Comments by "Big Woody" (@bigwoody4704) on "The REAL Operation Market Garden Plan | Battle Storm 1/8" video.
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@akgeronimo501 great posts - I won't waste my time reading this Crown's Comics
here's another from a poster Thrasherback who read the book-cover to cover.
The author makes absolutely outrageous claims based entirely on uninformed information and mistaken facts, and draws outlandish conclusions that are amateurish and embarrassingly naïve at best.
His major contention that had the Waal River bridge been secured when the British arrived at Nijmegen on September 19, the British would have had 48 hours to relieve their compatriots at Arnhem is a laughable observation. I'll ignore for the moment that 76 out of 260 American paratroopers of Company C of the 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion and Company H and Company I of the 504th Parachute Infantry were KILLED, and another 119 wounded crossing the Waal and along the river's far bank in their suicidal effort to get the British across the river, only so that the British could cross the bridge and then STOP for over twenty-four hours on the far bank? Adamantly refusing to drive on to Arnhem(Carrington). Hey, I'll even go the author one further, I'll also ignore the fact that XXX Corps should have been in Nijmegen on September 18. But I'll get back to that one. Meanwhile, I'll address some of his more ridiculous claims.
I'll start with the easiest lie to refute. That would of course be the author's contention that *"There is an official statement in which General Gavin admits that he alone was responsible for the shift in priority from capturing the Waal Bridge to defending the Groesbeek Heights." Really? When did General Gavin issue "official statements" after the battle?*(he didn't) If the author ever plans to write another book about Operation Market, I strongly suggest he take a quick glance at British Airborne Corps' Operational Order Number 1. In it, he'll find General Browning's explicit orders to the 82d Airborne Division that the high ground around Groesbeek is the 82d Airborne Division's primary objective, and all the division's other objectives, including the Waal bridge, are to be considered secondary to the high ground. General Gavin did make an off-hand comment that he agreed with General Browning's prioritizing of the high ground, but he never said it was his decision, as it was clearly General Browning's. If I were writing a book about Operation Market, I would have started with British Airborne Corps' Operational Order Number 1.
The author's entire assumption of the 508th Parachute Infantry easily taking the bridge if only given the chance, and "Authentic documents however prove that in fact no pre-jump orders were issued, as claimed by General Gavin," is equally libelous. Let's take the latter first, and quickly. Both General Gavin and Colonel Roy Lindquist have attested in writing to the fact that the evening before departing England General Gavin instructed Colonel Lindquist to try for the bridge if circumstances warranted it. Perhaps there is no official documentation because Gavin's instructions to Lindquist were contrary to Gavin's orders from Browning, which the author has yet to find in British Airborne Corps Operational Order Number 1 through his "well-founded" and "meticulous" research. And that leads me to the 508th Parachute Infantry.
The 508th Parachute Infantry actually landed with explicit orders, and they were the most demanding of any unit, American or British, in the entire operation. The regiment was stretched paper-thin the minute it landed. The First Battalion was to move 5 or 6 miles to the outskirts of south-central Nijmegen, primarily to block the Nijmegen-Groesbeek Road. If the situation then allowed, First Battalion was supposed to send a platoon into Nijmegen to try for the bridge. After sundown First Battalion dispatched a platoon from Company C, which quickly became lost inside the city. Later that night, First Battalion sent Company A and Company B into the city, both of which also became hopelessly lost inside the city, and were thrust into a firefight with elements of both Colonel Henke's defenders, and the arriving 9 SS Panzer Division's armored reconnaissance battalion.
By sunrise they had made no progress toward the bridge when General Gavin started receiving reports of a German assault against the landing zones. That would be the assault the author describes as "the German attack was only local and there was no need for the withdrawal of the three companies in Nijmegen who were making good progress in capturing the Waal Bridge." Well, as we have just seen, the two, not three companies were hardly making "good progress in capturing the Wall bridge." They were in fact, stopped cold in their tracks. And "the German attack that was only local," did overrun and nearly annihilate the 508th Parachute Infantry's Company D which had been left behind to hold the landing zones, and did consist of three full non-local kampfgruppe or 250-300 men each with twenty non-local armored vehicles (Pumas) supported by nearly a non-local regiment of artillery.
The 508th Parachute Infantry's Company G was in a perfect assault position, amazingly the author got that much correct. But it's hardly that simple when you're conducting a major combat operation. Company G was nearly alone in guarding the 82d Airborne Division's eastern flank, specifically the critical road out of Cleve in Germany. The very road that the Germans utilized a day later to launch another "non-local" attack which consumed all of the 508th Parachute Infantry, and eventually the British Coldstream Guards for three full days.
Strangely, in all the author's "meticulous research" he missed two salient facts. General Gavin initially planned a coup de main against the Waal bridge on September 17 by jumping the 508th Parachute Infantry's Company B, followed by two gliders carrying a pair of 37mm antitank guns. But General Browning and the Air Corps strenuously objected, and joined to have the plan scrapped. The author's "meticulous research" also missed General Gavin's having devised a two-prong attack to capture the bridge on September 18 by moving elements of the 504th Parachute Infantry down from the north, and elements of the 508th Parachute Infantry up from the south. But General Browning quickly vetoed the plan. Sadly, the 504th Parachute Infantry's proposed route would have brought it into contact with a then virtually undefended railroad bridge.
If the author is that interested in finding an element of Operation Market "Lost," I strongly suggest he look much further south. He can begin at the tiny village of Elst. Or he can spend his "meticulous research" analyzing the British 1st Airborne Division's operations, and explain how two-thirds of an entire airborne division were initially blocked from reaching the bridge in Arnhem by a para-military police force, and handful of converted German flack gunners, and a German training company. But I'd start with Elst, and explain an entire armored corps being held up for an entire day by a pair of 8mm guns.
Much was "lost" in Operation Market. But little of it involved the American operations. While the British airborne division struggled to seize a single bridge at Arnhem, the 82d Airborne Division captured five bridges across an area of twenty-five square miles, and two of those bridges were larger than the bridge in Arnhem. British XXX Corps decided to stop and rest and maintain its tanks for the night south of Eindhoven, throwing their entire drive irrecoverably behind schedule. A second division could have easily leap-frogged the lead division to maintain the momentum of the drive. But they failed to do so.
Field Marshal Montgomery's plan was brilliant. His only flaw was using British command.
By the way, a number of local Dutch have done amazing work in documenting Operation Market, especially the 82d Airborne Division's role in the operation. But sadly this author is not one of them. He takes a serious world event, and applies the analysis and insight not worth of a kindergarten student
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