Operation Market Garden failed because of three major Allied leaders making bad mistakes and three German leaders reacting fast and furious

Out of the Foxholes Questions
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That’s one of the more insidious ‘reasons’, that the 82nd was somehow to blame for M-G failing. The 82nd commander was ordered (by his superior, General Browning) specifically not to go for the Nijmegen bridge until he had taken the Groesbeek Heights, and then bridges at Grave, Malden, Heumen, Hatert, Honighutje and then and only then, the Waal bridge. Even so, the 82nd got within 400 yards of the Nijmegen before meeting impenetrable resistance on the first day.

One of their drop zones for reinforcements were overrun by the Germans, who were (surprise!) unexpectedly powerful all up and down the main highway. The 82nd quickly took the drop zone back, but only at the cost of pulling some men back from the bridge-attack forces. When XXX Corps arrived, they were unable to take the Nijmegen bridge for a day after their arrival. (Note that the 82nd was not all landed the first day - it took two more ‘lifts’ to bring it up to snuff.)

I’d say the 82nd did pretty darned well. Better than the British 1st, but that’s another story.

XXX Corps was slow, and continued to be slow, even with the Nijmegan bridge taken. Told they should be at the Rhine in three days, across the Rhine in four days they reached the vicinity of the south of the bridge in nine. The crossing at Nijmegen took less than a day once XXX arrived at the bridge. And then XXX Corps… stopped. For more than a day.

So what went wrong?

XXX Corps was presented with a hopeless task: reach and cross the Arnhem Bridge in three days. Up a highway under German artillery (and, at Eindhoven, Luftwaffe), infantry, and tank attack, requiring XXX to turn units back to clear the road.

1st Airborne was presented with a hopeless task: land 8 miles away from the objective, and walk there under heavy opposition. It’s a wonder that anyone reached the bridge, much less Frost’s brave, abandoned battalion.

82nd and 101st were presented with too many tasks, with forces not complete for three days (via the various airlifts).

It was a shambles. Declaring a 90 percent success is putting a bow on a turd. 90 percent success is still a defeat; and with Caen, Antwerp, and this, made Montgomery a well-respected (somehow) 0 for 3. Failing to take “a bridge too far”, if it’s the objective of the whole excercise, is failure of the entire operation.

What went wrong?

  1. underestimate of opposition. Montgomery’s plan not only required the German opposition to be light, it depended on German opposition being non-existent. Any German forces after breaking “the crust” at the front were expected to be whisked away. That the Germans might react in violent and clever ways simply did not occur to him.

  2. lack of aircraft - There simply weren’t enough transport aircraft to do the job. Rather than take that under advisement, Montgomery just ignored it. Transport aircraft from the “first lift” were expected to all survive that operation, and thus be able to drop reinforcements and supplies in the second and third “lifts.” Even so, the airborne elements were not expected to be completely available for three days (note this is the same amount of time expected for XXX Corps to actually reach Arnhem.) The plan also assumed (indeed, required) perfect weather in England and in Holland.

  3. lack of flexibility - the plan required use of one main highway to run the whole way, with no impediments by the Germans. 1st Airborne had to seize the (entire) bridge at the end of that highway, the US airborne divisions had to seize every bridge along the way, and XXX Corps had to roll up this highway at high speed. Any ‘variation’ would throw everything off. As it was, a couple of anti-tank guns would hold up all XXX Corp completely.

  4. lack of appreciation of the realities of the plan. That XXX Corps would scream north and take the bridge at Arnhem required that no additional supplies would be needed (supplies issued to the armored units of fuel and ammunition were for four days.) In reality, pretty much everything was in the wrong place when needed, and so… traffic jam. Huge traffic jam. Which slowed everything down.

  5. lack of infantry - XXX Corps had to wait north of Nijmegen for a day, waiting for infantry to come up. That is, the traffic jam made sure that the infantry needed by the armored units in the front were incapable of being there in a timely fashion.

  6. Groupthink - Montgomery himself. There’s a concept that encapsulates M-G; that Montgomery ignored everything that might make the operation fail. His subordinates, a number of whom were not so sure about the whole thing, were cowed into nodding their heads and saying (though not believing) that the thing would all just work. And so, off all those men went off to die.

  7. Fragility - Montgomery seemed to simply not be aware that any failing all along the way of the advance would ruin it. But a whole chain of unqualified successes were required.

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Thank you for pointing this out. The 82nd was incredibly brave, not just, but especially during those days. They eventually crossed the Waal river a few miles west of the bridge, circled around and captured the bridge from the other side. The place where they crossed is now called ‘de Oversteek’, the Crossing in English. Every day a veteran will march across the bridge in the Sunset March, a slow march across the bridge during which the lights will go on one by one at the same pace. It is an incredibly beautiful memorial to the brave action of those man who secured victory at Nijmegen with this brave and bold action.

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IMHO we tend to buy into the “Bridge to Far” myth. I believe the bridge itself not to have been the problem.

I believe it to be rather a case of A Road To Narrow than of A Bridge To Far

The biggest problem was the road. A raised, narrow road was always going to be a major job to tackle and is a defenders’ dream (I believe the Dutch Military College used to set this scenario to its students and they all failed)

Had 30 Corps been able to maintain its schedule and been at that bridge on time with its artillery (with rocket-firing Typhoons and P-51s overhead) then, surely, the Panzer divisions in Arnhem would just have been juicy targets. Of course working radio-sets would have helped.

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The “Bridge too far” doesn’t mean the bridge was too hard; it was that the planning was to take bridges along the way - Eindhoven, Nijmegen, Grave, and some others - and then Arhem. It was one too many bridges given what was up against XXX Corps.

Yeah; and since the road didn’t have much in the way of additional north-south paths, the Germans east and west of the highway were able to bring the road under artillery fire, and even infantry fire – occasionally making things so dangerous that lead units had to turn back to re-open the road – units south of the break in the highway were traffic-jammed behind the infantry and supply trucks trying to get through. (And the tankers refused to advance at all without infantry, and at night.)

Well, XXX Corps was behind schedule as soon as it started out, since the highway could be blocked by burning vehicles by a relatively tiny German anti-tank force. The original plan was for XXX to make it to Arnhem is two days. Monty believed that there simply was no defense worthy of the name in front of him, despite clear evidence that significant infantry and armor was going to stand in his way. Since it’s 64 miles from the start lines to Arnhem, XXX Corps would have to average 3 miles an hour for the two days. Against any defense at all, that’s just not going to happen. And if there’s any delay at any bridge at all, two days just impossible.

The other thing is that all that got to the bridge at all was one battalion of the entire 1st division (Frost’s 2nd), with no resupply possible. The only way to have a crack at the south end of the bridge would be if the Polish Brigade had been dropped – into the teeth of a panzer division – right next to the south end of the bridge. They weren’t dropped there, they were dropped west of there, in hopes of getting what was left of 1st Airborne back across the Rhine. (1st Airborne was so ruined it never dropped in combat again. It’s only operation after M-G was flying into Norway - not paradropping - to disarm Germans – after that, it was disbanded in November, 1945.)

Anyway, by the time XXX was across at Nijmegen, Frost’s battalion had been overwhelmed, and the Germans controlled the entire bridge. The front line stayed between Nijmegen and Arnhem for six months, until April 14th, 1945.

So yeah, if Monty’s absurd time-table had been doable, maybe. But Monty’s time-table was intended to out-Patton Patton, put Monty across the Rhine, and make him “the man who won the war.” He’d been trying to be that since North Africa, and been under-achieving since. Just look at his knuckle-headed moves to open Antwerp for supply traffic, or rather not. His only operation well handled was the dash to the Baltic, and then only to keep the Russians out of Denmark (a race won by the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion at Wismar.)

I found some interesting stuff about that:

Everybody had working radios, everybody had radios that could vary frequencies. But training for communications (for an airborne corps, rather than an airborne brigade or division) was not complete. 101st Airborne could get ‘connected’ with XXX Corps only on D+2. There were a plethora of headquarters (including some in London) that were part of the “radio net” for the operation - and most of those didn’t have any organized ‘path’ for signals heard by one to be passed to the other. Radio traffic even then so was so ‘dense’, that the whole system threatened to collapse - and of course the Germans were doing everything possible to jam Allied communications.

It was a shambles, but not exactly the shambles Ryan described. For instance, the Dutch phone system was actually still functioning, and could have easily been used to connect with XXX Corps and air support headquarters, but Urquhart didn’t trust that the Germans weren’t tapping the phones. (How is that different from them intercepting radio? Beats me.). The 82nd and 101st made good use of Dutch phone system, which was intact enough that calls to the Dutch East Indies were still possible at the time of M-G. (The Dutch had ‘public’ telephone networks, and a ‘private’ one, run by the resistance.)

Even so, Frost (at the Bridge) was able to contact Royal Artillery HQ by radio and order artillery support (that one was a surprise to me.). Eventually, the RA began relaying Frost’s traffic to XXX Corps.

1st Airborne’s Division Radios had a range of about 6 miles, which wouldn’t reach XXX Corps until it was 'way too late. (But they had plenty of range to reach other parts of the 1st Division itself, and, another radios in HQ that could reach London, and another radio for BBC(!).

It was a mess, and pretty much everybody who was involved in the airborne operation from corps level on down knew it was a mess. But they had their orders.

I put this down to Montgomery again. He should not have just hoped to muddle through on communications, and by so doing, got men killed. A lot of men. He dropped 1st Division far enough away from everybody that they couldn’t contact anybody (local control of airstrikes was down to reflective “panels” and colored smoke, which it turned out almost nobody had). Everything had to work exactly as Montgomery had ordered, including the Germans.

For an excellent survey, I found

https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1445&context=cmh