Operation Market Garden Reconsidered
By Lloyd Clark

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

I first read about Operation Market Garden as a nine-year-old school-boy in England and was immedi-ately entranced by the remarkable airborne effort to liberate the Netherlands in September 1944 and hasten the end of the war. I gulped down books on the subject, demanded that my parents take me to see Richard Attenborough’s film A Bridge Too Far, and asked for the soundtrack for my birthday. It wasn’t just the images of vast air armadas droning through the morning sky, or the scenes of tenacious airborne forces deep behind enemy lines awaiting relief by advancing ground forces; I was in awe of the operation’s ambition and its massive scale.

And because everything I had been told was summed up by the words of the author who described the operation as “an unmitigated disaster both absolute and terrible,” I also wanted to understand why Market Garden had failed. I lapped up the conclusion of British military historian Ronald Lewin: “Naked courage lacked the bodyguard of competent planning, competent intelligence, competent technology,” and then went on to offer this searing indictment: “War’s objective is victory, not only the Victoria Cross, and it was shameful that by the autumn of 1944 we could still be so amateur.” This was the conventional wisdom and, I, too, became a fervent detractor of Market Garden.

But as I went on to become a serious student of military history and learned to be more critical, to understand strategy and its relation to the operational level, to work ever more closely with the military and to explore the old battlefield itself, I found myself questioning some of the more glib criticisms made of the operation. Although I am criticisms made of the operation. Although I am well aware of the numerous errors made in all of the operation’s phases, I have become a defender of Market Garden. It was a bold but justifiable gamble made in a heady atmosphere in which a quick end to the war with Germany seemed tantalizingly possible. And even in its undeniable failure it reaped tangible but largely unrecognized successes, weakening the German forces in Holland at a time when they could ill afford major combat losses and paving the way for the ultimately successful invasion of western Germany.

It is ludicrous—and disrespectful—to believe that Allied commanders in the autumn of 1944 needed to be reminded that “war’s objective is victory, not only the Victoria Cross.” Operation Market Garden did not take place in the strategic vacuum such words imply, for Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s scheme had to fit into the grand design dictated by his boss, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Indeed, Ike approved Market Garden because he believed it held great strategic merit and had the potential to solve several problems the Allies had created for themselves owing to the speed of their advance after the Battle of Normandy.

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

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

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

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