Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "The Armchair Historian"
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The British 1st Airborne made it to Arnhem bridge, taking the north end of the bridge, denying its use to the Germans.
The other two airborne units, both US, failed to seize their assigned bridges immediately. If they had XXX Corps would have been in Arnhem on d-day+1, before any armour came in from Germany. Game set and match.
The Germans would not have known what had hit them.
The 12 hour delay caused by the 101st not seizing the Zon bridge, meant the Germans for 12 hours had a critical time window to pour in troops and get armour moving towards Arnhem.
The 36 hour delay, on top of the 12 hour delay, caused by the 82nd not seizing their bridge at Nijmegen (XXX Corps had to take it for them), meant another longer time window for the Germans to keep up the reinforcing. The 36 hour delay created by the 82nd, meant a bridgehead over the Rhine was precluded, as the two day time window given to the Germans was far too long.
The British paras did their part in securing a crossing over its assigned waterway, the Rhine. The two US para units failed in theirs. XXX Corps never put a foot wrong.
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@americanatlas3631
The US never had a top class general, many buffoons though - Patton, Bradley, Clark and MacArthur come to mind. Most were only colonels a few years previously, including Eisenhower. Montgomery had more years experience as a general than all of them combined in the ETO - literally.
♦ Only the Americans criticise Monty, in a veiled attempt
to disguise their inept performance in Europe.
Monty never retreated, not once.
♦ From mid-1942 onwards the British Army was
the finest in the world, taking all in its path.
♦ Bradley felt humiliated having 2 of his 3 armies
taken from him and given to Monty in the Bulge.
♦ The deplete and demoralised US armies should
have been pushed to the rear of the British 21st
Army Group. Monty never humiliated them. He
kept them at the front.
♦ Monty filled the losses of the two US armies
with British troops. British troops under US
command with the US command under British
command. It worked.
♦ The Americans always criticise Monty for not being
aggressive. Which is a way of saying he was
not stupid and overran his supply lines as Rommel
always did along with some British generals in
North Africa and as did US general Patton.
♦ A US report in the 1980s criticised Patton heavily
in the Lorraine.
When the US 1st and 9th armies were given to Monty at the Bulge, Monty chose the right option. Instead of joining a grindmeat where the Americans lost almost 100,000 and the Germans around 75,000, Monty decided to choose his own ground, and not fight in the Ardennes. The result was that more than 100,000 Germans were made casualties in Operation Veritable and Grenade, British (and American) casualties were less than 20.000. In Operation Plunder the British went further to make 30,000 German casualties, for an remarkable number of only 4,000 allied casualties.
Monty's operations were on the offensive, and yet the Germans suffered a gigantic number of casualties compared to the minimum of the British. Of the three main powers, the British managed the most cost effective advances in the war, while still keeping up the pace, and even facing the majority of the Germans in Normandy, while advancing faster than everyone else after the break-out to Belgium.
Patton was stuck in Metz for 3 months and had 50.000 casualties, Bradley had 34.000 in the Hurtgen Forest defeat. The Americans were having manpower troubles after the bulge. - mostly because of their head on tactics and complete lack of interest in keeping their soldiers alive. They counter-attacked in the Bulge not because it was the most sane thing to do, but just to try make Bradley and the Americans at large less humiliated.
Monty in the Bulge had the same thinking as in Operation Luttich. Let the Germans go as far as west as possible while minimizing casualties.
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