Was the invasion as big a tragedy as I’ve read? Was Montgomery a total fuck up? (I remember him saying in a documentary that “he” defeated the Germans in Africa.)
While I’m at it, was Degaulle the prick he was made out to be?
Little known fact - It caused a lot of problems in Holland after it did not work. The Nazis stopped food shipments and it caused 18,000 people to starve to death.
I know someone from Holland and she said the food problem was also partly caused by people assuming the war would be over by Christmas. They didn’t save up food like they normally did.
Yes, yes and yes. Monty ignored his intelligence reports, the plan was over-complicated and too ambitious, and no back-up plan was in place to deal with the inevitable cock-ups.
I don’t know if it was a big tragedy, but there is no doubt that it was a screw-up. Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far may be the best and most readable account of the events, but the movie does a good job of visualizing the problems that were faced too.
A I understand things, the Allies really did go one bridge too far: the idea of dropping paratroops to secure bridges that would open a path to Germany was a good one, but those troops would need resupplying/relieving, and the problems faced by supply convoys going up the path (such as civilian refugees going down the path on foot and blocking traffic) weren’t thought of by those in charge. History can show us what should have been done, but that’s not much good to those living the experience at the time.
In hindsight, it was a disaster. The men who fought there could have done more damage and shortened the war further by fighting elsewhere.
OTOH, it is unreasonable to judge Monty by our perfect hindsight. MG could have caused a collapse on the Northwestern front. It might have destroyed German air defenses against Allied bombers, it could have caused a general crack in German morale that perhaps could have led to the toppling of the Nazis. Stranger things have happened.
War is like that. You gamble, sometimes for small change, sometimes for all the marbles. No matter how well you prepare you can never be sure. (Unless of course you nuke them from orbit, that is the only way to be sure.)
If it had succeeded it would have been hailed as a master stroke. In retrospect, the plan carried the seeds of its own failure, particularly in the decision not to drop right near the Arnhem bridge and the consequent need to detach part of the force for several days just to hold the LZs for the successive glider lifts - itself a function of the shortage of transport aircraft. The planning process was a hurried one, this was the last in a series of 16 previous projected operations, all of which were cancelled, some as the troops boarded the aircraft. Possibly its flaws were overlooked with the thought that ‘this one probably won’t come off either’.
The plan might have worked but Montgomery was the wrong person to lead it. He was a cautious methodical general and this operation required somebody who was willing to risk everything and go all out in pursuit of the goal.
Perhaps- except for those annoying little details like having the river flowing the wrong way, not doing enough (if any) original research or personal interviews with soldiers who actually fought in the battle (instead relying on the reports of others)… Sloppy.
The film beautifully captured the unique decision to cease hostilities in order to allow the British to remove their wounded from the area around the bridge, but was annoying in that several distinct German commanders were fused into a single character.
My husband had the opportunity to interview the German commander of both divisions present at Arnhem, several British soldiers who fought there, General Sir John Hackett, two German soldiers who fought at the bridge, and doctors who treated the wounded. He had access to the reports of the battle in the original German, as well as internal Waffen SS documents relating to the battle. He also took soil samples in the forest, found still-existing tank tracks (this was the late 1980’s) and came to the conclusion that A Bridge Too Far described what went on there about as well as Apocalypse Now described the Viet Nam war- you get the idea, you know where it was, you understand why it occurred, but the important questions of why it didn’t go well and what the critical errors were, just have different answers than what was presented.
There are important details about Market Garden that I’m not sure many people are aware of. Namely, that the two Waffen SS divisions who were stationed at Arnhem (of whom the British were blissfully unaware) were both specifically trained to repel coordinated, large-scale airborne assaults. 
The British never came close to taking the bridge. Some units lost 1/3 or more of their number in the first hour of the battle. Some of these units were down below 25% strength by the time they were halfway from their drop zone to the bridge. The British knew that they were beaten on the first day, and made the best of it. The British faced machine guns before they landed, organized resistance before most troops were able to regroup, and tanks. Only a handful of soldiers got within rifle range of the bridge.
The Germans would have been even more effective if they had believed that this drop was the entire plan- “Dieter, this can’t be all of them, can it?” 
Something I recently discovered about the operation. The wrong types of radios were being used. Signals units needed to know the size of the dropzone so that they could use radios with the correct range. The planners ignored the protests that the dropzone was to large for the short range radios to be used. The signals units then asked for larger vehicle based radios and were refused.
The lack of effective comms meant that the units had the impossible task of trying to form up for the long march to the target without coordination.
Geoffrey Reagan in More Military Blunders says that the operation was in the British tradition of a good idea followed by half-hearted planning and desperate improvisation.
We talked to someone who works for a cellphone company in the Arnhem area and he said that they still have trouble providing decent cell coverage even today. Something to do with the topography.
Montgomery carried the responsibility, but he didn’t much if anything to do with the tactical decisions that were being made on the ground. To that extent blaming him for it all is beside the point. Browning’s decision to use valuable lift capacity transporting his headquarters in didn’t help at all.
I’ll agree that ABTF is far from the last word, and other works like Middlebrooke’s, and *It Never Snows In September *are worth reading.
So what did he do with all this fantastic research. Please tell me there’s a book.
Yes, although it is out of print- it’s Before I Sleep by Edward Monroe Jones (husband is not the author).
There is a remarkable film, called “Theirs is the Glory,” shot in 1946; it is a partial re-creation of the Arnhem part of the battle.
What makes it interesting is that there are no actors. All the participants are British Airborne, most of whom had been fighting there less than a year before; the rubble from the battle is still all around, and all the equipment is correct–including a couple of Panthers, one of which is shot at with a PIAT.
While it should not be taken as gospel as far as objective history goes, it is an incredible period resource, and documents the scene and equipment very well (even though it does this purely as a chance by-product).
Great scene with a Canadian war correspondent, too.
I am the last person to defend Montgomery, but blaming him for the execution in this plan was not the problem. You can blame him for being over ambitious in planning, for not making certain details were set (radios), for not realizing there were alternate routes up to Arnhem, for not listening to Dutch resistors, but I can;t say he wasn’t aggressive with the execution - the roads just didn’t work for the plan.
The only point where execution was held up by lack of boldness was the Tankers failing to move after the bridge at Njmegen was taken. That was inexusable.
Monty had some trouble delivering earlier in the European war too, promising to capture Caen on D-Day. I suspect (but have yet to really look into) that the fighting in Europe was so drastically different from combat in North Africa that Montgomery was unable to adapt. In the desert it was possible to make sweeping movements and capture a lot of ground; not so much the more confined, complicated terrain of Western Europe. The campaign in North Africa also favored Monty’s style more. He was able to conduct strong defense while building up his preferred overwhelming force of troops and supplies. Though I understand he had a problem trusting intelligence data in Africa too - even stuff that came from Enigma and would be labelled as extremely reliable.
(Slight highjack) Any suggestions for good bios of Montgomery?
Montgomery was the type of general who would run a campaign like a checklist. You made a plan and then did step one and then step two and step three and so on until you reached the end.
Market-Garden was the kind of operation that needed somebody who would do step one and step two at the same time, then skip ahead to step eight, then double back and do step four, then see there was an opportunity to get step ten done ahead of schedule, then realize step three isn’t go to work so let’s make up a new step and call it eleven, and now that we did step eleven we can skip step five and nine.
Monty’s reputation suffers largely because of his undiplomatic (to say the least) statements about the role of British units at Caen which exagerrated the effect of their attack, and dimnished the role of the US army in breaking the lines there.
He did have a point, but only to a limited degree in that the British assualt did divert German resources, but its something of a stretch, to say that it was the significant factor in the US success, if anything it sounds much more like a post justification for an unintended outcome.
He was not particualarly liked in US command circels prior to this, and the knives were already sharp well before he made his statement, and his insensitivity gave his detractors plenty of ammunition to attack his reputation.
Despite all this, Monty is heavily credited with ensuring that the landings at Normandy did not simply hit the shores and stay there, but immediately pushed inland, it has been said of him that other mitlitary minds got the Allies on to the beaches, and Monty made sure they didn’t stay there but instead moved on.
There is every reason to believe that if the Allies had dug in, the Northern France push would have taken longer, been more bloody than it ultimately proved to be.
Monty was often criticised for not being proactive enough in military terms, usually this comes from US sources, but Britiain had been fighting thrre years and with limited resources, you can readily understand his caution, and although the US wanted to be bold, this didn’t work out too well at Kesserine, and in any case its fairly easy to b bold when you have a massive logistical and mitlitary advantage.
‘Market garden’ might well have been Monstys attempt to disprove US miltiary clains of overcaution, and yet here was a situation of uncharacteristic boldness, which failed.
Hmmm… Lot’s of information to be digested, thanks all for your input.
Jack
QFT.
Monty didn’t suck…well at the end of the war he didn’t understand how weak the germans were and insisted on a last set-piece battle that wasn’t needed…but Monty was not a terrible general.
Methodical - yes.
Didn’t like to gamble - yes.
He was what the British needed at the time. The Americans? No—they could afford to be more gambling. The Brits could not afford any more debacles like they suffered many times early in the war.
It is interesting that MG…his most cock-up occurred when he tried to break out of his mold and do something gambling and aggressive…when he SHOULD have stuck his course and been methodical and cleared out the Zeelands and other resistance and built up logistic infrastructure.
I’d add that his enemies cooperated in the desert – Rommel was willing to give up huge sweeps of ground to keep his force intact and practically “fence” with Monty. After Rommel left North Africa on disability, the German command was less flexible (admittedly the supply problem was part of that inflexibility) and Monty was able to force a careful set-piece battle, which he won (El Alamein).
In Europe there much less willingness to retreat and advance in huge swoops (except for the collapse of the French front and subsequent German flight to the Rhine).