recruits fighting from the region is a travesty. There were never 1000 tanks, it was the german dutch citizen that bled for its city. Alas there is no song or defence for these people's wich is sad because we should learn of the sickness of war. Arrogance and ignorance played and still plays a huge role in the understanding of market garden and why it became such a tragedy. A sad truth when a mans livelyhood, his family, his desires and female affection is threatened. Also not mentioning the horrible injustice befallen on the corporal sohnenstuhl, wich saved over 200 british prisoners whilst only moments later being riddled with bullets in his car. A fact documented with video evidence and documented written reports. But ofcourse the propaganda machine painted this image as rightious vengeance and a so called bombing of its corporals in a white bearing flag of truce. That is why Market garden failed, not some failed plan or host hidden within its bushes. One must always see both sides of the conflict to understand why chances dictated this tragedy. The horrible crimes of war commited by both sides and why arnhem resisted liberation. A fact people never mention wich is why we are doomed to repeat it. Ofcourse its more fun to see autistic children driving in tanks to remember the victory of the allies, if one may even call it a victory. Yet a true understanding of the human pshyche and its repurcussions is hidden and clouded in a fake sense of moral justification. Perhaps the phrase a bridge to far can be seen as the moral injustice and going too far can be interpreted as going over the boundry of justified liberation. Ofcourse the tactical mistake of dropping soldiers behind enemy lines is a huge part of the failure, however the unbreaking army wich refused surrender is a fact documented very clearly. Even the surrender offered by the german army was dismissed by a pridefull idiot. Both sides were offered a truce and a chance at peace yet ofcourse the higher ups refused this. So the real tragedy was that both sides never declared a truce and the only exchange of prisoners that is truth is from the german army's. A fact often dismissed wich should tell others that not evry german was the most evil nazi person in history. quote You fought bravely with a fury that demands respect, so we offer you a honourable surrender and your lives Corporal Sohnenstuhl*
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive was launched exactly three months after Market Garden was launched. German forces: 557 tanks, 667 tank destroyers and assault guns and 1,261 other AFVs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
[Even as a casual observer of WW2 history, "1000 panzers" in random forest in Netherlands seemed absurd to me.] That is a very important point. Only a few military leaders in command of military history AND, AND knowledge of their enemies' military units and structure could have realized the meaning of that at that critical point in time. The Wehrmacht's elite military commanders filed to understand the Russian's ability to produce and maintain aircraft and tanks. And while being highly aware of Germany needing oil, they stopped at Kyiv from taking the Urals and turned North to capture Moscow. Wrong objective and lack of timing. I believe Gavin made the same mistake. He should have disobeyed Browning, take the bridge at Nijmegen, and once in Allied possession defend the Groesbeek Heights and then, the bridge from any oncoming attack.
Saw this come in my notifications last night and was chuffed to have something to listen to on my way into work. Market Garden has taken its place in pop culture history and very often is used by many as an anglophobic stick with which to prop up American superiorism. Your documentaries have helped shine some light into the misconstrued reality surrounding the operation and fairly deals out criticism and blame. I have to ask, you often quote books, do you use sources from the Archives or elsewhere as well or just use off the shelf books such as biographies, memoirs etc?
This was a very comprehensive and enjoyable video - clearly a lot of hard work to produce - so thank you for creating and putting it here. In the search for a blame victim(s) I was reminded of the last scene in the film "The Charge of the Light Brigade" where the General staff do their appraisal - a battle that took place 90 years before Arnhem.
Dad who was in the 1st airborn said that they felt let down by Montgomery and listening to your video leans me that way did find it very interesting at the moment writing a short story about Tommy my father for his great grandson who he is named after, we are finding out some interesting information thanks again
There is one criticism that this video does not discuss. There seems to be evidence Browning countermanded the last promising attack to take the bridge before it was too well reinforced. On the morning of the 18th (D+1) Gavin ordered all of the 508th, save one company to move on Nijmegen bridge. At 10:00 a regiment strength German counterattack struck that company, and Gavin ordered the entire 508th to rush back and charge the drop zone to prevent the afternoon reinforcement drops from being massacred. (At this point, Warren's battalion was recalled from its fighting in Nijmegen.) After the drop was complete (around 14:00) Gavin then moved to repeat his move from that morning. The 82nd's operations log then records the following. "At 1530, 18 September, General Gavin had a conference with General Browning at which General Browning asked for the plans for the ensuing 24 hours. General Gavin stated his plan for the night of 18-19 September was to seize the bridge North of Nijmegen using one battalion of the 504 and in conjunction with the 508 envelope the bridgehead from east and west. General browning approved the plan in general, but on giving more thought, in view of the situation with XXX Corps, he felt retention of the high ground South of Nijmegen was of greater importance, and directed that the primary mission should be to hold the high ground and retain its position west of the Maas-Waal Canal. Therefore, General Gavin assembled the regimental commanders and issued an order for the defense of position." The operations log is a contemporaneous account recorded by division staff. And it clearly suggests that Browning explicitly countermanded an attack on the bridge by four battalions the night of D+1. This was probably the last chance for lightly-armed paratroopers to take the town alone, before it was too well reinforced. Doesn't some blame accrue to Browning based on this?
The treatment of Sosabowski is unforgivable. Browning and Monty thinking he was in the wrong for criticizing them? Sosabowski as you pointed out save 1st airborne from being annihilated. The 2,000 men they saved in Arnhem would've been captured or killed. Now my own view is while Browning is not the sole person to blame, he does share some of the blame for the failure.
Where did he refused to take his troop ? To Oesterbeek ? 10km from objective, 5 days too late, having only pontoons to cross Rhein River under heavy fire ? Who did he refuse too - Browning ?
You know what's worse? When the Dutch Queen and government rehabilitated Sosabowski's name in 2006 and honored him and the Polish Paras, the British tried to stop this from happening. British officials still refuse to admit the man was blamed and stripped from position without a good reason.
@@Malas13 You. poles lost your country and want to blame everyone but yourselves. The British gave you a platform to fight from. But you want to dictate. Why would they listen to a bunch of failures. Your airforce failed but somehow you believe you won the BOB. Laughable
Back in the 1970s, I had a workmate who was a veteran of the British Parachute regiment who dropped on D-Day, Arnhem and across the Rhine. I didn't realise at the time but we had been paired-off so that I could act as his minder because of his PTSD. Something unknown to me back then. I had to drag him off a roof parapet once as he was about to jump off it - a drop of about fifty feet onto a concrete floor. He was bathed in sweat and trembling all over which scared me witless and left me confused. The root of his angst was that he had fought with distinction in three major battles, witnessed so many of his comrades killed and wounded while he escaped without so much as a scratch and lived to tell the tale. Survivor guilt? He never mentioned the war at all in the six months or so before he retired early on health grounds except once when he spotted me reading Cornelius Ryan's famous paperback account of Arnhem - then he let rip! He told me that his regiment feared that the war they had been training for incessantly for several months past would be over before they had a chance of a crack at "Gerry". The delay was beginning to affect unit morale and it was his firm belief that the Arnhem drop - a bridge too far - was specifically intended to let loose British Airborne against the Germans before unit discipline broke down completely. I am not expert in such fine military details though I do have an interest in military history, which is the reason why I am here, therefore, I cannot enter into any arguments defending my old long-departed workmate's personal belief and conviction that Arnhem was designed to fail to satisfy the vanities of the Allied top brass.
I said this after watching your detailed video on Market Garden. I know some commanders emphasized the importance, and insisted on, aggressive patrolling to gather information and capture prisoners for interrogation. This expedient and crucial step apparently was not taken. Given Gavin's his fear that there were 1,000 tanks in the forest it is gross negligence to not send patrols to assess the treat, if any.
General Gavin's fixaton on the Grosebeek Heights may have been more of an attempt to keep themout of German hands so they would not be overlooking his positions. Given the German army's fearsome reputation, a bit of a defensive mindset would probably be expected.
I think two lifts is a good point. Any lift to south of Arnhem would need to have been first on day 1 as on day 2 the flak would have been an issue for follow-up drops. The presumption was no flak by day 3 - taken out by the paras. But there weren't enough aircraft to do everything in one lift, and a second lift was not considered as the RAF and USAAF bomber commands wouldn't release additional pilots. Given that, perhaps just a battalion very close to Arnhem for a quick capture (fewer aircraft, less issue with flak losses), more for Gavin on day 1, then back to the distant LZs for day 2 onwards at Arnhem. And no letting the entire plan get into the hands of the Germans.
I blame Brereton. He set the tone for all the mistakes. No 2nd lift on day 1, no coup de main assaults, glider troops to defend landing zones instead of going for objectives...all his decisions. I also get the impression that the Americans didn't really get the point of Market-Garden. The 101st under Taylor were sluggish to reach their objectives and Gavin's mistakes are well known. With the hostility from Brereton and Ridgway and Gavin with his first divisional command I can see how Browning...out of a sense of having to appease the Americans...didn't use his authority properly and instead used the Poles, who weren't as high up in the Allied pecking order, as a scapegoat.
Brereton inherited Browning's operation COMET plan for Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave and had the job of expanding it for three divisions to include the US divisions and Eindhoven as a target by grafting his LINNET/LINNET II air plan onto COMET. The deletion of COMET's double airlift and the dawn glider coup de main assaults on the three main bridges (Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave) were key features of Browning's original concept and he did warn Dempsey that COMET should not go ahead without them. The airborne aspect of the campaign was now taken over by the Americans, who seemed to think they knew better just because they had more resources committed to it, so you may be right that Brereton (as a former USAAF fighter pilot and not an Airborne man) just didn't get the point of MARKET GARDEN. I am convinced Gavin understood the concept of the operation, but his divisional plan seemed to be compromised by politics, again - but this time internal to his own 82nd Airborne Division. According to Gavin's interview with Cornelius Ryan for A Bridge Too Far, Matthew Ridgway - the Division CO in Normandy, did not trust the 508th PIR CO, Colonel Lindquist, and wouldn't promote him. In fact, Gavin said he had a problem in that he couldn't promote any other Colonel in the division over him because Lindquist had seniority in the grade. Gavin may have had the same problem, because after Ridgway was promoted to command US XVIII AIrborne Corps and Gavin inherited the division, he failed to replace himself as Assistant Division Commander and spent MARKET GARDEN's planning and execution running himself ragged doing both jobs. If Gavin didn't trust Lindquist either, it wasn't to the extent that he was prepared to assign the more aggressive and experienced 505th PIR to the Nijmegen mission, preferring to have his old regiment facing the Reichswald, which he may have perceived as the greater threat in terms of counter-attack than the possibility of mission failure at Nijmegen. Gavin also told Cornelius Ryan the British (presumably Browning) requested he drop a battalion on the north end of the Nijmegen bridge, and although he toyed with this idea he eventually dismissed it because of his experience in Sicily where the Troop Carriers dropped the division over a huge area and it was disorganised for days. I think the 101st Airborne performed well, with the exception of Taylor's own decision to target the Wilhelmina canal bridge at Best as an alternative crossing to the one at Son - it was a bridge that Dempsey neither wanted nor had a use for, possibly because the Eindhoven-Hertogenbosch road was headed in the wrong direction - crossing the XXX/XII Corps boundary. The loss of both Wilhelmina canal bridges to German demolition, as well as several on the Maas-Waal canal west of Nijmegen, was not due to sluggish movement by the US Airborne units assigned to take them, but due to the fact these canals were both on prepared defence lines, with the bridges prepared for demolition and the bridge garrisons had standing orders to blow the bridges if threatened. Seizure of an intact bridge in these circumstances depends on as much luck and perhaps a mistake made by the defenders as it does with the assaulting force doing everything right. The lock bridge at Heumen failed to be demolished for reasons that are unknown, and the road bridge at Honinghutje also failed, but was part-damaged by the successful rail bridge detonation alongside it. The Grave bridge had one of the two initiator charges found to be at fault and the delay in sending a man back to Nijmegen for a replacement allowed the bridge to easily fall into American hands in the meantime. Browning's authority, such as it was as Brereton's deputy, had been effectively neutralised during the planning for LINNET II, a Brereton inititative in case LINNET was cancelled like so many others during the rapid Summer advances in August and early September. Browning threatened to resign over the lack of time for maps to be printed and distributed to the airborne troops, but thankfully LINNET II was also cancelled by the ground forces overunning the landing zones before Brereton could put into operation his plan to accept Browning's resignation and replce him with Matthew Ridgway and his US XVIII Airborne Corps. Both men agreed to put the incident behind them, but Browning was now aware of how precarious his position was politically and knew that protesting Brereton's MARKET planning was not going to effect any change. It would seem that Browning's response was to move the transport of his Corps HQ to Groesbeek up to the first lift in order to try and at least influence events once on the ground, at the expense of some of Urquhart's anti-tank guns destined for Arnhem, which got bumped to the second lift instead. Finally, the Poles were never made scapegoats, and I find this the most disgusting slur to come out of the whole operation. It is undeniable fact that Polish General Sosabowski was difficult to work with and he was insubordinate to Horrocks (XXX Corps commander) at the Valburg conference on 24 September. So far as I have read, there has never been any suggestion from British commanders that the Poles were in any way responsible for the failure of the operation, and people posting such suggestions on RUclips of course fail to provide any references when I challenge them to do so. Such a suggestion would be ridiculous, based on the fact the Poles did not arrive until D+4, and four days after the operation was already compromised by the Americans at Nijmegen - and that perhaps is the real source of the slur as a deflection. The valid criticisms of the Poles' performance, even the SS in Oosterbeek complained that the Poles fired on their medics trying to retrieve wounded from the battlefield (in Kershaw's book It Never Snows In September, 1990), has been conflated with the failure of the operation - it's absurd to connect the two issues. Montgomery's initital response after the operation was to write to Sosabowski to praise him and his brigade for their efforts, and to ask for recommendations for awards. It was then he received a report from Browning on his difficulties with Sosabowski and Montgomery backed his request to have the brigade removed from his command by forwarding the report to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke.
I am English. I find it disgusting that free Polish Forces were ever thought as failures in official reports. Half their country was the first to be occupied in WW2. See Battle of Britain fighter squadron results, Cassino, etc. They fought the Nazis with a passion to help us, we betrayed them in 1945.
The thing that struck me after reading Meads book was the almost sycophantic nature of its treatment of its subject. I've read a lot of the peripheral stuff about this and you can see that there are patterns that emerge. Firstly, many (including this author) are professional biographers with sometimes a limited military background. Secondly, there is no way that a really critical biography of someone like Browning could be written. That is because his old unit and family would have simply not cooperated, leaving the author very short of the necessities for a successful book. So, really, to look for a revealing straight synopsis will result in disappointment...... as indeed it does. Actually there are areas outside MG that are dealt with somewhat similarly by Mr Mead. But, hey that's life. History is full of such acts. Some of the higher ups were responsible for writing their own versions - at least Browning didn't do that.
The cooperation of Browning's family and the his old unit wasn't really necessary. There is now so much information in the public domain that a reasonable assessment can be made. After all how else was the video above produced? The verdict seems reasonable. The operation wasn't fundamentally flawed but some serious tactical errors made in its execution. The limited drops and the failure to prioritize the seizure of the bridge (which after all was major objective) seem the principal failures.
Everyone seems to forget about the small toll bridge. 30 corps had to request a special drop of enough nickels and dimes to cross. That money drop was delayed due to the banks closing early for their annual cricket match.
Monty. He conceived of the plan, and the political screws were applied to Ike to accept it. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption with too many moving parts.The failure of any would bring down the whole. The idea of advancing 60 mi along a ten-yard front, trailing 120 mi of flank, is just nuts. Staging five successful, simultaneous coups de main equally so. Monty was a bold, romantic dreamer; also a complete egotist who felt personally compelled to vault the Rhine and knock Jerry out of the war by Christmas. You need people like that, but you also need to rein them in. (Churchill's [not so] "soft underbelly of Europe" -- in two wars -- comes to mind; also Haig's "big push" to break through into open country where the cavalry can operate.) But once you've sold a monster plan, and mandated buy-in by all subordinates, those subordinates are confronted by all sorts of niggling realities -- and also a panicky desire not to be the one who screws everything else up. You have hard, inconvenient intelligence that is ignored, and rumors of enemy forces that are credited. You have planned resources that are really non-existent or cunningly withheld. You have sudden concerns about the fatigue of your men, and landing areas declared temporarily unsuitable. You have commanders who consume transport to be seen as commanding from (not quite) the front. You have CYA and you have grandstanders. And you always have the weather. If the plan was truly messed up by a momentary loss of focus and initiative by one (or two) commanders, why, Monty was uncharacteristically modest in claiming that it had been 90% successful! I'd give him 98%! At least! But any plan that fails even at 90% performance is a bad plan, too fragile for the real world -- let alone the real world of war.
Someone once wrote that Operation Market Garden failed because so many things went wrong all at once: the weather, the "unexpected" Panzer corps, the loss of the bridge over the Son, etc. The best rebuttal for this was, "No, Operation Market Garden failed because it required so many things to go right all at once." Any difficulty along the way would spell disaster. It seems Monty (and others) were more concerned that the operation take place than they were concerned that it would be successful. His inability to admit defeat--years later he still claimed to have never lost a battle--demonstrates how incapable he was of self-reflection.
Griffon Anderson What political screws were applied to accept it? Montgomery 'felt personally compelled to vault the Rhine and knock Jerry out of the war by Christmas.' Why do you claim that?
@@timhewlett1327 Political screws? Well, Churchill and Roosevelt were both strong backers of Market Garden. Is that political enough? Personal compulsion? Well, according to most accounts, Monty was an ambitious, self-aggrandizing egomaniac. To hear him tell it, he was the only commander with any brains; he was the only one who could win the war. Totally opposed to Ike's broad-front strategy, he tried to maximize the role of his own brigades. This was not only a Brit-Yank struggle, by the way: he also diverted resources away from other Brit/Commonwealth forces, e.g. in the Scheldt estuary, neglecting sound logistical planning (securing the port of Antwerp) in favor of trying to deliver a bold, decisive thrust himself But he overreached, his plan miscarried, men died. He never admitted his failure, though, maintaining even in his later years that he had "never lost a battle".
@@jbrowne9381 XXX Corps arrived in Nijmegen on time. If Son had been captured intact, then they would have arrived well ahead of schedule, and then maybe it would have worked. So either Son or Nijmegen going right could have meant success. I can't really blame the 101st at Son - that was bad luck given a valiant attempt to take the bridge. And the 82nd managed to grab 2 out of 3 bridges.
General Browning remained convinced that Market Garden was a sound plan which had been thwarted by bad luck. The incessant reference to the operation as a "failure" was a continual annoyance to him as the parts played by the two American airborne divisions had been a great success, and it angered him that they were never, in his lifetime, given due credit. In private correspondence he wrote "People don't seem to have been told that it [Arnhem] was only rather less than a third of the Airborne effort and the whole thing was 80% successful. The two US Airborne Divisions which I have the honour to command have done marvellously and if it hadn't been for the atrocious weather and sheer bad luck the whole thing would have been 100% successful which in war would have been phenomenal." He also said "I only wish that the exploits of the two American divisions and everyone else during those hectic days when we were holding the corridor open, fighting the battle against the Germans in the Reichswald and struggling to force a corridor to the 1st Division, might be more fully appreciated." Browning received no British recognition for the part that he played in the Battle, but he was, ironically considering his relations with both countries, honoured by the United States who awarded him the Legion of Merit, and by the Poles who gave him the Order of Polonia Restituta. Pegasus Archive Browning page
It sounds to me like inter ally rivalry was very important. Browning was concerned about losing his job to Ridgeway and he positioned his HQ with an American unit so that his information was based upon American actions and what they were doing.
Meanwhile Sosabowski got sacked from the brigade's command, got some bullshit security inspectorate posting in England and after the war worked minimum wage in a warehouse for 17 goddamn years. A Major General that started fighting all the way back in WWI stacking boxes well into his 70's. Shows you how important it is to have friends in high places.
I know it's been a while now, but what was the reasoning given for 6th Airborne Division never being committed, or 17th Airborne Division as well? To me, Arnhem ought to have had two divisions there just based on the sheer level of importance overall.
6th Airborne had been badly mauled in Normandy, they were used as normalise infantry until early August. When they were sent home to reform. This isn't an excuse, they could have put two brigades together and formed some part of the plan. There was also the 2nd Parachute Brigade in Southern France, less than seven hours flying time from the UK. They had only recently been on ops and had been engaged heavily but were still a viable force and highly manoeuvrable. With some urging they could have made the 6th Airborne up to full strength in less than a day. You also had the 52nd Mountain Div complete and idle in the UK. They were glider trained and air transportable. If the airfield at Grave had been put into service this division could have been flown in very quickly. Some parts could have been glider landed on day 1. There is no reason the British and Poles couldn't have put together a force of five parachute and five Glider/Air Mobile brigades. So roughly equal to the force used in Market Garden. But how to get them there? The problem with this plan is Interservice rivalry between RAF and British Army. The RAF was about bombing things, not serving the needs of the Army. From re-armament in the late 30s to D-Day the RAF acquired close to 100,000 aircraft of all types. Of that total the number of purpose built military transports was ..... 50*. The gigantic effort producing bombers for the RAF had almost completely stripped them of a transport arm. And the RAF was happy with that. For its first two years of operation the British Parachute force had maybe a few dozen converted Whitley bombers capable of dropping a single battalion at most, and then only slowly and spread out. By the time of Sicily the RAF could just about lift a brigade on their own, but most of that was through Gliders. In Normandy the RAF were still limited to a two brigade lift using converted Stirling and Albermale bombers not purpose built transport aircraft, dropping was slow, disorganised and limited in space. The Stirling was a massive aircraft, over a short range at low altitude it could out lift the Lancaster in terms of weight, But couldn't drop as many parachutists than the half sized Dakota. There was a demand for transport aircraft in the middle east, far east and parachute units from 1941 onwards this isn't armchair hindsight. It wasn't an impossible task either. UK aircraft industry manufactured almost 12,000 Wellington bombers. Half that number were used solely for training after they became obsolete from 1942. Another 2,300 Stirlings and 600 Albermales were produced even though both were considered obsolete in their bombing role prior to service. Engines are the bottleneck in aircraft production. Counting half the Wellingtons, just look at the number of engines in that group: 22,400 Bristol radials all bought and paid for. Enough to power 11,200 aircraft of a modernised bombay or dakota class transport. At 18 soldiers per aircraft thats 200,000 seats. If all available Gliders were towed at the same time, that could be as many as 350,000 seats for airborne troops. Even if you dropped twice the weight of each solider in supplies thats over 100,000 men, far more capacity than you could ever need. A transport force half this size could have been produced with ease and would have dramatically altered operations in Sicily, D-Day and Market Garden. Night or Day. Without this resource British Airborne got used to thinking in limited operations or to rely on the Americans. Airborne plans had to be two Brigades in strength or follow US procedures. Ie. Daylight. There wasn't a culture of big drops or even air mobility until Market Garden. 6th Airborne should never have been left in the field so long after D-Day. That it was shows the limited scope and pull of British Airborne ambitions. Why didn't we ask the Americans to swap the 82nd for a reformed 6th Airborne? I guess politics had something to do with it. My toys, my rules. Had the 1st, 6th, 52nd and Poles been lifted in together on D-Day from the fantasy transport fleet, Caen may well have been taken in that first 24hrs. The Airborne would have commanded great respect, had more clout at court and maybe got pulled out of Normandy earlier. With a three division drop/landing around Caen on D-day the allies could have been in Belgium by August or even July '44. Market Garden could have gone in at night, powered by a Corps HQ experienced in big drops, with less concern about transport losses. Whether the 6th Airborne would have got distracted by the Groesbeek heights is another matter. *50 Bombays the last delivered in 1940. The RAF in India received some Dakotas in 1942, but they wouldn't have a single operational Dakota squadron in Europe until after D-Day. I have excluded limited runs such as the 14 DH Flamingos and five long range Liberator transports. Also excluded are the civilian airliners pressed into service.
I read the book on Browning-not bad. A word in defense of Gavin is needed. Data on the 1000 tanks came from US Intelligence. Gavin could not ignore that. Even if the 1000 tanks turned out to be 100 and even if they were just a mix of Panzer II, III IV tanks, that is a problem for an airborne unit. Allied intelligence was correct about SS Panzers in the Arnhem area. The report of tanks near Njimegen could also have been correct. Allied commanders had no way of knowing for sure until their troops were on the ground.
Just finished watching it. High level and good info. I do think the videos with the maps are fantastic and this is just good and useful but not at that level. So this is more for the people who want more info but the battle videos are great for all kind of people. Still very good. I think the documentary show Air Emergency shows very well how things go wrong in a big system. It's very seldom just one part failing. It's 3 to about 8 parts failing at the same time. Because most of these big systems are set up to tackle single issues and problems, so one single problem won't really cause a crash. But when several small things fail at the same time because af various holes in the system then a crash can happen. Our mind is set up to look for single and simple causes and for scapegoats for the problems we find. In reality these leaders in WW2 did commit mistakes but were also part of a system that made these mistakes possible or even likely to happen. So sometimes one single person or cause cannot be found and it leaves us unsatisfied. Whether this is the case for Operation Market Garden I don't know.
I was born in Arnhem in 48. So I took an interest in the fighting there and why Frost could not hold the bridge for 48 hours more. Despite all de failures and delays at Nijmegen, the Arnhem bridge could have been held if the operation of the 1st Airborne had been better planned and executed. Read the book "Arnhem"written by the general Urquhart. First: the landing zones where 20 miles from Arnhem bridge. Nice space to land without losses, but undefendable. Second the radios did not work.Contact with England could not been made nor between the units an HQ of Urquhart. Third : with exeption of Frost, who went along the Rhine tot de Bridge, the rest had tot fight through a city. ( compare with the problem at Nijmegen for XXX corps). Urquhart could not get in contact with his units fighting in the outskirts of Arnhem. He went tot look for himself and was then surrounded by Germans and could not get back tot his HQ for two days. His second in command did'nt know what tot do. The main error was not tot land south of the bridge. They did not because of fear for heavy losses at the landing. So with exepcion of Frost, the entire division only got as far as Oosterbeek and never got tot Arnhem, and when driven back could not contact England for change in dropping zones. Nearly all supplies fell in German hands.. Conclusion. Yes there are errors made in Nijmegen which caused delay, but the real disaster was the bad preparation and execution of 1st Airborne division : Not the soldiers, but the general are to blame. Then they tried tot blame the Polish brigade. Well thanks tot te courage and skils of these man a lot of the 1st Airborne could escape over the Rhine. Personally knew a Polish soldier of the Polish Brigade who had fought in Arnhem and was after the war married with a Dutch women. He never talked about is, but when he died his son found his personal things from the war and the medal he got years after when finally the Polish where rehabilitated.
In general, the radios did work. The ones that didn't were the rather large long-range ones dropped with a few US Army operators into the LZs at Arnhem (10 miles out, not 20). It's somewhat fictionalised in the movie, maybe also Ryan's book. The radios for infantry use were short term, so sometimes it was hard to keep a full network going with 5 mile range, but that was the best that they worked. The artillery had longer range ones, but on different frequencies.
Commander is responsible for everything the unit does or fails to do and this responsibility cannot be delegated. At the 2 - 3 start level, or even at the 03 level, you have to check stuff before you plunge ahead unless you want to take a high risk. Eisenhower made a similar statement for D-Day failure, if it failed. I agree with what you are saying in that he left it to others but it was his responsibility to check their work. The whole thing had a lot of politics, which is normal in warfare (check Ceasar's Gallic Wars, or Thermopylae or Isandlwana or Little Big Horn) , but when told so, he should have checked it out given the nature of the information. The same thing applies to Biddle Smith and Eisenhower who was informed but Eisenhower said that he did not want to override Montgomery's decision. Even so, Montgomery was the driver and the commander. I also agree that Gavin has responsibility for failure to act or at least raise the issue with his superior command who was Boy Browning. They were the commanders in the field and were therefore responsible. In addition, the math of the 1k panzers should have been challenged. Checked OOB's is what intels do all the time. In this case, they were checking on the whereabouts of Panzer div anyway. These were not 2Lts just out of Sandhurst, these were experienced commanders at the star level, but Browning was THE commander on the ground. (I like this discussion)
Mike Quinton Browning was the commander of the First Allied Airborne Army on the ground until XXX Corps came along then they were in charge of all troops. Gavin was responsible for his part, the 82nd and their objectives. Browning was a level over Gavin. Browning was in charge of four generals: U.S. 101st Airborne Division - General Taylor; US 82nd Airborne Division - General Gavin; British 1st Airborne Division - General Urquhart; Polish 1st Parachute Brigade - General Sosabowski. Browning would not be focusing wholly on the 82nds tasks, even though he was in their zone, he entrusted them to Gavin. He would not hold a general's hand.
My grandfather was in Hohenstaufen division 9SS and he always said to me that with all the tanks they had along with fundsberg 10SS which amounted 14, 1 or 2 were running at the time of the landings. They only had serviceable halftracks and stug111
Yes he said they had one panther and even that had issues. I'm sure he said Frundsberg had some but were not used during the battle. I can't quite remember. Although he used to raise his eyebrows and laugh when he heard the drops were made on a panzer division! In name yes but they got out of France with hardly anything including men never mind equipment and tanks
@@lordsllim8053 Search Google on _RAF reconnaissance - Arnhem_ They give a report of the situation. They say hardly any armour was in the Arnhem area on the jump day. There was few old French tanks, one a Char B, which they knew of. The 1st Airborne took along a 17-pdr anti-tank gun to knock it out and did.
I wonder if this fits with your grandfather's recollections? Pieced together from several books and the online forum discussions between the armour research experts, I established what I believe is the position on 17 September: SS-Panzer-Regiment 9 at Saksen-Weimar kazerne in Arnhem with an alarm kompanie of 100 Panther crewmen acting as infantry and the Werkstatt Kompanie. 5 tanks: 3 Panthers and 2 Flakpanzer IV 'Möbelwagen' had been removed from the barracks by Friday 15 September and hidden under trees on Heijenoordseweg. According to the Dutch resident of the house on the corner of Callunastraat, who received a knock on the door on Friday morning by SS panzer crewmen asking for spare milk, they explained they were taken out of barracks to avoid any bombing. All other tanks in the Hohenstaufen were handed over to the Frundsberg, in preparation for the Hohenstaufen to be refitted in Germany. Two Panthers were knocked out in the western suburbs of Arnhem by B Company of 3rd Parachute Battalion on 19 September using a Gammon bomb and a PIAT, while the third survived to participate in the siege of Oosterbeek. The Möbelwagen were well documented and photographed in action on the Dreyenscheweg in Oosterbeek against 4th Parachute Brigade. SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 at Huis 't Medler, Vorden. I.Abteilung was still in Grafenwöhr in Germany, training with just 8 Panthers until receiving all their tanks and deployed in January 1945 for the 'Nordwind' counter-offensive in Alsace-Lorraine. In 1944 they continually received new tanks, only for them to be reassigned as replacements for units fighting in Normandy, hampering training. II.Abteilung at the Klooster (monastery) Kranenburg, near Vorden: 5.Kompanie - 16* x Panzer IV 6.Kompanie - logistics troops acting as infantry 7.Kompanie - 4 x StuG IIIG During the battle of Arnhem, Model arranged for the next 20 Panthers to be delivered direct from the factory in a batch of 8 and another of 12. They were crewed by the 100 de-horsed Panther crewmen of the Hohenstaufen and transferred to SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 as their 8.Kompanie. The II.Abteilung was known as Kampfgruppe Reinhold and ordered to Nijmegen, but the Arnhem bridge was blocked by 1st Parachute Brigade and the Huissen ferry scuttled by the Dutch ferryman after being used by Panzergrenadier Kampfgruppe Euling, so the ferry at Pannerden was to be used. The Mark IV panzers were too heavy for the ferry, according to Harmel the first tank slipped off the raft into the river, so only the 4 StuG managed to cross to the island and into Nijmegen. One was lost in Nijmegen and the others withdrew to the island and deployed in the Oosterhout-Ressen-Bemmel blocking line after the Nijmegen bridges were lost. *I had no idea how many of the reported 16 Mark IV panzers officially on strength and concentrated in Hans Quandel's 5.Kompanie were operational to start with, but we do know that according to British prisoners taken after the Arnhem bridge was retaken, the Boulevard Heuvelink leading to the bridge had a long line of Mark IV tanks as far as the eye could see were parked under the trees lining the boulevard and were told they were going to be used against them in the morning if they had not surrendered. They were clearly destined to be used against XXX Corps and held back until the Arnhem bridge was cleared, because they were expected by Reinhold to be in Nijmegen. If 14 were undergoing repair and 2 were running, that would add up? Sources: James Sims, Arnhem Spearhead: A Private Soldier's Story (1977). Bob Gerritsen and Scott Revell, Retake Arnhem Bridge: An Illustrated History of the Kampfgruppe Knaust September to October 1944 (2010). Dieter Stenger, Panzers East and West: The German 10th SS Panzer Division from the Eastern Front to Normandy (2017). Christer Bergström, Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited, vol 1 and 2 (2019, 2020).
Monty like you dweebs was nowhere around probably lathering up the lads - look that up is that why you like him? I've posted this before but you'd rather languish in the land of make believe HQ blaming Montgomery *Alan Brooke's own words* *"Triumph in the West, by Arthur Bryant, From the diary of Field Marshal Lord Alan Brooke, entry for 5 October 1944:Page 219" During the whole discussion one fact stood out clearly, that access to Antwerp must be captured with the least possible delay. I feel that Monty's strategy for once is at fault, Instead of carrying out the advance on Arnhem he ought to have made certain of Antwerp in the first place. Ramsay brought this out well in the discussion and criticized Monty freely....."* Or Bernard himself after the War admitting it *The Guns at Last Light, by Rick Atkinson, page 303* *Even Field Marshall Brooke* had doubts about Montgomery's priorities *"Antwerp must be captured with the Least possible delay" he wrote in his diary Admiral Ramsey wrote and warned that clearing the Scheldt of mines would take weeks, even after the German defenders were flicked away from the banks of the waterway" Monty made the startling announcement that he would take the Ruhr with out Antwerp this afforded me the cue I needed to lambaste him.......I let fly with all my guns at the faulty strategy we had allowed Montgomery. He would acknowledge as much after the war, conceding "a bad mistake on my part"* *From a PHD at King's College who also notes Ramsay/Brooke warned Monty about the Scheldt Estuary* *Eisenhower's Armies ,by Dr Niall Barr ,page 415* After the failure of Market-Garden, Eisenhower held a conference on 5 October 1944 that not only provided a post mortem on the operation but in which he reiterated his strategy for the campaign. Alan Brooke was present as an observer, noted that IKE's strategy continued to focus on the clearance of the Scheldt Estuary, followed by an advance on the Rhine, the capture of the Ruhr and a subsequent advance on Berlin. *After a full and frank discussion in which Admiral Ramsey criticized Montgomery freely, Brooke was moved to write, I feel that Monty's strategy for once is at fault,instead of carrying out the advance on Arnhem he ought to have made certain of Antwerp in the 1st place....IKE nobly took all the blame on himself as he had approved Monty's suggestion to operate on Arnhem* *How about Air Marshall Tedder* *With Prejudice, by Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander AEF, Page 599"* *Eisenhower assumed, as he and I had done all along, that whatever happened Montgomery would concentrate on opening up Antwerp. No one could say that we had not emphasized the point sufficiently by conversation and signal* *How about Monty's Chief of Staff* *Max Hastings, Armageddon:The Battle for Germany,1944-45 Freddie de Guingand Monty's Chief of Staff telephoned him saying the operation would be launched too late to exploit German disarray. That XXX Corps push to Arnhem would being made on a narrow front along one road,Monty ignored him* *How about IKE's/Allied HQ Chief of Staff Bedell-Smith* *Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany,1944-45* The release of the files from German Signals by Bletchley Park conclusively showed that the 9th & 10th Panzer Divisions were re-fitting in the Arnhem area. With their Recon Battalions intact. *Yet when Bedel-Smith(SHAEF) brought this to Monty's attention "he ridiculed the idea and waved my objections airly aside"* *How about IKE's Private Papers?* *The Eisenhower Papers, volume IV, by Edward Chandler By early September Montgomery and other Allied leaders thought the Wehrmacht was finished . *It was this understanding that led Monty to insist on the Market-Garden Operation over the more mundane task of opening the port of Antwerp. He ignored Eisenhower's letter of Sept 4 assigning Antwerp as the primary mission for the Northern Group of Armies* *And of course Admiral Ramsay who knew a deep water port was needed* *Ardennes 1944,By Sir Antony Beevor, page 14* Sir Bertram Ramsey ,Allied Naval commander-in-chief had told SHAEF and Monty that the Germans could block the Scheldt Estuary with ease. *The mistake lay with Monty, who was not interested in the estuary and thought the Canadians could clear it later* *Try looking up Churchill's biographer Martin Gilbert who took over 20 yrs to finish the 8 volumes on Winston's life* *Road to Victory, Winston Churchill 1941-45,by Martin Gilbert* A British War cabinet memo suggested that the appointment of Monty was from the point of view of it's reception by public opinion. *Apparently that clinched the War Cabinet's vote for Montgomery; based strictly on military accomplishments, the case for him was very weak* *The Second World War by John Keegan p. 437* The Plan was the most calamitous flaw in the post Normandy campaign .It was more over barely excusable, since Ultra was supplying Montgomery's HQs from Sept 5 onward with intelligence .As early as Sept 12 Monty's own intelligence reported the Germans intended to hold out along the approaches to Antwerp. Monty - despite every warning and contrary to common military sense - refused to turn his troops back in their tracks to clear the Scheldt Estuary Monty Garden go over and ask the Europeans, shouldn't take you 4 years like it did Bernard
Do not forget Brownibgs boss was an American.... entry about him from wiki Brereton, however, made key changes to the Linnet plan, first in restricting glider missions to "single-tows", that is, one tug aircraft towing one glider, whereas Linnet had contemplated a double-tow mission. A combination of poor weather, extensive resupply missions to the pursuing Allied armies, and anticipation of last-minute airborne drops cancelled virtually all training for IX TCC in August, as a consequence of which Brereton believed that untried and unpracticed double-tows were too hazardous. Brereton also decided that the operation, protected by massive air support from the RAF and the AAF, would take place in daylight, to avoid the dispersion experienced during both the British and American airborne landings in Normandy in June. His decision was finalized when weather and other delays pushed back D-Day for the operation to September 17, which was the dark moon. Finally, the shorter hours of daylight in September caused Brereton to refuse authorization for two lifts per day, and as a result of the limited number of troop carrier aircraft, the air movement of the Army required three consecutive days to complete.[63]
Your criticism of Mead is intetesting. Reminds me of Michael Senior's "Haking: A Dutiful Soldier" in which he defends one of the most incompetent men ever to wear a Lt General's badges, and does so poorly. I think some historians just think it is fun to defend clowns for the sake of being able to write provocative phrases on the book's cover: "a radical re-assessment", "correcting the record", "unfairly criticised".
I have a question, and it may be a stupid question. In every video I've watched on the failure of Market Garden, the bad intelligence about a large number of tanks located in the forest around Osterbeek heights is mentioned as a contributing factor. TIK, you make mention of it several times and say that both Gavin and Browning should've known better. That, it wasn't realistic to believe the Germans had a tank force that size in late 1944. But Im curious if it's possible that the size of the tank force was exaggerated. But not the existence of a large tank force itself. And there is only one reason I ask this question, the battle of the bulge. The sources I have found claim Hitler gave the official order to begin preparations for the offensive on September 16th, 44. Just one day before operation Market Garden. I've also read a couple of sources that claim some of the tank forces had already been told to begin repositioning before the official order to prepare was given. So, is it possible that a large tank force had been located in the forest outside the Osterbeek heights before being given orders to reposition in accordance with upcoming offensive preparations? We know about 1400 tanks, and assault guns took part in the battle of the bulge. With tanks alone totaling about 1000. So, maybe there weren't 1000 tanks in the forest surrounding Osterbeek. But is it possible there was a fairly large tank force, none the less?
To clarify, the forest that was reported to contain German armour was the Reichswald south of Nijmegen and on the border in Germany. There was also a reconnaissance Spitfire flight that photographed a few tanks in the Deelerwoud north of Arnhem near Deelen airfield on 12 September, which was a flight to confirm Dutch resistance reports of armour near Arnhem. The first reports of armour in the Reichswald came from Dutch resistance reports during the planning for operation COMET, set for 8 Septemeber and then postponed twice to 9 then 10 September. It started a silly rumour that 1000 tanks could be hiding in the Reichswald, but it was estimated that Model only had 50-100 operational panzers at the time, and we now know he had exactly 84 operational panzers in his Army Group B in the 5 September returns. COMET was cancelled because of this report and the strong resistance in the immediate 2nd Army front south of Eindhoven, and Montgomery realised one airborne division landing at Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave was not strong enough to deal with the opposition. It was decided to upgrade COMET by adding two more airborne divisions, so the 1st Airborne could concentrate at Arnhem, the 82nd would take Nijmegen-Grave, and the 101st would secure the corridor from Valkenswaard to Uden in order to facilitate a rapid advance from Belgium to Nijmegen and Arnhem. The drop zones near Valkenswaard and Uden were later deleted, with the 101st now landing between Son and Veghel. Around this time, more Dutch reports were received of German SS units moving into billets in the Arnhem-Apeldoorn-Ruurlo areas, with the vehicle insignia of the 'Hohenstaufen' Division (9.SS-Panzer) positively identified, and 'Ultra' code intercepts revealed that II.SS-Panzerkorps had been ordered to refit in the eastern Netherlands. By 16 September, the day before MARKET GARDEN began, the assessment was that there was an SS panzer Division northeast of Arnhem and another possibly in the Nijmegen barracks, both reduced to regimental battlegroups in strength with few if any tanks, and that they were probably drawing new tanks from a depot thought to be in the Kleve area behind the Reichswald, which could be used as a tank storage area. By 1830 hours on the first day, Gavin was told there were no German troops in the Reichswald and the tree density too great for armoured operations. We also now know that resistance at Arnhem was much greater than anticipated. It was only in 1966 that Gavin realised from the papers of Dutch researcher T.A. Boeree that he forwarded to Cornelius Ryan, the author of A Bridge Too Far (1974), that Boeree had tracked the 'Hohenstaufen' SS panzer division from its crossing of the Maas at Maastricht on 4 September and concentrating near Sittard, before receiving orders on 8 September to move north to Arnhem and the Veluwe region to refit. It was now clear to him that the route was through Nijmegen after a stop in the Reichswald, and this had generated the reports, but now understood it was the 'Hohenstaufen' division in transit to Arnhem. When COMET was cancelled on 10 September, and MARKET was proposed to replace it, Gavin was given a warning order he was assigned to Nijmegen, so he immediately went to 1st Airborne HQ to get the latest intelligence they had on the area and see the plans they had prepared for COMET. He saw the reports of German armour in the Reichswald and what 1st Airborne were doing to deal with it before COMET was cancelled, and this information informed his own divisional plan for MARKET. The decision to refit the II.SS-Panzerkorps in the Netherlands was probably connected with Model's plans for a counter-offensive to retake Antwerp from the Netherlands, planned to take place in October or November. This explains why he refused to give permission to blow the main bridges at Arnhem and Nijmegen, even after the airborne attack had begun, he still thought he would need them for his counter-offensive. Eventually the counter-offensive was delayed to December and re-routed through the Ardennes, and both 9 and 10.SS-Panzer-Divisions were involved after being refitted, although only SS-Artillerie-Regiment 10 of the 'Frundsberg' was involved. A brief word about the tanks in the Deelerwoud: these were believed by Browning's intelligence officer to confirm reports of SS panzer units near Arnhem and used in Cornelius Ryan's book, becoming an infamous scene in the film adaptation, but when the missing photos were located in a Dutch archive in 2015 it was found they showed older obsolete models of tanks as Browning had dismissed them. They had indeed broken down while ordered to Belgium and most of them did not make the journey. The unit was identified as a reserve panzer unit belonging to the training regiment of the Luftwaffe 'Hermann Göring' Panzer-Division and the tanks were camped near the 101st Airborne 506th PIR drop zone near Son on 17 September and attacked by escorting fighter aircraft. The RAF study of the found photo was published by Dr Sebastian Ritchie of the RAF Air Historical Branch in - Arnhem: The Air Reconnaissance Story - you can find it as a free download from the RAF MoD website on their Thematic Studies page. The papers of T.A. Boeree and Gavin's covering letter to Cornelius Ryan are in the Cornelius Ryan Collection online under A Bridge Too Far, box 101 folder 09 James Gavin (covering letter is page 48). Hope this helps.
A quick Googles will tell you just how formidable an obstacle the Groesbeek Heights would have been. It is a whopping 34 meters above sea level. As for Browning and the tanks, it's funny how a man who sees photographs of several tanks and other armored vehicles can dismiss them out of hand as "wrecks, unfit for duty" but buy wholeheartedly the "1,000 tanks" lurking in the woods past Groesbeek.
Steve 56 in the conditions of the Vale of Guelders, 34 meters is the Himalaya as the rest of the place is below sealevel. It is commanding high ground for the area. Still, I don't think it was the right place to deploy Gavin at all. He should have been south west of Nijmegen, not south east.
Actually the Groesbeek Heights are 100.8 meters that is 88 meters higher than the area around it. A perfect place to put artillery observers to close the roads into Nijmegen.
If he thought the tanks were in the Reichswald then given information the Allies had about how few effective panzer units the Germans had left he was unlikely to believe they were also simultaneously in Arnhem. It's like a 3 cups game. If you think the ball is under the middle cup, you aren't going to claim it's under the middle cup and the left-hand cup.
One question @TIKhistory, if you may quote your source for the 22:50 SHAEF G2 Summary of 13th of September 1944., stating that "1000 tanks reported in Reichwald etc", since I wasn't able to find that report in several books about Market Garden. Also, I found out that the Weekly summary reports were issued on Saturdays, meaning there was a report on September 9th (No. 25) and then September 16th (No. 26, in which there was allegedly a mention of possible tanks around Arnhem again, but the Operation was on for the next day), while September 13th was a Wednesday and there was no Weekly summary report on that date. Couldn't find the text of that September 9th or September 13th, they are kept in Box 8 in the Dwight D. Eisenhower library in Abilene Kansas, with other selected records from SHAEF 1943-1945. Have you ever seen any of these texts (transcribed, photographed, microfilmed...)? www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/finding-aids/pdf/shaef-selected-records.pdf
If they truly thought there might be a heavy number of tanks in the Nijmegan area. The operation should have been scrubbed. If those tanks were real they would have destroyed the airborne and kicked 30 corps right back to their starting point. So the logic is truly flawed.
Great stuff as always! I'd agree with you on the primary blame being on Gavin. It shouldn't really have been Browning's responsibility to tell him to...well... capture his objective as quickly as possible. However as the senior commander he really was quite "worthless" in the hour of need, and the treatment of the Poles is, well, just childish.
Excellent quality of video, I agree Richard Mead’s book does fall into the trap of confirmation bias,, although it is General Montgomery and Horrocks are most associated with the operation General Browning should be held accountable. Montgomery post-mortem the airborne plan. “The airborne forces at Arnhem were dropped too far away from the vital objective-the bridge. It was some hours before they reached it. I take blame for this mistake. I should have ordered Second Army and I Airborne Corps to arrange that at least one complete Parachute Brigade was dropped quite close to the bridge, so that it could have been captured in a few minutes and its defence soundly organised with time to do so. I did not do so” . This effectively vindicated General Sosabowski original argument. Whilst there is merit in your argument at the Tactical execution level, Market Garden was in many ways doomed because of the Strategic Eisenhower’s decision of a broad front attritional campaign than Montgomery’s plan of a immediate focused concentrated thrust towards the Ruhr. Revisionist Historians, tend to agree with Montgomery failure to accept this plan permitted the German Army to regroup.Consequently Germany could have been entered before winter set in and the Ruhr area encircled cutting the Reich off from essential industry. The Ardennes offensive would not have taken place to prolong the war. The war in Europe may have ended before 1945, the ‘Hunger Winter’ in Holland would not have taken place, and millions of Nazi victims would have survived. I agree with Montgomery that Eisenhower’s strategic failure in August 1944 was a very costly mistake, Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge were the tactical consequences of that mistake.
Very well done, but I still have to disagree with your conclusion. How does dropping 8 miles from Arnhem bridge not trump a few hours delay in Gavin sending troops to Nijmegen bridge as the critical error in this operation? Gavin was under Browning's direct supervision and had his approval. The 8 miles also allowed for the other critical issues to affect the probable success, such as the radios and 1st Airborne resupply. It's pretty much insane to drop paras that far from their objective. Even if there were only 50 tanks in the Reichwald, anybody commanding a partial, already spread out airborne division, would have to consider that a priority. Moreover, how was Gavin or Browning to know 10th SS was going to be sending significant forces down to that bridge straightaway? In a nutshell I would say the overriding problem with this operation was that, "there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians". Ike and Monty should have had a much more hands on role in this affair considering it was dealing with complex combined operations between two nations and several branches of the military. In the end when you expect XXX Corps, 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne to have to stick their neck out in a big way to save 1st Airborne, it's probably not going to happen to the extent you hope. (Such as air commanders worrying about how tired their guys would be.) Commanders usually set not getting their unit wiped out or severely mauled as first priority. That would be my first priority. It takes an overall commander to set these bickering self-interests straight in an operation like this. If the plan was better, it would have worked. It almost did anyway, but I can't single out Gavin or Browning for this. In the end one could say Gavin put "his guys" first, and Browning didn't. They cut too many corners in the planning to assure victory.
caelachyt Gavin was in charge of the 82nd who were tasked with seizing the bridge. Browning dropped at the same time, but was in charge of 3 generals in the operation on the 1st day. He could not communicate with them and was also setting up his HQ. The first hours are critical. Gavin sent about 40 men to the bridge of around 3,000, after a 3 hour delay. Gavin should have ensured a substantial amount of men moved on the bridge, the prime target, *immediately.* If he did so the operation would have been a success.
Gavin sent no sizeable force to the bridge until 22.00 in the evening when a Para company took a look at it and bumped into the SS battalion who had just arrived and were deploying. Considering this was his main objective which he was ordered to seize 'with thunderclap surprise' it's shocking that out of an entire airborne division he only made such a token gesture with a few hundred men so very late in the day. There were no defenders of note near the bridge until the SS arrived near nightfall, and Gavin's error caused a 36 hour delay and a lot of loss of life for an objective they could have walked over earlier. There were no sightings of tanks in the Riechswald, the Dutch underground and air recon had seen nothing, and the whole panic was caused by Gavin's G2 officer who later retracted his statement and instead concluded that at most there could be a few hundred German communications troops in there. Gavin chose to stick with the first ridiculous report though, and Browning went along with it as well. I suspect that the pair of them stuck with the first ludicrous G2 assessment not necessarily because they believed it, but because it suited their own agendas. 36 hours delay and an unnecessary pitched battle was easily enough to end the operations chance of success. I'm not sure I agree that a commanders first priority is to look after his men, especially a WW2 para commander. Those guys (and their men) were famously willing to take chances to get their objectives taken otherwise the paras would be mopped up in due course if they just sat there behind enemy lines.
SuperCaratacus Gavin's orders were Groesbeek then Nijimeen, read the operational order. Besides it's 12km from LZ T of the 508th to Nijimeen Bridge. What's your ETA of them reaching the bridge and securing both sides against KG Henke and further reinforcements. Also critical first few hours, go find Urqhart tell him his divisional staff will be looking for him for the next 2 days
John Burns it takes 2 Para five hours to cover the same distance. If I use that same standard, the 508th would have clashed with 9th SS Reece Bn around the bridge before last light.
Nice one, well presented, and entertaining. cannot believe Sasobowski ended up at working at Lucas in London as a factory worker. (wiki) But my money is on Browning. Looking forward to your next production. .
Was there actually any evidence for panzers in the Reichswald? And if there actually were panzers in the Reichswald shouldn't they have set up the defensive positions in Nijmegen itself, I would think airbourne troups have a much better position in urban environment instead of the quite open terrain around Groesbeek.
Except the initial SHAEF report declaring 1,000 panzers in the Reichswald, no there was no evidence. And yes, defending in the built-up areas makes sense. However, the classic counter-argument to moving off the Groesbeek Heights is "you've got to protect your landing zones" - which also was the Groesbeek Heights. Why not deploy West of Nijmegen instead, I've no idea, but you're right that the open terrain around Groesbeek wouldn't have been enough to stop a sizeable panzer-force.
TIK I find the choice not to deploy and land southwest of Nijmegen truly incomprehensible *. Hatert to the SW is the logical choice if you are supposed to make it easy for XXX Corps to advance from Grave to Nijmegen. Defending your LZ is circular logic. We defend it because we are there, like. * Incomprehensible UNLESS somebody higher up in a position to decide the LZ made up his mind that stopping the phantom threat from the Reichswald has priority. I have no idea who that might be and if I were to engage in unfounded speculation I would be into conspiracy theory. But the question remains: why on Earth is Gavin and his 82nd put in such an eccentric position? I find that more mystifying than his decision to defend Groesbeek. I agree that the urban environment is a much better place to ward off the German tanks, should such arrive. It is truly difficult to understand why he would be inserted there.
Really, any attack could have come from any direction, one thing you could glean from the intel is you didn't know. And in fact a counter-attack did come from an unexpected direction, from the north, on the other side of the river. Gavin clearly didn't expect an imminent attack there otherwise he wouldn't have waited so long to send any force to take either bridge.
You must understand that ALL of the generals so quoted are hiding the fact that Bletchley Park is decoding German radio traffic. It would've been signals intelligence, human intelligence and flat out paranoia and miscalculation that created the 1,000 panzers. Further, most of those panzers would've been HALF-TRACKS. Even half-tracks would've been nightmares for the paras. Germany was still producing half-tracks at quite a clip -- and the key factories were only a two-hour drive from the battle! And the Germans WERE pouring half-tracks, Tigers, Panthers, you name it into Arnhem to rebuild 9&10 SS divisions. Further, American tank factories produced X amount of tanks per month. Intelligence simply assumed that something like that number, say .3X, would spit out of Germany's tank factories in the Ruhr. They assumed that most of Germany's production was going to the east -- but now that Monty was knocking on the devil's door -- that ALL of the Ruhr's production would be vectored their way. Adding it all up, you start to see where Big Numbers come from. ( For paras, half-tracks are just as deadly as panzers, and perhaps even worse. Look what happened to Frost ! )
@Steve Bletchley was not given a time-line within their intercepts. It's a pretty good bet that Bletchley was tapping into morale boosting chatter between Adolf and OB West about its reinforcement priority -- which was -- in fact -- at the top of the stack. Hitler had ALREADY decided to counter attack out of the Ardennes even before the Allies rolled up to the West Wall. Yes, in his imagining he would repeat his super-success of 1940. All of this was in his head even before Paris was liberated. Quite simply, Hitler had ALWAYS assumed that his play was in the west, and that only Britain and America were sensitive to casualties, for clearly, Stalin was not deterred by even insane levels of blood. The disposition of Browning's HQ betrays the fact that he KNEW that the ONLY terrain suitable for a counter attack by panzers lay directly between the heights and the German border. Everywhere else, the ground was so soft that tanks bogged down. This was why Hell's Highway was an elevated highway, why XXX Corps tanks had to stay up on that 60-mile berm. The CRAZY thing about 1st Airborne and 82nd Airborne drop zones: they weren't on the island. The zone between the two bridges was an ISLAND in the Rhine river delta. The Germans couldn't get on it except by the bridges and a ferry. This ferry, indeed both ferries, were totally ignored by Browning and Monty. ANY Dutchman could've, would've brought them up. They were the traditional way of reaching the farmland that WAS the island. The island had no Germans, no FLAK, no nothing. No place to hide panzers, either. The island was the OBVIOUS place to take all subsequent air drops. It just screamed: land here, land here, land here! All of the FLAK was in Arnhem. That's where the RAF was taking a beating. BTW, the RAF DID adjust its drop zones after crews bitched about loads lost to Germany. However, no matter what was done, the SS kept over-running the new, tighter, drop zones. That's how fast the 1st Airborne was shrinking its perimeter. It was but a short time before its pocket was so tiny that the RAF couldn't hit it. Any plane making the attempt would have no more than a two second window between crossing the Rhine and reaching the (far ) German line. That's why the film is painting a false picture WRT the RAF. Its crews were not that stupid. What had happened is that British Airborne had lost the ability to defend its perimeter early in the fight. . ALL of Airborne's problems traced back to Browning's selection of drop zones. He had the PERFECT spot -- the island -- and he didn't select it. Urquhart and Company could not redeem that catastrophic error no matter how much blood they spent.
TIK, love your channell. Your final decision is well thought out. I have to say the majority of the fault has to lay with Browning. But that is just my thought. As you stated everyone has a piece of the blame. Trying not to be leaning to one side or the other but I think Montgomery was overrated. Thanks for these documentaries.
"I have to say the majority of the fault has to lay with Browning... but I think Montgomery was overrated." - any particular reasons or just the usual indoctrination by Hollywood?
A Bridge Too Far is my favourite movie and Operation Market Graden is one of my (I hesitate to use the word "favourite" for an event where people die in large numbers) battles that I am most interested in. I think the biggest thing the movie missed was the Groesbeek heights. That would have given a whole different flavour. Also, what do you think about the criticism if XXX corps? They seem to get accused of stopping and drinking tea and being generally incompetent. This seems to be the US depiction of British forces. In my opinion they did a pretty good job of pushing up one highway where they were being constantly ambushed and their supply lines overstretched. But they were forced to turn from a fast exploitation force into a force fighting heavily defended enemies in Nijmegen, a role for which they were not suited and which they wouldn't have had to fulfill had the Nijmegen Bridge been taken earlier.
XXX Corp had a crap job. The is no way you can have a major ground operation relying on just one road with no way to maneuver. Way to easy to have supply lines cut. Failure was in the plan itself. Ike should have not allowed it to happen.
This plan hinged on "thunderclap surprise". Ferrying in the troops over several days was anathema to that. Far too many corners were cut in the planning.
Jaak Sootak XXX Corps hardly put a foot wrong. They got to Nijmegen just ahead of schedule. When they were there they had to start fighting the Germans in street fighting and then plan and seize the bridge. They also sent a battalion of the Dorsets across the Rhine to Arnhem. XXX Corps had 20,000 vehicles. They had 9,000 sapper engineers with bridge equipment in 5,000 trucks.
Jaak Sootak _"Also, what do you think about the criticism if XXX corps? They seem to get accused of stopping and drinking tea and being generally incompetent. This seems to be the US depiction of British forces. "_ After WW2 the facts proved the British were highly professional and the Americans at times just amateurish, especially at the top brass levels. At the Battle of the Bulge, two US armies had to be put under Montgomery's control as they lost control and did not know what to do. At the beginning of 1942 Eisenhower was just a colonel. In 1939/40 Portugal had a larger army than the USA. They were short of well trained and educated top brass as their armies expanded into millions. Many of their generals would not have made it to general in the British Army. Mark Clark comes to mind, Simpson another. Since then the US media, and their ex military men, have attempted to put themselves in a favourable light - mainly by castigating and sneering the British, who outperformed them. Montgomery was the finest general in WW2 - he never suffered a reverse running through 9 countries commanding multi-national armies. To read many Americans he was an incompetent buffoon when facts show us the opposite. It is best to look at facts not people with agendas.
I watched a Bridge to Far then started reading more and ended up here. An excellent analysis with more detail facts than I can absorb in one watching. One caution, as facts are obvious, in the pressure and fog of war, second guessing too much to assign blame, is fraught with risk. I would prefer to say mistakes were made from the first inception of the operation. Contention between Ike and Monty was no secret the fact that they essentially argued for 5 days over its' merit set the failure in motion. your attention to detail is however admirable. and the facts you present are an excellent resource.
23.30 the Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Offensive was launched exactly three months after MG. German armor: 557 tanks, 667 tank destroyers and assault guns 1,261 other AFVs
Hello! I was considering subscribing to your channel as I noticed that the number of your subscribers jumped in the last month from 10000 to 15000, which could have been a bit frightening... So I decided to wait for a while. 🙂 But that would certainly not stop me to continue watching your videos. They are great! Greetings from Romania! 🇷🇴 By the way, I think that both Browning and Gavin are to be blamed. Defending against tanks would have been easier from the town of Nijmegen and capturing the bridge should have been a priority. I find it difficult to imagine what were they thinking.
(1) Market Garden can only be labeled as a "foreseeable accident in waiting", and like the vast majority of accidents, several concurring "factors" caused it to happen, making it very difficult or even impossible to pinpoint one single "culprit". It seems to me that removing one or two of those flaws would have been enough to prevent the disaster. (2) In order to present a valid opinion about the dropping of Browning's HQ on Niejmegen, I would have to be duly acquainted with its roles and functions, so I could confront them vis-à-vis the onus of spending air transport and weapons required to drop them there. (3) All said, my personal impressions are that, once Panzer divisions were considered as de facto planning risks, which soon proved real, the two most damaging flaws that caused MG's disastrous outcome were (a) only one drop per day, most importantly in the first two days of the operation, and (b) the unjustifiable delay to take and cross the Niejmegen bridge, with all its consequences. But, again, the use of armor in single line in Holland was a well known liability beforehand, radios failed to work etc., so back to number 1 above... (4) Eisenhower, Montgomery and other key commanding figures down the line failed to realize the importance and/or support the assignment of close air support by the tactical air forces. Were it treated accordingly, fighter-bombers and/or light bombers would have been properly assigned to MG, and they would have saved the operation for sure, bad weather considered. So, it's not solely what was improperly done, but also what wasn't done, that doomed such brilliant endeavor and led to the loss of so many beautiful, brave soldiers. Well, in the end, all in all, I think this was the major factor: the absence of air fire support when all else failed.
_"Panzer divisions were considered as de facto planning risks, which soon proved real"_ There was no armour in Arnhem on the 17th. If XXX Corps got over the Nijmegen bridge on schedule they would have met little armour in Arnhem. Even the German commander Harmel, said "it would have been all over for us." _"the British armor stalled, "_ It never, XXX Corps got to Nijmegen just ahead of schedule and instead of running over the bridge found it still in German hands.
The armor wasn't in Arnhem on the first day, but at least one of its divisions was, with an HQ at Oosterbeek, and it was responsible for severely limiting the access to the bridge until the armor's arrival, disrupting landing and dropping zones, restricting air supply etc., even without the armor. Thanks for clarifying that the XXX arrived at Niejmegen ahead of schedule.
jsfbr People do not get the timeline right. There was no armour in the Arnhem area on the 17th and none there in the previous weeks. I have given evidence from a RAF report. The armour came in from Germany pretty well unmolested as fighter-bomber support was withdrawn. On the 19th, when XXX Corps turned up at Nijmegen, there was little German armour on the _island_ between the two bridges, and little was in Arnhem. There was nothing XXX Corps could not have dealt with very easily. By the time XXX Corps got over Nijmegen bridge (they had to seize the bridge themselves) on the 20th in the dark, they were 36 hours late with German armour now on the island and in Arnhem. When XXX Corps consolidated and moved to Arnhem, on the 21st, they met stiff German armour which was now in Elst. Tigers, the lot.
John Burns You just got to get over your tunnel vision. Stop looking for excuses and what if's. The Monty plan was flawed and this was shown in the result. The Germans woke up to the plan early, out manouvered the allies, defended well, game over. Then the blame game started in true British tradition. Its still going on by the look of it.
My Farther told me that on occasion he was ordered to drive Browning around. I was to young and never asked or was interested. Wish i could talk to him now. Dad was in 1st Airborne artillery and never really spoke about the war. Not to me anyway.
Shouldn't we blame the Wehrmacht and weapon SS for the failure of Market Garden? Why is there so much obsession with blame for it? It was war, it's risk-taking based on imperfect information. The whole Western Front always struck me as a 'mopping up'-operation. In this case there was a high risk, high reward opportunity which didn't pay off but didn't change the balance of the war at all. Basically an 'oh well, that didn't work but it was worth trying'-moment than real failure. Or am I very far off the mark here?
You're correct in a lot of ways. The Western Front really was a mopping up operation compared to the Eastern Front, and this battle didn't change the war too much. However, the point of this is that the historiography of this battle is dominated by authors who are deliberately withholding information in order to blame the wrong people. If you watch the film A Bridge Too Far (which is based on the book by the same name), you'll come to a completely different conclusion to what I did here. That's what makes this battle so interesting, especially since it's a multi-national operation, so people get really passionate about it. I have tried to remain balanced, but technically I'm biased by being British (although, as I said in the video, if you blame Browning, Gavin or both, you're probably correct).
Good points, and I appreciate you tackling this subject in this video. My comment was more of a general remark than directed at you specifically so please don't take it as meant at you. I like your point about the multi-nationality and how people become passionate because of it. Perhaps that explains the obsession with blame the best; national prides. No small wonder since most involved nations had been at each others throats for centuries before the Germans became a thing. And no real military disasters befell the Western Allies since before Normandy, this really was the worst thing that happened in an otherwise 'smooth' campaign (well, apart from the Battle of the Bulge I guess) so of course it should be someone's fault.
Leon Michiel S. Eisenhower right up just before he died always insisted Market Garden was well worth going for. If Monty was active in the planning and they went for Kasel, that would be one less bridge to seize. I am sure he would have insisted on fighter-bombers being used. They did eventually go via Kasel.
Dirk Bogarde who played Frederick Browning in A Bridge Too Far said that Browning received a bad rap for his role in Operation Market-Garden. Bogarde in WW2 was actually part of the staff around Browning and knew the general.
Thanks for your awesome in depth videos, you, Military History Visualized and Military Aviation History are my favourite channels concerning, well military history. It is pretty much always in history the case that overwhelming victories and crushing defeats are put on one or a few people, who often often are the 'faces' of the operation, not necessarily the brains. Also often is the case that risky decisions are not disputed because the "herd" of the yea-sayers grants immunity in case of failure. So I would not blame Browning for the very "bold" planning of Market Garden, but for taking the risk of the Reichswald at face value, obsessing over Groesbeek Heights and not using the one advantage Paratroopers have - surprise. And Gavin as well, of course. I mean, let's face it, even if there had been 1000 panzers in the Reichswald, what would some paras with light equipment have done about that?
"The US Official History attributes this faulty Reichswald intelligence to the 82nd Airborne Division’s G-2, Lieutenant Colonel Walter F. Winton Jr." "The various Allied intelligence reports fail to mention them and soon after landing, says the US Official History, the 505th PIR, having sent a patrol into the Reichswald, reported that ‘no tanks could be seen’. This report confirmed other information, obtained from Dutch civilians, that _‘the report about the 1,000 tanks in the Reichswald was false.’_ " - Neillands
@@bigwoody4704 Rambo, a quiz. Name the US general who imagined that there was 1,000 German tanks in a forest, which led to him *failing* to seize a key bridge? 20 points for this.
Monty left 4 months before Clark took Rome.Officially the narrative was to *"HELP"* plan Market Garden.But the truth of the matter was to save face for the rancid runt who the press started in on after Sicily/Italy and the fact....well you know the 30 mile channel and the mighty British Empire tip toeing around it.Even Rommel was like WTF
@@bigwoody4704 *BZZZZZT!* Wrong answer. The name the US general who imagined that there was 1,000 German tanks in a forest, which led to him *failing* to seize a key bridge, was *General Gavin.* Zero points Rambo. Zero.
Extremely well done unlike so many other presentations on RUclips. Very well done gentlemen! I've read a couple of books on this subject but many years ago. The "idea" for the operation was to cross the Rhine attack headlong into the industrial heart of Germany, and, hopefully end the war. It was an audacious plan but worth the risks. What appears to me, given the strategic expectations for Market Garden, and that there were, historically, so many problems with air drops, that the main error was that there wasn't some hardcore overall commander appointed who would have ordered that air assets would bend their efforts to meet the plan, period, that some individuals who were not getting along, would find a way to do so or one or more of them would be gone. And I have a slight nagging feeling Boy was more concerned about keeping his position than about the situation his men would be dropping into. Well, to put the whole thing another way, there was just too much loosy-goosy for something with as bold a reach as this operation. Here's an antidote for what it's worth. As a young boy in class our teacher, just in passing, mentioned that he and some of his airborne friends noticed that the Brit tankers (30 Corp.) had stopped for "tea" instead of charging ahead as they thought proper. Several truck loads of American airborne troops motored over to the Brit encampment and a brawl ensued. I don't know which division he was in but in any case I've never read or heard of this instance being reported. (shugs) Who ultimately has to accept responsibility for the failure of this operation? Why the same people who would have stepped forward to accept the laurels had it gone well, shortening or ending the war.
In regards to the operation's true purpose, you might want to watch this other video I made a while ago ruclips.net/video/f79KgQVL3MM/видео.html And I couldn't agree more with your idea that Boy was "more concerned about keeping his position than about the situation his men would be dropping into". This is actually one of the big lessons to take away from history. Because a lot of people are like this in life.
The *US Official History* makes the point that even after the Nijmegen bridge had finally been taken: _The Guards Armoured’s Coldstream Guards Group still was needed as a reserve for the Airborne division. This left but two armoured groups to go across the Waal. Even those did not make it until next day, D plus 4, 21 September, primarily because of diehard German defenders who had to be ferreted out from the superstructure and bridge underpinnings. Once on the north bank, much of the British armour and infantry had to be used to help hold and improve the bridgehead that the two battalions of the 504th Parachute Infantry had forged. By the time the Nijmegen bridge fell on D plus 3, it was early evening and it would be dark before an armoured column could be assembled to march on Arnhem._ *_North of Nijmegen the enemy had tanks and guns and infantry of two SS Panzer divisions, in unknown but growing strength, established in country ideal for defence._* This account adds that: _At the village of Ressen, less than three miles north of Nijmegen, the Germans had erected an effective screen composed of an SS battalion reinforced by eleven tanks, another infantry battalion, two batteries of 88mm guns, 20 20mm anti-aircraft guns and survivors of earlier fighting in Nijmegen._ American readers should note that the above comments come from the US Official History, where the notion that Lord Carrington and his five tanks could have penetrated this screen and got up to Arnhem on the night of D plus 3 - even supposing such a move was ever suggested - is revealed as a delusion. - Neillands, Robin. The Battle for the Rhine 1944 A more perceptive analysis comes from Major-General John Frost, commander of the 2nd Parachute Battalion at the Arnhem bridge: _The worst mistake of the Arnhem plan was the failure to give priority to capturing the Nijmegen bridge. The capture would have been a walkover on D-Day, yet the 82nd Division could spare only one battalion as they must at all costs secure the Groesbeek heights where the Corps HQ was to be sited._ These numerous attempts to divert attention from this failure, and pass the blame to a captain in the Guards Armoured Division, have been shameful... and highly successful. The myths surrounding the Nijmegen bridge have persisted and been engraved on the public mind by the media and the cinema. Given the US commanders’ chronic tendency to pass the buck and blame their British allies at every opportunity, it certainly might have been better if some effort had been made to get elements of the Guards Division on the move to Arnhem that night. That, however, is the romantic view, bolstered by hindsight. In practical terms it takes time to assemble an entire armoured division from a battlefield in the dark streets of a town, issue fresh orders and prepare it for another advance. - Neillands, Robin. The Battle for the Rhine 1944
MrLemonbaby The Nijmegen bridge was taken at both ends by XXX Corps. The 82nd were not even at the bridge when the tanks went across. They were at the far end of the village of Lent, about 1km away, which was just north of the bridge. The Germans had naturally put a road block at the end of the bridge which the tanks had to push out of the way to proceed. On leaving the bridge two tanks of the four were hit and one knocked out with men killed, injured and taken prisoner. One was got going again. The Germans were firing from the girders and land around the bridge. No 82nd were there to meet the tanks, only Germans. The 82nd first met the British tanks near the railway embankment and railway bridge at the far side of Lent. The 82nd men kissed the tank and its guns. The leading two tanks had already knocked out a German self-propelled gun and hit the church. The tank would go no further as German guns were ahead and they were there to protect the bridge. Only four tanks moved over the bridge. The rest of the tanks were fighting in Nijmegen town helping the 82nd who had not taken Nijmegen. One tank added to the four. The tanks were tasked to secure the north end of the bridge in case of a counter-attack, not neglect their prime task and go on a suicidal night stroll into flat Dutch farmland on a raised road. There wasn’t only Waffen SS in the way to Arnhem. Schwere Panzerkompanie Hummel with 14 Tiger I tanks had also crossed the Arnhem bridge at that time and took up defensive positions near Elst north of Lent. There is no way that 4 Sherman tanks would have got anywhere near Arnhem. The big point is they were to protect the bridge and only the bridge. The best book on this is Market Garden Then and Now.
Love how you revise history. Are you by chance related to Monty? Is that why you try to place the failure on Market Garden at everyone else feet? Here are a few facts for you. 1: Always have 3 to one odds in your favor in the attack. They received intel that they would not have those odds at Arnhem and in fact that the British and Polish airborne troops, not at all armed to fight tanks were sent in anyway. You can blame the failure on Ike. He not only should have refused to allow Market Garden to proceed IMO he should have sacked Monty in France. IMO Monty insisted on this attack for 2 reasons. 1st was people were questioning his actions. Complaining that he was too timid. Was he trying to erase that criticism? 2nd was like Patton he just loved seeing his name in the news! For the most part Monty was a brilliant planner. Once the battle was joined he lacked the ability to be flexible to changing situations. That is what set Rommel apart from the crowd. Once the battle was joined he could react to changing situations in the blink of an eye. Patton was good at that too. Ike should have had Monty in charge of his G2 (planning staff). Heck with Monty in charge of G2 and Patton in command of the ground forces they could have conquered the world!Now one should keep in mind that Monty being as timid as he was wasn't really his fault. Churchill was having commanders relieved for losing battles they couldn't have won not matter what. Once relieved they were done. Monty was driven to succeed. Failure was not an option. So he spent more time making sure he wasn't going to be beaten than he did on winning.Most folks miss the fighting done by the Russians. But Monty nor Stalin won WWII. Neither did Patton or Ike. WWII was won on the US factory floors. While Germany at their best was producing 12,000 tanks or aircraft a year the US was producing 12,000 a MONTH! The battle of the Atlantic wasn't won when the convoys could avoid the wolf packs. It was won when American ship yards started producing ships faster than the Germans could sink them! It was won when America could build combat ships fast enough that Jeep carriers could roam the Atlantic in hunter killer groups while others provided coverage for the convoys. The hunter killer groups were to late to make much of a dent in the German Uboat fleet. But production had reached a point that those ships could be used in such missions. Heck because US factories/ship yards were not under attack the US was able to support landings in Normandy, the allies launch a summer offensive in Italy, land in the Marianas and invade southern France all in the space of 3 months. Lets not forget that both the US and British forces were still engaged in the China Burma area all during that time too. I don't care how many men you have. If you can't provide them with the tools of war they can't fight. Neither Russia nor England had the ability to produce enough to win. While the US only used about 45% of it's industrial ability to supply the war effort.Kinda like today. US citizens claiming that corporate greed moved jobs offshore. What really happened was after WWII was over only one industrial nation could provide the goods the world needed and wanted. The US. Sometime in the mid 70's most of the waring nations had recovered to the point where they could start exporting again. All of a sudden US manufacturers had competition. Competition that did not have US minimum wage laws. Got cheaper to import goods than producing them ourselves. Simple greed did the rest. I want, I want it now, and I want it at low enough prices that I can afford something else!Rick
Thing is the 6 pounder wasn't an assault weapon. Had Monty and his minions listened to intelligence Market Garden would have been canceled. Great plan if all they were facing were little boys and old men. But failing to listen to intel of that magnitude? We have much better manpac anti tank weapons today and they still don't like the idea of pitting light infantry against heavy armor. The manpac anti armor weapons from WWII left a whole lot to be desired. But trying to use the 6 pound gun in the attack? You have to set up, try to lure the enemy in close enough then move it and do it all over again. Now had they been able to drop on the bridge, set up a defense? Sure then they might have had a chance. But when they decided that they would have to fight 8 miles to the bridge the 6 pound gun was no longer going to be effective in an attack. Again, the plan should have been canceled or modified. Most people seem to forget that most of the British airborne failed to even make it to the bridge. Then yell because the US 82nd had trouble. Before the British forces linked up a light infantry division was facing at least 2 armored units or at least a brigade in size plus supporting infantry backed up by heavy artillery. Again, had the original intel been good it would have been OK. But when the Germans moved in seasoned Panzer units into the area the whole situation changed. Why do you think that they made every effort to keep heavy German armored forces at bay the first 3 or 4 days after the landings in Normandy? It's really hard to attack armor, especially armor fighting in the defense with infantry. Light or airborne infantry is even in worse shape. At least regular infantry has some armor support plus heavy artillery. LOL the " who Americans turned to in the Ardennes"? Lets see, the first major counterattack was by US forces! Patton was the one who relieved Bastogne. Monty was supposed to attack south to close a gap and trap Germans trying to escape but he failed to do so (same song different dance). On Jan 18 1945 because of Monty trying to claim credit for the victory in the Ardennes Churchill addressed Parliament and announced in no uncertain terms that the “Bulge” was an American battle-and an American victory. After taking command of the American forces given him (Monty) "He immediately fell into a familiar pattern, failing to act spontaneously for fear of not being sufficiently prepared. Montgomery was afraid to move before the German army had fully exhausted itself, finally making what American commanders saw as only a belated counterattack against the enemy." Churchill agreed. I never claimed any American general was the best in the war of all allied nations unlike many from England. I think it has more to do with embarrassment of having to be bailed out once again. Gotta have something that was the best. Heck England lost most of one generation in WWI and a large part of another in WWII. The British people have to be admired for standing up to Hitler alone for a s long as they did. Can't really yell to loud about the French soldiers as some people do. Many fought bravely. What was wrong was the leadership. The Poles were just outclassed in leadership, equipment and in training. Heck, Dec 1941 the US was totally unprepared for war. And when the US first went on the offensive there was a lot to learn. Then a lot of our folks thought we knew it all. England came up with a lot of gadgets that we laughed at that proved to be very effective. What US troops called funnies. I'm not claiming that we had better generals. I'm claiming that Monty was way overrated! With the way heads rolled in the early days Monty was as someone else put it "more concerned with not losing a battle than he was with winning one". For a while there it didn't take much for Churchill to sack a commander. He (Monty) too was much like Patton. Both knew that they were in the right place in time to earn a place in history and were much more concerned with how they would be viewed than they were with the conduct of the war. But I will say it again. WWII was not one by a single country on the battlefield. It was won on the factory floor and in the ship yards. Rick
Caen was a priority target because city's key position along the Orne River and Caen Canal as well as its role as a major road hub. Add that to how close it was to the invasion beaches.
Caen was not worth expending men on to take when Germans were in the field. If Caen could be taken easily then yes, but heavy resistance and Germans in the field, no. Taking cities consumes heavy resources. Monty said it was not that important a target. He was right. His armour took on the German armour destroying over 90% of it in the west - around Caen. Dutch intelligence and SHAEF said no armour was in or around Arnhem. They were correct. The tanks were brought in from Germany. Not one para was attacked by German armour on the 1st day. The first German tanks were late on the 2nd day and repelled by 6-pounders and PIATS. The 6-pounders were defensive weapons to hold the bridges until XXX Corps came along. If the 82nd had seized Nijmegen bridge immediately XXX Corps would have reached Arnhem by about noon of the 19th - D-Day was the 17th, without meeting any German tanks. They would have met German tanks outside of Arnhem as they came in from Germany. By then fighter-bombers would have joined in. All the paras had to do was hold the bridges, with no armour around, for 45 hours. The paras at Arnhem held the bridge for over 3 days, facing German armour on the last day capitulating on the evening of the 20th, just as the first XXX Corps tanks rolled over Nijmegen bridge - too late now. The paras at Arnhem faced Tigers, impervious in frontal attacks by 6-pdrs, although they knocked a number of them out.
oldtanker2 Patton was an average US general promoted to superstar status by the US media - the US never had any exceptional generals. Montgomery said Patton would be good as a Corps commander. *Patton at Metz advanced 10 miles in three months.* The poorly devised Panzer Brigade concept was deployed there with green German troops. The Panzer Brigades were a rushed concept attempting to plug the gaps while the proper panzer divisions were re-fitting and rebuilt after the summer 1944 battles. The Panzer Brigades had green crews with little time to train, did not know their tanks properly, had no recon elements and didn't even meet their unit commander until his arrival at the front. These were not elite forces. 17th SS were not amongst the premier Waffen SS panzer divisions. It was not even a panzer division but a panzer grenadier division, only equipped with assault guns, not tanks, with only a quarter of the number of AFVs as a panzer division. The 17th SS was badly mauled in Normandy and not up to strength at Arracourt in The Lorraine. Patton's Third Army was almost always where the best German divisions in the west were *NOT.* ♦ Who did the 3rd Army engage? ♦ Who did 3rd Army defeat? ♦ Patton never once faced a full strength Waffen SS panzer division nor a Tiger battalion. In The Lorraine, the 3rd Army faced a rabble. Even the German commander of Army Group G in The Lorraine, Hermann Balck, who took over in September 1944 said: _"I have never been in command of such irregularly_ _assembled and ill-equipped troops. The fact that we_ _have been able to straighten out the situation again…_ _can only be attributed to the bad and hesitating_ _command of the Americans."_ Patton was mostly facing a second rate rabble in The Lorraine. Patton was neither on the advance nor being heavily engaged at the time he turned north to Bastogne when the Germans pounded through US lines. The road from Luxembourg to Bastogne was pretty well devoid of German forces, with Bastogne being on the very southern German flank. Only when Patton neared Bastogne did he engage _some_ German armour but not a great amount at all. The Fuhrer Grenadier Brigade wasn't one of the best German armoured units, while 26th Volks-Grenadier only had a dozen Hetzers, and the small element of Panzer Lehr (Kampfgruppe 901) left behind only had a small number of tanks operational. Patton did not have to smash through full panzer divisions or Tiger battalions on his way to Bastogne. Patton's armoured forces outnumbered the Germans by at least 6 to 1. Patton faced very little German armour when he broke through to Bastogne because the vast majority of the German 5th Panzer Army had already left Bastogne in their rear moving westwards to the River Meuse. They were still engaging forces under Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Leading elements were engaging the Americans and British under Montgomery's command near Dinant by the Meuse. Monty's armies halted the German advance and pushed them back. In Normandy in 1944, the panzer divisions had been largely worn down, primarily by the British and Canadians around Caen. The First US Army around St Lo then Mortain helped a little. *Over 90% of German armour was destroyed by the British.* Once again, Patton faced very little opposition in his break out in Operation Cobra performing mainly an infantry role. Nor did Patton advance any quicker across eastern France mainly devoid of German troops, than the British and Canadians did, who were in Brussels by early September seizing the vital port of Antwerp intact. Patton repeatedly denigrated his subordinates. ♦ In Sicily he castigated Omar Bradley for the tactics Bradley's II Corps were employing ♦ He accused the commander of 3rd Infantry Division, Truscott of being _"afraid to fight"._ ♦ In the Ardennes he castigated Middleton of the US VIII Corps and Millikin of the US III Corps. ♦ When his advance from Bastogne to Houffalize stalled he criticised the 11th Armoured Division for being _"very green and taking unnecessary casualties to no effect"._ ♦ He called the 17th Airborne Division _"hysterical"_ in reporting their losses. After the German attack in the Ardennes, US air force units were put under Coningham of the RAF. Coningham, gave Patton massive ground attack plane support and he still stalled. Patton failed to concentrate his forces on a narrow front, committing two green divisions to battle and inadequate reconnaissance resulted in him stalling. Patton rarely took any responsibility for his own failures. It was always somebody else at fault, including his subordinates. A poor general who thought he was reincarnated. Oh, and wore cowboy guns. Patton detested Hodges, did not like Bradley disobeying his orders, and Eisenhowers orders. He also hated Montgomery. About the only person he ever liked was himself. Read _Monty and Patton: Two Paths to Victory_ by Michael Reynolds
I'm generally not inclined to defend Gavin ....or Browning, but. Knowing correctly or in this case wrongly, that 10 Panzer div's are possible threat nearby. I wouldn't want to lose any upper ground I had available. Throwing airborne at a perceived massive tank threat is nuts. Where did this false Intel come from? Like I say, I agree w your criticism of G and B but this perception of a Tank threat justifies holding the heights. It does not justify delay of taking the bridge. Well done on your work on this documentary!!! Bravo!
Urquhart?He had little airborne experience and was hiding out out in an attic for over a day.While the men under him were having communication problems with their radios.Neither of those men are to blame - it's Monty who after hatching this very bad plan never had the nerve to actually show up
I thought it was Monty's plan. Why didn't he plan every detail of the operation? they had one road to use and time was extremely critical yet he didn't know everything about his plan! I think the blame rests solely on Monty; He should have known about this and insisted on taking the bridge first.
Thank you for this... Its nice to see someone at last studied the facts therefore able to share the truth behind this operation. It is so easy for armchair generals who fight the war on Monday do not have the full facts of the battle. As stated during his planning, Gen Gavin (82nd Airborne Div) was concerned with the German Armour in the Reichwald area, therefore putting his main effort onto the high ground over taking Nijmegen Bridge. Hence the hold up of 30 Corps advance to Arnhem. Gen Brereton was being influenced by his transport commander (Williams) concern with fatiguing the pilots with doing a one day lift. A personality clash with Generals was so evident in this Operation.
Gavin's scouts determined there was no armour on the thick forest to the east. They were fired on at the road they were patrolling skirting the forest. The heights were between the LZs and the Nijmegen bridge. If you take the LZs you take the heights.
No they didn't you revisionist rube,nothing in their field orders or scouting reports mentioned this .It was only upon arrival they realized troops could be there as Dave mentioned it was on the German border. If Monty was an actual Field Marshall like Walter Model he would have shown up - a failed marsh mellow was more like it
@@bigwoody4704 Rambo, a quiz. Name the company of the 505th that reported the Reichswald was _"empty"_ and the trees too thick to allow tank operations? 20 points for the correct answer.
*BZZZZT!* Wrong answer. Rambo, the name the company of the 505th that reported the Reichswald was _"empty"_ and the trees too thick to allow tank operations, was.... 🍾🎈🎊 *Item company* 🍾🎈🎊 Zero points Rambo, zero. Better luck next time.
You are looking at this from 70years of study. Gavins' bridge was lightly held, but no one knew that at the time. The allies THINK they know there are 1000 tanks in the forest. IF the tanks existed Paratroops taking a bridge only to be ground beneath Panther tanktracks would have been stupid. The issue of "broken" tanks at Arnhem is symptomatic of the times. They trust intelligence that the Germans are in retreat and are broken, because that suits their belief it will win. The then ALSO trust mistaken intelligence about 1000 tanks pointed at the flank, because that threatens their success. Besides, no one knew what the hell Hitler had, least of all Hitler. The Germans propaganda machine was very effective. I have said it is just a matter of if it works, it was a fantastic plan. Since it didn't, it was a fantastic failure. But it was a success in a way, it provided useful intelligence, it siphoned off even more German forces and it was a propaganda event all it's own. The Allies were able and willing to commit that kind or force so soon after D-day. We had unlimited resources.
it wasn't the 9th SS with Victor Graebner sattacked the 82nd with APC's woth mounted mg-42s and self propelled 20 mm AA Guns that chopped up foot sodlies and some half tracks this artillery mounted
You, Good Sir, possess the extraordinary combination of great talent as a military historian and an engrossing video story teller. BRAVO! -- a thumb's up and new subscriber here. It's been a happy day for me discovering you. To borrow a line from Charles Dickens, I say, "Please, sir, I want some more."
Apart from some awesome Stalingrad videos coming up, Operation Crusader's the next Battlestorm documentary. However, I will do St Nazaire at some point
Looking forward to it. This leaves only "Operation adorable big Polish bear at the Glascow Zoo" I don't wanna brag but I'm a veteran so u must do it/him justice.
That would be great. I used to work with a close relative of Lt Tibbits who made the explosives and so much more. My old work mate (nephew I think) knew almost nothing of his gallant relative and did not know there was a memorial at St Nazaire till I found it whilst on holiday
Simon, Yeah I had no idea about the St. Nazaire raid and I like WW2 stuff. The one BBC program was quite good but their must be an incredible back story to the thing.
Hey all! Time stamps
00:00 Intro
01:07 Browning's Life
12:44 Frustration
17:57 Market Garden
28:52 Criticisms of Browning
29:28 Criticism 1
31:06 Criticism 2
32:30 Criticism 3
33:33 Criticism 4
35:36 Criticism 5
38:24 Browning's Defence is Flawed
43:45 Decision
Bibliography (Sources)
Brereton, L. The Brereton Diaries: The War in the Air in the Pacific, Middle East and Europe, 3 October 1941-8 May 1945. Kindle, 2014.
John Frost, A Drop Too Many. 2009.
Max Hastings, Armageddon. London, 2004.
Robert J. Kershaw, It Never Snows in September. Surry, 2007.
Mead, R. General Boy: The Life of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning. Kindle, 2010.
Martin Middlebrook, Arnhem 1944: The Airborne Battle, 17-29 September. 2009.
Robert Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine 1944. UK, 2014.
Poulussen, R.G. Lost at Nijmegen. 2011.
Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far. USA, 1974
Major General R E Urquhart, Arnhem. 1958.
Major General S Sosabowski, Freely I Served. Great Britain, 1982.
In addition, 26:51 A Brief Summary of the critical events during Operation Market Garden
I liked your video just for these time stamps, cheers
Glad you find them useful! Not every video deserves them, but I will include them if I think they're necessary.
Talk on liddel hart a genius
TIK - To many chefs, mission impossible!
To blame the poles who weren’t there until the battle was basically lost is ridiculous. It’s like having a platoon armed only with rifles attempt to stop an armored division and then blame the failure on them being lousy shots
If the rumors of the tanks in the Reichwald were true, putting everyone on the heights wouldn’t have mattered. They took the decision that guaranteed failure no Matter the outcome
Horrocks and Browning throwing Sosabowski under the bus was inexcusable.
Well said ! The accusation was so blatantly ridiculous, it is a scandal that it was obviously believed as it led to the end of Sosabowski's distinguished career. I am glad that the Dutch at least had the decency to put the record right, by honouring the general posthumously. Sosabowski joined the hallowed ranks of unfairly treated officers in British military history, from Dowding to Park, from Harris to himself, to mention just a few.
@@SNP-1999
Sosabowski had already been made an Honourary Commander of the British Empire during his lifetime. Montgomery criticized the work of the Poles during Market Garden. He did not blame them for Arnhem not being taken.
The Poles unlike Monty at least had the balls to show up,Bernard got scarce knowing he shit the bed yet again
Who was to blame for the failure of Market Garden? I'd wager the Germans had something to do with it.
Its not like the Germans were hiding from British intel gathering. Germans by that time knew the British high command incompetence would defeat or seriously hamper their own plans. So no need to hide in the bushes.
see my comments for the truth above.
Amazing ain't how quick people are to not even give much thought that just maybe the reason why the plan failed was due to the enemy actually reacting in a effective manner.
Damn Germans... Their divisions were like zombie units that could be cut to pieces but the remains would reassemble themselves into coherent, effective combat forces that would almost instantly go back into action, regardless of how much time the soldiers in these 'Kampfgruppe' had been working together before that time.
Before I did any research at all into these 'Kampfgruppe,' I thought they were like small armygroups or batallions because they were so effective during the fighting at Arnhem and Nijmegen.
Now, after having a little research (emphasis on a little), I think German Colonels and Captains were like: what, your unit got destroyed? You still got a few machineguns, do you? Hey you overthere, know how to fire a Panzerfaust? Sure you do, soon every mother and grandfather in Germany will know how to use them. Fine go with them, follow, don't rush ahead and keep your heads low!
@@RomanHistoryFan476AD That is the point of being a warrior. To expect that your enemy is capable of defeating you if you don't have your ducks in a row. That is the point of criticisms by all the comments, that the British Commanders had assumed the inferiority of the Wrmach High Command and unit commanders. The failure was born from sheer arrogance. Just another charge of the Light Brigade
i wrote my dissertation on 'Market Garden' at university 10 years ago! i am so pleased that many of the key points that i raised were bought up in this video especially that about Gavin and the 82nd prioritising the heights over the main bridge! i feel vindicated in my conclusion! fantastic video and i will be watching more of them!
Gavin initially did not prioritized the Heights over the bridge giving them equal priority. Lindquist, head of the 508 of the 82nd, was to move to the bridge via the Heights, which are on the way to the bridge, secure the Heights then move a battalion to the bridge immediately. No one was at the Heights, so Lindquist could send a battalion to continue to the bridge immediately without stopping at the Heights.
It was when Lindquist of the 508 82nd missed the boat, expecting Gavin to tell him to move to the bridge, allowing the Germans to reinforce the bridge, that Gavin changed priority. He took all his men out of Nijmegen town giving it back to the Germans, sending them back to the Heights and the DZ.
OK. So if the 82nd had taken Nijmegen, does that automatically mean the british armor could have reached Arnhem in time? I don't think so.
Whatever, it was Monty's flawed plan, since he lost his mind when he was, as planned, no longer going to be CIC of ground forces.
Had Nijmegen bridge been secured and defended 30 Corps, in my opinion, would have reached the south side of Arnhem bridge by the end of day 3. This is assuming that the Germans try to retake the bridge at Nijmegen and do not give up on that axis and concentrate on 1 ABD.
To sum up 30 Corps would have been in time, but they might still have been too late.
@@tomasdawe9379 It is an interesting scenario, if the 82nd had directly taken the Nijmegen bridge, then been met on the north side by the 9th SS Recon battalion, 10 SS infantry battalion, and the next day the Eulling battalion. The great unknown is what other forces the germans would have sent to Nijmegen to stop an advance on Arnhem. I assume they would have sent quite a bit, diverting some of the units they had instead used further south to attack the single road allied supply line.
It was good defensive ground north of Nijmegen, especially on the main road. To the west there was more maneuver room, but hardly ideal with all the canals and dikes.
@@majorintel9623 good point, also if the recon battalion had been mauled by the 82nd, Frost's battalion would not used so much AT firepower at the start of day 2 potentially allowing them to hold out longer. It really would depend on how the Germans react to the fall of the bridge at Nijmegen along with the result of any counter attacks there. It is one of the reasons I enjoy thinking on the operation, so many variables, what would have happened if any one of them changed?
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Your videos are the best, most carefully researched, and thoughtfully presented lectures on the subjects you choose I’ve ever seen. Better than any documentary on TV. I’ve read much of the source material and after watching you I come away informed. Everything else seems like mindless propaganda. Please keep up the work. I don’t know what you do for your day job, but not devoting your time to this work full time would be to deny us the work of the best military historian of our time.
Wow, thank you! No, seriously, thank you. I actually just took a screenshot of your comment and shared it with some friends and family. It's great to hear these videos are really appreciated and are (at least) getting people interested, if not contributing to the overall discussion. Sadly, my day job has nothing to do with history, and I don't enjoy it in the slightest :(
TIK
I’ve assumed the author is a university lecturer. Is that not the case? Presentation is brilliant too.
I can add to that! I am getting almost all of my "TV" content from RUclips where "amateur" historians are providing the most amazing content, and TIK is one of the best examples.
Are you american ? ?.......please go to a real school :
Our host is just giving a competent Bachelor or Master's paper, on a little history ......
When you go to a real School .... do a Masters' paper in Hard Science or Engineering, you'll learn what a
actual brain does .............
You'll thank me later, Jethro..........................
[ and keep the Good Work, TIK :]
indeed
Just bad leadership if your subordinates are afraid to question your decisions. The Snobbery and hardheadedness of both the British and American Generals makes me wonder how we won the Wester Front. The only time they worked together was to blame the poor Polish officer.
check my comment.
Typical careerism. It happens in civilian life but it particularly prevalent in the military. In civilian life you can go work elsewhere, no so easy in the military. You don’t get to the top by ruffling feathers. I am always a bit disappointed when I read about behind the scenes of WWII general staff.
we won because the best of the German army was 6ft under and the rest were in the East...
It's scary how much people's personalities play in these conflicts.
Someone has to make a decision somewhere (not just in the military, but in politics or business etc), and everyone's lives are reliant of those above making the right decisions. Then you see that those above you are just as flawed as everyone else, and it's about that point that you realise just how completely your life is in the hands of a bunch of idiots.
Precisely.
TIK - or out of thieR depth, as Cunningham seems to have been in Operation Crusader. Or just plain unwilling to fight *cough**cough*PIENAAR.
@@TheImperatorKnight I would say that 'bunch of idiots' is unreasonable. It's more that given the high profile of these decisions, they have been put under the microscope for almost 80 years. They may have been well above average, but few people and decisions will look good with this level of scrutiny. If you look at 1940 and the Fall of France, Guderian, Rommel, etc., made some very questionable decisions, but they were lucky so are lauded as heroes, but a couple of bridges blown by the French and they would have been seen as idiots too. Hindsight is pretty amazing.
In this case the options were: not launch Market Garden, war lasts into 1945; launch Market Garden, fails, war lasts into 1945; launch Market Garden, works, war ends in 1944. Given those options, launching Market Garden was not necessarily a bad option. The brutal reality is also that the operation resulted in many Allied deaths, but if it had worked, saved lives overall, Allied, German, Russian and Dutch.
I had two relatives in Market Garden, Major William Conran RE, a road construction expert seconded to XXX Corps staff for Comet and MG. The other was Major Brian Urquhart of Brownings Staff. I knew both growing up and keen as I was on a military career I badgered them both for advice and stories.
Bill was British Army from birth, he like all regulars was a product of his class, times and the slaughter of WWI, the highest form of criticism he could make of a fellow officer was 'maybe there was another option'. Brian was a hostilities-only idealist, who later became an advocate for the UN, he thought the UN should hold all nuclear weapons and control its own army. He could criticise senior officers, but, and I respect him enormously, post war he had a few political axes to grind and his story needs to be seen through those goggles.
Something I've heard from both (they were unknown to each other until the 70s) is the success of market garden, the genuine opinion of German Panzer reserves and real reason the operation was launched.
Both told me independently, so it was well understood by anyone who could read a map - "If it was only a quick right turn from Arnhem to the Ruhr, then it was only a quick left turn from the Ruhr to Arnhem!" The Ruhr had to be host to the best reserves on the Western Front, possibly the whole of Germany. The 2-3 day time limit on getting to Arnhem was forced on XXX Corps by the proximity of those reserves nothing else.
This is where your 1,000 tanks could come from, but a tad higher north, across two rivers, and a few days late. This could be where Brig Hackett got his belief, shared with his officers pre-launch, that Arnhem was an interesting way to commit suicide. Gen Gale summed up its chances as worthy of resignation. Anyone trained to read a map and work out train time tables would have laid poor odds on survival at Arnhem beyond 36hours, without need for intel, photos or ULTRA.
The Panzer fear at Arnhem was understood, genuine and obvious, but the hope was XXX Corps could get there first. And in fairness the majority of the German armour wasn't present on day one or even two. On Day 1, the 1st Airborne was held up more by snipers from Krafts force and MGs around Den Brink and the hospital. Only 3 Para met one SP gun en-route to Arnhem. Hardly a significant threat.
If Son and Nijmegen had been taken on time, its not unreasonable given XXX Corps timetable they could've made it. Certainly the medium artillery would have got to the 1st Airborne's perimeter before the King Tigers came from the Czech border on Blitztransport.
Regarding Brian's famous Panzer photos, I remember him telling me straight, the film was rubbish: He didn't brief Browning direct; he didn't argue with Browning, Majors don't do that with Lt Generals. He laid out ALL the intelligence he COULD to the Chief of Staff, a Brigadier, this Brigadier took it to Browning, this Brigadier told Brian to stop with the Panzer scare stories. Brian also wasn't sent on leave prior to take-off, he was never going to fly in. The reason had nothing to do with politics, stress or his earlier injury.
We wouldn't know this until well into the 80s but he was the Airborne Corps ULTRA officer and wouldn't be risked in the mission. He was always going to be following up in the sea tail. Not long after Market Garden Brian was promoted to Lt Col and given a plum intel job rounding up German scientists. Hardly a censure from the top brass.
He claimed he had photos of tanks, but these pictures have remained elusive to researchers. I admit we never discussed this (his brother was MI6, his cousins (my grandfather and his brother) were both SOE and war office we didn't talk about details in our family) but I think he lied to Cornelius Ryan. He said he had photos. We now know he had ULTRA, in the late 50s he could not tell Ryan that. I think the photos were a cover story. It also means Brian couldn't tell the Brigadier, Johnny Frost or anyone else what he knew and how he came by it. This has always been one of the problems of really good intel; how to share it. Divisions and Convoys had been sacrificed to secure ULTRA before Arnhem.
Now for the true purpose of Market Garden, and why Montgomery was given all those resources. The single biggest issue for the Western Allies in September 1944 was opening the port of Antwerp. For this the whole of the Southern Netherlands had to be taken. I can remember Bill hanging his fingers over a map, along the Rhine, Maas and Scheldt so they formed a grabbing motion over the Antwerp approaches. You had to clear each river as far as the Southern ramp of Arnhem to secure Antwerp. This was Eisenhowers plan. The Northern ramp of Arnhem was unnecessary for this objective.
Montgomery wanted Arnhem because that was his springboard into Germany. His longed for narrow thrust. Eisenhower wanted Antwerp to supply his wide front. This was the root of the blazing row between the two just before this battle. Yet everything up to the island between Nijmegen and Arnhem HAD to be taken if the Allies were to advance anywhere, anyhow in 1944/45.
So Market Garden did achieve vital aims for the loss of two light infantry brigades. This is not a disaster. Both Bill and Brian said that part of the operation HAD to take place and HAD to be successful. The losses were less than some of the positional battles around Caen, less than British attempts to hold Greece, take Sicily, breakout of Anzio or destroy Monte Casino. These were harsh times, casualties were to be expected, the transport planes rated higher among the brass than the idle airborne in the UK. But did they have to go so far, was it vanity to send the British over the Rhine?
Bill grudgingly agreed there might have been a better option than the springboard into Germany through Arnhem idea. Thats British Army for Monty was wrong. Brian's post-war opinions on the mission are well recorded. Brownings alleged 'Bridge too far' quote might have its roots in this conflict of objectives and may account for his tussles with Brereton. It may also explain what he was doing flying in on day 1. If his part of the Airborne Army was going to be sacrificed in a temper tantrum between his bosses he would have wanted to go down with it.
Given a plan from Britains pre-eminent Field Marshall, a differing mission from Europe's Supreme Commander and unworkable boundaries by his immediate superior. I'm not convinced Browning didn't fly in with the sure fire intent of getting killed in action. It was a shit detail and he was a solider, what was he supposed to do?
And still had the 101st and 82nd done ALL their jobs on day 1, the crazy British plan may just have worked. But I would bet all the money in my pockets Eisenhower would have cut Monty's supplies as soon as XXX Corps made it to Arnhem: on day 2 or day 9.
@David Rendall interesting perspective you have on the operation, coming from someone (Brian Urguhart) who had first hand knowledge of the intelligence gathered prior to the operation. It's well known now the RAF Squadron 26 flew low level tactical recon and were the ones that took the pictures showing German Armor in the Arnhem area. It's quite possible he did have the photos. My question is, has anyone ever looked into their unit history to see if they also have pictures?
There has been a lot of effort trying to find those pictures. The archives are empty but the majority of PR pictures were destroyed post war (there were a lot of them). I can't believe such important pictures wouldn't have gone into the keep pile. But what can you do?
Most PR ops at this time went through RAF Benson, a few amateur historians have gone through their files and found no low-level flights scheduled for Arnhem. They came to the conclusion Brian was lying, without giving motive or reason. I think it much more likely they were destroyed or they were a cover for ULTRA.
What I remember most talking to Both Brian and Bill is the true significance of this battle. Neither believed for one moment the Germans were finished before Christmas, it would have ben good to win everything, but what it achieved (opening Antwerp) was necessary.
The movie was huge when I was young, on telly a couple of times a year. I read the book and would badger them for details as "It was the biggest operation of the war!"
Both would gently remind me of the many operations prior to and post Arnhem. Bill's great moment was Dunkirk where he constructed breakwaters with abandoned vehicles to aid loading on the beaches. Brian's big story was the forcible return of the cossacks to Stalin which he was ordered to assist. I think that formed his post war career and distrust of authority.
They both tried to warn me of the perils of taking orders and what supermassive events wars become.
Bill showed be an example of staff work once: he had to assess how the single road to Arnhem would stand up to repeated tracked vehicle usage. Would it crumble? He worked out from maps and pictures where the faults were most likely be found. He worked out how to shore them up, where the sandbags would be found and how they would be transported forward. Where would the aggregate be found to fill them? Where would the men be found to fill them? Where would they sleep, eat, get into position? Where would you place all this stuff in the road plan so it wasn't buried behind the 25pdr shells, petrol, ambulances and boats. All had to be worked out if anyone was going to be a hero.
We tend to forget this was but one mission in a long war. The hyperbole and sacrifice overwhelms the diligence and boring detail.
Bill went on to work tirelessly over the next few months opening up Antwerp. That was a far bigger deal than Arnhem. Brian went on to scour Germany for SS on the run and top scientists. Both had fought elsewhere and Bill would stay in the army until the early 60s doing loads more fascinating things.
1st Airborne's 1,600 dead and 6,500 captured is a lot. few divisions took such losses in such a short time. But compared to Crete, Singapore, Sicily, Anzio, Goodwood, Epsom, these were equally destructive. and equally limited in success.
@@davidrendall2461
'Crete, Singapore, Sicily, Anzio, Goodwood, Epsom'. Surely better comparisons with Arnhem would be Aachen, The Hurtgen Forest and Metz?
@@thevillaaston7811 I was trying to show it had been a long old war, with many disasters on the road to a good end.
.a novel bold plan corrupted by backbitings and ignored intelligence .
sasobowski was more then just blamed he lost everything because of browning...it was criminal.
@John Cornell Because he knew his job very well and he had to deal with incompetent idiots.
@John Cornell it is your opinion. He built the brigade. He designed the training and he had first had experience fighting Germans in 1939. It was personality clash. He also jumped with his men and fought side by side with them.
@John Cornell It is a clash of cultures. The English and Germans have superiority complex. They will never ever think of Poles as equal to them. It is a fact that I encounter numerous times. This blows up the minute I criticize idiotic ideas and I prove them wrong. You also forget one critical fact about 1st Polish Brigade. It was formed to use it in Poland to aid the Home Army. The brigade was dropped in Sept. 1944 and it was clear to all Polish forces that they had been f... by the allies. The Warsa Uprising was at its last legs. These soldiers and Sosabowski had to agonize since August. It is written all over how they suffer emotionally. They saw their city being ravaged and they knew they will never see the city again. Keep in mind that Warsaw was Sosabowski's home garrison before WW II. His son was fighting in Warsaw Uprising. He lost his eyesight during the fight. You have no idea what toll it takes on you. His son was a true hero and a legend equal to his father. So, yes, you are wrong because you do not know full story. Here is a documentary which explains some of it: ruclips.net/video/b9em1kEg8C0/видео.html
@John Cornell Again chcek the facts. The banner of the brigade was made in 1942 in occupied Warsaw and smuggled into England. I spoke to many veterans from the brigade and all of them said one thing. They would have rather die in Warsaw Uprising than fightin in Arnhem. The fact is that the brigade was formed to aid the Home Army.
@John Cornell One route was thrught Italy. The Home Army had a special section that built field airstrips around Warsaw. Polish airforce was ready for such a dropp. It was possible to do it. There was also a plan to move fighter planes into Poland. The whole plan was not as crazy as you may think.
I have been watching your video's for the last two weeks now.
They are so clear and well brought that I would like to compliment you...
They have become a must see for me!
Keep up the good work.
Greetings from the Netherlands.
I don't buy the 1000 panzer argument. If they had really thought that there were 10 panzer divisions worth of armor in a small forrest, any sane commander would have leveled the forest with heavy bombing, as this would have represented a significant chunk of all tanks on the western front. And why they didn't scout it, I have no idea.
Agreed I think this story is a smokescreen for serious disagreements between allied commanders that has either been made unavailable or was never recorded. 1000 tanks in the forest is clearly nonsense, and Gavin claiming that he cannot move on the bridge on the 1st day because of that is equally nonsensical.
I think the Americans were unhappy with the operation from the outset. They didn't think it was the right thing to do and didn't like that the British 1st Airborne was sent into Arnhem.
For whatever reason 82nd Airborne basically sat on their arse on the first day and didn't move to send anyone to take the bridge. That doomed the operation. Yes there were plenty of other mistakes, misteps and contingencies but nothing that would have caused the failure of Market Garden.
The failure of the 82nd Airborne under General Gavin to take Nijmegen Bridge doomed the operation. But in an era where "band of brothers" single handedly won the war in the West stating the obvious wouldn't go down well.
How could they hide that many tanks and support personnel without somebody seeing them?
@@ellisjames7192 The Germans could not have mustered 1000 tanks into a single attacking force in 1942 or 1943 and even during Kursk had at most around 2700 tanks on the whole Eastern front in that time. At the battle of Prokorovka, the great Tank confrontation at Kursk, involved around 800 German tanks in one of the greatest Tank confrontations in history surpassed only by 1941 Barbarossa and later the Yom Kippur war 1973.
The idea there were was an Army group of 1000 tanks on the western front is as absurd as the idea Gavin could have defended the grosbeak heights from such a force with 1 airborne division even if such a German force existed.
It was clear the war was already in its final months by the time of operation market garden. Germany had been defeated by Soviet forces in the East who were rapidly advancing across Poland, and with the Balkans overrun, the Red Army was about to pounce on Eastern Germany in the Months ahead.
This is nonsense on stilts. The question remains why Gavin made the reports that he did and why Browning didn't call this out. I think TIK explains that. Browning's CO was an American who had already threatened to remove him.
As to Gavin's actions having elite troops trained for rapid movement and action sat on their hands for the first day in a stale defensive position where everyone from Private up to and including Montgomery's tennis partners knew speed was critical suggests more than incompetence.
This was a British operation that would have been quite stunning had it come off. It would have allowed the British to advance across the low countries and provide a bridgehead to launch 30 Corps into Northern Germany.
All while the Americans are bogged down in the south. Allowing the operation to wither and fall back after some gallant heroics was preferable from an American viewpoint.
We often forget the politics and maneuvering when looking at these events seeing only heroic individuals doing their best is often a very naïve assumption.
Yes I think Gavin was told to hold rather than move on Nijmegen in the full knowledge that would lead to a withdrawal of troops from Arnhem and the failure of the operation. Hence the bullshit story about the 1000 German tanks as a reason had to be found for holding an entire airborne division in place. Throw in the usual "it was confusing, and we were unsure what German forces were bearing down on us from the forest" and the question becomes a what if.
The simplest explanation is that the Americans didn't want a stunning and extraordinary British led operation to be successful and allow British forces to capture the low countries and invade Germany before they did. The British forces could have got to Stettin and occupied the entire Ruhr before the end of the year. It might even have been the catalyst that precipitated and early German surrender to the British.
@@myroseaccount Adolf PROMISED his western generals "a thousand tanks" and Bletchley Park found out about his assurance. German war production in 1944 totally eclipsed all that had gone before. So DON'T use 1941 metrics -- or even 1943 metrics. Speer had the numbers going through the roof -- right up until SEPTEMBER 1944. Yeah, the Krauts were building as many tanks in a month has they had in six-months earlier in the war. Next, the real worry for any parachute commander is not tanks -- it's HALF-TRACKS. They sport more machine guns... and their crews will have their heads on a swivel. Infantry HATE, HATE, HATE, attacking half-tracks for this reason. Adolf could've easily had 1,000 half-tracks sent to the fighting... given enough lead time. What Bletchley had picked up on was Adolf's pitch about his grand November counter-offensive against VIII Corps in the woods. He had visions of 1940 on his syphilitic brain.
Lost in all of the posts: the ONLY terrain that could support tanks was where Gavin focused his attention. His PRIMARY mission was to protect Browning -- his hero. If an Allied 3-star ARMY COMMANDER had been lost to the enemy -- that would've been the end of Gavin's career. Due to his rank, he was able to be read-in-on Ultra. No-one else was. So the 1,000 tank tale HAD to have come from Bletchley and HAD to have become knowledge via Browning to Gavin. Gavin's account was spewed out to protect Browning's reputation AND the existence of Ultra. Plainly, Browning let Gavin in on the Big Secret.
And, since you're asking: YES, Adolf DID promise his generals that they had priority #1 and that 1,000 tanks were to be given to them for the up coming counter-offensive. So Bletchley was not really wrong. They did not have a date-certain to go along with Adolf's pledge. He also pledged some crazy amount of fighter-cover, too. The counter-offensive was supposed to occur in November. In the event, it was launched in mid-December. The delay was primarily about GASOLINE. And yes, panzer production was insufficient to properly equip his attack force. For example the 12SS was never brought back up to strength. Elsewhere on YT there is a whole lecture on its problems. They were vast. The 12SS had been gutted by the Canadians and the fiasco of Falaise.
Browning was in charge NOT Gavin. It was HE who had received the estimate from Bletchley -- and Bletchley's track record was towering at this point.
The reason that Gavin was not so concerned about the magic bridge is because he believed British intelligence estimates -- and reasoned that 1st Airborne would entirely prevent German reinforcements from coming down from Arnhem. BTW, the solid ground was GERMAN ground. He, Gavin, had no Dutch spies telling him what was up in Germany, proper. He also figured that since this turf was the FIRST German soil to be occupied by any Allied force, that a stiff reaction just had to be in the cards. In this he was RIGHT. It's just that the Krauts couldn't do a very good job with an instant-outfit.
@@davidhimmelsbach557 hello DH good to see your posts again
A quick note - Browning may not have actually said 'I think we might be going a bridge too far' at all, which is why I said "supposedly". It is disputed, and apparently the evidence for it came after the battle, which is why it probably wasn't said. However, it is a cool phrase.
I always find it interesting that phrases attributed to various people are often difficult to prove due to lack of direct witness. It makes you wonder was this or that said by these various people or was it said by someone else after the fact or maybe a complete miss quote of what was actually said. Alas only the fly on the wall knows for sure.
It is simple human psychology that someone who failed would attempt to make an exculpatory statement about events that he, Browning, was a major player in. In other words, "it wasn't me, it was the plan and the decisions taken at HQ by e.g Bretherton therefore, if you want someone to blame, blame someone else, I wasn't there in terms of command, tactics or strategy"
I am grateful, TIK, for your comments about Sosabowski and his brave Poles who were made scapegoats for others failings- the comments here and on your main video indicate many others denigrate the Poles, even to the point of alleged cowardice[see my correspondence with John Burns, where I prevailed against him]
I find this amusing too. The US 1st Infantry Division has been trying for years to claim credit to a senior divisional officer making the statement on OMAHA beach to the effect of "2 kinds of soldiers on this beach, those who are dead and those who are going to be dead" or words to that effect. The officer in question never came forward to claim to have said those words so the division has claimed that he was KIA. Those words have been repeated in movies too. I served 4 hitches with the 1st division between 74 and 96. I recall being told at least 5 different officers credited with saying that!
It's seems ridiculous to me that in an operation framed around capturing a bridge over the Rhine anyone would think that bridge "one too far". It's the entire point of the operation.
"Sosabowski and his brave Poles who were made scapegoats for others failings" - I'm not convinced they were. I think this is yet another misquote of history. I've never seen anything specific from any of the Allied commanders blaming The Poles for anything
I find both Gavin and Browning responsible for the Nijmegen cock-up. (which to my mind ultimately cost the succsess of Market Garden) However I do not think for a second they believed there were 1000 enemy vehicles near Nijmegen. They would have assumed the report grossly exaggerated. But even if it was a thenth of the reported vehicles, that would be 100 enemy AFV's, - A threat indeed. However as stated in the video, both of them (instigated by Gavin) neglected to carry out the crucial task of taking the bridge immediately.
Wow. I didn't expect you to produce a 50-minute video so quickly. I thought your excellent Monday videos would be primarily 5-10 minute nuggets of history and enlightenment.
Your ability to produce marvelous results so rapidly is Rommel-like. ;)
They will primarily be 5-10 minute videos, but with the occasional longer video popped in. I'll be honest though, it took a lot of effort to get this done in time, which is why there's no music in the video. I simply ran out of time!
Have read many accounts of Market Garden and this by far the best explanation for its failure. Your conclusion about Gavin and Browning makes complete sense and how experienced commanders could really believe there were 1,000 Panzers parked in a forest at this stage of the war is inexplicable. It also baffles me how airborne troops could be expected to defend any area from any large force of German armour. That is not what airborne does, no matter how good the quality of the men and the American and UK airborne were some of the best troops of the whole conflict. Thank you very much for your analysis and taking the time to produce this history lesson.
There was no armour at Arnhem or Nijmegen on the jump day.
A skilled, talented and passionate young modern historian / historiographer - who gets down in the dirt and does his research! Thank you!
My Father was in 12th Devons 6th Airborne. He was a pegasus bridge and Arnham. He was one of A company who went in by glider to the bridge .He was injured at pegasus bridge in Ranville while recovering injuries, he qualified as a sniper a number one shot. He was then sent to Arnham. He told me that he was one of the men who laid the tape to the river when they withdrew. His name was Alfred Patrick Secker A company 12th Devons
If your father was in 1th Batlalion of the Devonshire regiment why would he have been at Arnhem?
Thanks for sharing your family story. They were a different bred. What they achieved and the cost of that are both hard to properly appreciate, other than never forgetting their sacrifices.
He cannot have served at Pegasus Bridge and served in Op. Market Garden.
@Alice_Long because the 6th Airborne Division didn't go to Arnhem. The 1st Airborne Division went to Arnhem in September 1944. The 12 Devonshire was part of The 6th Airborne Division
Even as a casual observer of WW2 history, "1000 panzers" in random forest in Netherlands seemed absurd to me.
The Reichswald is actually in Germany, however close to the dutch border. Nonetheless it seemed absolutely bonkers to me as wel!
How about we finally tell the truth after 70 years.
The real enemy was the dutch german citizen, drafted into the defence of arnhem after the liberation of Eindhoven.
German families seeing the ultimate fate of prosecution combined with the admiration of the female masses.
A dangerous combination often seen in history as detrimental.
A moral superiority was not achieved as is evident in the prosecution of german collaborateurs.
The ultimate defeat prompted by this invasion threatning all of the german country ment there was no backing down, as many tacticians and history tells us.
Threaten evrything with 1 move and tragedy befalls you.
Even sun tzu knew this, wich is why one must always leave an opening for retreat otherwise one will always fight to the death.
I dont want to defend nazi germany nor the hatred they perhaps rightiously deserved.
However to dismiss german documentation and the literal testimony's of german soldiers literally testifying to drafted recruits fighting from the region is a travesty.
There were never 1000 tanks, it was the german dutch citizen that bled for its city.
Alas there is no song or defence for these people's wich is sad because we should learn of the sickness of war.
Arrogance and ignorance played and still plays a huge role in the understanding of market garden and why it became such a tragedy.
A sad truth when a mans livelyhood, his family, his desires and female affection is threatened.
Also not mentioning the horrible injustice befallen on the corporal sohnenstuhl, wich saved over 200 british prisoners whilst only moments later being riddled with bullets in his car.
A fact documented with video evidence and documented written reports.
But ofcourse the propaganda machine painted this image as rightious vengeance and a so called bombing of its corporals in a white bearing flag of truce.
That is why Market garden failed, not some failed plan or host hidden within its bushes.
One must always see both sides of the conflict to understand why chances dictated this tragedy.
The horrible crimes of war commited by both sides and why arnhem resisted liberation.
A fact people never mention wich is why we are doomed to repeat it.
Ofcourse its more fun to see autistic children driving in tanks to remember the victory of the allies, if one may even call it a victory.
Yet a true understanding of the human pshyche and its repurcussions is hidden and clouded in a fake sense of moral justification.
Perhaps the phrase a bridge to far can be seen as the moral injustice and going too far can be interpreted as going over the boundry of justified liberation.
Ofcourse the tactical mistake of dropping soldiers behind enemy lines is a huge part of the failure, however the unbreaking army wich refused surrender is a fact documented very clearly.
Even the surrender offered by the german army was dismissed by a pridefull idiot.
Both sides were offered a truce and a chance at peace yet ofcourse the higher ups refused this.
So the real tragedy was that both sides never declared a truce and the only exchange of prisoners that is truth is from the german army's.
A fact often dismissed wich should tell others that not evry german was the most evil nazi person in history.
quote You fought bravely with a fury that demands respect, so we offer you a honourable surrender and your lives Corporal Sohnenstuhl*
Would have been one hell of a fihht
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive was launched exactly three months after Market Garden was launched. German forces: 557 tanks, 667 tank destroyers and assault guns
and 1,261 other AFVs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
[Even as a casual observer of WW2 history, "1000 panzers" in random forest in Netherlands seemed absurd to me.]
That is a very important point. Only a few military leaders in command of military history AND, AND knowledge of their enemies' military units and structure could have realized the meaning of that at that critical point in time.
The Wehrmacht's elite military commanders filed to understand the Russian's ability to produce and maintain aircraft and tanks. And while being highly aware of Germany needing oil, they stopped at Kyiv from taking the Urals and turned North to capture Moscow. Wrong objective and lack of timing. I believe Gavin made the same mistake.
He should have disobeyed Browning, take the bridge at Nijmegen, and once in Allied possession defend the Groesbeek Heights and then, the bridge from any oncoming attack.
Saw this come in my notifications last night and was chuffed to have something to listen to on my way into work.
Market Garden has taken its place in pop culture history and very often is used by many as an anglophobic stick with which to prop up American superiorism.
Your documentaries have helped shine some light into the misconstrued reality surrounding the operation and fairly deals out criticism and blame.
I have to ask, you often quote books, do you use sources from the Archives or elsewhere as well or just use off the shelf books such as biographies, memoirs etc?
This was a very comprehensive and enjoyable video - clearly a lot of hard work to produce - so thank you for creating and putting it here.
In the search for a blame victim(s) I was reminded of the last scene in the film "The Charge of the Light Brigade" where the General staff do their appraisal - a battle that took place 90 years before Arnhem.
"Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan".
Dad who was in the 1st airborn said that they felt let down by Montgomery and listening to your video leans me that way did find it very interesting at the moment writing a short story about Tommy my father for his great grandson who he is named after, we are finding out some interesting information thanks again
There is one criticism that this video does not discuss. There seems to be evidence Browning countermanded the last promising attack to take the bridge before it was too well reinforced. On the morning of the 18th (D+1) Gavin ordered all of the 508th, save one company to move on Nijmegen bridge. At 10:00 a regiment strength German counterattack struck that company, and Gavin ordered the entire 508th to rush back and charge the drop zone to prevent the afternoon reinforcement drops from being massacred. (At this point, Warren's battalion was recalled from its fighting in Nijmegen.) After the drop was complete (around 14:00) Gavin then moved to repeat his move from that morning.
The 82nd's operations log then records the following. "At 1530, 18 September, General Gavin had a conference with General Browning at which General Browning asked for the plans for the ensuing 24 hours. General Gavin stated his plan for the night of 18-19 September was to seize the bridge North of Nijmegen using one battalion of the 504 and in conjunction with the 508 envelope the bridgehead from east and west. General browning approved the plan in general, but on giving more thought, in view of the situation with XXX Corps, he felt retention of the high ground South of Nijmegen was of greater importance, and directed that the primary mission should be to hold the high ground and retain its position west of the Maas-Waal Canal. Therefore, General Gavin assembled the regimental commanders and issued an order for the defense of position."
The operations log is a contemporaneous account recorded by division staff. And it clearly suggests that Browning explicitly countermanded an attack on the bridge by four battalions the night of D+1. This was probably the last chance for lightly-armed paratroopers to take the town alone, before it was too well reinforced. Doesn't some blame accrue to Browning based on this?
Thanks Tik :) trying to catch up with all the market garden videos
The treatment of Sosabowski is unforgivable. Browning and Monty thinking he was in the wrong for criticizing them? Sosabowski as you pointed out save 1st airborne from being annihilated. The 2,000 men they saved in Arnhem would've been captured or killed. Now my own view is while Browning is not the sole person to blame, he does share some of the blame for the failure.
Sosabowski *did* refuse to take his troops in. Hence why he was disciplined.
Where did he refused to take his troop ? To Oesterbeek ? 10km from objective, 5 days too late, having only pontoons to cross Rhein River under heavy fire ? Who did he refuse too - Browning ?
You know what's worse? When the Dutch Queen and government rehabilitated Sosabowski's name in 2006 and honored him and the Polish Paras, the British tried to stop this from happening. British officials still refuse to admit the man was blamed and stripped from position without a good reason.
@@Xukti Of course they did. There's never a more vindictive cunt than a Brit scorned.
@@Malas13 You. poles lost your country and want to blame everyone but yourselves.
The British gave you a platform to fight from. But you want to dictate. Why would they listen to a bunch of failures. Your airforce failed but somehow you believe you won the BOB.
Laughable
The idea that a relief force would go sixty miles over an easily-defended hourglass neck of a two lane road in 48 hours was patently absurd.
Back in the 1970s, I had a workmate who was a veteran of the British Parachute regiment who dropped on D-Day, Arnhem and across the Rhine. I didn't realise at the time but we had been paired-off so that I could act as his minder because of his PTSD. Something unknown to me back then.
I had to drag him off a roof parapet once as he was about to jump off it - a drop of about fifty feet onto a concrete floor. He was bathed in sweat and trembling all over which scared me witless and left me confused. The root of his angst was that he had fought with distinction in three major battles, witnessed so many of his comrades killed and wounded while he escaped without so much as a scratch and lived to tell the tale. Survivor guilt?
He never mentioned the war at all in the six months or so before he retired early on health grounds except once when he spotted me reading Cornelius Ryan's famous paperback account of Arnhem - then he let rip! He told me that his regiment feared that the war they had been training for incessantly for several months past would be over before they had a chance of a crack at "Gerry". The delay was beginning to affect unit morale and it was his firm belief that the Arnhem drop - a bridge too far - was specifically intended to let loose British Airborne against the Germans before unit discipline broke down completely.
I am not expert in such fine military details though I do have an interest in military history, which is the reason why I am here, therefore, I cannot enter into any arguments defending my old long-departed workmate's personal belief and conviction that Arnhem was designed to fail to satisfy the vanities of the Allied top brass.
Good Post
I said this after watching your detailed video on Market Garden. I know some commanders emphasized the importance, and insisted on, aggressive patrolling to gather information and capture prisoners for interrogation. This expedient and crucial step apparently was not taken. Given Gavin's his fear that there were 1,000 tanks in the forest it is gross negligence to not send patrols to assess the treat, if any.
TIK, this is the best channel I’ve found on RUclips. It’s always a pleasure.
General Gavin's fixaton on the Grosebeek Heights may have been more of an attempt to keep themout of German hands so they would not be overlooking his positions. Given the German army's fearsome reputation, a bit of a defensive mindset would probably be expected.
Not landing the Poles on the south side of the Bridge on day 1 or 2, and not having 2 lifts on the 1st day doomed Market Garden from the start
I think two lifts is a good point. Any lift to south of Arnhem would need to have been first on day 1 as on day 2 the flak would have been an issue for follow-up drops. The presumption was no flak by day 3 - taken out by the paras. But there weren't enough aircraft to do everything in one lift, and a second lift was not considered as the RAF and USAAF bomber commands wouldn't release additional pilots. Given that, perhaps just a battalion very close to Arnhem for a quick capture (fewer aircraft, less issue with flak losses), more for Gavin on day 1, then back to the distant LZs for day 2 onwards at Arnhem. And no letting the entire plan get into the hands of the Germans.
again it is right out stupid not to consider intel on the tanks. especially when it came from more than one source
I think this is one of your best vids so far. It covers an aspect of a campaign that I had not even encountered before. Excellent.
I blame Brereton. He set the tone for all the mistakes. No 2nd lift on day 1, no coup de main assaults, glider troops to defend landing zones instead of going for objectives...all his decisions. I also get the impression that the Americans didn't really get the point of Market-Garden. The 101st under Taylor were sluggish to reach their objectives and Gavin's mistakes are well known. With the hostility from Brereton and Ridgway and Gavin with his first divisional command I can see how Browning...out of a sense of having to appease the Americans...didn't use his authority properly and instead used the Poles, who weren't as high up in the Allied pecking order, as a scapegoat.
Brereton inherited Browning's operation COMET plan for Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave and had the job of expanding it for three divisions to include the US divisions and Eindhoven as a target by grafting his LINNET/LINNET II air plan onto COMET. The deletion of COMET's double airlift and the dawn glider coup de main assaults on the three main bridges (Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave) were key features of Browning's original concept and he did warn Dempsey that COMET should not go ahead without them. The airborne aspect of the campaign was now taken over by the Americans, who seemed to think they knew better just because they had more resources committed to it, so you may be right that Brereton (as a former USAAF fighter pilot and not an Airborne man) just didn't get the point of MARKET GARDEN.
I am convinced Gavin understood the concept of the operation, but his divisional plan seemed to be compromised by politics, again - but this time internal to his own 82nd Airborne Division. According to Gavin's interview with Cornelius Ryan for A Bridge Too Far, Matthew Ridgway - the Division CO in Normandy, did not trust the 508th PIR CO, Colonel Lindquist, and wouldn't promote him. In fact, Gavin said he had a problem in that he couldn't promote any other Colonel in the division over him because Lindquist had seniority in the grade. Gavin may have had the same problem, because after Ridgway was promoted to command US XVIII AIrborne Corps and Gavin inherited the division, he failed to replace himself as Assistant Division Commander and spent MARKET GARDEN's planning and execution running himself ragged doing both jobs.
If Gavin didn't trust Lindquist either, it wasn't to the extent that he was prepared to assign the more aggressive and experienced 505th PIR to the Nijmegen mission, preferring to have his old regiment facing the Reichswald, which he may have perceived as the greater threat in terms of counter-attack than the possibility of mission failure at Nijmegen. Gavin also told Cornelius Ryan the British (presumably Browning) requested he drop a battalion on the north end of the Nijmegen bridge, and although he toyed with this idea he eventually dismissed it because of his experience in Sicily where the Troop Carriers dropped the division over a huge area and it was disorganised for days.
I think the 101st Airborne performed well, with the exception of Taylor's own decision to target the Wilhelmina canal bridge at Best as an alternative crossing to the one at Son - it was a bridge that Dempsey neither wanted nor had a use for, possibly because the Eindhoven-Hertogenbosch road was headed in the wrong direction - crossing the XXX/XII Corps boundary. The loss of both Wilhelmina canal bridges to German demolition, as well as several on the Maas-Waal canal west of Nijmegen, was not due to sluggish movement by the US Airborne units assigned to take them, but due to the fact these canals were both on prepared defence lines, with the bridges prepared for demolition and the bridge garrisons had standing orders to blow the bridges if threatened. Seizure of an intact bridge in these circumstances depends on as much luck and perhaps a mistake made by the defenders as it does with the assaulting force doing everything right. The lock bridge at Heumen failed to be demolished for reasons that are unknown, and the road bridge at Honinghutje also failed, but was part-damaged by the successful rail bridge detonation alongside it. The Grave bridge had one of the two initiator charges found to be at fault and the delay in sending a man back to Nijmegen for a replacement allowed the bridge to easily fall into American hands in the meantime.
Browning's authority, such as it was as Brereton's deputy, had been effectively neutralised during the planning for LINNET II, a Brereton inititative in case LINNET was cancelled like so many others during the rapid Summer advances in August and early September. Browning threatened to resign over the lack of time for maps to be printed and distributed to the airborne troops, but thankfully LINNET II was also cancelled by the ground forces overunning the landing zones before Brereton could put into operation his plan to accept Browning's resignation and replce him with Matthew Ridgway and his US XVIII Airborne Corps. Both men agreed to put the incident behind them, but Browning was now aware of how precarious his position was politically and knew that protesting Brereton's MARKET planning was not going to effect any change. It would seem that Browning's response was to move the transport of his Corps HQ to Groesbeek up to the first lift in order to try and at least influence events once on the ground, at the expense of some of Urquhart's anti-tank guns destined for Arnhem, which got bumped to the second lift instead.
Finally, the Poles were never made scapegoats, and I find this the most disgusting slur to come out of the whole operation. It is undeniable fact that Polish General Sosabowski was difficult to work with and he was insubordinate to Horrocks (XXX Corps commander) at the Valburg conference on 24 September. So far as I have read, there has never been any suggestion from British commanders that the Poles were in any way responsible for the failure of the operation, and people posting such suggestions on RUclips of course fail to provide any references when I challenge them to do so. Such a suggestion would be ridiculous, based on the fact the Poles did not arrive until D+4, and four days after the operation was already compromised by the Americans at Nijmegen - and that perhaps is the real source of the slur as a deflection. The valid criticisms of the Poles' performance, even the SS in Oosterbeek complained that the Poles fired on their medics trying to retrieve wounded from the battlefield (in Kershaw's book It Never Snows In September, 1990), has been conflated with the failure of the operation - it's absurd to connect the two issues. Montgomery's initital response after the operation was to write to Sosabowski to praise him and his brigade for their efforts, and to ask for recommendations for awards. It was then he received a report from Browning on his difficulties with Sosabowski and Montgomery backed his request to have the brigade removed from his command by forwarding the report to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke.
I am English. I find it disgusting that free Polish Forces were ever thought as failures in official reports. Half their country was the first to be occupied in WW2. See Battle of Britain fighter squadron results, Cassino, etc. They fought the Nazis with a passion to help us, we betrayed them in 1945.
browning knew the armor was there he did not report this fact he is to blame.
Good afternoon ,Please let me know which book by Mead are you quoting in this youtube presentation ?
The thing that struck me after reading Meads book was the almost sycophantic nature of its treatment of its subject. I've read a lot of the peripheral stuff about this and you can see that there are patterns that emerge. Firstly, many (including this author) are professional biographers with sometimes a limited military background. Secondly, there is no way that a really critical biography of someone like Browning could be written. That is because his old unit and family would have simply not cooperated, leaving the author very short of the necessities for a successful book. So, really, to look for a revealing straight synopsis will result in disappointment...... as indeed it does. Actually there are areas outside MG that are dealt with somewhat similarly by Mr Mead. But, hey that's life. History is full of such acts. Some of the higher ups were responsible for writing their own versions - at least Browning didn't do that.
The cooperation of Browning's family and the his old unit wasn't really necessary. There is now so much information in the public domain that a reasonable assessment can be made. After all how else was the video above produced? The verdict seems reasonable. The operation wasn't fundamentally flawed but some serious tactical errors made in its execution. The limited drops and the failure to prioritize the seizure of the bridge (which after all was major objective) seem the principal failures.
Great work, TIK.
Everyone seems to forget about the small toll bridge.
30 corps had to request a special drop of enough nickels and dimes to cross.
That money drop was delayed due to the banks closing early for their annual cricket match.
@B A
While amusing , the war was not going to stop for tolls.
The usual toll was paid in blood , anyway.
David Himmelsbach - Monty's plan, should have been Monty's blood.
Thanks for that. Fascinating stuff. Really admire all the effort you put into making a very informative and satisfying doc.
Glad you liked it! More to come :)
Monty. He conceived of the plan, and the political screws were applied to Ike to accept it. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption with too many moving parts.The failure of any would bring down the whole. The idea of advancing 60 mi along a ten-yard front, trailing 120 mi of flank, is just nuts. Staging five successful, simultaneous coups de main equally so. Monty was a bold, romantic dreamer; also a complete egotist who felt personally compelled to vault the Rhine and knock Jerry out of the war by Christmas. You need people like that, but you also need to rein them in. (Churchill's [not so] "soft underbelly of Europe" -- in two wars -- comes to mind; also Haig's "big push" to break through into open country where the cavalry can operate.)
But once you've sold a monster plan, and mandated buy-in by all subordinates, those subordinates are confronted by all sorts of niggling realities -- and also a panicky desire not to be the one who screws everything else up. You have hard, inconvenient intelligence that is ignored, and rumors of enemy forces that are credited. You have planned resources that are really non-existent or cunningly withheld. You have sudden concerns about the fatigue of your men, and landing areas declared temporarily unsuitable. You have commanders who consume transport to be seen as commanding from (not quite) the front. You have CYA and you have grandstanders. And you always have the weather.
If the plan was truly messed up by a momentary loss of focus and initiative by one (or two) commanders, why, Monty was uncharacteristically modest in claiming that it had been 90% successful! I'd give him 98%! At least! But any plan that fails even at 90% performance is a bad plan, too fragile for the real world -- let alone the real world of war.
Someone once wrote that Operation Market Garden failed because so many things went wrong all at once: the weather, the "unexpected" Panzer corps, the loss of the bridge over the Son, etc. The best rebuttal for this was, "No, Operation Market Garden failed because it required so many things to go right all at once." Any difficulty along the way would spell disaster.
It seems Monty (and others) were more concerned that the operation take place than they were concerned that it would be successful. His inability to admit defeat--years later he still claimed to have never lost a battle--demonstrates how incapable he was of self-reflection.
Griffon Anderson
What political screws were applied to accept it?
Montgomery 'felt personally compelled to vault the Rhine and knock Jerry out of the war by Christmas.'
Why do you claim that?
@@timhewlett1327 Political screws? Well, Churchill and Roosevelt were both strong backers of Market Garden. Is that political enough?
Personal compulsion? Well, according to most accounts, Monty was an ambitious, self-aggrandizing egomaniac. To hear him tell it, he was the only commander with any brains; he was the only one who could win the war. Totally opposed to Ike's broad-front strategy, he tried to maximize the role of his own brigades. This was not only a Brit-Yank struggle, by the way: he also diverted resources away from other Brit/Commonwealth forces, e.g. in the Scheldt estuary, neglecting sound logistical planning (securing the port of Antwerp) in favor of trying to deliver a bold, decisive thrust himself But he overreached, his plan miscarried, men died. He never admitted his failure, though, maintaining even in his later years that he had "never lost a battle".
@@jbrowne9381 XXX Corps arrived in Nijmegen on time. If Son had been captured intact, then they would have arrived well ahead of schedule, and then maybe it would have worked. So either Son or Nijmegen going right could have meant success. I can't really blame the 101st at Son - that was bad luck given a valiant attempt to take the bridge. And the 82nd managed to grab 2 out of 3 bridges.
@@timhewlett1327 "Montgomery 'felt personally compelled to vault the Rhine and knock Jerry out of the war by Christmas.'"
General Browning remained convinced that Market Garden was a sound plan which had been thwarted by bad luck. The incessant reference to the operation as a "failure" was a continual annoyance to him as the parts played by the two American airborne divisions had been a great success, and it angered him that they were never, in his lifetime, given due credit. In private correspondence he wrote "People don't seem to have been told that it [Arnhem] was only rather less than a third of the Airborne effort and the whole thing was 80% successful. The two US Airborne Divisions which I have the honour to command have done marvellously and if it hadn't been for the atrocious weather and sheer bad luck the whole thing would have been 100% successful which in war would have been phenomenal." He also said "I only wish that the exploits of the two American divisions and everyone else during those hectic days when we were holding the corridor open, fighting the battle against the Germans in the Reichswald and struggling to force a corridor to the 1st Division, might be more fully appreciated." Browning received no British recognition for the part that he played in the Battle, but he was, ironically considering his relations with both countries, honoured by the United States who awarded him the Legion of Merit, and by the Poles who gave him the Order of Polonia Restituta.
Pegasus Archive Browning page
It sounds to me like inter ally rivalry was very important. Browning was concerned about losing his job to Ridgeway and he positioned his HQ with an American unit so that his information was based upon American actions and what they were doing.
Probably more that he may have felt Arnhem might not have been secured, and so was as far forward as he felt prudent to avoid capture.
Who needs documentaries when you exist?
Browning was a protected man, he served at Buckingham Palace as Queen Elizabeth’s Royal Treasurer after the war
Meanwhile Sosabowski got sacked from the brigade's command, got some bullshit security inspectorate posting in England and after the war worked minimum wage in a warehouse for 17 goddamn years. A Major General that started fighting all the way back in WWI stacking boxes well into his 70's. Shows you how important it is to have friends in high places.
As to your final conclusion, I completely agree with you. Thank you very much for making huge complex questions plainly simple.
I just saw History Buffs "A bridge too far". here we go again.
Thank you. I thoroughly enjoy your videos and find your insight and arguments highly credible.
I know it's been a while now, but what was the reasoning given for 6th Airborne Division never being committed, or 17th Airborne Division as well? To me, Arnhem ought to have had two divisions there just based on the sheer level of importance overall.
6th Airborne had been badly mauled in Normandy, they were used as normalise infantry until early August. When they were sent home to reform. This isn't an excuse, they could have put two brigades together and formed some part of the plan.
There was also the 2nd Parachute Brigade in Southern France, less than seven hours flying time from the UK. They had only recently been on ops and had been engaged heavily but were still a viable force and highly manoeuvrable. With some urging they could have made the 6th Airborne up to full strength in less than a day.
You also had the 52nd Mountain Div complete and idle in the UK. They were glider trained and air transportable. If the airfield at Grave had been put into service this division could have been flown in very quickly. Some parts could have been glider landed on day 1.
There is no reason the British and Poles couldn't have put together a force of five parachute and five Glider/Air Mobile brigades. So roughly equal to the force used in Market Garden. But how to get them there?
The problem with this plan is Interservice rivalry between RAF and British Army. The RAF was about bombing things, not serving the needs of the Army. From re-armament in the late 30s to D-Day the RAF acquired close to 100,000 aircraft of all types. Of that total the number of purpose built military transports was ..... 50*. The gigantic effort producing bombers for the RAF had almost completely stripped them of a transport arm. And the RAF was happy with that.
For its first two years of operation the British Parachute force had maybe a few dozen converted Whitley bombers capable of dropping a single battalion at most, and then only slowly and spread out.
By the time of Sicily the RAF could just about lift a brigade on their own, but most of that was through Gliders. In Normandy the RAF were still limited to a two brigade lift using converted Stirling and Albermale bombers not purpose built transport aircraft, dropping was slow, disorganised and limited in space. The Stirling was a massive aircraft, over a short range at low altitude it could out lift the Lancaster in terms of weight, But couldn't drop as many parachutists than the half sized Dakota.
There was a demand for transport aircraft in the middle east, far east and parachute units from 1941 onwards this isn't armchair hindsight. It wasn't an impossible task either. UK aircraft industry manufactured almost 12,000 Wellington bombers. Half that number were used solely for training after they became obsolete from 1942. Another 2,300 Stirlings and 600 Albermales were produced even though both were considered obsolete in their bombing role prior to service.
Engines are the bottleneck in aircraft production. Counting half the Wellingtons, just look at the number of engines in that group: 22,400 Bristol radials all bought and paid for. Enough to power 11,200 aircraft of a modernised bombay or dakota class transport.
At 18 soldiers per aircraft thats 200,000 seats. If all available Gliders were towed at the same time, that could be as many as 350,000 seats for airborne troops. Even if you dropped twice the weight of each solider in supplies thats over 100,000 men, far more capacity than you could ever need.
A transport force half this size could have been produced with ease and would have dramatically altered operations in Sicily, D-Day and Market Garden. Night or Day.
Without this resource British Airborne got used to thinking in limited operations or to rely on the Americans. Airborne plans had to be two Brigades in strength or follow US procedures. Ie. Daylight. There wasn't a culture of big drops or even air mobility until Market Garden. 6th Airborne should never have been left in the field so long after D-Day. That it was shows the limited scope and pull of British Airborne ambitions.
Why didn't we ask the Americans to swap the 82nd for a reformed 6th Airborne? I guess politics had something to do with it. My toys, my rules.
Had the 1st, 6th, 52nd and Poles been lifted in together on D-Day from the fantasy transport fleet, Caen may well have been taken in that first 24hrs. The Airborne would have commanded great respect, had more clout at court and maybe got pulled out of Normandy earlier. With a three division drop/landing around Caen on D-day the allies could have been in Belgium by August or even July '44. Market Garden could have gone in at night, powered by a Corps HQ experienced in big drops, with less concern about transport losses.
Whether the 6th Airborne would have got distracted by the Groesbeek heights is another matter.
*50 Bombays the last delivered in 1940. The RAF in India received some Dakotas in 1942, but they wouldn't have a single operational Dakota squadron in Europe until after D-Day. I have excluded limited runs such as the 14 DH Flamingos and five long range Liberator transports. Also excluded are the civilian airliners pressed into service.
I read the book on Browning-not bad. A word in defense of Gavin is needed. Data on the 1000 tanks
came from US Intelligence. Gavin could not ignore that. Even if the 1000 tanks turned out to be 100 and even if they were just a mix of Panzer II, III IV tanks, that is a problem for an airborne unit. Allied intelligence was correct about SS Panzers in the Arnhem
area. The report of tanks near Njimegen could also have been correct. Allied commanders had no way of knowing for sure until their troops were on the ground.
I didn't even know I wanted this video. But now I'm hyped about watching it.
And how did you find it? Was it as good as the hype? :)
Just finished watching it. High level and good info. I do think the videos with the maps are fantastic and this is just good and useful but not at that level. So this is more for the people who want more info but the battle videos are great for all kind of people. Still very good.
I think the documentary show Air Emergency shows very well how things go wrong in a big system. It's very seldom just one part failing. It's 3 to about 8 parts failing at the same time. Because most of these big systems are set up to tackle single issues and problems, so one single problem won't really cause a crash. But when several small things fail at the same time because af various holes in the system then a crash can happen. Our mind is set up to look for single and simple causes and for scapegoats for the problems we find. In reality these leaders in WW2 did commit mistakes but were also part of a system that made these mistakes possible or even likely to happen. So sometimes one single person or cause cannot be found and it leaves us unsatisfied. Whether this is the case for Operation Market Garden I don't know.
I was born in Arnhem in 48. So I took an interest in the fighting there and why Frost could not hold the bridge for 48 hours more. Despite all de failures and delays at Nijmegen, the Arnhem bridge could have been held if the operation of the 1st Airborne had been better planned and executed. Read the book "Arnhem"written by the general Urquhart. First: the landing zones where 20 miles from Arnhem bridge. Nice space to land without losses, but undefendable. Second the radios did not work.Contact with England could not been made nor between the units an HQ of Urquhart. Third : with exeption of Frost, who went along the Rhine tot de Bridge, the rest had tot fight through a city. ( compare with the problem at Nijmegen for XXX corps). Urquhart could not get in contact with his units fighting in the outskirts of Arnhem. He went tot look for himself and was then surrounded by Germans and could not get back tot his HQ for two days. His second in command did'nt know what tot do. The main error was not tot land south of the bridge. They did not because of fear for heavy losses at the landing. So with exepcion of Frost, the entire division only got as far as Oosterbeek and never got tot Arnhem, and when driven back could not contact England for change in dropping zones. Nearly all supplies fell in German hands.. Conclusion. Yes there are errors made in Nijmegen which caused delay, but the real disaster was the bad preparation and execution of 1st Airborne division : Not the soldiers, but the general are to blame. Then they tried tot blame the Polish brigade. Well thanks tot te courage and skils of these man a lot of the 1st Airborne could escape over the Rhine. Personally knew a Polish soldier of the Polish Brigade who had fought in Arnhem and was after the war married with a Dutch women. He never talked about is, but when he died his son found his personal things from the war and the medal he got years after when finally the Polish where rehabilitated.
In general, the radios did work. The ones that didn't were the rather large long-range ones dropped with a few US Army operators into the LZs at Arnhem (10 miles out, not 20). It's somewhat fictionalised in the movie, maybe also Ryan's book. The radios for infantry use were short term, so sometimes it was hard to keep a full network going with 5 mile range, but that was the best that they worked. The artillery had longer range ones, but on different frequencies.
Commander is responsible for everything the unit does or fails to do and this responsibility cannot be delegated. At the 2 - 3 start level, or even at the 03 level, you have to check stuff before you plunge ahead unless you want to take a high risk. Eisenhower made a similar statement for D-Day failure, if it failed.
I agree with what you are saying in that he left it to others but it was his responsibility to check their work. The whole thing had a lot of politics, which is normal in warfare (check Ceasar's Gallic Wars, or Thermopylae or Isandlwana or Little Big Horn) , but when told so, he should have checked it out given the nature of the information. The same thing applies to Biddle Smith and Eisenhower who was informed but Eisenhower said that he did not want to override Montgomery's decision. Even so, Montgomery was the driver and the commander. I also agree that Gavin has responsibility for failure to act or at least raise the issue with his superior command who was Boy Browning. They were the commanders in the field and were therefore responsible.
In addition, the math of the 1k panzers should have been challenged. Checked OOB's is what intels do all the time. In this case, they were checking on the whereabouts of Panzer div anyway.
These were not 2Lts just out of Sandhurst, these were experienced commanders at the star level, but Browning was THE commander on the ground.
(I like this discussion)
Mike Quinton
Browning was the commander of the First Allied Airborne Army on the ground until XXX Corps came along then they were in charge of all troops. Gavin was responsible for his part, the 82nd and their objectives. Browning was a level over Gavin. Browning was in charge of four generals:
U.S. 101st Airborne Division - General Taylor;
US 82nd Airborne Division - General Gavin;
British 1st Airborne Division - General Urquhart;
Polish 1st Parachute Brigade - General Sosabowski.
Browning would not be focusing wholly on the 82nds tasks, even though he was in their zone, he entrusted them to Gavin. He would not hold a general's hand.
Very competent biography. Well done, old chap!
My grandfather was in Hohenstaufen division 9SS and he always said to me that with all the tanks they had along with fundsberg 10SS which amounted 14, 1 or 2 were running at the time of the landings. They only had serviceable halftracks and stug111
Yep, no German armour in Arnhem on the jump day.
Yes he said they had one panther and even that had issues. I'm sure he said Frundsberg had some but were not used during the battle. I can't quite remember. Although he used to raise his eyebrows and laugh when he heard the drops were made on a panzer division! In name yes but they got out of France with hardly anything including men never mind equipment and tanks
@@lordsllim8053
Search Google on _RAF reconnaissance - Arnhem_ They give a report of the situation. They say hardly any armour was in the Arnhem area on the jump day.
There was few old French tanks, one a Char B, which they knew of. The 1st Airborne took along a 17-pdr anti-tank gun to knock it out and did.
I wonder if this fits with your grandfather's recollections? Pieced together from several books and the online forum discussions between the armour research experts, I established what I believe is the position on 17 September:
SS-Panzer-Regiment 9 at Saksen-Weimar kazerne in Arnhem with an alarm kompanie of 100 Panther crewmen acting as infantry and the Werkstatt Kompanie.
5 tanks: 3 Panthers and 2 Flakpanzer IV 'Möbelwagen' had been removed from the barracks by Friday 15 September and hidden under trees on Heijenoordseweg. According to the Dutch resident of the house on the corner of Callunastraat, who received a knock on the door on Friday morning by SS panzer crewmen asking for spare milk, they explained they were taken out of barracks to avoid any bombing.
All other tanks in the Hohenstaufen were handed over to the Frundsberg, in preparation for the Hohenstaufen to be refitted in Germany.
Two Panthers were knocked out in the western suburbs of Arnhem by B Company of 3rd Parachute Battalion on 19 September using a Gammon bomb and a PIAT, while the third survived to participate in the siege of Oosterbeek. The Möbelwagen were well documented and photographed in action on the Dreyenscheweg in Oosterbeek against 4th Parachute Brigade.
SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 at Huis 't Medler, Vorden.
I.Abteilung was still in Grafenwöhr in Germany, training with just 8 Panthers until receiving all their tanks and deployed in January 1945 for the 'Nordwind' counter-offensive in Alsace-Lorraine. In 1944 they continually received new tanks, only for them to be reassigned as replacements for units fighting in Normandy, hampering training.
II.Abteilung at the Klooster (monastery) Kranenburg, near Vorden:
5.Kompanie - 16* x Panzer IV
6.Kompanie - logistics troops acting as infantry
7.Kompanie - 4 x StuG IIIG
During the battle of Arnhem, Model arranged for the next 20 Panthers to be delivered direct from the factory in a batch of 8 and another of 12. They were crewed by the 100 de-horsed Panther crewmen of the Hohenstaufen and transferred to SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 as their 8.Kompanie.
The II.Abteilung was known as Kampfgruppe Reinhold and ordered to Nijmegen, but the Arnhem bridge was blocked by 1st Parachute Brigade and the Huissen ferry scuttled by the Dutch ferryman after being used by Panzergrenadier Kampfgruppe Euling, so the ferry at Pannerden was to be used. The Mark IV panzers were too heavy for the ferry, according to Harmel the first tank slipped off the raft into the river, so only the 4 StuG managed to cross to the island and into Nijmegen. One was lost in Nijmegen and the others withdrew to the island and deployed in the Oosterhout-Ressen-Bemmel blocking line after the Nijmegen bridges were lost.
*I had no idea how many of the reported 16 Mark IV panzers officially on strength and concentrated in Hans Quandel's 5.Kompanie were operational to start with, but we do know that according to British prisoners taken after the Arnhem bridge was retaken, the Boulevard Heuvelink leading to the bridge had a long line of Mark IV tanks as far as the eye could see were parked under the trees lining the boulevard and were told they were going to be used against them in the morning if they had not surrendered. They were clearly destined to be used against XXX Corps and held back until the Arnhem bridge was cleared, because they were expected by Reinhold to be in Nijmegen.
If 14 were undergoing repair and 2 were running, that would add up?
Sources:
James Sims, Arnhem Spearhead: A Private Soldier's Story (1977).
Bob Gerritsen and Scott Revell, Retake Arnhem Bridge: An Illustrated History of the Kampfgruppe Knaust September to October 1944 (2010).
Dieter Stenger, Panzers East and West: The German 10th SS Panzer Division from the Eastern Front to Normandy (2017).
Christer Bergström, Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited, vol 1 and 2 (2019, 2020).
Monty like you dweebs was nowhere around probably lathering up the lads - look that up is that why you like him? I've posted this before but you'd rather languish in the land of make believe
HQ blaming Montgomery
*Alan Brooke's own words*
*"Triumph in the West, by Arthur Bryant, From the diary of Field Marshal Lord Alan Brooke, entry for 5 October 1944:Page 219" During the whole discussion one fact stood out clearly, that access to Antwerp must be captured with the least possible delay. I feel that Monty's strategy for once is at fault, Instead of carrying out the advance on Arnhem he ought to have made certain of Antwerp in the first place. Ramsay brought this out well in the discussion and criticized Monty freely....."*
Or Bernard himself after the War admitting it
*The Guns at Last Light, by Rick Atkinson, page 303* *Even Field Marshall Brooke* had doubts about Montgomery's priorities *"Antwerp must be captured with the Least possible delay" he wrote in his diary Admiral Ramsey wrote and warned that clearing the Scheldt of mines would take weeks, even after the German defenders were flicked away from the banks of the waterway" Monty made the startling announcement that he would take the Ruhr with out Antwerp this afforded me the cue I needed to lambaste him.......I let fly with all my guns at the faulty strategy we had allowed Montgomery. He would acknowledge as much after the war, conceding "a bad mistake on my part"*
*From a PHD at King's College who also notes Ramsay/Brooke warned Monty about the Scheldt Estuary*
*Eisenhower's Armies ,by Dr Niall Barr ,page 415* After the failure of Market-Garden, Eisenhower held a conference on 5 October 1944 that not only provided a post mortem on the operation but in which he reiterated his strategy for the campaign. Alan Brooke was present as an observer, noted that IKE's strategy continued to focus on the clearance of the Scheldt Estuary, followed by an advance on the Rhine, the capture of the Ruhr and a subsequent advance on Berlin. *After a full and frank discussion in which Admiral Ramsey criticized Montgomery freely, Brooke was moved to write, I feel that Monty's strategy for once is at fault,instead of carrying out the advance on Arnhem he ought to have made certain of Antwerp in the 1st place....IKE nobly took all the blame on himself as he had approved Monty's suggestion to operate on Arnhem*
*How about Air Marshall Tedder*
*With Prejudice, by Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander AEF, Page 599"* *Eisenhower assumed, as he and I had done all along, that whatever happened Montgomery would concentrate on opening up Antwerp. No one could say that we had not emphasized the point sufficiently by conversation and signal*
*How about Monty's Chief of Staff*
*Max Hastings, Armageddon:The Battle for Germany,1944-45 Freddie de Guingand Monty's Chief of Staff telephoned him saying the operation would be launched too late to exploit German disarray. That XXX Corps push to Arnhem would being made on a narrow front along one road,Monty ignored him*
*How about IKE's/Allied HQ Chief of Staff Bedell-Smith*
*Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany,1944-45* The release of the files from German Signals by Bletchley Park conclusively showed that the 9th & 10th Panzer Divisions were re-fitting in the Arnhem area. With their Recon Battalions intact. *Yet when Bedel-Smith(SHAEF) brought this to Monty's attention "he ridiculed the idea and waved my objections airly aside"*
*How about IKE's Private Papers?*
*The Eisenhower Papers, volume IV, by Edward Chandler By early September Montgomery and other Allied leaders thought the Wehrmacht was finished . *It was this understanding that led Monty to insist on the Market-Garden Operation over the more mundane task of opening the port of Antwerp. He ignored Eisenhower's letter of Sept 4 assigning Antwerp as the primary mission for the Northern Group of Armies*
*And of course Admiral Ramsay who knew a deep water port was needed*
*Ardennes 1944,By Sir Antony Beevor, page 14* Sir Bertram Ramsey ,Allied Naval commander-in-chief had told SHAEF and Monty that the Germans could block the Scheldt Estuary with ease. *The mistake lay with Monty, who was not interested in the estuary and thought the Canadians could clear it later*
*Try looking up Churchill's biographer Martin Gilbert who took over 20 yrs to finish the 8 volumes on Winston's life*
*Road to Victory, Winston Churchill 1941-45,by Martin Gilbert* A British War cabinet memo suggested that the appointment of Monty was from the point of view of it's reception by public opinion. *Apparently that clinched the War Cabinet's vote for Montgomery; based strictly on military accomplishments, the case for him was very weak*
*The Second World War by John Keegan p. 437* The Plan was the most calamitous flaw in the post Normandy campaign .It was more over barely excusable, since Ultra was supplying Montgomery's HQs from Sept 5 onward with intelligence .As early as Sept 12 Monty's own intelligence reported the Germans intended to hold out along the approaches to Antwerp. Monty - despite every warning and contrary to common military sense - refused to turn his troops back in their tracks to clear the Scheldt Estuary
Monty Garden go over and ask the Europeans, shouldn't take you 4 years like it did Bernard
EXCELLENT Video ! . . . I like both your "Information, as well as its Delivery" !.
General Browning comes across like the US General McClellan. Very good at organizing and training soldiers but poor leadership in the field.
Browning was not a field general. He dropped in to rubber-neck.
Do not forget Brownibgs boss was an American.... entry about him from wiki
Brereton, however, made key changes to the Linnet plan, first in restricting glider missions to "single-tows", that is, one tug aircraft towing one glider, whereas Linnet had contemplated a double-tow mission. A combination of poor weather, extensive resupply missions to the pursuing Allied armies, and anticipation of last-minute airborne drops cancelled virtually all training for IX TCC in August, as a consequence of which Brereton believed that untried and unpracticed double-tows were too hazardous. Brereton also decided that the operation, protected by massive air support from the RAF and the AAF, would take place in daylight, to avoid the dispersion experienced during both the British and American airborne landings in Normandy in June. His decision was finalized when weather and other delays pushed back D-Day for the operation to September 17, which was the dark moon. Finally, the shorter hours of daylight in September caused Brereton to refuse authorization for two lifts per day, and as a result of the limited number of troop carrier aircraft, the air movement of the Army required three consecutive days to complete.[63]
Brereton wasn't his boss but clearly he was the one who had a firm say in deploying the aircraft needed.
Great class! Thanks!
Your criticism of Mead is intetesting. Reminds me of Michael Senior's "Haking: A Dutiful Soldier" in which he defends one of the most incompetent men ever to wear a Lt General's badges, and does so poorly. I think some historians just think it is fun to defend clowns for the sake of being able to write provocative phrases on the book's cover: "a radical re-assessment", "correcting the record", "unfairly criticised".
EXCELLENT ,CONCISE AND VERY WELL PRESENTED.
Thank you!
I have a question, and it may be a stupid question. In every video I've watched on the failure of Market Garden, the bad intelligence about a large number of tanks located in the forest around Osterbeek heights is mentioned as a contributing factor. TIK, you make mention of it several times and say that both Gavin and Browning should've known better. That, it wasn't realistic to believe the Germans had a tank force that size in late 1944. But Im curious if it's possible that the size of the tank force was exaggerated. But not the existence of a large tank force itself. And there is only one reason I ask this question, the battle of the bulge. The sources I have found claim Hitler gave the official order to begin preparations for the offensive on September 16th, 44. Just one day before operation Market Garden. I've also read a couple of sources that claim some of the tank forces had already been told to begin repositioning before the official order to prepare was given. So, is it possible that a large tank force had been located in the forest outside the Osterbeek heights before being given orders to reposition in accordance with upcoming offensive preparations? We know about 1400 tanks, and assault guns took part in the battle of the bulge. With tanks alone totaling about 1000. So, maybe there weren't 1000 tanks in the forest surrounding Osterbeek. But is it possible there was a fairly large tank force, none the less?
To clarify, the forest that was reported to contain German armour was the Reichswald south of Nijmegen and on the border in Germany. There was also a reconnaissance Spitfire flight that photographed a few tanks in the Deelerwoud north of Arnhem near Deelen airfield on 12 September, which was a flight to confirm Dutch resistance reports of armour near Arnhem.
The first reports of armour in the Reichswald came from Dutch resistance reports during the planning for operation COMET, set for 8 Septemeber and then postponed twice to 9 then 10 September. It started a silly rumour that 1000 tanks could be hiding in the Reichswald, but it was estimated that Model only had 50-100 operational panzers at the time, and we now know he had exactly 84 operational panzers in his Army Group B in the 5 September returns.
COMET was cancelled because of this report and the strong resistance in the immediate 2nd Army front south of Eindhoven, and Montgomery realised one airborne division landing at Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave was not strong enough to deal with the opposition. It was decided to upgrade COMET by adding two more airborne divisions, so the 1st Airborne could concentrate at Arnhem, the 82nd would take Nijmegen-Grave, and the 101st would secure the corridor from Valkenswaard to Uden in order to facilitate a rapid advance from Belgium to Nijmegen and Arnhem. The drop zones near Valkenswaard and Uden were later deleted, with the 101st now landing between Son and Veghel.
Around this time, more Dutch reports were received of German SS units moving into billets in the Arnhem-Apeldoorn-Ruurlo areas, with the vehicle insignia of the 'Hohenstaufen' Division (9.SS-Panzer) positively identified, and 'Ultra' code intercepts revealed that II.SS-Panzerkorps had been ordered to refit in the eastern Netherlands. By 16 September, the day before MARKET GARDEN began, the assessment was that there was an SS panzer Division northeast of Arnhem and another possibly in the Nijmegen barracks, both reduced to regimental battlegroups in strength with few if any tanks, and that they were probably drawing new tanks from a depot thought to be in the Kleve area behind the Reichswald, which could be used as a tank storage area.
By 1830 hours on the first day, Gavin was told there were no German troops in the Reichswald and the tree density too great for armoured operations. We also now know that resistance at Arnhem was much greater than anticipated. It was only in 1966 that Gavin realised from the papers of Dutch researcher T.A. Boeree that he forwarded to Cornelius Ryan, the author of A Bridge Too Far (1974), that Boeree had tracked the 'Hohenstaufen' SS panzer division from its crossing of the Maas at Maastricht on 4 September and concentrating near Sittard, before receiving orders on 8 September to move north to Arnhem and the Veluwe region to refit. It was now clear to him that the route was through Nijmegen after a stop in the Reichswald, and this had generated the reports, but now understood it was the 'Hohenstaufen' division in transit to Arnhem.
When COMET was cancelled on 10 September, and MARKET was proposed to replace it, Gavin was given a warning order he was assigned to Nijmegen, so he immediately went to 1st Airborne HQ to get the latest intelligence they had on the area and see the plans they had prepared for COMET. He saw the reports of German armour in the Reichswald and what 1st Airborne were doing to deal with it before COMET was cancelled, and this information informed his own divisional plan for MARKET.
The decision to refit the II.SS-Panzerkorps in the Netherlands was probably connected with Model's plans for a counter-offensive to retake Antwerp from the Netherlands, planned to take place in October or November. This explains why he refused to give permission to blow the main bridges at Arnhem and Nijmegen, even after the airborne attack had begun, he still thought he would need them for his counter-offensive. Eventually the counter-offensive was delayed to December and re-routed through the Ardennes, and both 9 and 10.SS-Panzer-Divisions were involved after being refitted, although only SS-Artillerie-Regiment 10 of the 'Frundsberg' was involved.
A brief word about the tanks in the Deelerwoud: these were believed by Browning's intelligence officer to confirm reports of SS panzer units near Arnhem and used in Cornelius Ryan's book, becoming an infamous scene in the film adaptation, but when the missing photos were located in a Dutch archive in 2015 it was found they showed older obsolete models of tanks as Browning had dismissed them. They had indeed broken down while ordered to Belgium and most of them did not make the journey. The unit was identified as a reserve panzer unit belonging to the training regiment of the Luftwaffe 'Hermann Göring' Panzer-Division and the tanks were camped near the 101st Airborne 506th PIR drop zone near Son on 17 September and attacked by escorting fighter aircraft. The RAF study of the found photo was published by Dr Sebastian Ritchie of the RAF Air Historical Branch in - Arnhem: The Air Reconnaissance Story - you can find it as a free download from the RAF MoD website on their Thematic Studies page.
The papers of T.A. Boeree and Gavin's covering letter to Cornelius Ryan are in the Cornelius Ryan Collection online under A Bridge Too Far, box 101 folder 09 James Gavin (covering letter is page 48).
Hope this helps.
A quick Googles will tell you just how formidable an obstacle the Groesbeek Heights would have been. It is a whopping 34 meters above sea level.
As for Browning and the tanks, it's funny how a man who sees photographs of several tanks and other armored vehicles can dismiss them out of hand as "wrecks, unfit for duty" but buy wholeheartedly the "1,000 tanks" lurking in the woods past Groesbeek.
Steve 56 in the conditions of the Vale of Guelders, 34 meters is the Himalaya as the rest of the place is below sealevel. It is commanding high ground for the area. Still, I don't think it was the right place to deploy Gavin at all. He should have been south west of Nijmegen, not south east.
Actually the Groesbeek Heights are 100.8 meters that is 88 meters higher than the area around it. A perfect place to put artillery observers to close the roads into Nijmegen.
If he thought the tanks were in the Reichswald then given information the Allies had about how few effective panzer units the Germans had left he was unlikely to believe they were also simultaneously in Arnhem. It's like a 3 cups game. If you think the ball is under the middle cup, you aren't going to claim it's under the middle cup and the left-hand cup.
One question @TIKhistory, if you may quote your source for the 22:50 SHAEF G2 Summary of 13th of September 1944., stating that "1000 tanks reported in Reichwald etc", since I wasn't able to find that report in several books about Market Garden.
Also, I found out that the Weekly summary reports were issued on Saturdays, meaning there was a report on September 9th (No. 25) and then September 16th (No. 26, in which there was allegedly a mention of possible tanks around Arnhem again, but the Operation was on for the next day), while September 13th was a Wednesday and there was no Weekly summary report on that date.
Couldn't find the text of that September 9th or September 13th, they are kept in Box 8 in the Dwight D. Eisenhower library in Abilene Kansas, with other selected records from SHAEF 1943-1945. Have you ever seen any of these texts (transcribed, photographed, microfilmed...)?
www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/finding-aids/pdf/shaef-selected-records.pdf
Great a new Video! I didn't get a notification so I just re-clicked the bell.
If they truly thought there might be a heavy number of tanks in the Nijmegan area. The operation should have been scrubbed. If those tanks were real they would have destroyed the airborne and kicked 30 corps right back to their starting point. So the logic is truly flawed.
Well done. Really enjoyed it.
Great stuff as always! I'd agree with you on the primary blame being on Gavin. It shouldn't really have been Browning's responsibility to tell him to...well... capture his objective as quickly as possible. However as the senior commander he really was quite "worthless" in the hour of need, and the treatment of the Poles is, well, just childish.
Excellent quality of video, I agree Richard Mead’s book does fall into the trap of confirmation bias,, although it is General Montgomery and Horrocks are most associated with the operation General Browning should be held accountable. Montgomery post-mortem the airborne plan. “The airborne forces at Arnhem were dropped too far away from the vital objective-the bridge. It was some hours before they reached it. I take blame for this mistake. I should have ordered Second Army and I Airborne Corps to arrange that at least one complete Parachute Brigade
was dropped quite close to the bridge, so that it could have been captured in a few minutes and its defence soundly organised with time to do so. I did not do so” . This effectively vindicated General Sosabowski original argument. Whilst there is merit in your argument at the Tactical execution level, Market Garden was in many ways doomed because of the Strategic Eisenhower’s decision of a broad front attritional campaign than Montgomery’s plan of a immediate focused concentrated thrust towards the Ruhr.
Revisionist Historians, tend to agree with Montgomery failure to accept this plan permitted the German Army to regroup.Consequently Germany could have been entered before winter set in and the Ruhr area encircled cutting the Reich off from essential industry. The Ardennes offensive would not have taken place to prolong the war. The war in Europe may have ended before 1945, the ‘Hunger Winter’ in Holland would not have taken place, and millions of Nazi victims would have survived. I agree with Montgomery that Eisenhower’s strategic failure in August 1944 was a very costly mistake, Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge were the tactical consequences of that mistake.
Very well done, but I still have to disagree with your conclusion.
How does dropping 8 miles from Arnhem bridge not trump a few hours delay in Gavin sending troops to Nijmegen bridge as the critical error in this operation? Gavin was under Browning's direct supervision and had his approval. The 8 miles also allowed for the other critical issues to affect the probable success, such as the radios and 1st Airborne resupply.
It's pretty much insane to drop paras that far from their objective.
Even if there were only 50 tanks in the Reichwald, anybody commanding a partial, already spread out airborne division, would have to consider that a priority. Moreover, how was Gavin or Browning to know 10th SS was going to be sending significant forces down to that bridge straightaway?
In a nutshell I would say the overriding problem with this operation was that, "there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians". Ike and Monty should have had a much more hands on role in this affair considering it was dealing with complex combined operations between two nations and several branches of the military.
In the end when you expect XXX Corps, 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne to have to stick their neck out in a big way to save 1st Airborne, it's probably not going to happen to the extent you hope. (Such as air commanders worrying about how tired their guys would be.) Commanders usually set not getting their unit wiped out or severely mauled as first priority. That would be my first priority. It takes an overall commander to set these bickering self-interests straight in an operation like this.
If the plan was better, it would have worked. It almost did anyway, but I can't single out Gavin or Browning for this. In the end one could say Gavin put "his guys" first, and Browning didn't. They cut too many corners in the planning to assure victory.
caelachyt
Gavin was in charge of the 82nd who were tasked with seizing the bridge. Browning dropped at the same time, but was in charge of 3 generals in the operation on the 1st day. He could not communicate with them and was also setting up his HQ. The first hours are critical. Gavin sent about 40 men to the bridge of around 3,000, after a 3 hour delay. Gavin should have ensured a substantial amount of men moved on the bridge, the prime target, *immediately.* If he did so the operation would have been a success.
Gavin sent no sizeable force to the bridge until 22.00 in the evening when a Para company took a look at it and bumped into the SS battalion who had just arrived and were deploying. Considering this was his main objective which he was ordered to seize 'with thunderclap surprise' it's shocking that out of an entire airborne division he only made such a token gesture with a few hundred men so very late in the day. There were no defenders of note near the bridge until the SS arrived near nightfall, and Gavin's error caused a 36 hour delay and a lot of loss of life for an objective they could have walked over earlier.
There were no sightings of tanks in the Riechswald, the Dutch underground and air recon had seen nothing, and the whole panic was caused by Gavin's G2 officer who later retracted his statement and instead concluded that at most there could be a few hundred German communications troops in there. Gavin chose to stick with the first ridiculous report though, and Browning went along with it as well. I suspect that the pair of them stuck with the first ludicrous G2 assessment not necessarily because they believed it, but because it suited their own agendas.
36 hours delay and an unnecessary pitched battle was easily enough to end the operations chance of success. I'm not sure I agree that a commanders first priority is to look after his men, especially a WW2 para commander. Those guys (and their men) were famously willing to take chances to get their objectives taken otherwise the paras would be mopped up in due course if they just sat there behind enemy lines.
SuperCaratacus Gavin's orders were Groesbeek then Nijimeen, read the operational order. Besides it's 12km from LZ T of the 508th to Nijimeen Bridge. What's your ETA of them reaching the bridge and securing both sides against KG Henke and further reinforcements. Also critical first few hours, go find Urqhart tell him his divisional staff will be looking for him for the next 2 days
ETA? Less than 3 hours.
John Burns it takes 2 Para five hours to cover the same distance. If I use that same standard, the 508th would have clashed with 9th SS Reece Bn around the bridge before last light.
Fantastic video. Thank you.😊
Nice one, well presented, and entertaining. cannot believe Sasobowski ended up at working at Lucas in London as a factory worker. (wiki) But my money is on Browning.
Looking forward to your next production.
.
You'd have thought, with his talents, he'd have been a manager there.
Excellent Analysis. Thank you !
Was there actually any evidence for panzers in the Reichswald? And if there actually were panzers in the Reichswald shouldn't they have set up the defensive positions in Nijmegen itself, I would think airbourne troups have a much better position in urban environment instead of the quite open terrain around Groesbeek.
Except the initial SHAEF report declaring 1,000 panzers in the Reichswald, no there was no evidence. And yes, defending in the built-up areas makes sense. However, the classic counter-argument to moving off the Groesbeek Heights is "you've got to protect your landing zones" - which also was the Groesbeek Heights. Why not deploy West of Nijmegen instead, I've no idea, but you're right that the open terrain around Groesbeek wouldn't have been enough to stop a sizeable panzer-force.
TIK I find the choice not to deploy and land southwest of Nijmegen truly incomprehensible *. Hatert to the SW is the logical choice if you are supposed to make it easy for XXX Corps to advance from Grave to Nijmegen.
Defending your LZ is circular logic. We defend it because we are there, like.
* Incomprehensible UNLESS somebody higher up in a position to decide the LZ made up his mind that stopping the phantom threat from the Reichswald has priority.
I have no idea who that might be and if I were to engage in unfounded speculation I would be into conspiracy theory.
But the question remains: why on Earth is Gavin and his 82nd put in such an eccentric position? I find that more mystifying than his decision to defend Groesbeek. I agree that the urban environment is a much better place to ward off the German tanks, should such arrive. It is truly difficult to understand why he would be inserted there.
Really, any attack could have come from any direction, one thing you could glean from the intel is you didn't know. And in fact a counter-attack did come from an unexpected direction, from the north, on the other side of the river. Gavin clearly didn't expect an imminent attack there otherwise he wouldn't have waited so long to send any force to take either bridge.
You must understand that ALL of the generals so quoted are hiding the fact that Bletchley Park is decoding German radio traffic. It would've been signals intelligence, human intelligence and flat out paranoia and miscalculation that created the 1,000 panzers.
Further, most of those panzers would've been HALF-TRACKS. Even half-tracks would've been nightmares for the paras. Germany was still producing half-tracks at quite a clip -- and the key factories were only a two-hour drive from the battle!
And the Germans WERE pouring half-tracks, Tigers, Panthers, you name it into Arnhem to rebuild 9&10 SS divisions.
Further, American tank factories produced X amount of tanks per month. Intelligence simply assumed that something like that number, say .3X, would spit out of Germany's tank factories in the Ruhr. They assumed that most of Germany's production was going to the east -- but now that Monty was knocking on the devil's door -- that ALL of the Ruhr's production would be vectored their way.
Adding it all up, you start to see where Big Numbers come from.
( For paras, half-tracks are just as deadly as panzers, and perhaps even worse. Look what happened to Frost ! )
@Steve
Bletchley was not given a time-line within their intercepts. It's a pretty good bet that Bletchley was tapping into morale boosting chatter between Adolf and OB West about its reinforcement priority -- which was -- in fact -- at the top of the stack. Hitler had ALREADY decided to counter attack out of the Ardennes even before the Allies rolled up to the West Wall. Yes, in his imagining he would repeat his super-success of 1940. All of this was in his head even before Paris was liberated. Quite simply, Hitler had ALWAYS assumed that his play was in the west, and that only Britain and America were sensitive to casualties, for clearly, Stalin was not deterred by even insane levels of blood.
The disposition of Browning's HQ betrays the fact that he KNEW that the ONLY terrain suitable for a counter attack by panzers lay directly between the heights and the German border. Everywhere else, the ground was so soft that tanks bogged down. This was why Hell's Highway was an elevated highway, why XXX Corps tanks had to stay up on that 60-mile berm.
The CRAZY thing about 1st Airborne and 82nd Airborne drop zones: they weren't on the island.
The zone between the two bridges was an ISLAND in the Rhine river delta. The Germans couldn't get on it except by the bridges and a ferry. This ferry, indeed both ferries, were totally ignored by Browning and Monty. ANY Dutchman could've, would've brought them up. They were the traditional way of reaching the farmland that WAS the island.
The island had no Germans, no FLAK, no nothing. No place to hide panzers, either. The island was the OBVIOUS place to take all subsequent air drops. It just screamed: land here, land here, land here!
All of the FLAK was in Arnhem. That's where the RAF was taking a beating.
BTW, the RAF DID adjust its drop zones after crews bitched about loads lost to Germany. However, no matter what was done, the SS kept over-running the new, tighter, drop zones. That's how fast the 1st Airborne was shrinking its perimeter. It was but a short time before its pocket was so tiny that the RAF couldn't hit it. Any plane making the attempt would have no more than a two second window between crossing the Rhine and reaching the (far ) German line.
That's why the film is painting a false picture WRT the RAF. Its crews were not that stupid. What had happened is that British Airborne had lost the ability to defend its perimeter early in the fight. .
ALL of Airborne's problems traced back to Browning's selection of drop zones. He had the PERFECT spot -- the island -- and he didn't select it. Urquhart and Company could not redeem that catastrophic error no matter how much blood they spent.
TIK, love your channell. Your final decision is well thought out. I have to say the majority of the fault has to lay with Browning. But that is just my thought. As you stated everyone has a piece of the blame. Trying not to be leaning to one side or the other but I think Montgomery was overrated. Thanks for these documentaries.
"I have to say the majority of the fault has to lay with Browning... but I think Montgomery was overrated." - any particular reasons or just the usual indoctrination by Hollywood?
I agree with Beevor, It was a bad plan from the beginning and Montgomery should bear the blame
@@pearly872 great post and accurate
Awesome work!
A Bridge Too Far is my favourite movie and Operation Market Graden is one of my (I hesitate to use the word "favourite" for an event where people die in large numbers) battles that I am most interested in. I think the biggest thing the movie missed was the Groesbeek heights. That would have given a whole different flavour.
Also, what do you think about the criticism if XXX corps? They seem to get accused of stopping and drinking tea and being generally incompetent. This seems to be the US depiction of British forces. In my opinion they did a pretty good job of pushing up one highway where they were being constantly ambushed and their supply lines overstretched. But they were forced to turn from a fast exploitation force into a force fighting heavily defended enemies in Nijmegen, a role for which they were not suited and which they wouldn't have had to fulfill had the Nijmegen Bridge been taken earlier.
Thank you! You just gave me an idea to make a video on XXX Corps issue ;) not sure why I didn't think of that!
XXX Corp had a crap job. The is no way you can have a major ground operation relying on just one road with no way to maneuver. Way to easy to have supply lines cut. Failure was in the plan itself. Ike should have not allowed it to happen.
This plan hinged on "thunderclap surprise". Ferrying in the troops over several days was anathema to that. Far too many corners were cut in the planning.
Jaak Sootak
XXX Corps hardly put a foot wrong. They got to Nijmegen just ahead of schedule. When they were there they had to start fighting the Germans in street fighting and then plan and seize the bridge. They also sent a battalion of the Dorsets across the Rhine to Arnhem.
XXX Corps had 20,000 vehicles. They had 9,000 sapper engineers with bridge equipment in 5,000 trucks.
Jaak Sootak
_"Also, what do you think about the criticism if XXX corps? They seem to get accused of stopping and drinking tea and being generally incompetent. This seems to be the US depiction of British forces. "_
After WW2 the facts proved the British were highly professional and the Americans at times just amateurish, especially at the top brass levels. At the Battle of the Bulge, two US armies had to be put under Montgomery's control as they lost control and did not know what to do. At the beginning of 1942 Eisenhower was just a colonel. In 1939/40 Portugal had a larger army than the USA. They were short of well trained and educated top brass as their armies expanded into millions. Many of their generals would not have made it to general in the British Army. Mark Clark comes to mind, Simpson another.
Since then the US media, and their ex military men, have attempted to put themselves in a favourable light - mainly by castigating and sneering the British, who outperformed them. Montgomery was the finest general in WW2 - he never suffered a reverse running through 9 countries commanding multi-national armies. To read many Americans he was an incompetent buffoon when facts show us the opposite. It is best to look at facts not people with agendas.
I watched a Bridge to Far then started reading more and ended up here. An excellent analysis with more detail facts than I can absorb in one watching. One caution, as facts are obvious, in the pressure and fog of war, second guessing too much to assign blame, is fraught with risk. I would prefer to say mistakes were made from the first inception of the operation. Contention between Ike and Monty was no secret the fact that they essentially argued for 5 days over its' merit set the failure in motion. your attention to detail is however admirable. and the facts you present are an excellent resource.
23.30 the Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Offensive was launched exactly three months after MG. German armor: 557 tanks, 667 tank destroyers and assault guns
1,261 other AFVs
Hello!
I was considering subscribing to your channel as I noticed that the number of your subscribers jumped in the last month from 10000 to 15000, which could have been a bit frightening... So I decided to wait for a while. 🙂
But that would certainly not stop me to continue watching your videos. They are great!
Greetings from Romania! 🇷🇴
By the way, I think that both Browning and Gavin are to be blamed. Defending against tanks would have been easier from the town of Nijmegen and capturing the bridge should have been a priority. I find it difficult to imagine what were they thinking.
(1) Market Garden can only be labeled as a "foreseeable accident in waiting", and like the vast majority of accidents, several concurring "factors" caused it to happen, making it very difficult or even impossible to pinpoint one single "culprit". It seems to me that removing one or two of those flaws would have been enough to prevent the disaster. (2) In order to present a valid opinion about the dropping of Browning's HQ on Niejmegen, I would have to be duly acquainted with its roles and functions, so I could confront them vis-à-vis the onus of spending air transport and weapons required to drop them there. (3) All said, my personal impressions are that, once Panzer divisions were considered as de facto planning risks, which soon proved real, the two most damaging flaws that caused MG's disastrous outcome were (a) only one drop per day, most importantly in the first two days of the operation, and (b) the unjustifiable delay to take and cross the Niejmegen bridge, with all its consequences. But, again, the use of armor in single line in Holland was a well known liability beforehand, radios failed to work etc., so back to number 1 above... (4) Eisenhower, Montgomery and other key commanding figures down the line failed to realize the importance and/or support the assignment of close air support by the tactical air forces. Were it treated accordingly, fighter-bombers and/or light bombers would have been properly assigned to MG, and they would have saved the operation for sure, bad weather considered. So, it's not solely what was improperly done, but also what wasn't done, that doomed such brilliant endeavor and led to the loss of so many beautiful, brave soldiers. Well, in the end, all in all, I think this was the major factor: the absence of air fire support when all else failed.
_"Panzer divisions were considered as de facto planning risks, which soon proved real"_
There was no armour in Arnhem on the 17th.
If XXX Corps got over the Nijmegen bridge on
schedule they would have met little armour in
Arnhem. Even the German commander Harmel,
said "it would have been all over for us."
_"the British armor stalled, "_
It never, XXX Corps got to Nijmegen just ahead
of schedule and instead of running over the bridge
found it still in German hands.
The armor wasn't in Arnhem on the first day, but at least one of its divisions was, with an HQ at Oosterbeek, and it was responsible for severely limiting the access to the bridge until the armor's arrival, disrupting landing and dropping zones, restricting air supply etc., even without the armor.
Thanks for clarifying that the XXX arrived at Niejmegen ahead of schedule.
I'm taking out the stalling remark now.
jsfbr
People do not get the timeline right. There was no armour in the Arnhem area on the 17th and none there in the previous weeks. I have given evidence from a RAF report. The armour came in from Germany pretty well unmolested as fighter-bomber support was withdrawn. On the 19th, when XXX Corps turned up at Nijmegen, there was little German armour on the _island_ between the two bridges, and little was in Arnhem. There was nothing XXX Corps could not have dealt with very easily.
By the time XXX Corps got over Nijmegen bridge (they had to seize the bridge themselves) on the 20th in the dark, they were 36 hours late with German armour now on the island and in Arnhem.
When XXX Corps consolidated and moved to Arnhem, on the 21st, they met stiff German armour which was now in Elst. Tigers, the lot.
John Burns
You just got to get over your tunnel vision. Stop looking for excuses and what if's. The Monty plan was flawed and this was shown in the result. The Germans woke up to the plan early, out manouvered the allies, defended well, game over. Then the blame game started in true British tradition. Its still going on by the look of it.
My Farther told me that on occasion he was ordered to drive Browning around. I was to young and never asked or was interested. Wish i could talk to him now. Dad was in 1st Airborne artillery and never really spoke about the war. Not to me anyway.
Well done great historical assesment.
Shouldn't we blame the Wehrmacht and weapon SS for the failure of Market Garden? Why is there so much obsession with blame for it? It was war, it's risk-taking based on imperfect information. The whole Western Front always struck me as a 'mopping up'-operation. In this case there was a high risk, high reward opportunity which didn't pay off but didn't change the balance of the war at all. Basically an 'oh well, that didn't work but it was worth trying'-moment than real failure. Or am I very far off the mark here?
You're correct in a lot of ways. The Western Front really was a mopping up operation compared to the Eastern Front, and this battle didn't change the war too much. However, the point of this is that the historiography of this battle is dominated by authors who are deliberately withholding information in order to blame the wrong people. If you watch the film A Bridge Too Far (which is based on the book by the same name), you'll come to a completely different conclusion to what I did here. That's what makes this battle so interesting, especially since it's a multi-national operation, so people get really passionate about it. I have tried to remain balanced, but technically I'm biased by being British (although, as I said in the video, if you blame Browning, Gavin or both, you're probably correct).
Good points, and I appreciate you tackling this subject in this video. My comment was more of a general remark than directed at you specifically so please don't take it as meant at you. I like your point about the multi-nationality and how people become passionate because of it. Perhaps that explains the obsession with blame the best; national prides. No small wonder since most involved nations had been at each others throats for centuries before the Germans became a thing. And no real military disasters befell the Western Allies since before Normandy, this really was the worst thing that happened in an otherwise 'smooth' campaign (well, apart from the Battle of the Bulge I guess) so of course it should be someone's fault.
TIK
Market Garden is hardly mentioned in the allied progress of WW2.
Leon Michiel S.
Eisenhower right up just before he died always insisted Market Garden was well worth going for. If Monty was active in the planning and they went for Kasel, that would be one less bridge to seize. I am sure he would have insisted on fighter-bombers being used. They did eventually go via Kasel.
I think that's what makes Market Garden so interesting. It only failed by a whisker, and I'm not surprised that Ike thought it was worth a go.
Dirk Bogarde who played Frederick Browning in A Bridge Too Far said that Browning received a bad rap for his role in Operation Market-Garden. Bogarde in WW2 was actually part of the staff around Browning and knew the general.
Thanks for your awesome in depth videos, you, Military History Visualized and Military Aviation History are my favourite channels concerning, well military history.
It is pretty much always in history the case that overwhelming victories and crushing defeats are put on one or a few people, who often often are the 'faces' of the operation, not necessarily the brains. Also often is the case that risky decisions are not disputed because the "herd" of the yea-sayers grants immunity in case of failure. So I would not blame Browning for the very "bold" planning of Market Garden, but for taking the risk of the Reichswald at face value, obsessing over Groesbeek Heights and not using the one advantage Paratroopers have - surprise. And Gavin as well, of course. I mean, let's face it, even if there had been 1000 panzers in the Reichswald, what would some paras with light equipment have done about that?
"The US Official History attributes this faulty Reichswald intelligence to the 82nd Airborne Division’s G-2, Lieutenant Colonel Walter F. Winton Jr."
"The various Allied intelligence reports fail to mention them and soon after landing, says the US Official History, the 505th PIR, having sent a patrol into the Reichswald, reported that ‘no tanks could be seen’. This report confirmed other information, obtained from Dutch civilians, that _‘the report about the 1,000 tanks in the Reichswald was false.’_ "
- Neillands
Neilands writing novels,the 82nd had nothing in their order of battle about 1,000 tanks
@@bigwoody4704
Rambo, a quiz.
Name the US general who imagined that there was 1,000 German tanks in a forest, which led to him *failing* to seize a key bridge?
20 points for this.
Monty left 4 months before Clark took Rome.Officially the narrative was to *"HELP"* plan Market Garden.But the truth of the matter was to save face for the rancid runt who the press started in on after Sicily/Italy and the fact....well you know the 30 mile channel and the mighty British Empire tip toeing around it.Even Rommel was like WTF
@@bigwoody4704
*BZZZZZT!* Wrong answer.
The name the US general who imagined that there was 1,000 German tanks in a forest, which led to him *failing* to seize a key bridge, was *General Gavin.*
Zero points Rambo. Zero.
Burns you scream like you are caught in a fan belt again
Extremely well done unlike so many other presentations on RUclips. Very well done gentlemen!
I've read a couple of books on this subject but many years ago.
The "idea" for the operation was to cross the Rhine attack headlong into the industrial heart of Germany, and, hopefully end the war. It was an audacious plan but worth the risks.
What appears to me, given the strategic expectations for Market Garden, and that there were, historically, so many problems with air drops, that the main error was that there wasn't some hardcore overall commander appointed who would have ordered that air assets would bend their efforts to meet the plan, period, that some individuals who were not getting along, would find a way to do so or one or more of them would be gone. And I have a slight nagging feeling Boy was more concerned about keeping his position than about the situation his men would be dropping into. Well, to put the whole thing another way, there was just too much loosy-goosy for something with as bold a reach as this operation.
Here's an antidote for what it's worth. As a young boy in class our teacher, just in passing, mentioned that he and some of his airborne friends noticed that the Brit tankers (30 Corp.) had stopped for "tea" instead of charging ahead as they thought proper. Several truck loads of American airborne troops motored over to the Brit encampment and a brawl ensued. I don't know which division he was in but in any case I've never read or heard of this instance being reported. (shugs)
Who ultimately has to accept responsibility for the failure of this operation? Why the same people who would have stepped forward to accept the laurels had it gone well, shortening or ending the war.
In regards to the operation's true purpose, you might want to watch this other video I made a while ago ruclips.net/video/f79KgQVL3MM/видео.html
And I couldn't agree more with your idea that Boy was "more concerned about keeping his position than about the situation his men would be dropping into". This is actually one of the big lessons to take away from history. Because a lot of people are like this in life.
The *US Official History* makes the point that even after the Nijmegen bridge had finally been taken:
_The Guards Armoured’s Coldstream Guards Group still was needed as a reserve for the Airborne division. This left but two armoured groups to go across the Waal. Even those did not make it until next day, D plus 4, 21 September, primarily because of diehard German defenders who had to be ferreted out from the superstructure and bridge underpinnings. Once on the north bank, much of the British armour and infantry had to be used to help hold and improve the bridgehead that the two battalions of the 504th Parachute Infantry had forged. By the time the Nijmegen bridge fell on D plus 3, it was early evening and it would be dark before an armoured column could be assembled to march on Arnhem._ *_North of Nijmegen the enemy had tanks and guns and infantry of two SS Panzer divisions, in unknown but growing strength, established in country ideal for defence._*
This account adds that:
_At the village of Ressen, less than three miles north of Nijmegen, the Germans had erected an effective screen composed of an SS battalion reinforced by eleven tanks, another infantry battalion, two batteries of 88mm guns, 20 20mm anti-aircraft guns and survivors of earlier fighting in Nijmegen._
American readers should note that the above comments come from the US Official History, where the notion that Lord Carrington and his five tanks could have penetrated this screen and got up to Arnhem on the night of D plus 3 - even supposing such a move was ever suggested - is revealed as a delusion.
- Neillands, Robin. The Battle for the Rhine 1944
A more perceptive analysis comes from Major-General John Frost, commander of the 2nd Parachute Battalion at the Arnhem bridge:
_The worst mistake of the Arnhem plan was the failure to give priority to capturing the Nijmegen bridge. The capture would have been a walkover on D-Day, yet the 82nd Division could spare only one battalion as they must at all costs secure the Groesbeek heights where the Corps HQ was to be sited._
These numerous attempts to divert attention from this failure, and pass the blame to a captain in the Guards Armoured Division, have been shameful... and highly successful. The myths surrounding the Nijmegen bridge have persisted and been engraved on the public mind by the media and the cinema. Given the US commanders’ chronic tendency to pass the buck and blame their British allies at every opportunity, it certainly might have been better if some effort had been made to get elements of the Guards Division on the move to Arnhem that night.
That, however, is the romantic view, bolstered by hindsight. In practical terms it takes time to assemble an entire armoured division from a battlefield in the dark streets of a town, issue fresh orders and prepare it for another advance.
- Neillands, Robin. The Battle for the Rhine 1944
MrLemonbaby
The Nijmegen bridge was taken at both ends by XXX Corps. The 82nd were not even at the bridge when the tanks went across. They were at the far end of the village of Lent, about 1km away, which was just north of the bridge. The Germans had naturally put a road block at the end of the bridge which the tanks had to push out of the way to proceed. On leaving the bridge two tanks of the four were hit and one knocked out with men killed, injured and taken prisoner. One was got going again. The Germans were firing from the girders and land around the bridge. No 82nd were there to meet the tanks, only Germans. The 82nd first met the British tanks near the railway embankment and railway bridge at the far side of Lent. The 82nd men kissed the tank and its guns. The leading two tanks had already knocked out a German self-propelled gun and hit the church. The tank would go no further as German guns were ahead and they were there to protect the bridge.
Only four tanks moved over the bridge. The rest of the tanks were fighting in Nijmegen town helping the 82nd who had not taken Nijmegen. One tank added to the four. The tanks were tasked to secure the north end of the bridge in case of a counter-attack, not neglect their prime task and go on a suicidal night stroll into flat Dutch farmland on a raised road.
There wasn’t only Waffen SS in the way to Arnhem. Schwere Panzerkompanie Hummel with 14 Tiger I tanks had also crossed the Arnhem bridge at that time and took up defensive positions near Elst north of Lent. There is no way that 4 Sherman tanks would have got anywhere near Arnhem. The big point is they were to protect the bridge and only the bridge.
The best book on this is Market Garden Then and Now.
Love how you revise history. Are you by chance related to Monty? Is that why you try to place the failure on Market Garden at everyone else feet? Here are a few facts for you. 1: Always have 3 to one odds in your favor in the attack. They received intel that they would not have those odds at Arnhem and in fact that the British and Polish airborne troops, not at all armed to fight tanks were sent in anyway. You can blame the failure on Ike. He not only should have refused to allow Market Garden to proceed IMO he should have sacked Monty in France. IMO Monty insisted on this attack for 2 reasons. 1st was people were questioning his actions. Complaining that he was too timid. Was he trying to erase that criticism? 2nd was like Patton he just loved seeing his name in the news! For the most part Monty was a brilliant planner. Once the battle was joined he lacked the ability to be flexible to changing situations. That is what set Rommel apart from the crowd. Once the battle was joined he could react to changing situations in the blink of an eye. Patton was good at that too. Ike should have had Monty in charge of his G2 (planning staff). Heck with Monty in charge of G2 and Patton in command of the ground forces they could have conquered the world!Now one should keep in mind that Monty being as timid as he was wasn't really his fault. Churchill was having commanders relieved for losing battles they couldn't have won not matter what. Once relieved they were done. Monty was driven to succeed. Failure was not an option. So he spent more time making sure he wasn't going to be beaten than he did on winning.Most folks miss the fighting done by the Russians. But Monty nor Stalin won WWII. Neither did Patton or Ike. WWII was won on the US factory floors. While Germany at their best was producing 12,000 tanks or aircraft a year the US was producing 12,000 a MONTH! The battle of the Atlantic wasn't won when the convoys could avoid the wolf packs. It was won when American ship yards started producing ships faster than the Germans could sink them! It was won when America could build combat ships fast enough that Jeep carriers could roam the Atlantic in hunter killer groups while others provided coverage for the convoys. The hunter killer groups were to late to make much of a dent in the German Uboat fleet. But production had reached a point that those ships could be used in such missions. Heck because US factories/ship yards were not under attack the US was able to support landings in Normandy, the allies launch a summer offensive in Italy, land in the Marianas and invade southern France all in the space of 3 months. Lets not forget that both the US and British forces were still engaged in the China Burma area all during that time too. I don't care how many men you have. If you can't provide them with the tools of war they can't fight. Neither Russia nor England had the ability to produce enough to win. While the US only used about 45% of it's industrial ability to supply the war effort.Kinda like today. US citizens claiming that corporate greed moved jobs offshore. What really happened was after WWII was over only one industrial nation could provide the goods the world needed and wanted. The US. Sometime in the mid 70's most of the waring nations had recovered to the point where they could start exporting again. All of a sudden US manufacturers had competition. Competition that did not have US minimum wage laws. Got cheaper to import goods than producing them ourselves. Simple greed did the rest. I want, I want it now, and I want it at low enough prices that I can afford something else!Rick
The US faced little armour in their sector but still failed to take St.Lo. Caen was not a priority target, more a nice to take target.
Thing is the 6 pounder wasn't an assault weapon. Had Monty and his minions listened to intelligence Market Garden would have been canceled. Great plan if all they were facing were little boys and old men. But failing to listen to intel of that magnitude? We have much better manpac anti tank weapons today and they still don't like the idea of pitting light infantry against heavy armor. The manpac anti armor weapons from WWII left a whole lot to be desired. But trying to use the 6 pound gun in the attack? You have to set up, try to lure the enemy in close enough then move it and do it all over again. Now had they been able to drop on the bridge, set up a defense? Sure then they might have had a chance. But when they decided that they would have to fight 8 miles to the bridge the 6 pound gun was no longer going to be effective in an attack. Again, the plan should have been canceled or modified. Most people seem to forget that most of the British airborne failed to even make it to the bridge. Then yell because the US 82nd had trouble. Before the British forces linked up a light infantry division was facing at least 2 armored units or at least a brigade in size plus supporting infantry backed up by heavy artillery. Again, had the original intel been good it would have been OK. But when the Germans moved in seasoned Panzer units into the area the whole situation changed. Why do you think that they made every effort to keep heavy German armored forces at bay the first 3 or 4 days after the landings in Normandy? It's really hard to attack armor, especially armor fighting in the defense with infantry. Light or airborne infantry is even in worse shape. At least regular infantry has some armor support plus heavy artillery.
LOL the " who Americans turned to in the Ardennes"? Lets see, the first major counterattack was by US forces! Patton was the one who relieved Bastogne. Monty was supposed to attack south to close a gap and trap Germans trying to escape but he failed to do so (same song different dance). On Jan 18 1945 because of Monty trying to claim credit for the victory in the Ardennes Churchill addressed Parliament and announced in no uncertain terms that the “Bulge” was an American battle-and an American victory. After taking command of the American forces given him (Monty) "He immediately fell into a familiar pattern, failing to act spontaneously for fear of not being sufficiently prepared. Montgomery was afraid to move before the German army had fully exhausted itself, finally making what American commanders saw as only a belated counterattack against the enemy." Churchill agreed.
I never claimed any American general was the best in the war of all allied nations unlike many from England. I think it has more to do with embarrassment of having to be bailed out once again. Gotta have something that was the best. Heck England lost most of one generation in WWI and a large part of another in WWII. The British people have to be admired for standing up to Hitler alone for a s long as they did. Can't really yell to loud about the French soldiers as some people do. Many fought bravely. What was wrong was the leadership. The Poles were just outclassed in leadership, equipment and in training. Heck, Dec 1941 the US was totally unprepared for war. And when the US first went on the offensive there was a lot to learn. Then a lot of our folks thought we knew it all. England came up with a lot of gadgets that we laughed at that proved to be very effective. What US troops called funnies. I'm not claiming that we had better generals. I'm claiming that Monty was way overrated! With the way heads rolled in the early days Monty was as someone else put it "more concerned with not losing a battle than he was with winning one". For a while there it didn't take much for Churchill to sack a commander. He (Monty) too was much like Patton. Both knew that they were in the right place in time to earn a place in history and were much more concerned with how they would be viewed than they were with the conduct of the war.
But I will say it again. WWII was not one by a single country on the battlefield. It was won on the factory floor and in the ship yards.
Rick
Caen was a priority target because city's key position along the Orne River and Caen Canal as well as its role as a major road hub. Add that to how close it was to the invasion beaches.
Caen was not worth expending men on to take when Germans were in the field. If Caen could be taken easily then yes, but heavy resistance and Germans in the field, no. Taking cities consumes heavy resources. Monty said it was not that important a target. He was right. His armour took on the German armour destroying over 90% of it in the west - around Caen.
Dutch intelligence and SHAEF said no armour was in or around Arnhem. They were correct. The tanks were brought in from Germany. Not one para was attacked by German armour on the 1st day. The first German tanks were late on the 2nd day and repelled by 6-pounders and PIATS. The 6-pounders were defensive weapons to hold the bridges until XXX Corps came along.
If the 82nd had seized Nijmegen bridge immediately XXX Corps would have reached Arnhem by about noon of the 19th - D-Day was the 17th, without meeting any German tanks. They would have met German tanks outside of Arnhem as they came in from Germany. By then fighter-bombers would have joined in.
All the paras had to do was hold the bridges, with no armour around, for 45 hours. The paras at Arnhem held the bridge for over 3 days, facing German armour on the last day capitulating on the evening of the 20th, just as the first XXX Corps tanks rolled over Nijmegen bridge - too late now. The paras at Arnhem faced Tigers, impervious in frontal attacks by 6-pdrs, although they knocked a number of them out.
oldtanker2
Patton was an average US general promoted to superstar status by the US media - the US never had any exceptional generals. Montgomery said Patton would be good as a Corps commander.
*Patton at Metz advanced 10 miles in three months.* The poorly devised Panzer Brigade concept was deployed there with green German troops. The Panzer Brigades were a rushed concept attempting to plug the gaps while the proper panzer divisions were re-fitting and rebuilt after the summer 1944 battles.
The Panzer Brigades had green crews with little time to train, did not know their tanks properly, had no recon elements and didn't even meet their unit commander until his arrival at the front. These were not elite forces.
17th SS were not amongst the premier Waffen SS panzer divisions. It was not even a panzer division but a panzer grenadier division, only equipped with assault guns, not tanks, with only a quarter of the number of AFVs as a panzer division. The 17th SS was badly mauled in Normandy and not up to strength at Arracourt in The Lorraine.
Patton's Third Army was almost always where the best German divisions in the west were *NOT.*
♦ Who did the 3rd Army engage?
♦ Who did 3rd Army defeat?
♦ Patton never once faced a full strength
Waffen SS panzer division nor a
Tiger battalion.
In The Lorraine, the 3rd Army faced a rabble. Even the German commander of Army Group G in The Lorraine, Hermann Balck, who took over in September 1944 said:
_"I have never been in command of such irregularly_
_assembled and ill-equipped troops. The fact that we_
_have been able to straighten out the situation again…_
_can only be attributed to the bad and hesitating_
_command of the Americans."_
Patton was mostly facing a second rate rabble in The Lorraine. Patton was neither on the advance nor being heavily engaged at the time he turned north to Bastogne when the Germans pounded through US lines.
The road from Luxembourg to Bastogne was pretty well devoid of German forces, with Bastogne being on the very southern German flank. Only when Patton neared Bastogne did he engage _some_ German armour but not a great amount at all. The Fuhrer Grenadier Brigade wasn't one of the best German armoured units, while 26th Volks-Grenadier only had a dozen Hetzers, and the small element of Panzer Lehr (Kampfgruppe 901) left behind only had a small number of tanks operational. Patton did not have to smash through full panzer divisions or Tiger battalions on his way to Bastogne. Patton's armoured forces outnumbered the Germans by at least 6 to 1.
Patton faced very little German armour when he broke through to Bastogne because the vast majority of the German 5th Panzer Army had already left Bastogne in their rear moving westwards to the River Meuse. They were still engaging forces under Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Leading elements were engaging the Americans and British under Montgomery's command near Dinant by the Meuse. Monty's armies halted the German advance and pushed them back.
In Normandy in 1944, the panzer divisions had been largely worn down, primarily by the British and Canadians around Caen. The First US Army around St Lo then Mortain helped a little. *Over 90% of German armour was destroyed by the British.* Once again, Patton faced very little opposition in his break out in Operation Cobra performing mainly an infantry role. Nor did Patton advance any quicker across eastern France mainly devoid of German troops, than the British and Canadians did, who were in Brussels by early September seizing the vital port of Antwerp intact.
Patton repeatedly denigrated his subordinates.
♦ In Sicily he castigated Omar Bradley for the tactics
Bradley's II Corps were employing
♦ He accused the commander of 3rd Infantry Division,
Truscott of being _"afraid to fight"._
♦ In the Ardennes he castigated Middleton of the
US VIII Corps and Millikin of the US III Corps.
♦ When his advance from Bastogne to Houffalize
stalled he criticised the 11th Armoured Division for being
_"very green and taking unnecessary casualties to no effect"._
♦ He called the 17th Airborne Division _"hysterical"_ in
reporting their losses.
After the German attack in the Ardennes, US air force units were put under Coningham of the RAF. Coningham, gave Patton massive ground attack plane support and he still stalled. Patton failed to concentrate his forces on a narrow front, committing two green divisions to battle and inadequate reconnaissance resulted in him stalling. Patton rarely took any responsibility for his own failures. It was always somebody else at fault, including his subordinates. A poor general who thought he was reincarnated. Oh, and wore cowboy guns.
Patton detested Hodges, did not like Bradley disobeying his orders, and Eisenhowers orders. He also hated Montgomery. About the only person he ever liked was himself.
Read _Monty and Patton: Two Paths to Victory_ by Michael Reynolds
I'm generally not inclined to defend Gavin ....or Browning, but.
Knowing correctly or in this case wrongly, that 10 Panzer div's are possible threat nearby. I wouldn't want to lose any upper ground I had available. Throwing airborne at a perceived massive tank threat is nuts. Where did this false Intel come from? Like I say, I agree w your criticism of G and B but this perception of a Tank threat justifies holding the heights. It does not justify delay of taking the bridge. Well done on your work on this documentary!!! Bravo!
On the upside, we all can agree that Ole' Sosabowski could take Browning in a fist-fight any day of the week.
I would have loved General Urquhart to have knocked Brownings head off.
Never make the mistake of judging by appearances.
Urquhart?He had little airborne experience and was hiding out out in an attic for over a day.While the men under him were having communication problems with their radios.Neither of those men are to blame - it's Monty who after hatching this very bad plan never had the nerve to actually show up
Another good one,thank you.
I thought it was Monty's plan. Why didn't he plan every detail of the operation? they had one road to use and time was extremely critical yet he didn't know everything about his plan!
I think the blame rests solely on Monty; He should have known about this and insisted on taking the bridge first.
Thank you for this... Its nice to see someone at last studied the facts therefore able to share the truth behind this operation. It is so easy for armchair generals who fight the war on Monday do not have the full facts of the battle. As stated during his planning, Gen Gavin (82nd Airborne Div) was concerned with the German Armour in the Reichwald area, therefore putting his main effort onto the high ground over taking Nijmegen Bridge. Hence the hold up of 30 Corps advance to Arnhem. Gen Brereton was being influenced by his transport commander (Williams) concern with fatiguing the pilots with doing a one day lift. A personality clash with Generals was so evident in this Operation.
Gavin's scouts determined there was no armour on the thick forest to the east. They were fired on at the road they were patrolling skirting the forest. The heights were between the LZs and the Nijmegen bridge. If you take the LZs you take the heights.
No they didn't you revisionist rube,nothing in their field orders or scouting reports mentioned this .It was only upon arrival they realized troops could be there as Dave mentioned it was on the German border. If Monty was an actual Field Marshall like Walter Model he would have shown up - a failed marsh mellow was more like it
@@bigwoody4704
Rambo, a quiz.
Name the company of the 505th that reported the Reichswald was _"empty"_ and the trees too thick to allow tank operations?
20 points for the correct answer.
your lies have been so badly battered about it belongs next to one of Monty's military plan
*BZZZZT!* Wrong answer.
Rambo, the name the company of the 505th that reported the Reichswald was _"empty"_ and the trees too thick to allow tank operations, was....
🍾🎈🎊 *Item company* 🍾🎈🎊
Zero points Rambo, zero. Better luck next time.
You are looking at this from 70years of study. Gavins' bridge was lightly held, but no one knew that at the time. The allies THINK they know there are 1000 tanks in the forest. IF the tanks existed Paratroops taking a bridge only to be ground beneath Panther tanktracks would have been stupid. The issue of "broken" tanks at Arnhem is symptomatic of the times. They trust intelligence that the Germans are in retreat and are broken, because that suits their belief it will win. The then ALSO trust mistaken intelligence about 1000 tanks pointed at the flank, because that threatens their success. Besides, no one knew what the hell Hitler had, least of all Hitler. The Germans propaganda machine was very effective. I have said it is just a matter of if it works, it was a fantastic plan. Since it didn't, it was a fantastic failure. But it was a success in a way, it provided useful intelligence, it siphoned off even more German forces and it was a propaganda event all it's own. The Allies were able and willing to commit that kind or force so soon after D-day. We had unlimited resources.
it wasn't the 9th SS with Victor Graebner sattacked the 82nd with APC's woth mounted mg-42s and self propelled 20 mm AA Guns that chopped up foot sodlies and some half tracks this artillery mounted
You, Good Sir, possess the extraordinary combination of great talent as a military historian and an engrossing video story teller. BRAVO! -- a thumb's up and new subscriber here. It's been a happy day for me discovering you. To borrow a line from Charles Dickens, I say, "Please, sir, I want some more."
Pls do a video on the commando raid at St. Nazaire. Also do one on Wojtek the Polish soldier bear.
Apart from some awesome Stalingrad videos coming up, Operation Crusader's the next Battlestorm documentary. However, I will do St Nazaire at some point
Looking forward to it. This leaves only "Operation adorable big Polish bear at the Glascow Zoo" I don't wanna brag but I'm a veteran so u must do it/him justice.
Jeremy Clarkson did St. Nazaire,
That would be great. I used to work with a close relative of Lt Tibbits who made the explosives and so much more. My old work mate (nephew I think) knew almost nothing of his gallant relative and did not know there was a memorial at St Nazaire till I found it whilst on holiday
Simon,
Yeah I had no idea about the St. Nazaire raid and I like WW2 stuff. The one BBC program was quite good but their must be an incredible back story to the thing.
Of the errors of this operation, thanks for the through analysis and presentation.