Operation Market Garden Reconsidered
By Lloyd Clark

World War II  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Obviously the planners did not pay sufficient respect to the enemy; this was what made men like Sosabowski and Urquhart question the wisdom of the operation. Yet, with heavy hitters such as Churchill, Gen. George C. Marshall (the U.S. Army chief of staff), Eisenhower, Montgomery, Brereton, and Browning all behind Market Garden, it attained unstoppable momentum.

In fact, the Germans were increasingly capable of undermining the Allied plan. One reason for this was the presence of so many extremely able senior commanders in and around the Market Garden area. These included Field Marshal Walther Model, commander of Army Group B, who had recently sited his headquarters in Oosterbeek alongside one of the British 1st Airborne Division’s intended routes to Arnhem. Model had helped to create growing order out of the chaos of early September and was in the process of reinforcing his front. One of his new formations was the First Parachute Army, commanded by the skillful Gen. Kurt Student, which had its headquarters just off the main Eindhoven–Nijmegen highway. Bittrich’s panzer corps was located just twenty-five miles from Arnhem. All three men had developed contingency plans for an Allied attack and ensured that they could counter quickly.

The Allied operation began the morning of September 17, with spectacularly successful daylight insertions of the airborne troops accurately hitting their drop zones and landing zones that afternoon.

Yet their very success actually assisted the German response from the start. Because the troops weren’t scattered, the Germans could easily pinpoint where they had hit the ground and make a quick deduction of the likely objectives of the Allied operation. Troops from some SS units that were about to board a train back to Germany for reorganization were summarily stopped and turned around.

“Now we immediately received weapons,” SS Cpl. Paul Müller remembers. “Everyone got a rifle and ninety rounds of ammunition which was stuffed into our pockets or haversacks, because we no longer had our ammunition pouches, steel helmets, or entrenching tools.”

Meanwhile, local field commanders did what they could to stall the Allied airborne forces. SS Maj. Sepp Krafft sent his under-strength SS Panzer Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion, which had been exercising in the woods near the British drop and landing zones, to immediately block routes into Arnhem. One of the British units they stopped was the reconnaissance squadron, which had sped off by jeep to capture the bridge at Arnhem ahead of the rest of the 1st Parachute Brigade, approaching on foot.

Trooper Arthur Barlow recalled what happened when his vehicle came under German machine gun fire: “[We] ran to the road verge on the right hand side of the jeep.…The heavy machine gun fire continued. Minns, being more exposed, had his hip shattered and other wounds, and lay in the road bleeding profusely, calling for help. Thomas was hit in the foot, whilst Hasler was hit in both legs and unable to move.…[McGregor] raised himself up on his hands to have a look around and died immediately, falling flat on his face without making a sound, killed by a burst of machine-gun fire in the face and chest.”

The success of Krafft’s defensive enterprise meant that only a small force of 720 airborne soldiers managed to get through to Arnhem bridge (see related story,“They Stood to Their Guns,” p. 62). Urquhart’s prospects never recovered from this early blow, and the majority of his division eventually became isolated and surrounded miles from the bridge.

One of the most obvious weaknesses in the Market Garden plan was XXX Corps’s reliance on a single road—“Hell’s Highway,” as the American 101st Airborne Division called it. Indeed, Maj. Freddie Hennessy, the operations officer of the Guards Armoured Division, which was in the vanguard of the push up the road, compared advancing sixty-four miles on a narrow highway over several major water crossings to “threading seven needles with one piece of cotton, and we only have to miss one to be in trouble.”

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Airborne Operations, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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