Arnhem E-Book

Dr Chris Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 323

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The greatest airborne operation in history commenced on 17 September 1944. Nine days later nearly four out five of the British 1st Airborne Division and their Polish comrades would be killed, wounded or captured as Germany secured her last great battlefield victory of the war. The ferocious and gallant actions in Arnhem and Oosterbeek have fascinated historians and students ever since. Drawing extensively on eye-witness experience and unit diaries, and providing a detailed tactical and technical analysis of the arms, equipment and practices of the day, Arnhem: Nine Days of Battle provides a fascinating day-on-day account of one of the most iconic actions of the Second World War. Supported by battle maps, timelines, troop diagrams as well as touring guides – this is the perfect companion for the armchair historian or the intrepid battlefield traveller.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As ever, I am indebted first and foremost to my wife Pat, who has been a tower of strength in encouraging me to take on each of the writing projects that have been part and parcel of my life for more than a decade. I would have struggled without the access that I have had to four websites: www.arnhem1944fellowship.org, www.defendingarnhem.com, www.paradata.org.uk and, most of all, www.pegasusarchive.org. Between them, these sites provide the student of the battle in and around Arnhem and Oosterbeek with a wealth of information. I am particularly indebted to Mark Hickman of the Pegasus Archive for putting the diaries of the different units of the 1st Airborne Division into the public domain, and to Niall Cherry of the Arnhem Fellowship for the effort he puts into organising the regular fellowship newsletter and the various battlefield walks and lectures that help to maintain interest in this remarkable feat of arms. I am obliged to the Dreyeroord Hotel in Oosterbeek – a significant location during the battle, when it was widely referred to as the ‘White House’ – for its hospitality, and I should also like to thank Philip Reinders for his exceptional generosity in driving me around the battlefield and for taking the time to give the manuscript a ‘once over’ when it was still at a rough and ready stage. Fiona McDonald of the public library service in Lerwick, Shetland, has been assiduous in locating several volumes that are very difficult to obtain – I cannot thank her and the rest of the staff there enough.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Timeline

1 Planning for Disaster

2 Structure of British 1st Airborne Division

3 D-Day: Sunday 17 September

4 D+1: Monday 18 September

5 D+2: Tuesday 19 September

6 D+3: Wednesday 20 September

7 D+4: Thursday 21 September

8 D+5: Friday 22 September

9 D+6: Saturday 23 September

10 D+7: Sunday 24 September

11 D+8: Monday 25 September

12 D+9: Tuesday 26 September

13 When the Shooting Was Over

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

There are battles and there are iconic battles. Arnhem is most certainly one of the latter. It is hard to say what makes a battle iconic – there are no universal factors. The battle may be a victory for the smaller army, or it may herald a reversal of fortune in a long or especially arduous struggle. When we take an interest in a specific action it may be out of admiration for – or distaste for – a leader or army or it may be a product of our interest in the history of a nation, region, religion or ideal. It may be no more than the fact that we like the uniforms, literature or romance of a certain place or time.

Personally, I could point to a number of convergent streams. In all probability the very first ‘grown-up’ book I ever read – at the age of 9, I think – was Major General Urquhart’s account of his experiences in Arnhem and Oosterbeek in September 1944. Shortly after that, and probably as a consequence, the first novel I read was The Cauldron, which I still think is one of the finest war novels ever written. It has occurred to me more than once that it would make great television – the only medium that would allow enough time for the development of the characters and a full portrayal of the story. It is, to say the least, unusual for a historian to give credence to a novel, but The Cauldron was written (under the pseudonym ‘Zeno’) by a man who served in the Independent Company in North Africa and Arnhem. Known at the time as Kenneth Allerton (and before that as Gerald Lamarque), the author described the battle from the point of view of an infantry soldier, which provides a unique perspective. It is even more unusual for historians to cite authors who produced their work while serving a life sentence for murder in Wormwood Scrubs prison – where he also wrote several successful novels and screenplays – but such is life.

Those two books were certainly instrumental in my interest, and none of the many hundreds of battle accounts from the Middle Ages to the Gulf Wars has made the same impact. Sometimes we cleave to a topic because of factors that are not entirely rational, though I do not subscribe to the idea that an irrational like or dislike is any less valid than a rational one.

In my case, there is also the matter of a dog – though not a dog that failed to bark. When I was a small boy, my family owned (or was owned by) a rather portly black Labrador bitch. My parents had not chosen to have a dog; my father’s boss had asked him to look after his dog for a matter of a few days or perhaps a week. The nature of service life – my father was an officer attached to the Parachute Regiment at the time – is such that people sometimes move on to other pastures rather suddenly, and that was the last the family saw of the dog’s owner for many years. The dog was called Judy and the owner was Jimmy Morrison, who had served as chaplain to 7th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers at Arnhem.

The cauldron.

Anyone with an interest in the Arnhem battle has the benefit of a massive amount of material. There are hundreds of Arnhem books and there are a great many personal accounts – more, perhaps, than for any other divisional battle. In a perfect world, with an unlimited amount of space and readers who were happy to read a 5,000 page book, one could produce a marvellous volume, which not only contained all of the material but collated it in some magical way that allowed every word and deed to be compared and then related to date and location. Since that is clearly not possible – the book would be the size of a piano – the writer must be selective, and inevitably subjective. The incidents related here were not chosen because they are particularly famous or even very significant; that was not the objective of the exercise. They were chosen for no better reason than it seems to this writer that they give a certain feel or flavour of the battle. There are a number of places where the recollections of one individual are in conflict with those of another. Some discrepancies are apparent rather than real. Unit diaries and personal accounts would seem to list a great many more than the twenty-two German armoured and armed vehicles that can be confirmed as being lost in action against the 1st Airborne Division. There is not necessarily any conflict at all. Unit diaries refer to vehicles that were put out of action but not necessarily destroyed. Since the Germans retained the battlefield, it should hardly be surprising that they were able to recover and repair a substantial proportion of the half-tracks, armoured cars, self-propelled guns and tanks that had been immobilised or put beyond immediate repair during the fighting.

As a rule I have chosen to form no opinion on inconsistencies of time or date that might arise from eyewitness material or from unit diaries. The men concerned wrote about what they had seen and how they had seen it. Some personal recollections also conflict with unit diaries, and a number of those diaries are in conflict with one another – and one contradicts itself. Again, I have largely avoided that as an issue. Several unit diaries had to be compiled from memory after the battle was over, and the others were kept up to date by exhausted and hungry men; men who were immersed in an arduous fight for their survival, and therefore had rather more pressing responsibilities than discharging a relatively insignificant administrative duty.

There are several excellent blow-by-blow chronological accounts of the battle, and I did not see any pressing need to write another one. This book describes the battle as I have come to see it and nothing more. Next month or next year some new selection of material may come to light that would radically change my appreciation of the rationale behind the planning decisions or the factors that led to defeat. It is extremely doubtful, though, that anything would reduce my admiration for the men who served at Arnhem and who were, in the words of Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich, ‘incredible in defence’.

TIMELINE

1940

10–11 May: German glidertroops seize the Belgian fort of Eben-Emael in the first airborne operation in Western Europe. Their success inspires Churchill to order the formation of an airborne force to total 5,000 men.

22 June: No.2 Commando is assigned to a parachute and glider role.

22 November: No.2 Commando is renamed 11th Special Air Service Battalion and becomes the foundation of British airborne forces.

1941

10 February: The first British airborne venture, ‘Operation Colossus’ is mounted to seize and destroy an aqueduct in Calibri in Southern Italy. The operation fails to achieve its objective.

27–28 February: ‘Operation Biting’ is mounted to capture German radar equipment at Bruneval and is a success.

September: Formation of 1st Polish Parachute Brigade at Leven, Scotland under Major-General Sosabowski. The Poles invented and developed many techniques and practices which had a profound effect on the development of Allied airborne forces. The Brigade was initially raised for operations in Poland in support of the Polish Government in exile.

10 October: 1st Airlanding Brigade formed under Brigadier Hopkinson.

November: Brigadier Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning promoted to Major-General and appointed to command 1st Airborne Division.

1942

November: 1st Parachute Brigade and other elements of 1st Airborne Division are deployed to North Africa. Units are in action between 12–29 November at Bone, Beja, Souk-el-Abra and Pont-du-Fahs.

1943

July: Elements of the airborne forces are deployed in ‘Operation Husky’, the invasion of Sicily. Toward the end of the year 1st Airborne units are withdrawn to Britain to train for the invasion of Northern Europe.

1944

January: Major-General Urquhart takes command of 1st Airborne Division.

4 April: Montgomery is given control of 1st Allied Airborne Army and starts to formulate a plan to renew the offensive in Northern Europe.

June: A plan to land 1st Airborne near Caen as part of the Normandy campaign is abandoned due to the risk of high losses. Over the next two months at least a dozen proposed operations were abandoned either because they were unfeasible or because the advance to the Seine was so rapid that the planned objectives were overrun before the operation could be mounted.

19–25 August: The battle and liberation of Paris.

1 September: Eisenhower assumes command of all Allied forces in Europe, superseding Montgomery.

2 September: Allied troops enter Belgium.

3 September: 2nd Army liberates Brussels.

7 September: 11th Armoured Division crosses the Albert Canal.

10 September: Eisenhower accepts Montgomery’s ambitious plan for a massive airborne operation to seize the road from Neerpelt to Arnhem – ‘Operation Market Garden’.

11 September: 15th Scottish Division crosses into the Netherlands.

16 September: Airstrikes in support of Market Garden begin throughout the Arnhem–Nijmegen–Eindhoven–Grave areas.

17 September: First lift of the British Airborne Division lands at Arnhem as the American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions land around Nijmegen and Eindhoven.

18 September: The second lifts of the three airborne divisions arrive.

19 September: Poor weather conditions in Britain prevent the deployment of the infantry battalions of 1st Polish Parachute Brigade.

20 September: Nijmegen Bridge is captured by the American 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

21 September: The infantry battalions of 1st Polish Parachute Brigade are dropped around Driel on the south side of the Lower Rhine. Arnhem Bridge is recovered by the Germans.

24 September: Lieutenant-General Horrocks’ XXX Corps reaches lower Rhine.

25 September: Horrocks and Browning agree that Market Garden should be abandoned and 1st Airborne is withdrawn from Oosterbeek through the night.

1

PLANNING FOR DISASTER

By the late summer of 1944, two massive Allied forces had advanced across France from Normandy and were poised to break through into Germany. One of these bodies, known as 21st Army Group, consisted primarily of British and Canadian troops under the command of Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery; the other – 12th Army Group - consisted of US forces led by General Omar Bradley. During the initial period of the invasion, Montgomery had had overall responsibility for tactical decisions, a position he retained until there were enough US formations in France to justify – in fact, demand – splitting the command structure by forming 12th Army Group. The first stage of the invasion had involved a long, hard fight for little territorial gain. Eventually, the German defence cracked under the strain, and both Allied army groups were able to make incredibly rapid progress for several weeks and the 21st Army Group reached the western borders of the Netherlands. The speed of the advance had been greater than expected, and the strain on the supply chain was enormous. By the end of August, the armies were tired, the logistical system was massively overburdened and the Germans had started to make what would turn out to be an impressive recovery.

Inevitably, the rate of the Allied advance slowed as resistance stiffened, and it became increasingly clear that a major initiative would be required. Montgomery – anxious to restore the situation and, if possible, bring the war to an end before the onset of winter – formulated a daring and innovative plan to deploy a massive force of airborne units to seize river crossings throughout the Netherlands and race a strong force of armoured and infantry divisions all the way to Germany. The plan adopted was named Market Garden. It would lead to the final German battlefield victory in the west and leave Montgomery with a long, narrow salient that cost a great deal but was of little value. The war would, after all, continue into 1945.

Although it is abundantly obvious that the men who conceived, planned and executed the Market Garden operation did not anticipate a defeat – no commander sets out to be beaten, after all – it is equally clear that, from the outset, the entire exercise had serious flaws. Some of these were recognised at the time and some were not. But even those that were, or should have been, anticipated were ignored or, even worse, actively suppressed.

The initial premise was not without merit. Had the operation been completely successful, the Allies would have secured the highway into the Reich that Montgomery and others truly believed would bring victory much closer. The advantages were potentially far-reaching. The war would have been shortened by a considerable margin, resulting in much less loss of life, money and other resources. The idea that there would have been an immediate collapse of the German Army, and consequently the Nazi state, does not really bear examination, but that was not the essence of Montgomery’s analysis. It might not have been utterly inconceivable, but it was certainly less than likely.

Breaking into Germany’s core industrial powerhouse in the Ruhr region would, however, have had major consequences. Allied commanders had had this in mind for some time. On 22 August Montgomery’s chief of staff, Major General Francis (Freddie) de Guingand, had met with General Eisenhower to discuss and deliver Montgomery’s current thinking, including a series of notes on general policy that the Field Marshal had written.

In Montgomery’s view – as recorded in his memoirs – the route to victory was for ‘… the great mass of the Allied armies to advance northwards, clear the coast as far as Antwerp, establish a powerful air force in Belgium and advance into the Ruhr’ (Field Marshal Montgomery, 1958). Disrupting and, in due course, destroying the German war industry would inflict a crucial, even deadly blow on the remaining power of the Third Reich, although Germany would not be utterly bereft of stockpiles of arms, ammunition and fuel. Even complete success in the Ruhr would not necessarily have brought the war to quite as sudden an end as all that; it would not, for example, have closed down production in that other industrial powerhouse, the Saar region.

Even so, given a successful Allied offensive into the Ruhr, Germany might well have been obliged to give up territory in the east more quickly, in order to shorten her eastern front and lines of communication – even at the cost of re-aligning right on, or even within, the border – although the Russians might not necessarily have been able to take full advantage of such a development. Although it is widely accepted that Stalin used the strain on his enormously long logistics chain as an excuse for not proceeding against the Germans in Poland at the time of the Polish Home Army’s rising in Warsaw, his failure to press the battle did have some basis in reality. The Russian industrial and logistical effort was under huge strain and probably not capable of sustaining a deep, high-speed advance on a front broad enough to keep the Germans fully occupied and prevent them from making the sort of extensive reorganisation needed to keep the Russians out of Germany.

The expertise and will to carry out a far-reaching reconstruction certainly existed – as the German high command demonstrated in the western theatre in September 1944. Allied intelligence had identified that a great many German units were without effective command and control after the retreat through France, and also that there were a large number of headquarters, support and administrative units whose formations had effectively ceased to exist. However, it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the German staff structure might be capable of combining these elements at such a remarkable rate and so effectively that they could form a defensive line offering serious resistance to the Allied forces. It is hard to imagine that in the event of a rapid withdrawal in the east the German command would have proved incapable of achieving a similar degree of reorganisation. In the west, the Germans had been retreating at great speed due to massive Allied pressure on the ground. They had suffered enormous casualties and losses in materiel and were at a much greater disadvantage in the air. A planned withdrawal in the east – though losses had been heavy there, too – might well have proved to be even more effective.

By the beginning of September, it was becoming evident that the momentum of the Allied advance across France could not be maintained without a major new initiative; the questions were the ‘where’ and the ‘how’. In Montgomery’s mind the answer was clear: a single, concentrated, full-blooded thrust into Germany. This was at odds with Eisenhower’s general policy of fighting on a broad front, which would force the Germans to spread their forces thinly from north to south – a policy that conformed to the old military dictum that to defend everything is to defend nothing. There was some virtue in this view. If the German Army were kept fully occupied all along their western front, they would have little or no opportunity to gather the size of force needed to mount the sort of counter-offensive that Hitler – and, even at this stage, some of his generals – believed could turn the course of the campaign and force the Allies back across the Channel.

The drawback of the broad-front policy was that the Allied supply effort was already creaking under the strain of keeping a vast force in action over a front hundreds of miles long and also hundreds of miles from its only source of materiel. Equally, there were many problems that could arise from mounting what even Montgomery described as a ‘pencil-like’ thrust deep into enemy-held territory, not least the enormous commitment of men, armour, artillery and air support to protect the flanks of the narrow salient from counter-attacks.

Montgomery was, however, confident that a concentrated attack would bear the most fruit. Although the destruction of Germany’s industrial base would certainly have had a major effect on the progress of the war on both fronts, it is still open to question whether a successful operation would have allowed the fast breakthrough that Montgomery envisaged. The Allied supply chain was already strained to the utmost, and there was no prospect of any significant improvement in the logistical situation until, as Montgomery recognised, the port of Antwerp could be secured and brought into action. This was not simply a matter of capturing the city. The Germans were still firmly embedded on either side of the roads to the port, and clearing those areas was likely to involve a good deal of hard fighting over a protracted period. Even if the Germans decided to abandon the city and withdraw from the water roads, it would not take much effort for them to damage the harbour installations at least enough to keep the port from being fully operational for many months.

Montgomery had been convinced of the value of a thrust into the Ruhr for some time. He was not persuaded by Eisenhower’s opinion that the Allied armies should close up to the river Rhine and cross in great strength but on a broad front so that, while 21st Army Group overran the Ruhr, the US forces could conquer the Saar region and thus completely unhinge the German munitions industries. Montgomery believed – or perhaps chose to believe – that he had secured agreement in principle to his general plans from Eisenhower’s other lieutenant in the ground battle, General Bradley. Either he was mistaken in his interpretation of Bradley’s words or the US general had had a change of heart, because when Montgomery flew to Bradley’s Headquarters at Laval on 23 August it transpired that Bradley now believed the main thrust of his own army group should be a drive on Metz and thence to the Saar. Montgomery went on to meet with Eisenhower to press his case. According to Montgomery, Eisenhower accepted that 21st Army Group was not strong enough or adequately supplied to start a massive new offensive without US support or priority of resupply and that any such offensive must be made under the direction of a single officer – Montgomery.

Standard paratroop supply container.

Montgomery’s initial request was that he should take over direct command of no less than twelve US divisions from 12th Army Group. That was too much for Eisenhower to accept, although Montgomery did secure an undertaking that the northern elements of 12th Army Group would be ‘adequately supported’ in terms of supply to afford the protection that 21st Army Group would need on its right wing when the new offensive got under way.

Whatever Eisenhower had meant and whatever Montgomery had interpreted that to mean, it soon became apparent that the left wing of the US army was not getting the logistical support it needed – a fact reported to Montgomery by his liaison officer at Bradley’s Headquarters. Montgomery decided to press his case and sent a message to Eisenhower on 4 September. Effective communications were not the easiest thing to achieve, since Eisenhower’s own headquarters were at Granville in Brittany and almost unbelievably had no direct telephone or radio link with the headquarters of either Montgomery or Bradley. Montgomery’s message reiterated his earlier suggestions and comments – chiefly that in his opinion the Allies had reached a stage in the campaign where a thrust to Berlin was likely to be successful, that the supply situation could not provide adequate support for two major offensives and that a thrust into the Ruhr was much more likely to bring about a successful march on Berlin than an operation with the same target but emanating from the Saar.

The message was sent on 5 September. Eisenhower’s response did not arrive until 7 September, and then it contained only the second half of the message – the first part would not arrive for another 48 hours. The first part of the response, however, made Eisenhower’s decision absolutely clear. He had come to the conclusion that ‘No reallocation of our present resources would be adequate to sustain a thrust to Berlin’ and that his policy was to occupy both the Saar and the Ruhr. He considered that once this had been achieved, the ports of Le Havre and Antwerp would be in Allied hands and it would be possible to support either or both offensives. But he went on to say that he had ‘… always given and will continue to give priority to the Ruhr, RPT [repeat] Ruhr, and the northern advance’ (Field Marshal Montgomery, 1958).

Montgomery’s response was to give a brief outline of his current supply and transport difficulties, but repeating the view that a ‘… reallocation of our present resources of every description would be adequate to get one thrust to Berlin’ (Field Marshal Montgomery, 1958). Clearly Montgomery was still not amenable to Eisenhower’s broad-front policy, and he soon had another issue to factor into his thinking. On 9 September, he was informed that a new German weapon – the V2 rocket – had made its first strike on London. Such intelligence as there was seemed to indicate that the rockets would be coming in some number, launched from sites in the Netherlands. Montgomery had already identified a route through the city of Arnhem as being the most promising avenue for a new offensive, and the V2 situation reinforced his view. Accordingly, he met with Eisenhower again on 10 September, this time at Brussels, where a knee injury prevented Eisenhower from leaving his aircraft. Yet another attempt to persuade Eisenhower to give 21st Army Group first call on any and all resources to facilitate an advance to the Ruhr and then Berlin failed to move the US general from his policy. But in the light of increasing German strength to his front and the new V2 attacks, Montgomery did secure backing for 21st Army Group to move on Arnhem. He was left in no doubt that he would not have all the logistical support (or control over a very large portion of 12th Army Group) that he wanted – a fact Montgomery recognised in a signal to Eisenhower on 11 September. He was, though, now in a position to press on and had already been given control over an additional force – 1st Allied Airborne Corps – which he intended to use in his new offensive. It was not the meeting with Eisenhower on 10 September that prompted Montgomery’s decision, but rather a meeting the same morning with General Dempsey, commander of 2nd Army, and General Browning, the Airborne Corps commander. The basic premise for Operation Market Garden had already been formulated before Montgomery even went to Brussels; he was just looking for more support to carry it out.

The operation envisaged was well within the norms of airborne warfare. Parachute and glider troops would land behind enemy lines, secure a number of objectives – in this instance the river crossings over the Meuse (or Maas), the Waal and the Neder Rijn – and then hold them until relieved by ground troops. This was no different in principle to operations that had taken place in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, but the scale was immense and the distance that the ground troops would need to cover was considerable – the ‘airborne carpet’ over which British XXX Corps would advance was to stretch for about 60 miles. In theory, XXX Corps would start its advance from the Meuse–Escaut canal, through the area of Valkenswaard and join up with the US 101st Airborne Division under General Maxwell Taylor.

The 101st’s area of operation would consist of more than 25 miles, from Eindhoven to a point just short of Grave. This was an enormous undertaking for a single division, but of the three airborne formations the 101st would also have the shortest period of contact with the enemy. It was also expected that the Germans would have to concentrate their efforts on delaying XXX Corps and therefore have little to commit to the battle against the 101st.

German troops and armour at Arnhem.

The US 82nd Airborne Division, under General James Gavin (at 37, the youngest US officer to take command of a division since the Civil War in the 1860s), would have responsibility for taking the bridges and securing the path northwards from there to the far side of Nijmegen – a distance of approximately 20 miles. As well as seizing bridges, the 82nd would also have to secure the Groesbeek Heights to the east of Nijmegen, to protect the flank of XXX Corps’ advance from German attacks coming out of the Reichswald Forest.

At the same time, the British 1st Airborne Division, supported by the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, would seize the Arnhem road and rail bridges and form a bridgehead on the far side of the Neder Rijn that would include the whole city of Arnhem. All the airborne formations would, naturally, be lightly equipped, with little artillery support and limited supplies, but they would not have to hold out for very long. According to the plan, the leading formation of 2nd Army – General Brian Horrocks’ XXX Corps – would have advanced to Arnhem in 24 hours, or 48 hours at worst, with XII Corps and VIII Corps to the left and right of the axis of attack, which would – it was assumed – put more pressure on the German defence by drawing forces away from the main battle.

Montgomery’s concept of a massive force advancing across the Rhine, through the Netherlands and into Germany was bold and impressive, but not necessarily viable. Amassing the size of force that he had in mind – at one point he was thinking of an army of forty divisions – would have involved bringing US formations under his control, which would probably have been difficult to reconcile with political and public opinion in the United States. But even if that were possible, the operation could only be mounted at the expense of the supplies needed to sustain the advances of General Patton and the operations of General Devers to the south, though in fact relatively little of Devers’ supplies came through Normandy. This too would be a public relations problem. Were it possible to find the forty or so divisions that Montgomery wanted for the drive to Berlin, would it have been practical to maintain them in the field? The unexpectedly rapid advance across France and into Belgium had already proved to be too much of a burden for the available logistical effort – indeed one British division had been left behind on the Seine for lack of petrol and other supplies, and their transport had been removed to bolster the supply chain.

Polish paratroops.

Polish paratroops waiting to embark.

There might well have been political resistance from the French, too. The French government in exile and its military leaders had limited influence, but they still probably had rather more than was justified by their contribution to the general war effort since 1940. By September 1944, the French army was well into a phase of reconstruction and was a significant force once more. French support, at a time when co-operation was so crucial, might have been hard to retain in a situation where the war was to be carried deep into Germany before the liberation of France was complete.

There was also the matter of the condition of the army. The leading formations of the British, Canadian and US forces had been in more-or-less continual action for three months. The men were tired and their equipment was worn. Undertaking a massive offensive might have provided a fillip to their morale in the short term, but strong German resistance – and there is no reason to believe that the troops would have faced anything less – might have proved too much for divisions that had already fought so hard for so long. The same factor applied to the Russians. Soviet divisions had fought at least as hard, and for rather longer, as the British, Canadian and US forces, so there was no guarantee that they would be able to continue to exert the same pressure on the Germans as they had in the past, even if their logistical and industrial effort was up to the task – a highly questionable assumption, bearing in mind that their logistical chain was even longer than that in the west.

On the other hand, the offensive had certainly run out of steam, the Germans were clearly requiring discipline and confidence, and autumn was approaching. Shorter days, colder weather, more rain and fog would all militate against fast movement and would also be likely to put even more strain on the logistical effort. It would become harder to move material up to the front and there would be increased demand for various items – particularly bulky materiels like food, fuel and winter clothing.

Collecting supply panniers.

Supply containers on the Wolfheze–Arnhem railway line.

Supply pannier from Drop Zone ‘V’. (Courtesy of Philip Reinders)

The approach of winter would bring another practical problem: the western Allies had never really fought a winter war. Britain and France had been at war with Germany through the winter of 1939–40, but there had been virtually no fighting at all. The Germans on the other hand had done two hard years of winter campaigning in the infinitely more challenging environment of Russia. The lessons learned, particularly in 1941–42, had been costly ones, but the Germans knew what they were doing when it came to fighting in the cold.

The risks posed by Market Garden were considerable, but the potential benefits were huge. There was a real possibility – and not just in the opinion of Montgomery and his staff – that the war could be brought to a successful conclusion before the end of the year. It might not mean that the troops could be home by Christmas, but at least the fighting would be over.

If the operation were successful, the Allies would have the opportunity to do more than neutralise the German industrial complexes in the Ruhr and thereby seriously undermine Germany’s ability to continue the fight. They would be able to secure the basis for a huge advance across open country to Berlin, though the supply issue would still hamper that. Whether such an advance could be mounted and maintained all the way across Germany would still be open to question, but the blow to German morale would potentially be a very serious matter for their hierarchy. That said, if the Allies proved unable to make rapid headway eastward, there might not be Montgomery’s hoped-for quick conclusion to the war.

The loss of the Netherlands might not be such a great issue to the German public, but fighting on home soil would be a different matter. Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler had made repeated assertions about the impregnable nature of the home defences, but these must have seemed rather hollow by the late summer of 1944. It was possible that the will of the nation might crumble in the face of a new offensive, and Hitler’s regime could collapse. On the other hand, the fact that the war had been carried on to German soil might achieve little more than a stiffening of the resolve of the people and the army. There is a widespread belief that the Germans would have been prepared to give up the fight in the west in order to concentrate on the eastern front and that the British, US and Canadian forces – ‘and increasingly the French’ – would have had a relatively easy path to Berlin. There are weaknesses, though, in that assumption.

So long as Hitler could rely on the obedience of various internal security and political forces of the Reich – and, of course, the Waffen SS on the battlefield – there was a good chance that the army and the people could be kept in line. It is all too easy to assume that Germans would be more inclined to surrender to the western Allies than to the Russians, but there was no guarantee that they would surrender at all. German officers may have thought wistfully of the possibility that there could be an armistice in the west while the war continued in the east, but in reality the political hierarchy of the Reich would not countenance surrender – they were surely aware that there could be no agreement with the western Allies that would allow the continuation of the Nazi state in any form or that they, as individuals, could remain in government. Since they were all destined for the death penalty in the event of defeat and capture, they really had no option but to fight on to the very last gasp. Moreover, there was no prospect of securing any kind of agreement with the western Allies that did not include the Soviet Union. Churchill and Roosevelt may not have had any illusions about the nature of Joseph Stalin, but they were committed to the defeat of Germany. Nothing else would be politically possible. After years of sacrifice, the only settlement that would have been acceptable to public opinion in Britain, the United States or Russia was the complete and unconditional surrender of Germany.

The operation Montgomery envisaged would effectively demand that the US forces operating to his south had to halt to conserve fuel. This would be difficult for US political and military figures – and hard for the general public to understand since both Devers and Patton were making good progress. Patton was certainly unimpressed, though he was not actively opposed to a major thrust in principle and rather admired the concept of the plan. Naturally Patton would prefer his own force to be given the task of breaking through the German defence and therefore have priority for fuel – he was quoted by Chester Wilmot as saying ‘my men can eat their belts, but my tanks have got to have gas’ (Chester Wilmot, 1952).

Despite the political difficulties, Eisenhower accepted Montgomery’s view that a plan to make a dash across the Netherlands was viable and agreed that extra resources would have to be diverted to 21st Army Group. He drew the line at making the operation the sole priority for supply, instead telling Montgomery that it would be a priority, not the priority. Montgomery, however, chose to interpret Eisenhower’s support as a promise to ensure that 2nd Army, the leading formation in 21st Army Group, would have first call on whatever material was available.

Eisenhower and Montgomery had clashed over the general policy of the Allied offensive and about the need to provide the Market Garden operation with everything it might require, leading to the incident at a meeting in which Eisenhower was obliged to remind Montgomery that he was not the supreme commander and famously told him – ‘Steady Monty, you can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss’ (Chester Wilmot, 1952). Montgomery backed down. It was, after all, reasonable that an American should have overall control of policy given that the US was providing the bulk of the combat troops, aircraft and logistical support in terms of both materiel and transport – quite an undertaking given the scale of the war in the Pacific.