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Originally Posted by Legbreaker
Firstly, Rommel was a good Divisional commander. He was not great at commanding anything much larger.
Secondly, Market Garden, in theory, was a brilliant plan. Unfortunately the necessary intelligence was not passed back to those who needed to know about it, and that little which did get back was basically dismissed as there was little supporting evidence. Montgomery cannot be blamed for not knowing about the presence of two understrength SS Panzer Divisions in Arnhem if he hadn't been personally told about them (amongst other intel deficiencies).
Another problem with the operation was the radios used by the British Paras - they simply didn't work due to (I think) moisture getting to the crystals or something... If they had, then the dire situation could have been relayed back to HQ and the Poles dropped earlier (and on the right side of the river), supplies dropped in amongst the British soldiers instead of in fields covered by the Germans, and about a dozen other things too.
There were a number of other issues such as the bridge being blown in the face of the US 101st which held up the advance by about a day, the stubborn defence of the bridge at Nimegen, and the single narrow road up which nearly every man, tank, artillery piece, and especially supplies was to move. Yes, it was a complex plan, but if it had worked, if the British Paras had been able to hold out another day or two and armour reinforcements arrived....
And now on to the reason the British were so hesitant - they'd been fighting the war just a bit longer than the Americans - a couple of years longer.... The British manpower reserves where almost spent, they simply couldn't afford to throw men away on operations that only had a marginal chance of success unless sufficient reserves were available to at least hold the gained ground. The Americans on the other hand hadn't really fought before Italy (Africa doesn't really count as a major engagement when you consider how few Germans were actually left and how few operational tanks Rommel had available most of the time). The Americans also had a massive pool of reserve manpower they could draw upon and hadn't suffered the near catastrophe of Dunkirk, nor Rommels drive across North Africa and into Egypt.
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The sheer concept of sending an armored corp up a narrow two-lane road that for most of its length is several feet above the polder insured the failure of Market-Garden far better than anything that the Germans could have done. Considering that most of the forces that were committed to cutting the highway were ad-hoc kampfgruppes should speak volumes about the tactical situation that XXX Corps and 1st Airborne Army faced.
To be sure the intelligence failed in warning of the presence of two understrength, battered SS Panzer Divisions. These divisions proved the key to encircling and slaughtering British 1st Airborne Division and holding the key bridge at Nimegen. But it is also true that the decision to drop the Brits over 12km from their target, and then to drop the division over three days doomed the Arnhem fight to a certain conculsion.
The failure to drop a regiment on the bridge at Nimegan was a operational failure...but the 82nd Airborne always had the primary mission of seizing a low ridge mass that provided plenty of positions for artillery observers on that damned highway.
The loss of a key bridge early in the fight also speaks volumes about the difficulty of running "a one track railroad". Airborne divisions have minimal engineer support and none of what they had was dedicated to building bridges to support armor. The failure of the Guards Armored Division to assign engineer bridging support to the front of their column was a major failure...but one forced on them by the tactical situation that they faced. But then when one throws armor up a highway covered with over a dozen bridges, would it not be fair to assume that the enemy would get lucky, at least once?
Finally, Monty did have access to a wonderful source of intelligence. The Royal Dutch Army. A full brigade was operating with the British and yet their knowledge of local conditions was ignored. And to add insult to injury, the pre-war Dutch Army staged their field exercises in the Nimegen/Arnhem area, they were well aware of the difficults of the terrain and they even knew about the Driel ferry and how it could have been used to transport reinforcements and supplies north of the Rhine.
I have always felt that Market-Garden accomplished several things; first it created a sixty-mile long bulge that led nowhere (and indeed several miles of it had to be abandoned during the fall when the Germans started flooding the Rhine); it destroyed one airborne division and shot up two others; it diverted attention from the vital clearing of Antwerp and the clearing of Antwerp's even more vital passage to the sea, causing further supply problems for the Allied forces. The planning and execution of Market-Garden showed Monty at his worse.