Comments by "Dave M A C" (@davemac1197) on "The REAL Operation Market Garden Plan | Battle Storm 1/8" video.
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The possible reason for it was that Browning was sidelined in the air planning by Brereton and Williams of 1st Allied Airborne Army and US IX Troop Carrier command respectively. He had threatened to resign over a previous Brereton operation called LINNET II (Liege-Maastricht bridges), which was scheduled with too short notice to print and distribute maps. Brereton planned to accept Browning's resignation and replace him with Matthew Ridgway as his deputy and his US XVIII Airborne Corps for the operation. The operation was fortunately cancelled, so Browning withdrew his letter and both men agreed to forget the incident, but Browning was now powerless to object to changes made to his and Montgomery's provisional operation SIXTEEN outline for the final plan codenamed MARKET.
All Browning could do was advance the transport of his own British I Airborne Corps HQ to Groesbeek from the 2nd lift (now pushed back to D+1 by Brereton and Williams after they deleted the planned double airlift on D-Day) to the 1st lift, in an effort to influence events as soon as he was on the ground in the Netherlands. He was clearly concerned by Nijmegen since Brereton and Williams had also deleted the proposed dawn glider coup de main assaults on all three main Arnhem-Nijmegen-Grave bridges, and then asked Gavin to drop a battalion on the northern end of the Nijmegen bridge as an alternative coup de main. Gavin told Cornelius Ryan in his 1967 interview for A Bridge Too Far (1974) that he toyed with the idea, but eventually discarded it because of his experience in Sicily with a dispersed drop, which left the division disorganised for days.
Instead, Gavin assigned his least aggressive and experienced 508th Regiment to the critical Nijmegen mission and Colonel Lindquist failed to follow Gavin's instruction to send his 1st Battalion directly to the bridge as soon as possible after landing, thinking he had to clear the Drop Zone and secure his other objectives first. He even ignored a personal report from Dutch resistance leader Geert van Hees who met Lindquist at De Ploeg on the initial Groesbeek ridge objective and told him the Germans had deserted Nijmegen and left only a non-commissioned officer and seventeen men to guard the bridge. Lindquist instead sent a pre-planned recon patrol, most of which got lost, but three scouts reached the bridge, took the southern end and seven prisoners without firing a shot, and waited an hour until dark for reinforcements that never arrived. When they decided they had to withdraw, they could hear "heavy equipment" arrive at the other end of the bridge.
The impact of the last minute switch of glider tugs from Arnhem to take the Corps HQ to Groesbeek was on some elements of the 1st Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery. Records are unreliable as it seems many of the glider schedule entries that were changed last minute were not amended on the official records, but it appears it affected the second line ammunition trailers and Jeeps for the AT Troops (platoons) supporting 1st Parachute Brigade, and was the reason no HE rounds for the 6-pounders were at the Arnhem bridge, and also the guns and Jeeps of Z-Troop (assigned to protect Division HQ) were bumped to 2nd lift, but there's an interesting story associated with the Z-Troop commander.
Lieutenant Eustace McNaught was commander of Z-Troop and told his story to the Battery sea tail commander when they made contact in Nijmegen that would only be possible if his glider carrying his command Jeep had remained on the 1st lift schedule. The glider (CN.1005) landed near Zetten, on the Nijmegen 'island' between the Waal and Rijn rivers, and short of the landing zone north of the Rijn. McNaught had seven men of his Z Troop and the two glider pilots with him, plus his command Jeep with No.22 set radio and a trailer of ammunition. He could not transport everybody in the Jeep and elected to leave the trailer, four of his men and the pilots, at the glider with instructions to wait, while he planned to take three men in the Jeep and head for the Arnhem bridge where he expected the Reconnaissance Squadron to have taken it by coup de main and he could arrange transport for the rest of his party. He said they reached the main (Nijmegen-Arnhem) road without seeing any enemy troops and drove north towards Arnhem, and they were within sight of the bridge when they saw a column of armoured vehicles come over the bridge and head towards them. Realising they must be German he turned the Jeep around and headed south towards Nijmegen, where he knew the Americans would be. It was after dark when they reached the Nijmegen bridge and McNaught was surprised they were able to carefully drive over it without being challenged. They had gone a short distance into the city centre when they were stopped by Dutch civilians, who told them the Germans were on their way into the city and offered to hide the men and the Jeep in a monastery. They remained hidden until they were told on 21 September Allied troops had liberated the city and McNaught was able to find Lieutenant Howe from the seaborne echelon of his own Battery and tell his story. McNaught turned his three men over to Howe and alone took the Jeep, saying he was off to find the nearest SAS patrol to attach himself to and Howe learned after the war he did indeed do just that, and then later joined MI6 as a military attaché. The main point McNaught made in his report to Howe was how disappointed and angered he was about being able to cross the Nijmegen bridge without challenge - it was, he said, "a lost opportunity".
Sources:
Letter General Gavin to US Army Historical Officer Captain Westover, 17 July 1945 (p.11, Lost At Nijmegen, RG Poulussen 2011)
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)
Retake Arnhem Bridge - An Illustrated History of Kampfgruppe Knaust September to October 1944, Bob Gerritsen and Scott Revell (2010)
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)
The 508th Connection, Zig Boroughs (2013), Chapter 6 – Nijmegen Bridge
Little Sense Of Urgency – an operation Market Garden fact book, RG Poulussen (2014)
The 1st Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery At Arnhem: 'A Lost Opportunity' - Battery Z Troop, Nigel Simpson, Philip Reinders, Peter Vrolijk, Marcel Zwarts (2022)
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@steveogle8942 - I only wished to point out that Browning's experience was overlooked and that his judgement has been proved correct a number of times, in the planning when he tried to get troops landed closer to the objectives, and infamously after he was criticised by his own Intelligence Officer Brian Urquhart for dismissing a photo of German tanks near Arnhem. Browning's judgement was proved correct when the 'missing' photo was found in a Dutch government archive only in 2014, and found to show obsolete models just as he pointed out, and having identified the owners were not II.SS-Panzerkorps the RAF study established they were near Son on the day the operation began and did not impact the landings of the 101st Airborne there. Cornelius Ryan made the mistake of basing his 'story' on a one-sided account by Brian Urquhart, and my own checks reveal that as a Major, Brian Urquhart would only be the GSO2 (Assistant) Intelligence Officer in a Corps HQ, so the GSO1 (Lieutenant Colonel) was apparently an unfilled post and Urquhart was probably out of his depth in such an important job. After the war he was involved in setting up the useless and corrupt UN organisation and served as the Under-Secretary-General for 'Special Political Affairs' - apparently a euphemism for peackeeping operations. Impressed by Brian Urquhart, I am not. Browning also made the right call on 18 September when Gavin proposed a plan to make a second attempt on the Nijmegen bridge and Browning rejected it in favour of waiting for the tanks of XXX Corps to arrive for support, and the fact that even with their support a frontal attack failed on 19 September showed that Vandervoort's 2nd/505th would not have succeeded on their own a day earlier. This decision was made before the 82nd Airborne came under XXX Corps command, as would any other decision Browning may have made on the first day - which would not be possible if he wasn't there.
Browning's decision to take 38 glider tugs from the Arnhem 1st lift did not impact the battle at Arnhem significantly, if at all. Most of the affected glider transports were 1st Anti-Tank Battery loads involving guns and second line ammunition not used in the first 24 hours. The only negative I have found is that the second line trailers contained all the HE allocation for the 6-pounders, and a comment from someone at the bridge that this might have been useful as they had to rely on the HE bombs for the PIATs that were eventually exhausted. The AT rounds for the 6-pounders were practically the only munition not exhausted at the end of the bridge siege, because German tanks had learned to avoid their fields of fire, so it is debateable what impact having more 6-pounder ammuntion of any type would have had. Even if the glider tugs were used to transport the second half of the South Staffords Airlanding Battalion, you have to consider their Phase 1 task was protecting the landing zones, and when Brigadier Hicks decided to release the first half of the battalion early (because they weren't under any pressure) to go into Arnhem, the leading companies had only just got into the western suburbs of the town when the 2nd lift had arrived and caught up with them anyway - it would have made zero difference.
All the evidence, much of which is in Cornelius Ryan's interview notes but selectively not put into his book, points to Gavin's judgement being incorrect in a number of aspects, and it's now clear Browning was concerned by this and was trading off the possible impact of his decisions on Arnhem against his concern the Nijmegen mission would fail in the first critical 24 hours.
The long and the short of it is that criticism of Browning is made by people who don't actually know what they're talking about, and haven't dug too deeply into Gavin's role in all of this. My view of both men has therefore flipped 180 degrees since I first read Cornelius Ryan in 1977, and most of that has been from reading literature only published in the last 10-15 years with previously unknown information.
Logistics in England were being managed by Ridgway's US XVIII Airborne Corps staff, while Ridgway himself had no role in MARKET GARDEN and contented himself by 'borrowing' a Jeep from a motor pool in Belgium and driving up the corridor to visit his two divisions, following a few miles behind a similar but more official expedition conducted by Brereton. Gavin returned from dealing with a crisis on the front line to his CP on one occasion to find Ridgway was there studying a map on the wall. Gavin was handed a note about another emergency and left to deal with it before either man could acknowledge the presence of the other. One of the things Gavin had told Cornelius Ryan in his 1967 interview was that neither he nor Ridgway trusted Colonel Lindquist in a fight, and that Ridgway would not promote him, and in fact had a problem in that he couldn't promote Ekman, Tucker, or any other Colonel in the division over him because Lindquist had seniority in the grade. Gavin had the same problem when Ridgway was given command of XVIII Airborne Corps and Gavin moved up to Division Commander, because he didn't replace himself as Assistant Division Commander and was running himself ragged doing both jobs during MARKET GARDEN. You won't find it in the book, but the interview is in the Cornelius Ryan Collection, box 101, folder 10.
It's a mess to be sure, but it's Gavin at the centre of it, and unfortunately Browning was not in a position of real authority to sort it all out because of the nature of the politics within 1st Allied Airborne Army.
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That's a myth perpetrated by A Bridge Too Far. As far as is known, the 101st Airborne Division liaison officer to Browning's HQ, whose glider crashed near General Kurt Student's 1.Fallschirm-Armee HQ at Vught, was only carrying documents that included a resupply schedule for his division. Student, as an experienced airborne commander himself, understood the significance of the documents and could extrapolate the airlift timetable for the whole operation. He did not have, as the film version of A Bridge Too Far suggests by using the same prop as Dirk Bogarde used in the briefing scene for the operation, a complete set of operational plans with maps etc.. Incidentally, the liaison officer had his communications team with him in the WACO glider (not a British Horsa as seen in the film) and their loss was the reason Browning was not in communication with the 101st Airborne throughout the operation.
The captured documents ironically helped the airborne, because after Model was unconvinced by them, Student was able to alert his own Luftwaffe chain of command to have fighter aircraft over the drop zones at the planned times, but the airlifts were all delayed by bad weather and the planes were back at their bases in Germany when the transports finally arrived.
This is one of the many ways that A Bridge Too Far spun the myths that Market Garden failed for many reasons other than the Americans simply dropping the ball at Nijmegen and a study of Hollywood as an American propaganda machine would make an interesting topic all of its own.
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