Comments by "Big Woody" (@bigwoody4704) on "AFTER ARNHEM 1944 | Q&A 9" video.
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British trucks
Wilmot's "The Struggle For Europe" and on page 524 of the Reprint Society London 1954 edition
By the start of September all the transport reserves of 21st Army Group were on the road. Imports were cut from 16,000 tons per day to 7,000 so that transport companies could be diverted from unloading ships to forward supply. This gain, however, was almost offset by the alarming discovery that the engines of 1,400 British-built three-tonners (and all the replacement engines for this particular model) had faulty pistons which rendered them useless. [1] These trucks could have delivered to the Belgian border another 800 tons a day, sufficient to maintain two divisions. By reducing the daily tonnage of First Canadian Army, by bringing in fresh transport companies from England, and by such expedients as welding strips of airfield track on the sides of tank-transporters to convert them for supply carrying, 21st Army Group was able to provide enough supplies to carry Dempsey's two forward corps into Belgium as far as Brussels and Antwerp, but with it's own resources it could go no further.
[1]See "The Administrative History of the Operations of 21 Army Group." p.47
"Eisenhower's Lieutenants" by Russell F. Weigley, page 281
Yet Montgomery had been unable to avoid lowering his logistical sights from arguing for a forty-division offensive to settling for an eighteen-division advance. For one thing, he had on his hands an embarrassing fiasco of British logistics which increased his dependence on American help. Some 1,400 British three-ton lorries, plus all the replacement engines for this model, had been discovered to have faulty pistons rendering them useless. That represented the loss of 800 tons a day.
"There's A War To Be Won, The United States Army In World War II" by Geoffrey Perret, page 371
The transportation crisis was made worse by square-wheeled British mobility. In North Africa and again in Italy it took the British up to three times as long to move a soldier or a ton of supplies as it took the Americans. (footnote 37) During the pursuit, the British supply system virtually collapsed when thousands of brand-new but useless British trucks fell apart almost as soon as they hit the road. Three U.S. divisions were immobilized: The 26th, 95th, and 104th had come to fight but couldn't get out of Normandy because their trucks-and hundreds more-were taken to haul supplies for Montgomery. (footnote 37, page 588; John P. Lucas papers: diary, November 15, 1943: "Now I am stopped, not by the enemy but by the British inability to move. Their transport is so inferior . . ." USAMHI Archives. See also Lucian K. Truscott Jr., Command Missions (New York: 1954), 188.)
"Eisenhower A Soldier's Life" by Carlo D'Este, page 591
The Red Ball continued in a modified form until the pursuit ended, a heroic but ultimately futile effort to keep the wheels from coming off the great Allied war machine, which had become a casualty of its own spectacular triumph. (footnote 31) To make matters worse, at a crucial moment fourteen hundred newly introduced three-ton British trucks broke down almost immediately with cracked piston rings, leaving the British 21st Army Group without crucial transportation and dependent on U.S. assistance. (footnote 32) (footnote 31, Christopher C. Gabel, The Lorraine Campaign, U.S. Army monograph, 1985. to long to copy talks about overloading trucks, tire shortages, supply Paris, and the French rail system that had not been repaired yet) (Footnote 32, The author cites Perret, which is above)
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Alan Brooke placing the blame on Bernard
"Triumph in the West, by Arthur Bryant, From the diary of Field Marshal Lord Alan Brooke entry for 5 October 1944:Page 219" During the whole discussion one fact stood out clearly, that access to Antwerp must be captured with the least possible delay. I feel that Monty's strategy for once is at fault, Instead of carrying out the advance on Arnhem he ought to have made certain of Antwerp in the first place
Admiral Ramsay brought this out as well in the discussion and criticized Monty freely....."The mistake lay with Monty for not having made the capture of Antwerp the immediate objective at highest priority & I let fly with all my guns at the faulty strategy we had allowed Montgomery. Our large forces were now grounded for lack of supply. Had we got Antwerp instead of the corridor we should be in a far better position for launching a knock out blow."
How about Air Marshall Tedder???
With Prejudice, by Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander AEF, Page 599" Eisenhower assumed, as he and I had done all along, that whatever happened Montgomery would concentrate on opening up Antwerp. No one could say that we had not emphasized the point sufficiently by conversation and signal
How Allied HQ Chief of Staff Bedell-Smith
Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany,1944-45 The release of the files from German Signals by Bletchley Park conclusively showed that the 9th & 10th Panzer Divisions were re-fitting in the Arnhem area. With their Recon Battalions intact. Yet when Bedel-Smith(SHAEF) brought this to Monty's attention "he ridiculed the idea and waved my objections airily aside"
Monty's Chief of Staff
Max Hastings,Armageddon:The Battle for Germany,1944-45 Freddie de Guingand Monty's Chief of Staff telephoned him saying the operation would be launched too late to exploit German disarray. That XXX Corps push to Arnhem would being made on a narrow front along one road, Monty ignored him. Montgomery’s own staff was opposed to the plan, as was his own chief of staff.
How about IKE's Private Papers?
The Eisenhower Papers, volume IV, by Edward Chandler By early September Montgomery and other Allied leaders thought the Wehrmacht was finished . *It was this understanding that led Monty to insist on the Market-Garden Operation over the more mundane task of opening the port of Antwerp. He ignored Eisenhower's letter of Sept 4 assigning Antwerp as the primary mission for the Northern Group of Armies.
There's more but I'd have to start charging you and TIK
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Don't dare lump the canadians in with Monty - he left them die on the vine during the battle of the scheldt.The absent ass's plan came apart almost immediately then he left my canadian neighbors to clean up the the mess monty left
Leo Major, the most decorated Canadian soldier of WWII From the Ottawa Citizen,May 7th ,2005 Mr. Major less than charitable to Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, who headed up British and Canadian forces.
Field Marshall Montgomery's ill-fated thrust deep into occupied Holland in the fall of 1944, a paratroop attack on river crossings, was an utter failure and undertaken at the expense of a broad steady advance. That delayed the the liberation of the country's biggest cities, Mr. Major figures, and condemned their populace to slow starvation through the infamous "Hunger Winter" that took the lives of 20,000 Dutch civilians
Pte. Major had an opportunity to express his displeasure with Field Marshall Monty soon afterward. It was during the battle for Scheldt, an estuary guarding the Belgian port of Antwerp. The exploit was supposed to win him a field decoration directly from the hands of Field Marshall Montgomery, but Pte. Major couldn't bring himself to accept. "He had made an awful mistake. I didn't like him at all.
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Clausewitz warned against marching through a valley without having taken the hills. Market Garden was the equivalent of doing just that. Monty demanded this operation then doesn't show up to direct it when the reality of it coming apart immediately is evident. Having only one road to advance upon should have been warning enough not to undertake the operation.
Source Daly, James. Proposed Airborne Assaults in the Liberation of Europe: Cancelled Allied Plans from the Falaise Pocket to Operation Market Garden (p. 175)
3 September
After the cancellation of Linnet Montgomery continued to look for opportunities to use the First Allied Airborne Army during 21st Army Group’s advance into the Low Countries. Although previous airborne plans had included river crossings as objectives, particularly Axehead and Linnet, even a cursory glance at the map confirms that the many rivers and canals in Holland and Belgium would inevitably become obstacles to the Allied rate of advance.
As Anthony Tucker-Jones puts it in The Devil's Bridge: The German Victory at Arnhem, 1944, “Model, Student and Bittrich [the German Generals in charge of local forces], or more precisely their men, had performed miracles during the hard-fought battle for Arnhem. Stragglers, teenagers, trainees, old men and Luftwaffe/Kriegsmarine staff somehow stopped three airborne, three infantry and one armored division. Forming ad hoc battle groups, they literally fought Operation Market Garden to a standstill.
This was a quite remarkable achievement and represented a major blot on Field Marshal Montgomery’s reputation that he could never quite escape.” Tucker-Jones shows how Germany’s victory at Arnhem went far beyond Montgomery’s fatal underestimation of the Nazis’ will to fight. Monty's most notable mistake of all was his high-handed dismissal of the clear intelligence of Bittrich’s Panzer divisions being deployed right in the area of the attacks. Armored half tracks-mounted a 75mm, StuK 40 L/48,APCs mounted MG42s, or a 75mm PaK 42 L/70
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sources oh really the river crossing in broad daylight that killed 89 and wounded 151 of the 82nd in what Horrocks callant the most gallant attack he witnessed in the whole of the war. How can you get a mouth full of of food with your head up bernard's backside? Not that you'd complain about that
How about some academia instead of arses like dave hac
Horrocks, A Full Life, p. 205. On 4 September, Montgomery inexplicably halted Horrocks' XXX Corps, the lead element of his Second Army, just seventy miles from the Rhine river. In a military blunder second only to the failure at Antwerp the Germans were given time to regroup and form defensive lines where none previously existed. Horrocks best describes the frustrations in his memoirs: "Had we been able to advance that day we could have smashed through and advanced northward with little or nothing to stop us. We might even have succeeded in bouncing a crossing over the Rhine"
Richard Lamb, Montgomery in Europe 1943-1945: Success or Failure? (London: Buchan and Enright, 1983), pp. 201-02.General Pip Roberts was rightfully more critical of Montgomery than Horrocks who as a corps commander accepted much of the blame for the actions of his superiors, "Monty's failure at Antwerp is evidence again that he was not a good General at seizing opportunities."
Sir Francis De Guingand, From Brass Hat to Bowler Hat, p.16 Unfortunately I cannot say that I did support Operation MARKET-GARDEN Montgomery's supposed master stroke; but as I was in the hospital in Aldershot I was powerless to dissuade him. I attempted to, on the telephone; for there were too many ifs in the plan and Prince Bernard was warning, from his intelligence network in Bolland, that German armored units were stationed there However, to my telephone warnings Montgomery merely replied, 'You are too far away Freddie, and don't know what's going on'
Liddell-Hart, History Second World War, p. 594. Liddell-Hart, although understanding Montgomery's reasoning, believed that the last true hope to end the war in 1944 dissolved with the halting of Patton's tanks on 23 August 1944.
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How about some book names and page numbers rather than your usual backside bombast lil villa? Mostly British Historians BTW
The Guns at Last Light,by Rick Atkinson,633 What Churchill called the American "prodigy of organization" had shipped 18 million tons of war supplies to Europe,equivalent to the cargo in 3,600 Liberty Ships or 181,000 rail cars from 800,000 military vehicles to footwear.U.S munitions plants had turned out 40 Billion small arms ammunition,56 million grenades,500 million machine gun bullets & 23 million artillary rounds
By 1945 the USA had built 2/3 rds of all ships afloat and was making half of all manufactured goods in the world including half of all armaments.The enemy was crushed by logistical brilliance,yet the War absorbed barely 1/3rd of American gross domestic product
The Second World War by John Keegan,p. 399 In 1944 the USA produced 47,000 tanks ,while Germany produced 29,600 tanks and assault guns.Britain in 1944 produced only 5000 tanks.
The Second World War 1939-45,p.85,By Maj.Gen. J.F.C.Fuller. Britain was placed in a such a desperate situation as she must have accepted a negotiated peace with out American economic support she could not continue the struggle
Winston's War,by Max Hastings,p.160 "In private to Herriman. "The PM bluntly stated that he could see no prospect of victory until the United States came into the war."
DeGaulle said right after Pearl Harbor; "well the war is over. Of course,there are more operations,battles and struggles ahead; but the out come is no longer in doubt. In this industrial war nothing can resist the power of American industry. From now on the British will do nothing with out Roosevelt's agreement."
Harold Nicolson wrote "we simply can't be beaten with America in. But how strange it is that this great event should be recorded and welcomed here with out any jubilation. We should have gone mad with joy if it had happened a year ago....not an American Flag flying in the whole of London - how odd we are."
Churchill had cabled to Antony Eden who was en route to Moscow: "The ascension of the United States makes amends for all, and with time and patience will give certain victory."
An Army At Dawn,by Rick Atkinson,p.8 "I knew the United States was in the War,up to the neck and into the death." Churchill later wrote."I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."
Winston's War,by Max Hastings,p.181-83 Churchill considered the Dec 7,1941 attack "a blessing.....greater good fortune has never happened to the British Empire." Churchill wrote in his memoirs: saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. One hopes that eternal sleep may be like that
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