Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "TIKhistory"
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Montgomery never planned or was involved in the execution of Market Garden, only proposing the concept. Eisenhower, approved and under-resourced the operation. Two American Air Force Generals, Brereton, in command of the First Allied Airborne Army, and Williams, USAAF, were the prime culprits of why the Market Garden plan was flawed - they were the prime planners. The Market part was planned by mainly Americans while Garden mainly the British. Nevertheless, despite their failings, the operation failed to be a 100% success by a whisker. It was Brereton and Williams:
♦ Who ignored nearly all the Airborne tactics and doctrine that had been established, practiced and performed in operations in Sicily, Italy and Normandy;
♦ Who decided that there would be drops spread over three days, losing all surprise, defeating the object of para jumps;
♦ Who decided that there would only be one airlift on the first day, despite there being multiple airlifts on day one on Operation Dragoon weeks previously. The RAF offered to man the US planes for a second lift but were refused;
♦ Who rejected the glider coup-de-main on the bridges that had been so successful on D-Day on the Pegasus bridge and which had been agreed to on the previously planned Operation Comet;
♦ Who chose the drop and landing zones so far from bridges - RAF were partly to blame here;
♦ Who would not allow the ground attack fighters to attack the Germans while the escort fighters were protecting the transports and thereby not hindering the German reinforcements. Ground attack fighters were devastating in Normandy, however rarely seen at Market Garden;
♦ Who rejected drops south of the Wilhelmina Canal that would prevent the capture of the bridges at Son, Best and Eindhoven by the 101st because of "possible flak". The job of the Airborne was to capture the bridges with as Brereton said 'thunderclap surprise'. Only one bridge, at Grave, was planned and executed using airborne tactics of surprise, speed and aggression - land as close to the objectives as possible and attack the bridge simultaneously from both ends.
General Gavin of the 82nd decided to lower the priority of the biggest road bridge in Europe, the Nijmegen road bridge, going against orders compromising the operation. To compound his error, lack of judgement or refusal to carry out an order, he totally ignored the adjacent Nijmegen rail bridge, which the Germans had installed wooden planks between the rails for light vehicles to move on. At the time of the landings by the 82nd there were only 19 Germans guarding both bridges with a few troops in the town. There were no bridge defences such as ditches and barbed wire. This has been confirmed by German archives.
Gavin sent only two companies of the 508 seven hours after they had landed to capture the bridges. They arrived at 2200, eight hours after being ready to march. Company A moved towards the bridge while Company B got lost. In the interim eight hours the 19 guards had been replaced by Kampfgruppe Henke with 750 men and then a brigade of the 10th SS Panzer Division (infantry) setting up shop in the park adjacent to the south side of the road bridge at 1900 hours, five hours after the jump. The Germans occupied the town, which was good defensive territory being rubble in the centre as the USAAF had previously bombed the town in March 1944 by mistake thinking they were in Germany, killing 800.
XXX Corps Guards Division's aim was to reach Arnhem at 15.00 on D-Day+2. They arrived at Nijmegen in the morning of D-Day+2, with only 7 miles to go to Arnhem. Expecting to cross the road bridge they found it in German hands with Germans fighting 82nd men at the edge of the town, seeing something seriously had gone wrong. The 82nd had not captured either of the bridges or cleared out the Germans from Nijmegen town itself.
XXX Corps then had to seize both bridges and clear the Germans from the town, using some 82nd men, seizing the bridge themselves. What you see in the film 'A Bridge Too Far' is fiction. It was the Grenadier Guards tanks and the Irish Guards infantry who seized the Nijmegen road bridge. If the 82nd had seized the road bridge, immediately on landing, as ordered, XXX Corps' Guards Division would have reached Arnhem well within time relieving the British 1st Airborne men on the north side of Arnhem bridge. The German archives state quite clearly that failure to capture the Nijmegen bridge on d-day was the reason for XXX Corps not making a bridgehead north of the Rhine. A clear failure by General Gavin.
Even the US Official War record confirms this. Charles B. MacDonald wrote the US Official history on Market Garden: https://history.army.mil/books/70-7_19.htm
The Market part of Market Garden failed. The Garden part was a success. XXX Corps hardly put a foot wrong.
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I am from another generation. When young all my uncles, neighbours and older men I worked with were in WW2. Also fuelled by films on TV - mainly American. I have talked to men, British American and German who were: on the first wave at D-day, Arnhem, Falaise, Arctic convoys, Sinking of the Bismarck, fighting the Graf Spree, in the 8th Army, Italy, Burma, US army in the Philippines, on a US carrier 50 miles off Tokyo, etc, etc.
I had one uncle on the 1st wave at D-Day, one killed 500 miles east of Cape Race by a U-Boat (froze to death in a lifeboat), one torpedoed twice and never sunk, and many on AA guns in southern England, Malta, etc.
I am interested in all history, not just WW2.
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@strikehold
Montgomery never planned or was involved in the execution of Market Garden, only proposing the concept. Eisenhower, approved under resourcing the operation. Two American Air Force Generals, Brereton, in command of the First Allied Airborne Army, and Williams, USAAF, were the prime culprits of why the Market Garden plan was flawed. The Market part was planned by mainly Americans while Garden mainly the British. Nevertheless, despite their failings, the operation failed to be a 100% success by a whisker. It was Brereton and Williams who:
♦ Ignored nearly all the Airborne tactics and doctrine that had been established, practised and performed in operations in Sicily, Italy and Normandy;
♦ Who decided that there would be drops spread over three days, losing all surprise, defeating the object of para jumps;
♦ Who decided that there would only be one airlift on the first day, despite there being multiple airlifts on day one on Operation Dragoon weeks previously. The RAF offered to man the US planes for a second lift but were refused;
♦ Who rejected the glider coup-de-main on the bridges that had been so successful on D-Day on the Pegasus bridge and which had been agreed to on the previously planned Operation Comet;
♦ Who chose the drop and landing zones so far from bridges - RAF were partly to blame here by agreeing;
♦ Who would not allow the ground attack fighters to attack the Germans while the escort fighters were protecting the transports and thereby not hindering the German reinforcements. Ground attack fighters were devastating in Normandy, yet rarely seen at Market Garden;
♦ Who rejected drops south of the Wilhelmina Canal that would prevent the capture of the bridges at Son, Best and Eindhoven by the 101st because of "possible flak". The job of the Airborne was to capture the bridges with as Brereton said 'thunderclap surprise'. Only one bridge, at Grave, was planned and executed using Airborne tactics of surprise, speed and aggression - land as close to the objectives as possible and attack the bridge simultaneously from both ends.
General Gavin of the 82nd decided to lower the priority of the biggest road bridge in Europe, the Nijmegen road bridge, going against orders compromising the operation. To compound his error, lack of judgement or refusal to carry out an order, he totally ignored the adjacent Nijmegen rail bridge, which the Germans had installed wooden planks between the rails for light vehicles to move on. At the time of the landings by the 82nd there were only 19 Germans guarding both bridges with a few troops in the town. There were no bridge defences such as ditches and barbed wire. This has been confirmed by German archives.
Gavin sent only two companies of the 508 seven hours after they had landed to capture the bridges. They arrived at 2200, eight hours after being ready to march. Company A moved towards the bridge while Company B got lost. In the interim eight hours the 19 guards had been replaced by Kampfgruppe Henke with 750 men and then a brigade of the 10th SS Panzer Division (infantry) setting up shop in the park adjacent to the south side of the road bridge at 1900 hours, five hours after the jump. The Germans occupied the town, which was good defensive territory being rubble in the centre as the USAAF had previously bombed the town in March 1944 by mistake thinking they were in Germany, killing 800. An easy taking of the bridge had now passed.
XXX Corps Guards Division's aim was to reach Arnhem at 15.00 on D-Day+2. They arrived at Nijmegen in the morning of D-Day+2, with only 7 miles to go to Arnhem. Expecting to cross the road bridge they found it in German hands with Germans fighting 82nd men at the edge of the town, seeing something seriously had gone wrong. The 82nd had not captured either of the bridges or cleared out the Germans from Nijmegen town itself.
XXX Corps then had to seize both bridges themselves and clear the Germans from the town, using some 82nd men in clearing the town, seizing the bridge themselves. What you see in the film 'A Bridge Too Far' is fiction. It was the Grenadier Guards tanks and the Irish Guards infantry who seized the Nijmegen road bridge. If the 82nd had seized the road bridge, immediately on landing, as ordered, XXX Corp's Guards Division would have reached Arnhem well within time relieving the British 1st Airborne men on the north side of Arnhem bridge.
The German archives state quite clearly that failure to capture the Nijmegen bridge on d-day was the reason for XXX Corps not making a bridgehead north of the Rhine. A clear failure by General Gavin.
Even the US Official War record confirms this. Charles B. MacDonald wrote the US Official history on Market Garden: https://history.army.mil/books/70-7_19.htm The Market part of Market Garden failed. The Garden part was a success. XXX Corps hardly put a foot wrong.
"it was not until 9 October, more than a month after the fall of Antwerp, that General Eisenhower told Montgomery to devote his entire attention to the clearance of the Scheldt. By that time Monty had the Canadians cleared it, or were investing in many of the Channel ports"
- Neillands, Robin. The Battle for the Rhine 1944
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John Cornell
US Official History...
The priority on gasoline which had been assigned the First Army, in consequence of General Eisenhower’s decision to make the main Allied effort in the north, left the Third Army virtually immobilized from 1 to 5 September.
During the period 26 August–2 September the gasoline received by the Third Army averaged 202,382 gallons per day. 51 Since Patton’s tanks and trucks had habitually consumed between 350,000 and 400,000 gallons a day during the last phases of the pursuit, and since some 450,000 gallons per day would be needed east of the Moselle, there could be no real question of mounting a fullscale attack against the Moselle line until the supply situation improved. On 2 September the gasoline receipts at Third Army dumps reached the lowest figure of the entire arid period—25,390 gallons. But finally on 4 September the gasoline drought started to break, only a day later than General Bradley had predicted to General Patton. On this date the Third Army was issued 240,265 gallons; during the next three days 1,396,710 gallons arrived, and by 10 September the period of critical shortage was ended.
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General Bodo Zimmermann, Chief of Operations, German Army Group D, said that had the strategy of Montgomery succeeded in the autumn of 1944, there would have been no need to fight for the Westwall, not for the central and upper Rhine, all of 24 which would have fallen automatically.
Indeed, had Monty's idea for a 40 division concentrated thrust towards the Ruhr been accepted by Eisenhower instead of messing about in the Lorraine, Alsace, Vosges etc, it would have all been over for the Germans in the west.
"The best course of the Allies would have been to concentrate a really strong striking force with which to break through past Aachen to the Ruhr area. Germany's strength is in the north. South Germany was a side issue. He who holds northern Germany holds Germany. Such a break-through, coupled with air domination, would have torn in pieces the weak German front and ended the war. Berlin and Prague would have been occupied ahead of the Russians. There were no German forces behind the Rhine, and at the end of August our front was wide open. There was the possibility of an operational break-through in the Aachen area, in September. This would have facilitated a rapid conquest of the Ruhr and a quicker advance on Berlin.
By turning the forces from the Aachen area sharply northward, the German 15th and 1st Parachute Armies could have been pinned against the estuaries of the Mass and the Rhine. They could not have escaped eastwards into Germany."
- Gunther Blumentritt in, The Other Side Of The Hill by Liddell Hart
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@davemac1197
Reading Chester Graham and Gavin, Lindquist was not given an order to wait for a divisional order to proceed. Gavin failed to put his order in writing. Or if he did it was inexplicably removed from the US archives.
US Official History...
"Although extensive combat interviews were conducted with personnel of the 508th Parachute Infantry, they are inexplicably missing from Department of the Army files. The story has been reconstructed from unit records; Gavin's letters to Westover and OCMH; letters to OCMH from Colonel Warren, 5 July 1955, Colonel Lindquist, 9 September 1955, Col. Thomas J. B. Shanley formerly Executive Officer, 508th Parachute Infantry, 2 Sep 55, and Rev. Bestebreurtje, 25 Oct 56; a postwar interview with Colonel Lindquist by Westover, 14 Sep 45, copy in 82d Airborne Division Combat Interview file; and Westover, The American Divisions in Operation MARKET, a preliminary narrative written in the European theater shortly after the war, copy in OCMH. Captain Westover had access to all the combat interviews when writing his narrative."
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@trickylifts
Kershaw wrote, "All that stood in the way of XXX Corps and Arnhem during much of the night of 20-21 September were a few security pickets". He is wrong.
Harmel: "At this instant there were no German armoured forces available to block Elst".
Kershaw: "at the same time we lost the Nijmegen bridge, we were just about over the Arnhem bridge" Correct.
Kershaw said in an interview that there was two companies of German infantry at Elst as pickets. With Panzerfausts. He never mentioned that as soon as the Nijmegen bridge fell to XXX Corps, they were joined by tanks.
Armour, with a number of Tigers, were waiting to cross south on the Arnhem bridge. They moved immediately. The five British tanks that crossed the Nijmegen bridge, with two being hit, were to form a bridgehead on the north of the bridge. They were unable to move north to Arnhem.
Later, five unarmoured Achilles self propelled guns, not tanks, with the crews open to the atmosphere, moved north over the Nijmegen bridge, to protect the bridgehead against the German tanks that had moved south over the Arnhem bridge.
Harmel and Kershaw, were wrong. German records show otherwise.
When the Arnhem bridge was surrendered by the British paras, there is an account, from Private James Sims of 2nd Battalion, as he was led out under the bridge ramp, he turned left and then right into a tree-lined avenue, he saw an "unending line of Mark IV tanks" parked under the trees. The Germans had a lot of tanks available to send over the bridge once the wreckage was cleared and it was re-opened, which they cleared very quickly. They had far more tank available than the three the British had at the northern end of Nijmegen bridge.
There were two Tiger units deployed to Arnhem. The first was Panzer Kompanie 'Hummel' (named after Hauptmann Hummel, the commander) from schwere-Panzer-Abteilung 500 (heavy tank battalion 500) at Paderborn - it was a unit held in reserve as a fire brigade. The (1st) Kompanie was equipped with 14 Tiger I tanks, but because they could not be sent to a railhead near Arnhem due to air attacks, they were detrained at Bocholt road marching to Arnhem. This is not good for mechanically unreliable vehicles and all but two broke down on the way. The two that did arrive approached the bridge area, shot up a few British occupied buildings and then retreated when they came under anti-tank gun fire. By the time the whole of Kompanie Hummel was assembled in Arnhem, the siege at the bridge was over, ready to move south to Elst.
The other Tiger unit was schwere-Panzer-Abteilung 506, re-equipped with 45 King Tiger tanks in three companies. They were due to be sent to Aachen to deal with the American penetration of the Westwall, but instead the 3.Kompanie was detached to 9.SS-Panzer-Division being deployed against British 1st Airborne at Oosterbeek, and 2.Kompanie detached to 10.SS-Panzer-Division and deployed with Kampfgruppe Knaust. The 1.Kompanie and the Abteilung staff were either sent immediately to Aachen or held in reserve for a period at Elten, on the German-Dutch border.
SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 had 16 Mark IV tanks on the books, concentrated in 5.Kompanie of the II.Abteilung. They tried to raft them over the Pannerden canal (the canalised part of the Rijn at the Pannerden ferry location) but the Mark IVs were too heavy for the raft and had to wait for the Arnhem bridge to be cleared. They could raft their remaining 4 StuG III assault guns, concentrated in 7./SS-Panzer-Regiment 10 and sent to reinforce Nijmegen. They fought a fighting retreat from Nijmegen northwards over the bridge. At least one survived to halt Sgt. Robinson's Firefly' and Shermans at the Lent railway viaduct, and again halted the Irish Guards the next day on a defence line established between Oosterhout and Ressen by Kampfgruppe Knaust.
They also had a few old surviving Mark III tanks from Panzer Kompanie Meikle (part of Knaust's battlegroup from the training units in Germany), the whole of Panzer Kompanie Hummel (14 x Tiger I) and 2.Kompanies.
Panzer-Abteilung 506 (14 x Tiger II). Heavy tank operations on the 'island' between Arnhem and Nijmegen were extremely difficult because of the terrain. They could not be deployed off the roads onto the soft polder, and a number were lost after falling into roadside ditches not being extricated. About 5 Tiger I tanks were lost in the area of Elst due to the terrain and an ambush by infantry units from 43rd (Wessex) Division. The tanks simply couldn't be deployed effectively.
GenFM Model also had 20 brand new Panthers delivered straight from the factory to Arnhem, with no camouflage paint or tactical markings. They were crewed by the 100 Panther crewmen of a 9.SS 'alarm kompanie' that had been quartered at the Saksen-Weimarkazerne in north Arnhem, the barracks were assigned to the remnants of SS-Panzer-Regiment 9 under a junior officer and possessed two alarm companies acting as infantry, the 100 dehorsed Panther crews and 100 or so men from the workshop company.
They also had three Panthers from Normandy, kept off the books, and two Flakpanzer IV 3.7cm. Two Panthers were lost to British paras dropping gammon bombs on them from upper floor windows in western Arnhem, and the Flakpanzers were deployed by Kampfgruppe Spindler against 4th Parachute Brigade with deadly effect. The 20 new Panthers were also attached to Kampfgruppe Knaust and several lost in the Elst area.
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@trickylifts wrote:
"No, there's no error there on XXX Corps' missed opportunity to drive on to Elst and thereby offer a last chance at saving Frost's force. If they'd taken off fast they would have certainly beaten the German tanks to Elst, while consolidating a tough position there."
Not this US blame diversion again. You have been watching too many Hollywood films.
One of the statements by Kershaw/Harmel was incorrect. Look...
At the village of Ressen, less than three miles north of Nijmegen, the Germans had erected an effective screen composed of an SS battalion reinforced with 11 tanks, another infantry battalion, 2 batteries of 88-mm. guns, 20 20-mm. anti-aircraft guns, and survivors of earlier fighting at Nijmegen, all operating under General Bittrich's II SS Panzer Corps. Arnhem lay seven miles north of this screen. The British could not pass.
- US Official History.
And it would have been a 100% success had the US 82nd Airborne captured the Nijmegen bridge when there were only 19 Germans guarding it. As it happens they didn’t move on it for hours, allowing time for it to be reinforced.
The biggest mistakes historians make is to glorify and narrow mindedly concern themselves with Arnhem and Oosterbeek. The Allies were stopped in the south just north of Nijmegen- that is why Arnhem turned out as it did.
- SS Major-General Heinz Harmel, 1987
”The US history points out that there ‘was no incentive for urgency over taking the Nijmegen bridge as XXX Corps were not yet in Eindhoven’ and it might be some time before they arrived at the Nijmegen bridge. In fact, XXX Corps had already passed Eindhoven and were waiting to cross the Bailey bridge at Zon. The US Official Historian, Charles B. MacDonald, dismisses this casual approach to the question of taking the Nijmegen bridge, stating that: ‘According to this theory, General Gavin had another full day to tackle the Germans at Nijmegen.’ This theory also assumes that one day would be sufficient for a Gavin to take the bridge - from one side only - having already sacrificed the advantage of surprise and with German strength increasing”.
- Neillands Robin. The Battle for the Rhine 1944
You have selective amnesia. The US 82nd men held the southern approaches to the Nijmegen bridge overnight. This amazing German force in Nijmegen of non-combat troops you keep on about, was so good it could not suppress a small US force form holding the end of a bridge in a town they were based and holding.
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