Operation Market Garden Reconsidered
By Lloyd Clark

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

The remainder of the British 1st Airborne Division continued to fight from slit trenches and burning buildings outside Arnhem. Here the battle was not only ferocious but often at close quarters. “We heard a great deal of shouting and prepared ourselves for yet another attempt by the enemy to dislodge us from our house,” Staff Sgt. Les Frater said of one German attack. “Over they came, screaming and yelling, and this time they made it to the house. I could see them through the iron grille on the front door and fired up the hallway at point-blank range, working the bolt of my rifle as fast as I could, dodging back behind the wall to reload hastily, and then firing again.”

Although there were attempts to reinforce the division with units from the Polish Brigade and XXX Corps, they largely failed. Thus, high on casualties and low on everything required to sustain themselves, some four thousand British and Polish troops were evacuated across the Lower Rhine the night of September 25–26. Market Garden had come to an end.

There is no doubt that Operation Market Garden failed. No matter how close XXX Corps got to Arnhem, the British Second Army did not cross its bridge over the Rhine, and the war in Europe continued into 1945. There were some remarkably courageous acts by units and individuals: indeed, five Victoria Crosses and two Medals of Honor were later awarded. But many argued then and since that all that courage was in vain. When one equates the ground taken (a vulnerable finger pointing toward the Lower Rhine) to the cost (nearly eleven thousand airborne casualties and more than five thousand ground casualties), the outcome of Market Garden looks abject.

“Through inappropriate risk-taking, underestimation of the enemy, the neglect of unpalatable information and a failure of technology,” British author Norman Dixon wrote, “military decisions by able brains, at high levels of command, brought down misery and chaos.”

Such words raise the question of whether the operation should ever have been mounted. But the majority of the military hierarchy, as well as the airborne troops themselves, were willing and ready to take bold operational risks. With the Germans in retreat, September 1944 was just the time for a daring operation to bring down the final curtain. Gavin, for one, later reflected, “We knew that the risks were great, but we believed that the battle we were about to fight would lead to the battle that would bring the war to an end.” The British prime minister went further in the immediate aftermath of the operation: “The battle was a decided victory.…I have not been afflicted by any feelings of disappointment over this and am glad our commanders are capable of running this kind of risk.”

Churchill’s thoughts would be less cogent if the potential gains that a successful Market Garden offered had not been so great and the operation had not come so close to succeeding. Delays notwithstanding, XXX Corps was within just a few hours of linking up with the small airborne force holding out at Arnhem bridge. With a little more luck—better weather for example—the operation could have worked despite its planning weaknesses. In other words, the risk became “inappropriate” only in hindsight because Market Garden failed. However, neither Montgomery—who suggested that the operation was “90 per cent successful”—nor the British Official History viewed the operation as a disaster. The latter argued, “Operation Market Garden accomplished much of what it had been designed to accomplish. Nevertheless, by the merciless logic of war, Market Garden was a failure.”

Although these two sources are not without obvious bias, the venture did yield some tangible gains: the Germans, already severely weakened by the Soviets pushing in from the east, were in no position to absorb the eight thousand casualties and equipment losses they suffered as a result of the operation. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the German commander in chief West, was prevented from using his forces to strengthen the defenses of their homeland against the Allies. Furthermore, the Germans never reclaimed the proportion of the Netherlands liberated up to the Waal, and that area subsequently became the springboard from which the final western offensive into Germany was launched.

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

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