Comments by "Dave M A C" (@davemac1197) on "TIKhistory"
channel.
-
Not bizarre if you're across all of the facts:
The concern was that II.SS-Panzerkorps was known to be in northeastern Netherlands with two shattered SS-Panzer-Divisions under command - the 9.'Hohenstaufen' and the 10.'Frundsberg' Divisions. The Dutch resistance had only identified elements of the 9.SS-Panzer among the scattered troops billeted in the area between Arnhem-Apeldoorn-Deventer-Ruurlo, and they had identified a divisional headquarters at Ruurlo, but not which division it belonged to.
The Allied intelligence assessment (the latest before the operation was SHAEF Weekly Intel Summary #26, dated 16 September 1944) was that these divisions were each reduced to a regimental battlegroup with few if any tanks, and that they were refitting by drawing new tanks from a depot thought to be in the Kleve area just across the German border southeast of Nijmegen. There was a fear that the Reichswald could be hiding up to 1,000 tanks - hyperbole that started a silly rumour the tanks were actually there, and Gavin was told the excellent Dutch army barracks facillites in Nijmegen may have a regiment of SS troops in them.
This in turn created the concern over the Groesbeek heights - an area of woodland ridge line that was a natural defensive position between the drop zones and the city of Nijmegen with its bridges. It was for this reason the 508th PIR had to seize three initial objectives on the ridge at De Hut (2nd Battalion), De Ploeg (1st Battalion), and Berg-en-Dal (3rd Battalion), but as soon as this was achieved the 508th were expected to send 1st Battalion into the city to seize the highway bridge as soon as possible, and this is where things went wrong - the precise details of which are the answer to another question and not the one you're asking here, so that's a discussion for another comment.
Browning's dismissal of the tanks photographed by reconnaissance Spitfire on 12 September in the Deelerwoud north of Arnhem, was based on his view that the tanks were obsolete models and probably not even serviceable. This story rested on Browning's Corps Intelligence Officer, Major Brian Urquhart (name changed to 'Fuller' in the film A Bridge Too Far), who connected these tanks to the Dutch resistance reports and gave his story to Cornelius Ryan in an interview for his 1974 book, A Bridge Too Far. The 1977 film is based on the book and is highly controversial, not least because Browning's widow and actor Dirk Bogarde both objected to the portrayal of Browning in the film, but Bogarde didn't opt to turn down the part and seems (in my personal opinion watching the film) to have sought to mitigate the script by playing the character as somewhat conflicted. I presume it was all he could do, or pass and have someone else play the role. By the way, Bogarde served in the war as an RAF photo interpreter working on Dempsey's 2nd Army staff, selecting bombing targets during the European campaign, including Operation Market Garden. He knew all the key personalities, including Montgomery and Browning.
The problem with Major Brian Urquhart's testimony is that Browning was no longer alive to give his side of the story, and the photo in question was no longer available... until 2015. The photo (Frame 4015 taken 12 Sep 44 by 541 Sqn), along with the RAF's entire library of images, was donated to the Dutch government after the war to help with reconstruction and land use surveys, and only came to light when the Dutch government digitised their archives and put them online. The key photo frame was identified and studied by the RAF's Air Historical Branch, and under magnification the tanks can be determined to be Mark III and older Mark IV models (with the short 7.5cm gun), ruling out a 1944 panzer division as the likely owner. The study is available as a free pdf called 'Arnhem: The Air Reconnaissance Story' (2nd Ed, 2019) on the RAF MoD site.
So, we now know which unit the tanks belonged to, because the only unit in the Netherlands with those vehicles at the time (before Market Garden started) was the Reserve Panzer Kompanie of Fallschirm-Panzer-Ersatz-und-Ausbildungs-Regiment 'Hermann Göring', the training unit for the Luftwaffe's only panzer division currently fighting the Soviets in Poland. The Regiment was based in Utrecht and the Reserve Panzer Kompanie in Harderwijk on the Zuider Zee coast.
During the crisis in the west in September 1944, the 1.Fallschirm-armee was formed to plug the gap in the line in Belgium. the 'HG' Regiment transferred to it from LXXXVIII Korps (Netherlands occupation forces), and the three training Abteilungen (infanterie/panzer/artillerie) were mobilised and sent south to fight British 2nd Army on the Albert canal. The Reserve Panzer Kompanie was mobilised on 7 September and sent to Hechtel in Belgium to join II.Abteilung, but only three tanks completed the journey without breaking down, and were destroyed with much of the battalion at Hechtel by Guards Armoured Division on 12 September, the same day the remainder were photographed near Deelen undergoing maintenance (turrets were turned to allow engine hatches to be opened) at a supply dump in the woods near Fliegerhorst Deelen, the largest German airbase in the Netherlands.
On 17 September, the day Market Garden was launched, these tanks were laagered at Wolfswinkel, near Son north of Eindhoven, and they attempted to fire on the drop zone of the 506th PIR (101st Airborne) during the landings, but were shot up by escorting fighter bombers. Two Mark III tanks escaped, one ran the gauntlet of 502nd troopers in St Oedenrode but was only hit by unprimed bazooka rounds, and they both by-passed the 501st at Veghel to bump the E/504th (82nd Airborne) roadblock at Grave. Some casualties were caused to troopers climbing out of their foxholes, in the belief the tanks were the British arriving early, and they then turned tail were not seen again.
So, Browning's dismissal of the tanks in the photo appears to have been good judgement on his part, and history proves that he was right to be more concerned about the unknown location of 10.SS-Panzer-Division - it was not known that the Ruurlo headquarters was the 10.SS-Panzer-Division's, the 9.SS-Panzer were headquartered at Beekbergen near Apeldoorn.
Your question is all part of the Arnhem mythology created by Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far, but I hope I've been able to answer this part of it at least.
15
-
12
-
10
-
9
-
17:20 - "So Gavin is admitting that he didn't follow orders by giving out pre-drop orders, and we know he really didn't give those pre-drop orders." - Actually we do, but you need a couple of books not on TIK's booklist, which dig deeper into the story and contain first hand accounts by people who were in the final divisional briefing confirming Gavin instructed Lindquist to send a battalion directly to the bridge:
September Hope – The American Side of a Bridge Too Far, John C McManus (2012), Chapter 3 –
As Gavin finished his briefing, the British General [Browning] cautioned him: “Although every effort should be made to effect the capture of the Grave and Nijmegen bridges, it is essential that you capture the Groesbeek ridge and hold it.”
General Browning’s order, of course, made perfect sense. It was of paramount importance to hold the high ground. Any commander worth his salt understood that. Even so, the purpose of Market Garden was to seize the bridges in order to speedily unleash a major armored thrust into northern Germany, toward Berlin. High ground notwithstanding, the only way for the Allies to accomplish this ambitious objective was to take the bridges, and these were, after all, perishable assets, because the Germans could destroy them (and might well be likely to do so the longer it took the Allies to take the bridges). By contrast, the Groesbeek ridge spur wasn’t going anywhere. If the 82nd had trouble holding it, and German artillery or counterattacks became a problem, the Allies could always employ air strikes and artillery of their own to parry such enemy harassment. Also, ground troops from Dempsey’s Second Army could join with the paratroopers to retake Groesbeek from the Germans. So, in other words, given the unpleasant choice between the bridges and the hills, the bridges had to come first.
General Gavin did have some appreciation of this. At an earlier meeting with his regimental commanders, he [Gavin] had told Colonel Roy Lindquist of the 508th Parachute Infantry that even though his primary mission was to hold the high ground at Berg en Dal near Groesbeek, he was also to send his 1st Battalion into Nijmegen to take the key road bridge. Gavin told Lindquist to push for the bridge via "the flatland to the east of the city and approach it over the farms without going through the built-up area." Gavin considered this so important that he stood with Lindquist over a map and showed him this route of advance.
At the same time, Colonel Lindquist had trouble reconciling Gavin's priorities for the two ambitious objectives of holding Berg en Dal and grabbing the bridge. He believed that Gavin wanted him to push for the bridge only when he had secured the critical glider landing zones and other high ground. According to Lindquist, his impression was that "we must first accomplish our main mission before sending any sizeable force to the bridge." Actually, General Gavin wanted the 508th to do both at the same time, but somehow this did not sink into the 508th's leadership. "If General Gavin wanted Col Lindquist to send a battalion for the bridge immediately after the drop, he certainly did not make that clear to him," Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Shanley, the executive officer of the 508th, later wrote.
Perhaps this was a miscommunication on Gavin's part, probably not. Lieutenant Colonel Norton, the G-3, was present for the conversation (Shanley was not) and recorded Gavin's clear instructions to Lindquist: "Seize the high ground in the vicinity of Berg en Dal as his primary mission and ... attempt to seize the Nijmegen bridge with a small force, not to exceed a battalion."
Put Us Down In Hell – A Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke (2012), Chapter 9 -
Captain Chet Graham was assigned as the regimental liaison officer with division headquarters. "I sat in on a high level briefing at division headquarters. Colonel Lindquist was told by General Gavin to move to the Nijmegen bridge as soon as Lindquist thought practical after the jump. Gavin stressed that speed was important. He was also told to stay out of the city and to avoid city streets. He told Lindquist to use the west farm area to get to the bridge as quickly as possible as the bridge was the key to the division's contribution to the success of the operation."
- Chet Graham was also witness to what happened when Gavin found out Lindquist was not moving on the bridge, because as liaison officer he was the messenger:
Nordyke, Chapter 10 -
Captain Chet Graham, the regimental liaison officer with division headquarters, decided to obtain a status of the progress toward the capture of the Nijmegen highway bridge. "I went to the 508th regimental CP and asked Colonel Lindquist when he planned to send the 3rd Battalion to the bridge. His answer was, 'As soon as the DZ is cleared and secured. Tell General Gavin that.' So I went through Indian country to the division CP and relayed Lindquist's message to Gavin. I never saw Gavin so mad. As he climbed into his Jeep, he told me, 'come with me - let's get him moving.' On arriving at the 508th regimental CP, Gavin told Lindquist, 'I told you to move with speed.' "
- Based on the timelines, Gavin's intervention to get Lindquist moving, and Lindquist's orders to Warren Shields to get his 1st Battalion out of the line along the Groesbeek ridge and moving into Nijmegen, occurred at 8 PM, around the same time that Gräbner's SS-Panzer-Aufklärungs-Abteilung 9 arrived at the Nijmegen bridge. The first clashes between the two units occured hours later, between 10 PM (when A Company of 1st Battalion moved off from the IP - Initial Point - at the Krayenhoff barracks) and midnight (when the Kanon-Zug of SS-Pz.AA.9 that Gräbner left behind in Nijmegen was withdrawn). The clash occurred at the Keiser Karelplein traffic circle, near the railway station, about 1 km from the highway bridge.
The German movements are recorded in Retake Arnhem Bridge – An Illustrated History of Kampfgruppe Knaust September to October 1944, Bob Gerritsen and Scott Revell (2010). Chapter 4 is based on the diary of SS-Untersturmführer Gernot Traupel, who was acting adjutant to SS-Sturmbannführer Leo-Hermann Reinhold (II./SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 and Kampfgruppe Reinhold in charge of the Nijmegen defence).
My conclusion is that Lindquist was a poor field commander, and Nordyke's earlier chapters on the 508th in Normandy bear this out, so the fault is squarely on Lindquist. However, Gavin was his supervisor and was responsible for his divisional plan. He told Cornelius Ryan in his interview for A Bridge Too Far:
'Gavin and Lindquist had been together in Sicily[?] and Normandy and neither Gavin nor Ridgway, the old commander of the 82nd, trusted him in a fight.
He did not have a “killer instinct.” In Gavin’s words, “He wouldn’t go for the juggler [jugular].” As an administrative officer he was excellent; his troopers were sharp and snappy and, according to Gavin, “Made great palace guards after the war.”
Gavin confirms he ordered Lindquist to commit a battalion to the capture of the Nijmegen bridge before the jump. He also confirms he told Lindquist not to go to the bridge by way of the town but to approach it along some mud flats to the east.
We discussed also objectives. Gavin’s main objectives were the heights at Groesbeek and the Grave bridge; he expected and intelligence confirmed “a helluva reaction from the Reichswald area.” Therefore he had to control the Groesbeek heights. The Grave bridge was essential to the link up with the British 2nd Army. He had three days[?] to capture the Nijmegen bridge and, although he was concerned about it, he felt certain he could get it within three days.
The British wanted him, he said, to drop a battalion on the northern end of the bridge and take it by coup de main. Gavin toyed with the idea and then discarded it because of his experience in Sicily. There, his units had been scattered and he found himself commanding four or five men on the first day. For days afterward, the division was completely disorganized.'
(Notes on meeting with J.M. Gavin, Boston, January 20, 1967 - James Maurice Gavin, Box 101 Folder 10, Cornelius Ryan Collection, Ohio State University)
8
-
3,300 was Model's estimate for German casualties in Market Garden, according to Robert Kershaw's book It Never Snows In September (1990), which has a note on German casualties in Appendix C (page 339 in the downloadable pdf version).
As a British Army liasion officer to the West German Bundeswehr with access to their records, Kershaw's study of the Arnhem-Oosterbeek casualties alone comes to 2,565 with the note: "(understatement as unit records incomplete)". Most of the units listed in his Arnhem-Oosterbeek tally suffered an estimated 50% casualties quite consistently.
The biggest problem with German records is that the Luftwaffe in particular were very efficient at destroying their records at the end of the war, so there are no complete 'official' figures possible and much of the Market Garden corridor was in Student's 1.Fallschirm-Armee (from which no records survived), and only from the Waal defence line northwards involved von Tettau's forces and II.SS-Panzerkorps, from which Kershaw was able to draw his Arnhem-Oosterbeek figures. 6,000-9,000 for the whole of Market Garden may still be a conservative figure. Some historians suggest it may be over 13,000 if you have a brief look on the internet.
Swedish historian, Christer Bergström, is probably the most neutral author on the subject in his two volume book Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited (2019, 2020), which researched Cornelius Ryan's documents and interviews and debunks the many myths in the Hollywood film version of his book A Bridge Too Far. In volume 2 chapter VII: Results and Conclusions, he has this to say on German casualties:
'On the German side, there is no reliable compilation of losses. According to the war diary for OB West, the battle of Arnhem cost the Germans a loss of 3,300 men, about one third of whom, that is, about 1,100, were killed. However, counting soldier's graves shows that 1,725 Germans were killed in the Arnhem area between 17 and 26 September 1944. If we take a 1:3 ratio between killed and all casualties (killed, wounded and missing) as our starting point, that means that the real German losses would amount to somewhere in the region of 5,000 men.
However, "Market Garden" comprised much more than just the battle of Arnhem. Cornelius Ryan estimated the German losses at Nijmegen and around "Club Route" during the same period at another 7,000 to 10,000 men, perhaps one fourth of whom were killed. This - which is of course based on very deep knowledge of the battle - still seems to hold up. 59.Infanterie-Division alone lost, on 19 September at Best - out of a force of 2,500 men - 300 killed and 1,400 captured as well as a non specified number of wounded.'
So to me, a figure of 6,000 to 9,000 "in the heads of the British" would be a very conservative estimate indeed. It strikes me that you don't really understand how fair-minded the British people really are. I recall a scene in the film Battle of Britain (1969) in which Air Chief Marshal Dowding (Laurence Olivier) receives a phone call from the government minister complaining that he's having trouble with their people in Washington, they don't believe Dowding's claims on casualties, are they reliable? Dowding replies that he doesn't care about figures. If the figures are right, they (the Germans) will give up. If they're wrong, they'll be in Whitehall within a week, and he hangs up the phone.
People in the UK get fed up with the continual anti-British crap in YouTube comments. If you continue with the crap, you'll continue to get pushback.
8
-
8
-
8
-
7
-
Obviously, Sir, you're an expert on these matters, with all your medals and successful campaigns...
TIK has done an excellent job of research and critical thinking, but he could have gone further and found more evidence against Gavin in his own words to the official US Army historian, his interview with Cornelius Ryan, and from other first hand witness accounts in books by American historians:
Letter General Gavin to Historical Officer Captain Westover, 17 July 1945
Notes on meeting with J.M. Gavin, Boston, January 20, 1967 (James Maurice Gavin, Box 101 Folder 10, Cornelius Ryan Collection, Ohio State University)
September Hope - The American Side of a Bridge Too Far, John C McManus (2012)
Put Us Down In Hell - The Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke (2012)
7
-
@ErikExeu -Best is an interesting example because it was not a bridge Dempsey requested or had a use for, probably because the road it carried was headed toward the XII Corps boundary and would cause more problems than it would solve for both Corps if XXX Corps used it as an alternative crossing. The bridge was selected by Taylor on his own initiative in case the Son bridge was blown, but in the event both were on a prepared defence line along the Wilhelmina canal and both bridges were blown on D-Day, resulting in a wasteful battle at Best for a bridge that was already lost and eventually drew in most of the 502nd Regiment with high casualties.
I still don't know what you mean by the flanking Corps "not properly integrated in the fighting" - I think not properly integrated in the public consciousness would be a more accurate statement, despite appearing (although not explained) in an episode of Band of Brothers.
A Better 'Heart Route' example that was actually used would be the Heumen lift bridge on the Maas-Waal canal, also on a prepared defence line and the only intact alternative to the damaged Honinghutje road bridge on the main 'Club Route' - the demolition charges failed to detonate, but the bridge was damaged by the successfully demolished rail spans directly next to it, and engineers deemed the structure too weak for the tanks and only suitable for light traffic.
On the terrain aspects, it did vary over the length of the corridor - there were areas where armoured operations off the roads were possible and some sections where it was not. One of the problems with public perception is the opening breakout scene in the Hollywood film, which is almost completely wrong in creating the impression the tanks could not leave the road in that (or any) section of the advance - they could, and did. (That scene also completely misrepresented the positioning of the German anti-tank guns and the part they played). I have at least one publication showing Irish Guards Shermans moving across the fields to attack German forces in farms and woodlands on the flanks - the After The Battle magazine publication of Operation Market Garden - Then And Now edited by Karel Margry (2002) definitely has those photographs. That publication also has a sketch map showing the corridor broken down into sections with notes on the terrain - the section between Nijmegen and Arnhem being the worst, and it was planned that the advance would be led by 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division for that section and unexpected events at Nijmegen impacted that plan adversely - they were committed to mopping up operations in Nijmegen and the Irish Guards (again) had to continue the advance in terrain they were not expected to have to deal with.
As for Guderian advising against using tanks in terrain which was not suitable - I'm sure his advice was not as simple as that. Model was planning his counter-offensive to recapture Antwerp from the Netherlands - the reason he didn't want to authorise demolition of the main bridges. The Germans were not averse to using armour in "unsuitable" terrain, regardless of whether it's in the Netherlands or th Ardennes. It may be difficult, but it's certainly not impossible, and having armoured support for the infantry is advantageous in any terrain. The Germans used tanks on the Nijmegen 'island' (the Betuwe) quite effectively - the blocking line based on the hedgehog positions at Oosterhout-Ressen-Bemmel involved the three StuGs from 7./SS-Panzer-Regiment 10, the tanks from Panzer Kompanie Mielke attached to Kampfgruppe Knaust, and at least two Tiger I tanks from Panzer Kompanie Hummel (based on tracks and 8.8cm shell casings found later on the line). They also later fed in at least some of the 20 Panthers Model sent directly from the factory and crewed by the SS-Panzer-Regiment 9 'alarm kompanie' - photographs of several Panther wrecks in the Elst area are testament to their deployment. The rapid advance of XXX Corps from Son to Nijmegen in just a few hours is evidence that the route and the terrain were not a total impediment, and the operation was still broadly on schedule until they reached Nijmegen, where the delay fatal to the operation occurred. The failure of MARKET to secure some bridges was the major impediment, and the cumulative compromises in the airborne planning process were the cause, not the ground advance.
Criticising "the plan" is a bit moot when the fatal compromise was the failure to carry out a critical part of the plan - namely the capture of the Waal highway bridge at Nijmegen on D-Day, but the nice thing about that story is that we know the 'what-if' scenario of the 1st Battalion 508th going straight to the bridge as instructed would have worked, because three men from the battalion S-2 Section did in fact do that and captured the southern end of the bridge and seven prisoners without even firing a shot. They graphically demonstrated what the battalion could have done if they had moved "with speed" as Gavin had intended, and would in fact have replicated the position that Frost had established at the highway bridge at Arnhem.
7
-
7
-
I've just watched the first part of this video again and TIK's information is out of date, but I know his later videos on Market Garden was clearer on some of these points, particluarly his videos on Browning and Gavin at Nijmegen:
17:15 - the reason the Son and Best bridges were quickly blown by the Germans was because the Wilhelmina canal was a prepared defence line, manned by the Luftwaffe training unit, Flieger-Regiment 53 in this sector, and at the bridges were batteries of schwere Flak-Abteilung 428 repositioned from Deelen airfield. The bridges had 'sprengkommando' (demolition teams), which could blow their bridges on short notice or standing orders, so it's hardly surprising both of these bridges at Best and Son were demolished as soon as they were threatened. The bridge at Son was supported by 4 x 8.8cm guns and 3 x 2cm autocannon from 4./s.Flak.Abt 428. There was one 8.8cm each on the north canal bank west and east of the bridge, and the west gun held up 1st Battalion 506th moving through the forest, and two more 8.8cm on the main street north of the bridge that could fire directly down the street, so they turned their barrels around to fire north at the 2nd Battalion 506th troopers (I believe Dog Company was leading and Easy were at the rear of the column on this occasion, which would have made Perconte happy at least). The other two 8.8cm guns, 'E' and 'F' guns from the battery, had been detached to Klooster Dreef and Woenselsche Straat in the northern suburbs of Eindhoven, and were captured the next day by Fox Company 506th in a flanking move using the back streets.
17:45 - XXX Corps being delayed by having to build a replacement for the Son bridge is a very common perception, but John Sliz in his book, Bridging The Club Route - Guards Armoured Division's Engineers During Market Garden (2015, 2016) and part of his excellent and informative Market Garden Engineers series, makes a good point that because the Irish Guards reached the Son bridge site at 1900 hrs, and the advance party of Royal Engineers at 1930 hrs as it was getting dark, the bridging equipment arrived at 2000 hrs to begin work immediately and the Bailey bridge was built in 10 hours 15 minutes entirely during the hours of darkness, when it was doctrine not to operate tanks, so the delay was effectively zero at Son. The tanks would have stopped in the Eindhoven/Son area anyway that night. The first armoured cars of the Household Cavalry moved over the bridge at 0615 hrs on the 19 September before first light and the Grenadier Guards' tanks crossed at Dawn. Horrocks had ordered that tanks were not to advance at night, as was standard procedure. In his book Corps Commander (1977), he said he had twice risked an advance into enemy territory during his career and both times it had paid off. He thought that during Market Garden he would be pushing his luck if he risked it a third time and he was already irked by the fact the operation had started on a Sunday. In his experience, no major operation starting on a Sunday had gone well.
17:52 - the glider crash near General Kurt Student's headquarters did not carry the full operational plans for Market Garden, this was a prop used in the film A Bridge Too Far in the earlier briefing scene, giving a false impression. The glider was a US WACO (not a British Horsa - another prop built for the film for other scenes and reused for this one) carrying the US 101st Airborne's liaison officer and Comms team to Browning's Corps HQ at Groesbeek. It was the main reason Browning had no radio communications with the 101st during the operation. The officer was carrying a number of documents that Student had translated and he realised the significance of a resupply schedule for the 101st Division, as his airborne experience told him he could extrapolate the airlift schedule for all three divisions. Model was unconvinced, so Student used his own Luftwaffe chain of command to alert fighter aircraft to be over the drop zones when the airlifts were due. Fortunately, they were all delayed by weather and the fighters were back at base being refuelled when the transports finally arrived.
18:45 - the real priority was the Nijmegen bridge, but it's not correct that the 1st Battalion 508th were ordered to take the bridge, not until Gavin found out the regiment were dug-in on the heights and not moving. He had specifically ordered the regiment commander, Colonel Roy Lindquist, to "move with speed" on the bridge as soon as possible after landing and securing their initial objectives on the heights. When Gavin went to the 508th CP to get Lindquist moving, Lindquist then ordered the 1st Battalion to be prepared to move, and this came as a total surprise to battalion commander Shields Warren. This is essentially why Market Garden failed, and only recently published books have exposed the true story and overturned the conventional narrative of Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far, published in 1974, who had failed to pick this up in his research.
Sources:
Lost At Nijmegen, RG Poulussen (2011)
Put Us Down In Hell - A Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke (2012)
September Hope - The American Side of a Bridge Too Far, John C McManus (2012)
The 508th Connection, chapter 6 - Nijmegen Bridge, Zig Boroughs (2013)
Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited, vols 1 and 2, Christer Bergström (2019, 2020)
7
-
They did provide flanking forces, and if you're under the impression they didn't because of Hollywood, then episode 4 of Band of Brothers 'Replacements' actually shows them doing exactly this, but not explained explicitly. The 11th Armoured Division's advance to Nuenen from Eindhoven on 19/20 September with support from the US 506th PIR was a reconnaissance in force to help open up the advance of the flanking British VIII Corps, which had a dedicated MSR (Main Supply Route) called 'Spade Route'. The XII Corps was also on the left flank, with their own MSR called 'Diamond Route'.
The VIII Corps consissted of 11th Armoured and 3rd Infantry Divisions, but their start in Market Garden was delayed by the fact they had no captured bridge over the Meuse-Escaut canal in Belgium, like the central XXX Corps on the 'Club Route'. While the 3rd Infantry Division were constructing a Bailey bridge at Sint Huibrechts-Lille over the canal, 11th Armoured got permission to use the 'Club Route' bridge at Neerpelt and their MSR as far as Eindhoven in order to strike right towards Nuenen, into the rear area of German units holding the Meuse-Escaut line in the Sint Huibrechts-Lille area. They bumped Panzerbrigade 107, which was based at Nuenen for strikes against the Market Garden corridor at the Son bridge on the Wilhelmina canal, and the 11th Armoured/506th PIR patrol helped dislodge them and persuade them to withdraw. This is protrayed in Band of Brothers as a failure or retreat on the main MARKET GARADEN axis, but it's simply nonsense. Stephen Ambrose got many of his facts wrong on this episode in his book.
VIII Corps' axis of advance ('Spade Route') was towards Helmond and Gennep on the river Maas. They eventually made contact with 82nd Airborne patrols in the area of Mill and Haps, if I recall, which was an area not strongly occupied by the Germans and the 82nd's Reconnaissance Platoon (using armored Jeeps) made contact with VIII Corps units - probably Inns of Court Reconnaissance Regiment (armoured cars) in this area.
XII Corps' axis of advance ('Diamond Route') was from the Meuse-Escaut canal at Lommel, also having to construct a Bailey bridge, with 7th Armoured, 53rd (Welsh) and 15th (Scottish) Infantry Divisions, and was aimed at 's-Hertogenbosch.
The flanking Corps' progress was also slower than XXX Corps because Montgomery did not receive the "absolute" priority of supplies promised by Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Bedell Smith, during his 12 September visit - there seems to be a language barrier on the meaning of the word "absolute", so the priority of supplies obviously went to XXX Corps on the centre line. 11th Armoured Division also started a day late due to having to relocate from Antwerp, which it had captured on 4 September while under XXX Corps command and was switched from the 2nd Army's left flank to the right for MARKET GARDEN.
Descriptions like "deep thin rapier thrust" is misleading, and it comes from some of the histories - Cornelius Ryan was the most responsible, only mentioning XII and VIII Corps just once in his book when Model struck at Veghel five days into the operation, and said the flanking Corps had only reached Son - not true - they had advanced further than that when the corridor was cut north of Veghel and the 506th were already free to have moved up to Uden at the time and helped the 501st at Veghel reopen the corridor by striking south to meet them.
I've never heard the RAF said they couldn't fly twice a day (do you have a source?) - they were doing if for operation COMET, which was only cancelled at the last minute as the men were loading their aircraft at 0200 hrs on 10 September for the dawn first airlift. Montgomery and Browning's proposed upgrade operation SIXTEEN (approved by Eisenhower) retained the double airlift and dawn glider coup de main raids on the three main bridges from COMET, but because the upgrade added the two US Airborne divisions, the detailed planning was handed over to USAAF Generals Brereton and Williams of 1st Allied Airborne Army and US IX Troop Carrier Command respectively. It was Williams who decided his troop carriers could not fly twice a day, and the glider coup de main raids (RAF tugs and British glider troops) were also cancelled by Williams because he determined the raids would be too risky in broad daylight. The main reasons seem to be a lack of night-trained navigators in the USAAF Troop Carrier units, the available turnaround time between lifts required for aircraft maintenance was deemed insufficient, and concerns over flak near the bridges.
The RAF had been bombing Germany at night for years, so they had night-trained navigators on every plane, including the obsolete Stirlings they were using as glider tugs in 1944. I have Dutch researcher Hans Den Brok's Market Flights volumes that cover the Arnhem and Nijmegen airlifts, and the crew rosters show that only a small number of C-47s even had five-man crews including a navigator (the four man crew is a pilot, co-pilot, radio operator and crew chief), and these were leading the serials while the other aircraft followed behind. The USAAF had far greater numbers than the RAF in 1944, but they were less capable in comparison. This was a common theme throughout the war - the US achieved a rapid expansion of its forces in order to bully its way into becoming the 'senior partner' in the alliance, but it had sacrified quality in order to achieve quantity. The US Troop Carriers were often criticised for being insufficiently trained, and Gavin lamented the fact the USAAF glider pilots were a liability once on the ground and advocated for combat training and equipment to match the doctrine of the British Army's Glider Pilot Regiment, which provided two Wings (battalions) of light infantry fighting at Arnhem.
7
-
@thevillaaston7811 - I was reading Roger Cirillo's PhD thesis on the Market Garden Campaign (available online) on the shenanigans going on with Operation Linnet II. Brereton was trying to get Browning fired so he could replace him with Ridgway. I was actually trying to find some information on the falling out between Montgomery and Bradley over Linnet II but never got to the bottom of that (I suppose you could read their memoirs and decide for yourself, but I thought it would be nice to get some objective research on it). So because Browning had already threatened to resign over Linnet II (because the timescale was too short to print and distribute maps for the troops involved) he realised Brereton would gladly accept his resignation and withdrew the threat.
Thankfully, the ground troops reached the drop zones around Liege and Maastricht before the operation could be launched, so it was cancelled. Linnet II was a creation by Brereton purely on his own initiative, it was not requested by 21st Army Group (to which 1st AAA was attached and supposed to be supporting), but the Liege-Maastricht area of operations was within the US XIX Corps area of US 1st Army, and according to Roger Cirillo, Bradley didn't request it either (maybe Montgomery thought he had and that's the source of the falling out, I don't know).
So within this context, I'm not really surprised that Brereton readily backed Williams' objections to certain aspects of the Comet plan being carried over into Market (glider coup de main on the Arnhem, Nijmegen and Grave bridges, and the double airlift on D-Day). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Brereton actually put Williams up to making the objections, because although Comet was ostensibly an all-British operation planned by Browning's British I Airborne Corps staff, it did require one of William's Troop Carrier Groups and it doesn't make any sense to me why Williams would object to the glider coup de main (tugs flown by RAF bombers and release points on the same track as for the main landings zones) for Market when he hadn't objected to it for Comet. The only difference was that Market required all 14 of William's TCGs and not just one, and his argument was that he couldn't afford to lose a single aircraft. Perhaps because the 82nd Division took over the Nijmegen and Grave objectives, they were expected to provide the troops for their own coup de main, I don't know. We only know that Reuben Tucker, the highly experienced 504th PIR commander and a man you don't want to to say 'no' to, insisted on a company landing south of the Grave bridge, so he was given a special drop zone for one company of his 2nd Battalion.
Market Garden was a fuster-cluck, but it was American politics and not British planning that was at fault.
7
-
You might get that impression from A Bridge Too Far - book and film, but both are flawed. The book is incomplete and both versions are heavily biased against the British commanders involved. The "single road" in any literal meaning is a myth.
The ground Operation GARDEN involved not a single armoured division but all three Army Corps of British 2nd Army. Their main supply routes were code named after card suites since the Normandy breakout and used all the way to the end of the war terminating in Germany, and were nothing unique to MARKET GARDEN. The flanking VIII and XII Corps were advancing on 'Spade Route' and 'Diamond Route' respectively, while the centre line XXX Corps were on the more famous Guards Armoured Division's traditional 'Club Route', which had many planned diversions named 'Heart Route' if an alternative bridge crossing was needed. The 'Heart Route' was actually used in a couple of instances, one between Grave and Nijmegen via the Heumen lock bridge, because the Honinghutje bridge over the Maas-Waal canal on the main highway 'Club Route' was damaged in a German attempt at demolition and engineers deemed it too weak for the tanks.
You'll appreciate that none of this is explained in the Hollywood film, which only features three bridges in any detail, and a fourth (at Grave) shown for just ten seconds. The Airborne Operation MARKET involved the capture of about 24 bridges in total, so the attention is on just a handful and assumed connected by a "single road".
Even if a "single road" were true, it doesn't explain the failure of the operation, when the tanks of the Guards Armoured Division reached Nijmegen still on time to get to Arnhem in 2-3 days as intended, but then had to stop there because the River Waal bridges were still in German hands - not part of the MARKET plan at all - and this is where TIK has a point in focusing on Gavin and the 82nd Airborne.
The "single road" is simple misdirection - nice try, but people shouldn't fall for it.
6
-
I find Captain T. Moffatt Burriss to be an unreliable witness. He actually mentions in his own account of 'taking' the Nijmegen highway bridge that he passed an abandoned German anti-tank gun on the riverbank between the two bridges before reaching the highway bridge, just as the 'lead' tanks of the Grenadier Guards crossed over. The anti-tank gun was also mentioned in Grenadier Guards Sergeants Robinson and Pacey's accounts, as it was Pacey's gunner that scored a hit on the gun as he crossed the bridge and forced the crew to abandon it. This was some 45 minutes before Burriss' paratroopers arrived and Carrington's tank crossed over. When Burriss arrived, Robinson and Pacey had gone half a mile up the road into the village of Lent, stopped by an American roadblock (Robinson's tank was hit by an American mine) in the railway embankment underpass. There was also a German StuG III covering the exit of the underpass, preventing any further movement. Neither the tanks or the paratroopers from G Company 504th (who were out of bazooka rounds) were in no position to do anything about the StuG, and it was also well after dark - contrary to the completely false scene of daylight tranquility presented in the Hollywood film that also lacked a burning village, Germans running around everywhere, and mopping up operations.
Carrington's role, as commander of the operation to take the bridge, was to stop at the far end and act as a radio relay between Robinson in Lent and his squadron commander back in Nijmegen. He had no orders to move and had a good technical reason for stopping where he did.
Burriss was understandably emotional after just losing half his men (from I Company 504th) in the river assault crossing, but his lack of dicipline in either threatening Carrington with his Tommy gun or making the story up (it doesn't really make much difference which) does him no credit. Both the Grenadier Guards and the 504th had their orders, and that was to secure the Nijmegen bridgehead, not go to Arnhem. The whole operation MARKET was already compromised on the first day, when the 508th PIR failed to secure the Nijmegen highway bridge while it was still defended by just 18 German guards, and by the time the bridge reinforced with SS panzer troops was finally taken, the Germans had already retaken the Arnhem bridge back from Frost.
6
-
6
-
6
-
@jbjones1957 - the Oxford dictionary definition of "imperative" is "of vital importance; crucial."
I still think this all came out of Browning's planning for COMET and not Montgomery. Montgomery did often involve himself in Dempsey's 2nd Army operations planning, but down to divisional level I don't think he was involved at all. My understanding of military command structures - and I'm fully prepared to be corrected by serving or veteran officers - is that commanders concerned themselves no more than two levels below their own command, so for Montgomery as an Army Group commander he would be working with Dempsey's 2nd Army staff to plan the Corps operations of XXX, VIII and XII Corps, and for the I Airborne Corps component he had meetings directly with Browning.
There's plenty of documented evidence Browning had the view the Groesbeek heights were critical but not a word from Montgomery on this. I wouldn't expect there to be, but it doesn't really make much difference because Browning and Gavin seem to have been in agreement and there was no apparent discord on this point. The heights were an operational concern for 82nd Airborne (and previously 1st Airborne Division for COMET).
With regard to what went wrong at Nijmegen, the issues are the planning compromises - the removal of COMET's dawn glider coup de main assault, the British request (Cornelius Ryan's interview notes with Gavin does not state who specifically) to drop a parachute battalion north of the bridge as an alternative, and the assignment of the 508th PIR to the Nijmegen mission instead of the more experienced and aggressive 505th. The issue on the ground was then the command failure at the top of the 508th in not following Gavin's pre-flight instruction, the instruction is again well-documented, and more recently backed by witnesses to the briefing published in books by John McManus and Phil Nordyke. The bridge was not de-prioritised until after the first belated attempt to secure the bridge in the evening of D-Day, 17 September, had already failed. Browning then overruled Gavin on trying again until the tanks of XXX Corps arrived.
6
-
Oh my gosh, are you having a total meltdown? You're coming across as a two year old that's just had his ice cream taken away from them!
1. "90% success" - was probably Montgomery's coded dig at Eisenhower. Operation MARKET involved 24 bridge targets, and a minimum of 10 were needed to get XXX Corps to Arnhem. The 82nd Airborne missing one at Nijmegen on the first day meant that MARKET had 10% failed. That's how I interpret it.
2. This idea the Poles were blamed for the failure of the operation has no basis in fact. If you have a reference that suggests this, please provide it. I've asked many people for a reference and not a single one has come up with anything. It's a disgusting slur. Sosabowski was criticised by Browning for being difficult to work with and insubordinate to Horrocks at the Valburg conference on 24 September, and the Polish troops lacked discipline when they had a chance to fight the Germans - perhaps understandably - and even the SS complained that Polish troops fired on their medics trying to retrieve wounded from the battlefield (this is in Rob Kershaw's It Never Snows In September, 1990). Montgomery initially wrote to Sosabowski to thank him and his brigade for their efforts and to ask for recommendations for awards. He then changed his tune after receiving reports from Browning and Horrocks and wrote to Alan Brooke (the CIGS) to ask that they be removed from Browning's command. Nowhere in any of that is a suggestion they caused the operation to fail - perhaps because they arrived too late to have a negative impact on an operation that was already compromised. Again - any reference that says otherwise, I would like to see it. People need to put up or shut up about this.
3. Eisenhower approved Browning and Montgomery's outline proposal for operation SIXTEEN as an upgrade to COMET by adding the two US Airborne divisions. USAAF Generals Brereton and Williams at 1st Allied Airborne Army compromised the key features of COMET/SIXTEEN by removing the double airlifts on the first day and deleting the dawn glider coup de main assaults on the Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave bridges. Browning was unable to object to the changes after he had already threatened to resign over Brereton's LINNET II operation that was scheduled with too short notice to print and distribute maps, and Brereton had planned to accept his resignation and replace him with Matthew Ridgway and his US XVIII Airborne Corps for the operation. LINNET II was thankfully cancelled and both men agreed to forget the incident, so Browning withdrew his resignation letter, but his position was now neutralised by American politics.
4. Those four tanks had just fought a major battle and were in no condition to go haring off into the night (tanks in WW2 could not fight at night except for an experimental infra-red system used on some German Panthers). One tank was knocked out on the bridge, one had its crew captured, and of the two that reached the rail overpass in Lent the lead tank was stopped by an American anti-tank mine. The rest of Guards Armoured Division was fully committed to assisting 82nd Airborne's battles in and around Nijmegen.
5. The performance of Urquhart's division was remarkable. Only a reinforced battalion battlegroup held the Arnhem bridge for four days, fulfilling Browning's promise to Montgomery. While a British airborne division was supposed to be able function independently for eight days if properly supplied by air - 1st Airborne at Arnhem held out nine days while most of its resupply fell to the Germans.
6. Urquhart's division did their job, but they quite rightfully ask did everybody else? 1st Airborne's job was not to cover 82nd Airborne's failures by holding out until April 1945 (when Arnhem was finally liberated).
TIK's research and presentation is impeccable, and he could have gone a lot further if he had dug deeper into the 508th PIR's regimental history - it was not just Gavin that had made mistakes, but he was responsible for his divisional plan and the compromises he made. According to his 1967 interview with Cornelius Ryan for A Bridge Too Far, he received "a British request" (probably from Browning) to drop a battalion on the north end of the Nijmegen bridge to seize it by coup de main, and while he toyed with the idea, he said he eventually dismissed it because of his experience with a scattered drop in Sicily. He then instructed Colonel Lindquist of the 508th to send his 1st Battalion directly to the bridge after landing, and this Lindquist failed to do. Lindquist had not performed well in Normandy and Gavin told Cornelius Ryan neither he nor Ridgway (82nd CO in Normandy) trusted Lindquist in a fight.
TIK himself in a video responding to criticism of his Antony Beevor Arnhem book review said history is not a competition. It's about getting to the truth. If you're not on the side of the truth, where does that leave you?
Sources (none are British, they are Irish, American, Dutch, American, American, and Swedish authors):
Notes on meeting with J.M. Gavin, Boston, January 20, 1967 (James Maurice Gavin, Box 101 Folder 10, Cornelius Ryan Collection, Ohio State University)
The MARKET GARDEN Campaign: Allied operational command in northwest Europe, 1944 (Roger Cirillo PhD Thesis, 2001 Cranfield University, College of Defence Technology, Department of Defence Management and Security Analysis)
Lost At Nijmegen, RG Poulussen (2011)
September Hope - The American Side of a Bridge Too Far, John C McManus (2012)
Put Us Down In Hell - The Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke (2012)
Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited vols 1 and 2, Christer Bergström (2019, 2020)
6
-
I have the same reaction when people ask this question: do you expect an Army Group commander to be in the lead tank? Seriously? The other aspect is that as 21st Army Group commander, Montgomery was responsible for strategic planning, not tactical, so once the target of Arnhem for the Rhine crossing was selected over Wesel by Montgomery with Browning's assistance for Operation Comet, Miles Dempsey (British 2nd Army) was informed of the decision and then his staff would carry the detailed planning for the 2nd Army ground forces and Browning's (British I Airborne Corps) staff for the 1st Airborne Division and Polish Brigade element..
When Comet was cancelled by Montgomery, because he became aware of the increased German build-up in the Netherlands (from 'Ultra' and other sources), he proposed an upgraded operation with three divisions by adding the two American units, and with Eisenhower's approval, it was turned over to Brereton's (1st Allied Airborne Army) staff to adapt the cancelled three division Linnet II (Liege-Maastricht bridges) air plan to the Comet drop zones at Arnhem-Nijmegen), and it was there that some of the compromises were made on the air plan, such as removing the glider coup de main attacks on the big bridges and the double airlifts on D-Day.
None of these details are "Monty's plan". They are Brereton's and Dempsey's plans at Army Level. Browning and Horrocks at Corps level, and for the Airborne it was Urquhart, Gavin, and Taylor, responsible for their own divisional plans. Do people really think Monty stayed up late in his caravan every night for a week plotting Johnny Frost's route march to the bridge on a map of Arnhem?
Montgomery's comment that Market Garden was "90% successful" can be interpreted in a number of ways. It may refer to the road mileage from Neerpelt to Arnhem, or it may refer to the fact that 24 bridges were involved in the airborne element and because of multiple redundancy a minimum of 10 bridges on the main supply 'Club Route' are required to get XXX Corps across the Rijn at Arnhem. So, the operation did not depend on 100% success at all, there was flexibility in the plan and the numerous alternative crossings were on route diversions coded 'Heart Route'. Operation Market missed a bridge at Nijmegen, allowing the Germans to reinforce both bridges and hold the operation up on the River Waal for 36 vital hours, so Market was 90% successful. After the tanks of Guards Armoured Division arrived, Operation Garden eventually secured the Nijmegen highway bridge, but could not get to the Arnhem bridge before it was retaken by the Germans, so Garden was 90% successful in the final reckoning as well.
But to assume that's how Montgomery measured the success of the operation as a simple percentage may be missing the point. The point may have been more subtle, like Churchill's House of Commons speech after Dunkirk, with the famous passage beginning "we shall fight them on beaches..." and ending with "... we shall never surrender." Most people listening to that speech over the radio or even in the House of Commons chamber itself were not aware that every word in that passage was carefully chosen using only words derived from Old English, except for the very last word which is derived from the Old French 'sur rendre' (to give up). It was a subtle dig at the French, who had capitulated to Germany, but only the intended recipients of the message would get it.
6
-
6
-
@valiskuk - I'm glad you didn't delete the comment, I think you're on the right track - and too few people are because the conventional narrative has become so widely accepted for so long.
Antwerp is a common diversion - a lot of people think it should have been the priority over a Rhine crossing, but mostly they're the people who think Patton should have crossed the Rhine first. The logic was that a Rhine crossing at Arnhem would be easier sooner rather than later, before the Germans had reinforced their river and canal defence lines. Eisenhower saw that logic and that's why he endorsed the operation. Montgomery was already going to Arnhem with COMET, he only needed Eisenhower's endorsement to expand the operation into MARKET to include the American divisions. Antwerp was needed for Eisenhower's broad front advances into Germany, not for getting to the Rhine, so the argument that Antwerp should have come first is completely beside the point. Opening Antwerp doesn't cut the V-2 supply lines, it doesn't even trap the 15.Armee at Antwerp (only one of Montgomery's wider encirclements could do that after a smaller one fails), and it certainly wouldn't make a later Rhine crossing any easier. So Antwerp is a diversion from the real debate.
The thing about Browning is that his judgement seems to have been spot on. He was right about holding the Arnhem bridge for four days (and perhaps it being "a bridge too far"). He was right to dismiss the aerial photo of German tanks in the Arnhem area - now that the photo has been found it does indeed show obsolete vehicles and not a 1944 panzer division. And he took his Corps HQ to Groesbeek on the first lift at the expense of not more infantry as I had first assumed (38 glider tugs could have taken the second half of the South Staffords battalion) but actually disrupted the original anti-tank gun delivery schedule. I've recently finished reading a new series of books on the Anti-Tank Batteries at Arnhem by Nigel Simpson et al (2019-2023). It's clear from them that heavy armoured counter-attacks were expected and briefed to the AT units, but the fact the German armoured response took several days to build up is a question of judgement, so the guns were not all needed on the first lift, and indeed some that were delivered on the 1st lift barely fired any rounds throughout the whole battle, such was German wariness of British AT guns. His attitude towards the Americans has one of being totally supportive - he won't hear a word against them. I think he took the view of "by their deeds shall they be known" (which is a biblical expression and I've probably butchered it). Maybe he didn't anticipate Cornelius Ryan and Hollywood, I don't know.
I think Gavin does bear a great deal of responsibility for the failure of the operation, but not because he didn't try to get the Nijmegen bridge. Clearly he did, but he was let down by a subordinate and when he found out it was a scene that would have been truly worthy of Ryan O'Neal's soap opera scenery chewing acting, but of course America would never accept the true circumstances being filmed. The internal politics within 82nd Airborne were hinted at by Gavin in his interview with Cornelius Ryan, but how much he appreciated the problems at the time is an open question. In 1967 he told Ryan that Ridgway didn't trust Lindquist and wouldn't promote him. In fact, Ridgway had a problem in that he couldn't promote another colonel from the division over him because Lindquist had seniority. Gavin may have had the same problem because he didn't replace himself as Assistant Division Commander when he inherited the division from Ridgway, so throughout MARKET GARDEN's planning and execution Gavin was running himself ragged doing both jobs (and carrying a jump injury sustained on 17 September).
Best book on the overall operation is Swedish historian Christer Bergström's Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited vols 1 and 2 (2019, 2020). They use unpublished documents and interviews in the Cornelius Ryan Collection and specifically debunk the myths in the Hollywood film version of A Bridge Too Far.
Dutch researcher RG Poulussen's Lost At Nijmegen (2011) and his factbook on the whole operation, Little Sense Of Urgency (2014), are also recommended.
A free download on the aerial photo story is an interesting read and can be found on the RAF's MoD site, called 'Arnhem: The Air Reconnaissance Story', Air Historical Branch (Royal Air Force 2016, 2nd Ed 2019), it's written by Sebastian Ritchie, whose book Arnhem: Myth And Reality: Airborne Warfare, Air Power and the Failure of Operation Market Garden (2011, revised 2019) is a study of the air planning aspects if you want to go further into that side of it.
Best wishes and happy reading.
6
-
I think Browning and Gavin both need to be given more credit for the Nijmegen highway bridge being a primary objective and too much emphasis has been given to Browning's warning to Gavin that the Groesbeek heights also needed to be secured. Because the bridge was not seized on the first day, I think people assume this was intended by the bridge not being given high enough priority. There is an argment that the bridge should have been given more consideration with a coup de main operation, but it was not de-prioritised in favour of the high ground until after the first failed attempt to seize the bridge. The fact is that the officer charged with the capture of the bridge failed to carry out Gavin's instruction, and there's plenty of evidence in the literature, some of it going back to the officer's previous performance in Normandy, to support it.
First, Gavin wrote in his report to US Army Historical Officer, Captain Westover, on 17 July 1945:
"About 48 hours prior to take-off, when the entire plan appeared to be shaping up well, I personally directed Colonel Lindquist, commanding the 508th Parachute Infantry, to commit his first battalion against the Nijmegen bridge without delay after landing, but to keep a very close watch on it in the event he needed it to protect himself against the Reichswald. So I personally directed him to commit his first battalion to this task. He was cautioned to send the battalion via the flat ground east of the city."
In his interview with Cornelius Ryan for A Bridge Too Far, Ryan notes [with my square brackets]:
Gavin and Lindquist had been together in Sicily[?] and Normandy and neither Gavin nor Ridgway, the old commander of the 82nd, trusted him in a fight.
He did not have a “killer instinct.” In Gavin’s words, “He wouldn’t go for the juggler [jugular].” As an administrative officer he was excellent; his troopers were sharp and snappy and, according to Gavin, “Made great palace guards after the war.”
Gavin confirms he ordered Lindquist to commit a battalion to the capture of the Nijmegen bridge before the jump. He also confirms he told Lindquist not to go to the bridge by way of the town but to approach it along some mud flats [polder or farm land] to the east.
We discussed also objectives. Gavin’s main objectives were the heights at Groesbeek and the Grave bridge; he expected and intelligence confirmed “a helluva reaction from the Reichswald area.” Therefore he had to control the Groesbeek heights. The Grave bridge was essential to the link up with the British 2nd Army. He had three days to capture the Nijmegen bridge and, although he was concerned about it, he felt certain he could get it within three days.
The British wanted him, he said, to drop a battalion on the northern end of the bridge and take it by coup de main. Gavin toyed with the idea and then discarded it because of his experience in Sicily. There, his units had been scattered and he found himself commanding four or five men on the first day. For days afterward, the division was completely disorganized.
(James Maurice Gavin, Box 101 Folder 10, Cornelius Ryan Collection, Ohio State University - Notes on meeting with J.M. Gavin, Boston, January 20, 1967)
The British request to drop a battalion north of the bridge for a coup de main was a legacy of Browning's original operation COMET plan to use dawn glider coup de main assaults on all three main bridges - Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Grave - to repeat the success of operation DEADSTICK on the Orne canal and river bridges in Normandy. These elements had been removed by Brereton for the planning of operation MARKET, because he thought it too risky for a daylight assault, having already deleted COMET's double airlift for D-Day. Despite Browning having advised Dempsey (British 2nd Army) that COMET should not go ahead without the glider coup de main assaults, he could not protest their removal by Brereton for MARKET, because he had already threatened to resign over Brereton's LINNET II plan (Liege and Maastricht bridges), scheduled with too short notice to print and distribute maps. LINNET II was thankfully cancelled and the two men agreed to forget the incident, but Browning was now aware Brereton had intended to accept his resignation and replace him with Matthew Ridgway as his deputy and his US XVIII Airborne Corps HQ for the operation. Browning was now politically neutralised and it seems his only influence on the planning for MARKET was to bring forward the delivery of his Corps HQ to Groesbeek on the first lift, where he could at least influence events after the troops had landed, but at the expense of some anti-tank guns going to Urquhart's 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem.
(The MARKET GARDEN Campaign: Allied operational command in northwest Europe, 1944 - Roger Cirillo PhD Thesis, 2001 Cranfield University)
So everything now rested on Gavin's instruction to Colonel Lindquist and the battalion assigned to secure the Nijmegen bridge, but Lindquist failed to appreciate the urgency and importance of the primary objective and sent only a pre-planned recon patrol to the bridge. By the time Gavin found out and ordered Lindquist to get the 1st Battalion moving, it was too late, and the 10.SS-Panzer-Division had won the race to reinforce the city and its bridges. Cornelius Ryan did not explore this aspect of the operation and most historians have also followed Ryan's established narrative. Only more recent books have explored what Gavin had already indicated in 1945 letter and 1967 interview, and if you want to read in detail the drama that followed and is completely absent in A Bridge Too Far, you would have to consult some books written about 12 years ago, although I have posted extracts from these books elsewhere in the comments:
September Hope - The American Side of a Bridge Too Far, John C McManus (2012).
Put Us Down In Hell - A Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke (2012).
The 508th Connection, Zig Boroughs (2013), chapter 6 – Nijmegen Bridge.
6
-
6
-
Well done, and thank you for doing this video. I think you covered all the major issues and certainly did a great job of picking up on points that a lot of (professional?) authors miss. I find the same problems of fighting the conventional narrative or orthodoxy whenever the Montgomery haters (it's almost like a religion) vent their spleen over Market Garden. (By the way, it was Lindquist. Gavin was just his boss, and was very angry when he found out his divisional plan was not followed at Nijmegen against zero opposition and knew this had probably compromised the entire operation - Ref: Phil Nordyke - Put Us Down In Hell, 2012).
A good reference on the German 15.Armee during this period is Jack Didden and Maarten Swarts' new book - The Army That Got Away - The 15.Armee in the Summer of 1944 (2022). It's effectively a prequel to their first book, Autumn Gale (Herbststurm) - Kampfgruppe Chill, schwere Heeres Panzer-Jäger-Abteilung 559 and the German recovery in the Autumn of 1944 (2013). These books are heavy, expensive, limited print runs, and based on detailed research of primary sources, aimed at people seriously interested in these topics instead of the pulp mass-market Montgomery-hating orthodoxy.
6
-
@Truthaholokz - G-3 (and S-3 in units below Division) was the Operations staff section, so I think that may be right, G-1 was Admin and Personnel. When I did a search on G-5 I kept getting hits on a United Nations staff position, which is obviously post-war and not what I was looking for. I could only find a wartime position called G-5 in SHAEF as the Civil Affairs Division, which I had never heard of before in the US structures. In the British Army, "Civil Affairs" was a wartime staff position, but British positions are enumerated by rank rather than department, so at Divisional General Staff Officer level you would have a Lieutenant Colonel as GSO 1 Operations, GSO 1 Intelligence, etc., and their deputies would be a GSO 2 - Major, and the third officer a GSO 3 - Captain.
I also have a long-time interest in UFOs and learned through the Admiral Thomas Wilson leak/memo case that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have 'J' staff positions, as he was Assistant to the J-2 Intelligence Officer and Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time in 1997 under the Clinton admin. His boss in both positions was J-2 and Director DIA, and Wilson himself was promoted to those positions after being threatened with early retirement and loss of one or two stars and pension rights if he exposed a UFO reverse engineering program. He duly retired in 2002 after getting the promotion and serving in those positions, and then leaked the story of his investigation into the program to a UFO investigator.
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
Buckingham has form as a well-known advocate of the conventional narrative first established by Cornelius Ryan and followed by so many others with a vested interest in criticising the British commanders. This review on Amazon may be a minority report, but it should not be ignored:
"This is undoubtedly the best detailed narrative of Operation MG, and for that he should be commended. He very much comes down on the side of criticising the British generals and Commanders, without a peep of a criticism of American involvement. He also picks fault with any period of a few hours here and there that British 30 Corps wastes, but 82nd Division spent the best part of two full days achieving little and any blame apparently lies at Browning's feet. And then there is the 2nd reason for the failure of the operation that is given as 1st Airborne's failure to control Arnhem bridge. Staggering assessment, again when you consider 82nd are literally absolved from not giving any real priority to Waal bridge. I certainly don't believe the failure was solely due to the American inaction, and also criticism of British 30 Corps caution and slowness at points is possibly justified, though 30 Corps actually arrived on time at Nijmegen, and in my opinion he falls for the same tired old over-emphasis with blaming them. The commencement of the operation at 2.35pm even gets criticised. For anyone to co-ordinate 50,000 troops and 20,000 vehicles, as well as 408 guns and 11 squadrons of Typhoon attack aircraft with all the supplies required over 3-4 days is no easy logistical task. Especially when Brereton only gave the definite go ahead on the 16th at being 1pm the following day. They only started at 10.25am too, wasting any possible opportunity of two drops in a day which many feel were possible, a decision which affected all operations adversely. Again, no inferred criticism of slowness there by the author. But to leave out altogether the importance of the decision-making, hesitation, lack of direction and lack of priority of Brigadier-General James Gavin at Nijmegen is quite incredible - it feels like there is a chapter missing, just like 508 PIRs official records. No criticism of Gavin for his poor handling of Lindquist. To blame this entirely on Browning is also highly questionable, he may hold some responsibility, but Gavin in the US Official history enquiry states clearly to Captain Westover that it was his sole decision to place emphasis on the Reichswald Heights, and that Browning as Corps Commander merely ratified it. This is a critical statement by Gavin and the author seems to overlook or disregard the responsibility of that key decision, and just deflect it to British command. Hence can only give it a 3. BTW, the Grenadier Guards troops and tanks fought supremely well at Nijmegen.
So overall, a superb detailed account with some great analysis, but compromised by the above weakness, bias, and lack of subjectivity massively."
(nick, verified purchase, reviewed in the UK on 4th January 2023)
What's missing seems to be the material covered by:
The MARKET GARDEN Campaign: Allied operational command in northwest Europe, 1944 (Roger Cirillo PhD Thesis, 2001 Cranfield University, College of Defence Technology, Department of Defence Management and Security Analysis)
Retake Arnhem Bridge - An Illustrated History of Kampfgruppe Knaust September to October 1944, Bob Gerritsen and Scott Revell (2010), Chapter 4: Betuwe
Lost At Nijmegen, RG Poulussen (2011)
Arnhem: Myth and Reality: Airborne Warfare, Air Power and the Failure of Operation Market Garden, Sebastian Ritchie (2011, revised 2019)
September Hope - The American Side of a Bridge Too Far, John C McManus (2012)
Put Us Down In Hell - The Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke (2012)
The 508th Connection, Zig Boroughs (2013), Chapter 6 – Nijmegen Bridge
Little Sense Of Urgency – an operation Market Garden fact book, RG Poulussen (2014)
Arnhem: The Air Reconnaissance Story, Air Historical Branch (Royal Air Force 2016, 2nd Ed 2019)
Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited vols 1 and 2, Christer Bergström (2019, 2020)
Blaming Browning is problematic after Brereton had politically neutralised him during the operation LINNET II affair (Roger Cirillo thesis 2001), so he was unable to object to Brereton and Williams' changes to the plan for MARKET. Browning and Gavin were in agreement that the bridges had priority, but that the Groesbeek ridge also must be secured (there's an excellent analysis by McManus 2012). There is clear evidence Gavin dropped the ball at Nijmegen by selecting the 508th to the mission (Poulussen 2011, McManus and Nordyke 2012), and a recon patrol reached the lightly guarded Nijmegen bridge and took the southern end with just three men until SS armour arrived (Zig Boroughs 2013), proving what could have been achieved if the whole battalion had been sent promptly as Gavin had instructed. The German side of events at Nijmegen corroborate this with a chapter based on the diary of Reinhold's adjutant, Gernot Traupel (Gerritsen and Revell 2010).
The best overall history of MARKET GARDEN so far has to be Swedish historian Christer Bergström's volumes (2019, 2020). He uses unpublished documents and interviews from the Cornelius Ryan Collection held at Ohio State University and also debunks the many myths established by the film version of A Bridge Too Far.
By the way, to answer Nick's question in the review - commencement of operation GARDEN at 1435 hrs, an hour and thirty-five minutes after H-Hour for MARKET, was to deconflict their tactical air support from the troop carrier airlift. The skies would have been just too congested - this point is explained by Sebastian Ritchie (2011, 2019). Horrocks also wanted to be sure the airborne operation was not cancelled before committing his ground troops, so seeing the 101st Airborne flying overhead confirmed the operation was on. I doubt Buckingham also included Ritchie's study of the 'missing' aerial photo showing German armour in the Arnhem area (RAF 2016, 2019) - the tanks belonged to a Luftwaffe training unit and not II.SS-Panzerkorps, and on D-Day they were laagered in an orchard opposite the 506th PIR's drop zone north of Son many miles from Arnhem and were duly neutralised by escorting USAAF fighter aircraft.
5
-
5
-
I don't think Gavin simply shelled the Reichswald for the sake of it, he had only one Parachute Field Artillery Battalion and limited ammunition available on the first day, and the 505th did patrol the forest to ascertain the enemy's disposition there at that time.
I have the 82nd Airborne G-2 (Intelligence) and G-3 (Operations) documents during their WW2 service downloaded from the PaperlessArchives website for twelve dollars (and change), and is in the form of a single pdf document with 9,333 pages of handwritten notes and messages as well as typed reports in varying degrees of readability due to the fact they are photocopies. My main purpose in studying them is to research the German unit identifications derived from prisoner of war interrogations, but I'm also interested in this question of what exactly went wrong at Nijmegen to compromise the operation.
We know from first hand accounts in September Hope - The American Side of A Bridge Too Far by John C McManus (2012), and Put Us Down In Hell - The Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2 by Phil Nordyke (2012) - both published the year after RG Poulussen's Lost At Nijmegen - that Gavin learned from the 505th that the Reichswald was unoccupied and judged too dense for armoured operations (except along the forest 'rides') at around the same time (about 1830 hrs D-Day) the 508th's liaison officer reported in that Colonel Lindquist was not sending a battalion to the bridge until the drop zone was cleared. According to Nordyke's first hand witness, Captain Chester 'Chet' Graham - the 508th's liaison officer to Division HQ who delivered Lindquist's report, Gavin was as mad as he'd ever seen him and immediately ordered Graham to come with him by Jeep to the 508th CP to "get him moving."
From the G-2 documents, which gives map references on patrol routes that were taken, the 505th seem to have penetrated the Reichswald to a depth about halfway between the western edge of the forest (which was also the German border) and the main Kranenburg-Gennep road, which in the forest section between the villages of Frasselt and Grünewald the eastern side of that road is the main line of the Westwall in this sector - no more than trenches and log-reinforced dugouts rather than concrete bunkers, and largely unmanned.
By the way, the only radios with an effective range of a few miles were the SCR-300 backpack sets that were issued to Parachute Battalions on a scale of six per battalion on the battalion net. So there was one issued to each rifle company and the other three at battalion HQ, one on the companies frequency and one on the regiment frequency, plus a spare set. Each company had the smaller walkie-talkie SCR-536 (actually called a "handie-talkie" during the war), for communications within the company with the platoons, and a small patrol would reasonably take one of these radios - however, their range was extremely limited and in the Netherlands terrain often reduced to virtually line of sight. As a rule, a patrol would have to report back in person because they would be out of range until they were almost back in the company area.
It's worth noting that in the 508th on D-Day, Colonel Lindquist's pre-flight plan was to send a recon patrol based on Lt Robert Weaver's 3rd Platoon of C Company (Weaver was selected because he had performed well in Normandy), reinforced with Lt Lee Frigo's 1st Battalion S-2 (Intel) Section, a section from the LMG Platoon, and an SCR-300 radio and operator from battalion. Their mission was to recon the main highway bridge in Nijmegen and report on its condition. This was at variance to Gavin's instructions from his final divisional briefing two days before take-off, where he instructed Lindquist to send the 1st Battalion directly to the bridge after landing, and stressed that speed was important and "to get to the bridge as quickly as possible as the bridge was the key to the division's contribution to the success of the operation" (Chet Graham, who sat in on the briefing, in Nordyke 2012).
So what happened to the patrol? It got split up in the crowds of Dutch civilians in Nijmegen and lost contact with the point team from the S-2 Section. By the time they obtained a guide from the Dutch resistance, it was after dark and the bridge was reinforced with SS panzer troops, and in the contacts with the enemy had taken some casualties. Contact with Battalion on the SCR-300 failed until Weaver eventually received a message that two companies (A and B) were on the way to the bridge (this was after Gavin's intervention), and he decided to withdraw to rejoin C Company back on the Groesbeek ridge. The three-man point team under PFC Joe Atkins had meanwhile managed to push their way through crowds of celebrating Dutch civilians and reached the highway bridge, taking the southern end and seven surprised German guards prisoner without firing a shot. They waited an hour until dark for the rest of the patrol that never arrived, and then decided they would have to withdraw. As they were leaving they could heavy "heavy equipment" arriving at the other end of the bridge (Atkins' account, in Zig Borough's The 508th Connection, 2013).
Colonel Lindquist did not interpret his instructions correctly, believing he had to secure the drop zone and his other objectives before sending any large force to the bridge, hence the failure to secure the bridge and Gavin immediately realising the operation was potentially compromised when he received Lindquist's report via Chet Graham. By the time Gavin intervened ("I told you to move with speed" - Nordyke, 2012) and ordered Lindquist to send the 1st Battalion into Nijmegen, it was too late. It took two hours to get A and B Companies out of their extended positions along the Groesbeek ridge line and organised for a move into the city.
TIK is on the right line as far as his reading goes, but he doesn't seem to have drilled down to regimental level and read Nordyke, or McManus' book on the American side of the operation. The 82nd Airborne G-2 and G-3 documents are illuminating, but frustrating at the same time - they did not record map references or the 82nd sub-unit responsible for the prisoners taken, so it's difficult to identify the locations of enemy units as well as determine the disambiguated identity of the unit from the anglicised translation - compare with a British unit war diary where at least map refs are usually always recorded. I think you've overestimated the communications systems they had at the time, and Gavin only received the liaison officer's reports the Reichswald was not a threat (yet) at about the same time he found out his divisional plan had just fallen apart at Nijmegen, possibly fatally.
5
-
18:58 - context on the German tanks - I don't know where the intelligence report on the 1,000 tanks in the Reichswald comes from, except that it was suspected there was a tank depot near Kleve behind the forest, and that the forest could conceal up to 1,000 tanks. The depot was later discovered to be near Münster, the HQ of Wehrkreis VI (military district 6) deeper into Germany. So the 1,000 figure was a rumour, not a serious estimate.
Generalfeldmarschal Model was actually assessed to have less than 100 operational panzers in his Heeresgruppe B (Army Group B) front between Aachen and the North Sea coast, and we now know his 5 September returns actually listed 84 as operational, so the Allied intelligence estimate was actually correct. By a bizarre coincidence, the combined anti-tank gun establishments of the British 1st Airborne Division and attached Polish Independent Parachute Brigade was exactly 84 AT guns, as if the universe were trying to tell the naysayers something!
For additional context, Model was facing Montgomery's 21st Army Group with 2,400 tanks, and the US 1st Army at Aachen with another 1,500. This is why confidence in the Allied camp was so high in September of 1944.
5
-
I have just a few notes:
1. Market had failed on the evening of 17 September when the 508th PIR failed to secure the Nijmegen highway bridge before it was reinforced by Gräbner’s SS-Panzer-Aufklärungs-Abteilung 9 arriving from Beekbergen, via the Arnhem bridge, when it was only guarded by an NCO and seventeen men. Despite Gavin’s specific instruction to Colonel Lindquist to “move with speed” on it as soon as possible after landing.
2. It was the view of 1st Parachute Brigade Major, Tony Hibbert, that they could have received XXX Corps as late as 21 September. As he was an experienced officer and was actually there and I’m not, I don’t feel qualified to say that I know better.
3. The original intention for the XXX Corps advance from Nijmegen to Arnhem was for 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division to lead that sector and they may have deployed into Arnhem-Oosterbeek to assist 1st Airborne to allow Guards Armoured to pass through and attack Deelen, so the way the advance would have developed on 19 September with a clear run through Nijmegen has to be speculative, but Guards were not intended to be leading at this point because of the terrain on the Betuwe.
4. You say you’re reluctant to assign blame and then you assign blame to Browning, the Guards, Urquhart, and the Germans! I think blaming the Germans is a bit unfair as it was actually their job to sabotage Market Garden and not Lindquist’s, but perhaps you just didn’t want your hit list to be all British? I’m only surprised you didn’t blame Frost for not holding on until Arnhem was liberated in April 1945.
5. Browning was awarded the DSO in WW1 as a Lieutenant for an action in which he distinguished himself in taking command of three companies. The DSO was generally given to officers in command above the rank of Captain, and when awarded to a junior officer this was often regarded as an acknowledgement that the officer had only just missed out on being awarded the Victoria Cross. I think your assessment of his command career is nothing short of insulting.
6. Montgomery was “hands off” the operation because he was busy planning the next phase of 21st Army Group operations – the opening up of Antwerp by the Canadians and then the next 2nd Army operation, the Ruhr envelopment with US 1st Army. While his Chief of Staff was on sick leave, he was also doing both jobs, so visits were not possible.
7. Much is made of Browning’s Corps HQ taken to Groesbeek, but here’s the thing: Montgomery gets criticised for not visiting the front during the operation and then Browning gets criticised for leading the operation he actually had more of a hand in planning.
8. Browning was not in contact with 101st Airborne during the battle because their liaison officer and his comms team had all been killed in a glider crash near Student’s headquarters at Vught.
9. Browning’s Corps HQ required tugs for 38 Horsa gliders and another 2 to tow WACO gliders for the American liaison officers. Another 4 RAF aircraft towed WACOs to Groesbeek carrying two attached USAAF Fighter Control Teams. Those towing aircraft could not have carried “another battalion” to Arnhem, as that would require aircraft for 60 Horsas, and a Hamilcar glider for their two Universal Carriers.
10. The South Staffordshire Airlanding Battalion was flown to Arnhem in two lifts, the first half in 20 Horsas and the second half in 40 Horsas, and one Hamilcar. The reason why ‘half’ a battalion can be carried by such different numbers of Horsas is because Airlanding Battalions had two Mortar Platoons and Two MMG Platoons in the Support Company, one each using hand carts and the other using Jeeps and trailers. Only the Hand Cart Platoons went with two rifle companies in the first lift, hence only 20 Horsas required, and the Jeep Platoons went with the other two rifle companies in the second lift, hence 40 Horsas.
11. If the aircraft required to tow Browning’s Corps HQ to Groesbeek were reassigned to tow the entire Staffords battalion to Arnhem on the first day, what difference would it have made to the operation? The Staffords’ mission in Phase 1 was to protect Landing Zone ‘S’, more than adequately achieved by the two rifle companies, glider pilots, and the Independent Company (pathfinders), because the zone was not under any significant German pressure during Phase 1. After the second lift arrived, their Phase 2 role was brigade reserve, as the 1st BOrder and 7th KOSB were assigned the role of holding the 1st Airlanding Brigade sector of the divisional perimeter around Arnhem. Their reserve status made them the logical choice to be reassigned in Phase 2 to move into Arnhem to support 1st Parachute Brigade, and the second half of the battalion had arrived to join them during this move. So, it remains that if it wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome of the battle at Arnhem to split the South Staffords over two lifts, then Browning might as well have done what he considered his duty to lead his Corps into the operation from the first day. I maintain point 1, that the operation was compromised at Nijmegen on the first evening, and not at all at Arnhem.
12. The only point on which we might agree, is that a better plan at Arnhem might have been to commit all six and a half battalions landing on the first lift (one of the two Glider Pilot Wings operated as a battalion of light infantry and reinforced the Staffords holding LZ ‘S’) to seizing the town. It might have worked, arguably, and holding the Airlanding Brigade back to hold the zones indeed had the disadvantage of telegraphing intent to the enemy, which is not something that would be done today in modern warfare. That compromise was forced on Urquhart by Paul Williams of US IX Troop Carrier Command, because his pilots could not navigate large formations at night, which would be required at both ends of the first day for a double lift. He also made a lame excuse about insufficient turnaround times for maintenance, which I don’t think would have impressed the Battle of Britain veterans in the RAF who had worked around the clock to save their country from a Nazi invasion - something the United States never had to go through.
5
-
Gavin, as the 82nd Division commander, has to take the overall responsibility, but the failure was that of one of his regimental commanders to follow Gavin's divisional plan. I believe TIK's research is correct as far as it goes, but I don't think he's drilled down to the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment's combat history - Put Us Down In Hell by Phil Nordyke, 2012:
Captain Chet Graham was assigned as the regimental liaison officer with division headquarters. "I sat in on a high level briefing at division headquarters. Colonel Lindquist was told by General Gavin to move to the Nijmegen bridge as soon as Lindquist thought practical after the jump. Gavin stressed that speed was important. He was also told to stay out of the city and to avoid city streets. He told Lindquist to use the west farm area to get to the bridge as quickly as possible as the bridge was the key to the division's contribution to the success of the operation."
Captain Ben Delamater, the [1st] battalion’s executive officer, got the command post organised. "The regimental commanding officer [Colonel Roy Lindquist], with his radio operator and two Dutch interpreters from the British army soon followed us onto our first objective. The planned defenses were being set up when several civilians wearing arm bands and carrying Underground credentials of some sort told the colonel that the Germans had deserted Nijmegen, that the town and the highway bridge were lightly held. The regimental CO had been instructed that if the initial mission were accomplished to 'go ahead and take the highway bridge if you can.' This division order was perfectly understood in relation to the primary missions and was not a weak, conditional order as might be supposed offhand.”
Captain Chet Graham, the regimental liasion officer with division headquarters, decided to obtain a status of the progress toward the capture of the Nijmegen highway bridge. "I went to the 508th regimental CP and asked Colonel Lindquist when he planned to send the 3rd Battalion to the bridge. His answer was, 'As soon as the DZ is cleared and secured. Tell General Gavin that.' So I went through Indian country to the division CP and relayed Lindquist's message to Gavin. I never saw Gavin so mad. As he climbed into his Jeep, he told me, 'come with me - let's get him moving.' On arriving at the 508th regimental CP, Gavin told Lindquist, 'I told you to move with speed.' "
I think that because these senior American officers were still around at the time Cornelius Ryan published A Bridge Too Far in 1974, and Browning and Montgomery had both already passed, the latter became convenient scapegoats. It seems that only in the last 10-12 years the details on the events at Nijmegen are starting to become clear. A further complication was that Lindquist had performed badly in Normandy on the 508th's first combat operation and both Matthew Ridgway (CO of the 82nd in Normandy) and Gavin (who had been his Assistant Commander in Normandy) did not trust Lindquist. According to Gavin after the war, Ridgway would not promote Lindquist, despite beieng the senior Colonel in the Division. This may be why Ridgway did not take Lindquist with him as his S-1 (Admin Officer), a role Lindquist has proven to be gifted at earlier in his career before being given a combat command, when Ridgway was promoted to command US XVIII Airborne Corps in the month before Market Garden. Gavin took over the 82nd Division and inherited Lindquist, but it's not clear how Gavin regarded him until after the war (perhaps with the benefit of hindsight). Gavin also failed to replace himself as Assistant Division Commander, so he was running himself ragged doing both jobs in the planning and execution of Market Garden, and carried a spinal injury after the jump. Ridgway and US XVIII Airborne Corps did not have a role in Market Garden (it was under Browning's British 1st Airborne Corps), so Ridgway borrowed a Jeep from a motor pool in Belgium and drove up the Market Garden corridor to visit his two divisions unofficially. When he got to the 82nd CP, he was studying a map on the wall when Gavin returned from dealing with a problem on the front lines and was handed a message about another problem and left the CP to deal with it before either man could acknowledge the other's presence.
I find the whole story quite extraordinary.
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
@thevillaaston7811 - a bit more from the same folder - page 95, letter Ryan to Gavin agreeing that the 'King Kong' Lindemans betrayal story is nonsense, but Ryan says he was under a lot of presure from (prince) Bernhard (of the Netherlands) to put it all in his book. Ryan says he had a burr under the saddle about the whole thing (nice turn of phrase).
Most interesting point is about the documents that fell into Student's lap - Ryan didn't know until Gavin told him it was a 101st officer and it was only a resupply schedule not a list of all the objectives, but Student guessed it was Arnhem. Ryan had interviewed Student and said he was quite sore about not being able to communicate the information for 48 hours, so it was that long before Model heard about the document, by which time Runstedt, Model, Bittrich, Harmel and Harzer already knew what all the objectives were.
Gavin also had an artillery officer that took orders into the air because they captured one of their own musette bags from the Germans with the orders still in it, apparently unread, but Gavin had charges proferred over the incident.
Letter also contains Ryan's belief Browning did not listen to his own intelligence officer who is now with the UN (Brian Urquhart), so this is decades before the photo emerged in 2014. Ryan thinks both Brereton and Browning were at fault and although won't commit it to print believes Urquhart (Roy) should not have been in command of an airborne division. In second guessing the decisions made at Arnhem, Ryan says he wondered what would Jim Gavin have done?
Gavin replies that he was amazed by Urquhart's divisional plan and turned to Jack Norton (his G-3) and said "My God, he can't mean it", and thought he should have dropped a 'regiment' south of the bridge. Gavin wondered why Browning did not question Urquhart's plan and assumed it was Browning's lack of airborne operational experience! Obviously Gavin had not studied the terrain and flak in that area and was not aware Browning had proposed glider coup de main assaults on all three main bridges and had them deleted by Brereton and Williams. And this was the same Jim Gavin that rejected the British request to drop a battalion north of the Nijmegen bridge!
5
-
I think you're right in that Gavin was a very quiet, thoughtful man, and was not flattered by Ryan O'Neal's daytime soap scenery-chewing performance in the Hollywood version of A Bridge Too Far. In fact, the one scene where O'Neal's performance would probably have been spot on was a scene that wasn't filmed:
As Gavin finished his briefing, the British General [Browning] cautioned him: “Although every effort should be made to effect the capture of the Grave and Nijmegen bridges, it is essential that you capture the Groesbeek ridge and hold it.”
General Browning’s order, of course, made perfect sense. It was of paramount importance to hold the high ground. Any commander worth his salt understood that. Even so, the purpose of Market Garden was to seize the bridges in order to speedily unleash a major armored thrust into northern Germany, toward Berlin. High ground notwithstanding, the only way for the Allies to accomplish this ambitious objective was to take the bridges, and these were, after all, perishable assets, because the Germans could destroy them (and might well be likely to do so the longer it took the Allies to take the bridges). By contrast, the Groesbeek ridge spur wasn’t going anywhere. If the 82nd had trouble holding it, and German artillery or counterattacks became a problem, the Allies could always employ air strikes and artillery of their own to parry such enemy harassment. Also, ground troops from Dempsey’s Second Army could join with the paratroopers to retake Groesbeek from the Germans. So, in other words, given the unpleasant choice between the bridges and the hills, the bridges had to come first.
General Gavin did have some appreciation of this. At an earlier meeting with his regimental commanders, he [Gavin] had told Colonel Roy Lindquist of the 508th Parachute Infantry that even though his primary mission was to hold the high ground at Berg en Dal near Groesbeek, he was also to send his 1st Battalion into Nijmegen to take the key road bridge. Gavin told Lindquist to push for the bridge via "the flatland to the east of the city and approach it over the farms without going through the built-up area." Gavin considered this so important that he stood with Lindquist over a map and showed him this route of advance.
At the same time, Colonel Lindquist had trouble reconciling Gavin's priorities for the two ambitious objectives of holding Berg en Dal and grabbing the bridge. He believed that Gavin wanted him to push for the bridge only when he had secured the critical glider landing zones and other high ground. According to Lindquist, his impression was that "we must first accomplish our main mission before sending any sizeable force to the bridge." Actually, General Gavin wanted the 508th to do both at the same time, but somehow this did not sink into the 508th's leadership. "If General Gavin wanted Col Lindquist to send a battalion for the bridge immediately after the drop, he certainly did not make that clear to him," Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Shanley, the executive officer of the 508th, later wrote.
Perhaps this was a miscommunication on Gavin's part, probably not. Lieutenant Colonel Norton, the G-3, was present for the conversation (Shanley was not) and recorded Gavin's clear instructions to Lindquist: "Seize the high ground in the vicinity of Berg en Dal as his primary mission and ... attempt to seize the Nijmegen bridge with a small force, not to exceed a battalion."
(Chapter 3, September Hope – The American Side of a Bridge Too Far, John C McManus, 2012)
Captain Chet Graham was assigned as the regimental liaison officer with division headquarters. "I sat in on a high level briefing at division headquarters. Colonel Lindquist was told by General Gavin to move to the Nijmegen bridge as soon as Lindquist thought practical after the jump. Gavin stressed that speed was important. He was also told to stay out of the city and to avoid city streets. He told Lindquist to use the west farm area to get to the bridge as quickly as possible as the bridge was the key to the division's contribution to the success of the operation."
(Chapter 9, Put Us Down In Hell - The Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke, 2012)
Captain Chet Graham, the regimental liaison officer with division headquarters, decided to obtain a status of the progress toward the capture of the Nijmegen highway bridge. "I went to the 508th regimental CP and asked Colonel Lindquist when he planned to send the 3rd Battalion to the bridge. His answer was, 'As soon as the DZ is cleared and secured. Tell General Gavin that.' So I went through Indian country to the division CP and relayed Lindquist's message to Gavin. I never saw Gavin so mad. As he climbed into his Jeep, he told me, 'come with me - let's get him moving.' On arriving at the 508th regimental CP, Gavin told Lindquist, 'I told you to move with speed.' "
(Chapter 10, Put Us Down In Hell - The Combat History of the 508th PIR in WW2, Phil Nordyke, 2012)
I think TIK is on the right track, but he hasn't gone as far as reading these books, judging by his published booklist. I highly recommend them. Nordyke's earlier chapters on Normandy are also important backstory for Lindquist's performance during the 508th's first combat operation, and the way the command problems in the 508th were (partially) dealt with by Matthew Ridgway at the time. The fact these problems were not fully resolved when Gavin took over the division in August 1944 before MARKET GARDEN was unfortunate, but also now his responsibility.
5
-
Perhaps you could have read my comment that preceeded yours by just a couple of days, because timing is the missing element in this issue.
I'll deal with the "1,000 tanks" first because that figure was just a ridiculous rumour started by an observation that the Reichswald could hide a thousand tanks, but realistically Allied intelligence estimated Model had less than 100 operational tanks in his entire Heeresgruppe B (Army Group B) front from the North Sea coast to Aachen, and he was facing Montgomery with 2,400 and the US 1st Army at Aachen with another 1,500. We now know that he had 84 listed as operational in the September returns, so the Allied estimate was accurate, and by a stunning coincidence 84 is the exact number of anti-tank guns in the combined establishments of 1st Airborne Division and the attached Polish Parachute Brigade's Anti-Tank Squadron.
The main issue I want to address is the timeline and sequencing. Montgomery cancelled the original Arnhem operation called COMET in the early hours of 10 September, because he had just received reports II.SS-Panzerkorps with 9.'Hohenstaufen', and presumably 10.SS-Panzer-Division 'Frundsberg' under command, had arrived in the Arnhem target area for refit and realised COMET was not strong enough to deal with them. Montgomery and Browning then devised an upgraded replacement operation provisionally called SIXTEEN (COMET had been operation FIFTEEN), by adding the two American divisions, which would allow the 1st Airborne and the Poles to concentrate at Arnhem, or wherever the armoured threat was deemed greatest. The outline proposal was put to Eisenhower by Montgomery at their scheduled meeting at Brussels airport later the same day, and then Browning took the approved outline back to 1st Allied Airborne Army in England, where Brereton and Williams were primarily involved in the detailed planning for the operation now officially named MARKET.
My previous comment posted two days ago relates to finding a letter in the Cornelius Ryan Collection, which was a covering letter dated November 18, 1966 from Gavin to Ryan enclosing some papers by Dutch researcher Colonel T.A. Boeree, and how in reviewing these Gavin had just realised the route march of the 9.SS-Panzer-Division 'Hohenstaufen' had taken it through Nijmegen and Arnhem on its way to the Veluwe region north of Arnhem, where it dispersed to its various billets.
This now tied in with Gavin's recollection that on 10 September he was advised 82nd Airborne were now assigned to Nijmegen, so he went to the British 1st Airborne HQ, where they had been studying the Nijmegen area for COMET. Their intel was that there was "a regiment of SS" in Nijmegen (sanitised intel of the reduced condition of the SS divisions) and "very heavy German armoured forces" in the Reichswald, and the British had been preparing their plans accordingly to deal with them.
Gavin had just now realised in 1966 these armoured forces in the Reichswald were in fact the Hohenstaufen in transit, which explains why nothing was there on 17 September when MARKET was finally launched.
So the SS divisions were not missed, they formed the reason COMET was cancelled and MARKET was an upgrade to deal with them, but the Dutch intelligence on the SS troops in the Veluwe and Achterhoek regions (west and east bank of the river Ijssel) had only identified the Hohenstaufen from 'H' vehicle insignia and the Frundsberg had not been positively located. It was feared the Frundsberg may still be in the Nijmegen area.
Another factor to take into account is that the 'Ultra' code intelligence was only known to exist down to Army HQ level - that would be Eisenhower, Montgomery and Dempsey. No one in the Airborne (Army) was privvy to the existence of Ultra and any intelligence from this source passed down to the divisions had to be 'sanitised' by stripping out the unit identifications and source, so it appeared to be vague reports from resistance or other sources. The anti-tank batteries sent to Arnhem were given briefings to expect heavy armoured counter-attacks from the first day, and this may include Panther and Tiger tanks - a steer that a 1944 panzer division and a corps heavy tank battalion may be involved, but no unit IDs. The paratroopers were surprised by the presence of Bittrich's SS troops, because of the santised nature of the Ultra handling. Ultra was only declassified in 1974 with F.W. Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret, published the same year as Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far, so Ryan was obviously not aware of Ultra, or that the SS divisions were known to be in the area, and the same still applied to most of the people he interviewed.
Final point - the reported armour near the landing zones in the infamous aerial photograph taken by reconnaissance Spitfire on 12 September, showing tanks in the Deelerwoud near Deelen airfield, were 10 km (6.2 miles) from the nearest landing zone. These are the tanks dismissed by Browning as obsolete and probably unserviceable vehicles, regarded as a scandal by Cornelius Ryan because he only had Major Brian Urquhart's incredulous account to go on. Browning had passed away in 1965 and unable to defend himself, and the photo could not be located. Until 2014 that is, when it was found in a Dutch government archive, and then studied by the Air Historical Branch of the RAF. It was found to indeed show older tanks, ruling out a 1944 panzer division as the likely owner, and we now know that not only the owners were the Fallschirm-Panzer-Ersatz-und-Ausbildungs-Regiment 'Hermann Göring' - the training unit for the Luftwaffe's only panzer division - but we also know that on 17 September they were located at Wolfswinkel near Son, where they attempted to interfere with the drop of the 506th PIR (101st Airborne Division) and were duly shot up by escorting aircraft.
The nearest unit of II.SS-Panzerkorps was SS-Panzer-Regiment 9, with an 'alarm kompanie' of 100 Panther crewmen acting as infantry and the Werkstatt (Workshop) Kompanie based at the Saksen-Weimar barracks in northern Arnhem, and they had dispersed three Panthers and two Flakpanzer IV 'Möbelwagen' that survived Normandy and hidden them under trees on Heijenoordseweg in the western suburbs. II./SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 at Kranenburg monastery near Vorden, 33 Km (19 miles) northeast of Arnhem, had 16 Mark IV tanks in the 5.Kompanie and 4 StuG IIIG assault guns in the 7.Kompanie. Of more immediate trouble to 1st Airborne Division was the unfortunate fact a known SS training battalion, Sepp Krafft's SS-Panzergrenadier-Ausbildungs-und-Ersatz-Bataillon 16, had been moved out of their barracks in Arnhem before they were bombed and were camped in the woods north of Model's headquarters in Oosterbeek as additional security. Krafft had attended a dinner in which Model was warned by Luftwaffe General Walter Grabmann from Deelen airfield that the fields to the west of his HQ around Wolfheze were ideal landing grounds for airborne troops, but while Model dismissed these concerns, Krafft was the only officer present who took the warning seriously and had his two training companies moved out of their barracks, in an ideal position to counter the first British movements off the drop zones.
5
-
I think you're right, but with one or two nuances. Two lifts per day were possible and certainly desirable, but the objection from USAAF Generals Brereton of 1st Allied Airborne Army and Paul Williams of US IX Troop Carrier Command was that there was not enough time for aircraft maintenance and rest for the crews if two flights were made in daylight, but they had arbitrarily decided to conduct all flights in daylight instead of the original proposal by Browning to take off at night for a dawn arrival over the target and then an evening second lift that would return to land that night. This also avoids the hazard of fog forming at sunrise, delaying morning take-offs. So Browning's proposed dawn glider coup de main assaults on the Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave bridges were consequently deleted as being 'too risky' for broad daylight. I suspect the American commanders did not like the idea of the 82nd's two key objectives (the largest single span and the longest multi-span bridges in 1944 Europe) being captured for them by two British Airlanding companies at Nijmegen and Grave - speculation on my part, based on Brereton being suspected of rejecting an operation on Walcheren when only US Airborne troops were available and didn't want them sacrificed for Montgomery's opening of Antwerp.
The first attempt on the Nijmegen bridge as actually planned by Gavin would have been a walkover, had Colonel Lindquist of the 508th PIR sent his 1st Battalion straight into Nijmegen as Gavin had instructed in the final divisional briefing two days before the operation. He failed to do so, despite receiving a personal report from Dutch resistance leader Geert van Hees that the Germans had evacuated Nijmegen and left only a non-commissioned officer and seventeen men guarding the highway bridge. Lindquist stuck to his original plan (made earlier in the planning process before Gavin decided to chance a battalion) to send a reinforced platoon to the bridge to report on its condition.
Unfortunately the main body of Lt Weaver's patrol got lost in the crowds of celebrating Dutch civilians after losing contact with the three-man point team from the Battalion S-2 (Intel) Section who led the way, and only PFC Joe Atkins and his two companions reached the bridge. They surprised seven guards at the southern end of the bridge and took them prisoner without a shot being fired, then waited an hour until dark for the rest of the patrol to arrive. When they didn't show up, they decided to withdraw and released their prisoners, and as they were leaving heard 'heavy equipment' arriving at the other end of the bridge.
When Gavin received a report that Lindquist had not sent the battalion into Nijmegen, he went to the 508th CP to chew out Lindquist and ordered him to send in the battalion. Lt Col Shields Warren was not aware his battalion was expected to take this bridge and his men were strung out in foxholes along the Groesbeek ridge in defensive positions. He received the order at 8pm, about the time Atkins withdrew and the SS armour arrived at the bridge, to move out and assemble on the main road, taking over an hour to get A Company out of their defensive positions, and then they waited at the IP (Initial Point - situated at the Krayenhof barracks) until 10pm for B Company to catch up, when they were ordered to move on without them. Both companies then got involved in a firefight at a traffic circle near the railway station over 1 km from the bridge sometime between 10pm and midnight.
In the conventional narrative established by Cornelius Ryan in A Bridge Too Far, the story goes from Gavin instructing Lindquist before the jump to send in the 1st Battalion, and the battalion encountering strong resistance at the traffic circle. The part in between has only emerged in more works like American historian John C McManus' September Hope - The American Side of a Bridge Too Far (2012), and 82nd Airborne historian Phil Nordyke's combat history of the 508th - Put Us Down In Hell (2012).
You might also be unaware of Cornelius Ryan's notes from his interview with Gavin in the Cornelius Ryan Collection held at Ohio State University and available to view online - box 101, folder 10, James Maurice Gavin is the location. In the notes, Gavin said that neither he nor Matthew Ridgway (82nd CO in Normandy) trusted Lindquist in a fight and Ridgway wouldn't promote him. In fact, he had a problem in that he couldn't very well promote another colonel in the division over him because Lindquist had seniority in the grade. Gavin may have had the same problem as he failed to replace himself as assistant division commander when Ridgway was promoted to command US XVIII Airborne Corps in August, and was effectively doing both jobs during MARKET.
Gavin also told Ryan the British wanted him to drop a battalion on the northern end of the Nijmegen bridge to seize it by coup de main, and although he toyed with the idea, he eventually dismissed it because of his experience in Sicily, where the Air Corps dropped them all over the island and the division was disorganised for days. It's interesting that the highly experienced Colonel Tucker of the 504th 'insisted' on a special drop zone for one company south of the Grave bridge so that it could be attacked from both ends, and he got it.
Because the Arnhem bridgehead was secured and held for 80 hours - longer than expected to be necessary, the real failure of MARKET and the whole operation was therefore at Nijmegen, and the chain of command responsible was Brereton-Williams-Gavin-Lindquist.
Williams was also responsible for objecting to Browning's proposed drop zones for the 101st Airborne south of the Wilhelmina canal at Son and south of Eindhoven, to help secure the Son-Eindhoven-Aalst bridges as part of his 'airborne carpet' concept to help the Guards' breakout and contact the 101st. His objection was based on some Flak around Eindhoven. Aalst is only 4 km north of Valkenswaard, where the Guards stopped one hour before dark, so if the Guards had continued on just 4 km to contact US Airborne troops at Aalst on D-Day, a whole day of delay at Aalst by two 8.8cm Flak guns and a StuG on D+1 could have been avoided, and the Son bridge replaced 24 hours earlier.
Browning was unable to object to the changes after unsuccessfully threatening to resign over a previous Brereton operation called LINNET II, so he was politically neutralised, and if he appealed to Montgomery then it might have gone to Eisenhower to adjudicate and Brereton might possibly have pulled the plug on the whole operation, as he did with Montgomery's proposed INFATUATE plan to land on Walcheren island to help open Antwerp requested on 11 September - not to be confused with the INFATUATE that went ahead later in November as an amphibious assault.
5
-
I have to agree, and attempts to have a coup de main assault on the Nijmegen highway bridge were cancelled or dismissed. In the first instance, Browning had planned dawn glider coup de main assaults on the Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Grave bridges, for Operation COMET using D Companies of the three battalions of 1st Airlanding Brigade. The lead Glider Pilot for the Nijmegen mission was to be the same man who led Operation DEADSTICK in Normandy on D-Day to secure the Orne canal 'Pegasus Bridge', Sergeant Jim Wallwork. This operation was planned for 8 September, delayed by weather until 10 September, when it was cancelled by Montgomery as troops were boarding the aircraft after he had received intelligence on the II.SS-Panzerkorps moving into the Arnhem area.
Montgomery proposed instead an upgraded operation (provisionally called SIXTEEN, then later MARKET GARDEN) involving three divisions instead of just British 1st Airborne and the attached Polish Brigade by adding the two US Airborne Divisions to hold the corridor between Eindhoven and Nijmegen. This would enable the British and Poles to concentrate at Arnhem with their superior anti-tank gun assets, 83 guns in total. This necessitated turning over the planning to Brereton's 1st Allied Airborne Army, and he removed some of the key features of Browning's COMET plan. This was thought necessary because the US air assets had reduced capabilities - fewer trained night navigators that forced a single daylight lift instead of double lifts on the first day, and US glider pilots were not combat trained for direct assaults like their British counterparts.
The glider assaults on the bridges were also deemed to be too risky for broad daylight, but Browning had warned during the COMET planning that the operation should not go ahead without the planned dawn raids. He was unable to protest Brereton's changes because he had already been politically neuralised over the Operation LINNET II affair, in which he threatened to resign because Brereton had planned the operation with too little notice to print and distribute maps for the troops. Brereton had planned to accept Browning's resignation and replace him with Matthew Ridgway as his deputy and his US XVIII Airborne Corps for the operation. Fortunately, the operation was cancelled and both men agreed to forget the incident, but Browning could hardly threaten resignation again, knowning what would happen if he did. It may have been this episode that persuaded Browning that if he could not influence the planning then he would try to influence events on the ground by taking his Corps HQ to Groesbeek on the first lift - it is known that this decision was a last minute change to the MARKET glider lift schedules.
For MARKET the 82nd Airborne were assigned to the Nijmegen and Grave sector and they were briefed by 1st Airborne Division planners who had already spent a week studying the same area for COMET. According to Cornelius Ryan's 1967 interview with General James Gavin for his book, A Bridge Too Far (1974), "the British" requested that a battalion be dropped north of the Nijmegen highway bridge to secure it by coup de main, and after toying with the idea, Gavin eventually dismissed it because of his experience in Sicily. There, the USAAF were panicked by Flak and dropped his 505th Regiment over a huge area, so Gavin landed with just four or five men to command. He said the whole division was disorganised for days. He decided instead to land his troops concentrated on three main drop zones as a power centre and then fan outwards to secure the objectives. At Grave, 504th PIR CO Colonel Reuben Tucker - a veteran of Sicily and Anzio - insisted on a special drop zone south of the Grave bridge for one company and he got it, but there were no other coup de main provisions made by the US Airborne for MARKET.
Gavin therefore instructed the 508th PIR to secure the vital Groesbeek heights as their initial objective to protect the landing zones from a counter-attack from Nijmegen, and only if this went well to send the 1st Battalion on to the highway bridgeas soon as possible. Unfortunately, the 508th CO was a poor field commander and did not understand the importance of securing the bridge quickly and delayed sending the battalion, only sending a small pre-planned recon patrol instead. This was in spite of being met at De Ploeg (1st Battalion objective on the Groesbeek ridge) by Dutch resistance leader Geert van Hees, who told him the Germans had evacuated the city and left only an NCO and seventeen men guarding the highway bridge. It was for this reason the 508th lost the race to secure the bridge to elements of the 10.SS-Panzer-Division, compromising the entire operation and sealing the fate of 1st Airborne at Arnhem.
5
-
5
-
You have to allow several hours for the Arnhem bridge to be secured before enemy traffic could be interdicted. This happened from about 2100 hrs on D-Day when Frost's unit stopped three fuel trucks from crossing the bridge, which probably belonged to the supply column of SS-Hauptsturmführer Viktor Gräbner's SS-Panzer-Aufklärungs-Abteilung 9, which had been mobilised at Beekbergen rail station (unloaded from flat cars and had tracks and guns refitted to make them administratively 'operational' again) and attached to 10.SS-Panzer-Division to reconnoitre reports of airborne landings at Arnhem and Nijmegen. Frost observed most of Gräbner's unit crossing the Arnhem bridge between 1830 and 2000 hrs as he approached the bridge from the west.
We also know from the diary of SS-Untersturmführer Gernot Traupel that he and SS-Sturmbannführer Leo-Hermann Reinhold (adjutant and commander of II./SS-Panzer-Regiment 10) were probably the last to cross the Arnhem bridge by car before Frost started stopping traffic, and they arrived in Nijmegen to assess the local defences (Retake Arnhem Bridge - An Illustrated History of Kampfgruppe Knaust September to October 1944, Bob Gerritsen and Scott Revell, 2010). The next unit attempting to cross the bridge was SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl-Heinz Euling's Panzergrenadier-Abteilung (previously II./SS-PGR 19 and transferred to 10.SS-Panzer as IV./SS-PGR 21), which after a short engagement with Frost was redirected to the ferry crossing at Huissen. The Dutch ferryman at Huissen had little choice but to pass Euling's unit over the Neder Rijn, but then scuttled his vessel afterwards.
After this, German attention switched to the ferry crossing at Pannerden and elements of SS-Panzer-Flak-Abteilung 10 were used to secure the ferry site to prevent any further sabotage and as a defence against Allied air raids. The next units that were passed across the river to Nijmegen were elements of the engineer battalion - 1./SS-Panzer-Pionier-Ateilung 10, and the four StuG IIIG assault guns concentrated in Reinhold's 7.Kompanie of SS-Panzer-Regiment 10. The sixteen Panzer IV tanks of 5./SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 were too heavy for the ferry, or even a raft made from Rhine barges (the first tank slipped from the raft and fell into the river), so these tanks were held back until the Arnhem bridge was finally cleared on 21 September.
Because of the ferries, the process of infiltrating units onto the Nijmegen 'island' was a slow process and mostly had to be done at night to avoid Allied air interdiction.
Taking the Nijmegen bridge was considered a priority, but one that was not adhered to due to a command failure in the unit assigned to take it - the 508th PIR. The regiment CO failed to send his 1st battalion directly to the bridge as instructed. The failure to provide for a coup de main mission on the bridge was also a choice made by Gavin - he told Cornelius Ryan he had received a British request to drop a battalion on the north end of the bridge and eventually dismissed it, because of his experience of widespread drops in Sicily, preferring to concentrate his landings instead. It was also Gavin's decision to assign the critical Nijmegen mission to the 508th, with its problematic command issues that had manifested during their first combat operation in Normandy, instead of the more aggressive and experienced 505th. The 505th was assigned the Reichswald sector of the divisional perimeter and it seems that Gavin either did not fully appreciate the issues in the 508th or his rationale was that the Reichswald represented a greater threat of counter-attack than the possibility of mission failure in Nijmegen.
I think the best analysis of the bridge versus ridge priority is in chapter 3 of John C McManus' September Hope - The American Side of a Bridge Too Far (2012), and his point is that possession of the high ground is pointless without the bridges, since the bridges are a perishable commodity in enemy hands, but the heights weren't going anywhere and could be regained with support from XXX Corps if temporarily lost. He concludes, I think correctly, that Gavin and Browning expected both the bridge and the heights to be secured by the 508th, and since neither were strongly held by the enemy on D-Day, the opportunity to secure them both and ensure the success of the overall operation was an opportunity lost by the 508th.
5
-
5
-
5
-
5