Operation Market Garden

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Market Garden launched on the 17th of September 1944, and for two days it looked like it might actually work. Around 35,000 to 40,000 airborne soldiers dropped from the sky over German-occupied Netherlands while a column of British armour raced up a single road below. The plan was breathtaking in its ambition: seize nine bridges in 48 hours, cross the Lower Rhine at Arnhem, and punch a corridor 62 miles deep into German territory, opening a path into the heart of northern Germany. It was the largest airborne operation the war had ever seen. And it ended with the British 1st Airborne Division shattered, 8,000 of its 10,000 men dead, missing, or captured, retreating across the Rhine in borrowed boats. What went wrong at Arnhem? Why did Allied commanders dismiss their own intelligence? And what did a single tank column trying to move up two narrow lanes of highway have to do with the fate of the war?

• 2. The Road to Market Garden

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  By late August 1944, the Allied armies had exploded out of Normandy and were chasing a broken German force back toward its own border. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery commanded the 21st Army Group, and he wanted to end the war fast. On the 1st of September, General Dwight D. Eisenhower took personal command of ground forces, a change that demoted Montgomery's former subordinate Omar Bradley to become his equal. Montgomery resented this bitterly. He began pushing for a "single thrust" strategy, a concentrated all-in drive directly through the northern German industrial heartland to Berlin. He argued that with enough supplies, one powerful strike could collapse Germany entirely. George S. Patton was making the same argument from the south, except each man saw himself as the one to lead it. Eisenhower rejected both and chose a broad advance across a wide front.

  The supply crisis added urgency to Montgomery's thinking. Allied armies were running on near-empty fuel reserves, trucked in jerry cans from makeshift Normandy ports via a logistics chain called the Red Ball Express. On the 4th of September, Montgomery's forces captured the massive Belgian port of Antwerp virtually intact. But the Scheldt Estuary leading to it was still controlled by Germany, and neither Eisenhower nor Montgomery initially made opening it a priority. Antwerp would not receive Allied supply ships until the 28th of November. Churchill later described the delay in clearing the Scheldt Estuary as something done "for the sake of the Arnhem thrust."

  Montgomery had actually proposed an earlier, smaller operation called Comet, a limited airborne strike he planned to launch on the 2nd of September. Poor weather and growing signs of German resistance led him to cancel it on the 10th of September. He replaced it with something far larger. On that same day, at Brussels airport, Montgomery confronted Eisenhower directly, tearing a file of Eisenhower's messages to shreds in front of him. Eisenhower reportedly placed a hand on Montgomery's knee and said, "Steady, Monty! You can't talk to me like that. I'm your boss." Eisenhower nonetheless gave Market Garden limited approval and promised to deliver an additional 1,000 tons of supplies daily to support it.

• 3. The Plan's Architecture

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  Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton's First Allied Airborne Army would execute Market, the airborne phase, while General Brian Horrocks's XXX Corps would drive north in the Garden phase. Four divisions would drop from the sky. Major General Maxwell D. Taylor's U.S. 101st Airborne would land near Eindhoven and Veghel. Brigadier General James M. Gavin's 82nd Airborne would drop northeast of them at Grave and Nijmegen. Major-General Roy Urquhart's British 1st Airborne Division, with Major General Stanisław Sosabowski's Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade attached, would land at the far northern end and capture the road bridge at Arnhem and the rail bridge at Oosterbeek.

  The ground forces would move up Highway 69, a two-lane road that would later earn the nickname "Hell's Highway." The road ran partly elevated above a flat terrain of polder and floodplain; the ground on either side was in places too soft for armoured vehicles, and drainage ditches with tree-lined dikes blocked any outflanking move. XXX Corps would have to cross six major water obstacles: the Wilhelmina Canal at Son en Breugel, 100 feet wide; the Zuid-Willems Canal at Veghel, 80 feet; the Maas River at Grave, 800 feet; the Maas-Waal Canal, 200 feet; the Waal River at Nijmegen, 850 feet; and the Rhine at Arnhem, 300 feet. A failure at any one of them would stop the entire operation. To cover this, 9,000 engineers and 2,300 vehicles were assembled with bridging material to rebuild any span the Germans destroyed.

  The scale of the lift was historic. Over 34,600 men were to be delivered to the continent; 14,589 landed by glider and 20,011 by parachute. Gliders brought in 1,736 vehicles, 263 artillery pieces, and 3,342 tons of ammunition. The combined transport fleet included 1,438 C-47 and Dakota aircraft, 321 converted RAF bombers, 2,160 CG-4A Waco gliders, 916 Airspeed Horsa gliders, and 64 General Aircraft Hamilcar cargo gliders. One United States Air Force historian later noted that Market was the only large airborne operation of the war in which the USAAF "had no training program, no rehearsals, almost no exercises." The planning and training for Sicily and Normandy had taken months. Market Garden was assembled in days.

• 4. German Resurgence

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  Allied intelligence had concluded by early September that the German army was a spent force. Between the 6th of June and the 14th of August it had suffered more than 23,000 killed, nearly 200,000 missing or captured, and over 67,000 wounded. Many formations had been reduced to skeletons. The rout appeared total. It was not.

  Between the 5th and the 21st of September, the German Fifteenth Army extracted as many as 89,707 troops, 645 guns, and 6,625 vehicles across the Scheldt Estuary in a flotilla of commandeered freighters, barges, and small boats, according to the records of the operation's naval command. Adolf Hitler had personally recalled Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt from retirement on the 4th of September to rebuild the western defenses. Colonel General Kurt Student, commander of the German airborne forces, received orders from Alfred Jodl to rush from Berlin to the Netherlands and assemble all available units along the Albert Canal.

  Critically for what was about to happen at Arnhem, Model ordered the battle-worn II SS Panzer Corps, consisting of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions under Lieutenant General Wilhelm Bittrich, to rest and refit. He chose two areas for them: Eindhoven and Arnhem. The 9th SS Panzer Division was to transfer its heavy equipment to the 10th for rebuilding. Both divisions were weakened: one accounting found the 9th with approximately 6,380 men on the 3rd of September and the 10th with about 7,142 men. Bittrich said after the war that he had only five tanks at Arnhem. But an organised, experienced armoured force was sitting directly on top of the British 1st Airborne's assigned drop zones, and Allied planners had largely decided not to worry about it.

• 5. Dismissed Warnings

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  The intelligence picture was not completely dark. British signals intelligence at Bletchley Park, through Ultra decrypts, had revealed the movement of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions to the area north and east of Arnhem. The information concerned Eisenhower enough that he sent his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, to raise the issue with Montgomery on the 15th of September, just two days before the operation was to begin. Montgomery dismissed Smith's concerns entirely and refused to alter the landing plans. In his memoirs Montgomery would later write, "The 2nd S.S. Panzer Corps was refitting in the Arnhem area, having limped there. But we were wrong in supposing it could not fight effectively; its battle state was far beyond our expectation."

  The intelligence officer of I Airborne Corps, Major Brian Urquhart, had received reports from the Dutch Resistance indicating SS divisions were in the area. He requested aerial reconnaissance. A photo-reconnaissance Spitfire XI from RAF No. 16 Squadron photographed the Arnhem area on the 12th of September and images showed tanks. Urquhart arranged a meeting with Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning and told him what the photos showed. Browning dismissed the claims. He then ordered the division's senior medical officer to put Urquhart on sick leave, citing "nervous strain and exhaustion."

  The 1st Parachute Brigade's own Intelligence Summary dated the 13th of September noted "a reported concentration of 10,000 troops SW of ZWOLLE on 1 Sep may represent a battle scarred panzer division or two reforming." A Second Army intelligence summary from the 17th of September assessed that large-scale German reinforcement was "unlikely" and that remaining German forces "will not amount to much." After the war, Brigadier John Hackett, who had commanded the 4th Parachute Brigade during the battle, offered a blunter assessment: "You have never fought in a real war, until you have fought Germans."

• 6. Arnhem Falls Short

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  The British 1st Airborne Division landed at 13:30 on the 17th of September without serious incident, but the plan's structural flaws became apparent within hours. Only half the division arrived in the first lift, and only half of those could actually move toward the bridge; the rest had to stay and defend the drop zones overnight to protect the arrival of the second lift the following day. The division's primary objective was left to less than half a brigade.

  Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost's 2nd Parachute Battalion, advancing along the southernmost road near the Rhine, found a largely undefended route and reached the north end of the Arnhem bridge that evening. They set up defensive positions and were joined by Brigade HQ under Major Tony Hibbert. They held the northern ramp. Two attempts to take the bridge's southern approach failed. The other battalions trying to reach Frost were repeatedly slowed or stopped by German blocking units that had established thin defensive lines covering the obvious routes into Arnhem. The 3rd Parachute Battalion had covered only half the distance to the bridge before halting for the night; the 1st Parachute Battalion pushed through skirmishes through the darkness but made little progress.

  Communication between the bridge and divisional headquarters, 13 kilometres away, collapsed almost immediately. The primary radio, the Type 22 set, had an effective range of only 5 kilometres. British radios were found to have been set to different frequencies, two of which happened to coincide with German and British public broadcasting stations. One special jeep-based radio set was destroyed by mortar fire; the other was abandoned the next day. The only way to call for RAF fighter-bomber support was gone. The 1st Airborne Division was fighting nearly blind while German defences were coordinated and reinforced.

  By the morning of the 19th of September, the 1st Battalion was spotted in open ground and collapsed under fire from three sides. The 2nd South Staffordshires were overwhelmed by midday. Approximately 500 men withdrew westward toward the main force in Oosterbeek, 5 kilometres away. Frost's group, by then holding with around 740-750 men, was being systematically demolished house by house by German tanks and artillery from two battle groups under SS-Sturmbannführer Brinkmann and Major Hans-Peter Knaust. Frost himself was among the wounded evacuated under a two-hour truce arranged on the 20th of September. The Germans took full control of the northern approaches to the Arnhem bridge that afternoon.

• 7. Hell's Highway and the Race North

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  XXX Corps opened its advance at 14:35 on the 17th of September behind a creeping barrage from 300 guns, 1 mile wide and 5 miles deep, supported by seven squadrons of RAF Hawker Typhoons firing rockets. Lieutenant Keith Heathcote, commanding the lead tank of the Irish Guards, gave the order to move. The Guards crossed into the Netherlands by 15:00 hours and were immediately ambushed by infantry and anti-tank guns dug in on both sides of the main road. After clearing the German positions with artillery and fresh waves of Typhoons, the column resumed. By last light it had reached Valkenswaard, 7 miles forward. Horrocks had expected to cover 13 miles to Eindhoven that day.

  The halt at Valkenswaard became a point of lasting dispute. Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur of the Irish Guards recalled that the Guards Brigade commander, Norman Gwatkin, told him to "Push on to Eindhoven tomorrow, old boy, but take your time. We've lost a bridge." The Son bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal had been blown up by the Germans as the 101st Airborne approached. XXX Corps engineers, working with German prisoners of war, built a class 40 Bailey bridge across the canal within 10 hours; but the bridging material was in the column behind the Guards, and repairs did not actually begin until 21:00 on the 18th of September. The Irish Guards reached Eindhoven at 18:00 on the 18th and the Son bridge area at 19:00.

  On the night of the 19th of September, 78 German bombers hit Eindhoven. Allied forces had no anti-aircraft guns in the city. The Germans dropped parachute flares and bombed at will. More than 200 houses were "gutted" and 9,000 buildings damaged, with over 1,000 civilian casualties including 227 dead. General Matthew Ridgway, in the city during the attack, wrote: "Great fires were burning everywhere, ammo trucks were exploding, gasoline trucks were on fire, and debris from wrecked houses clogged the streets." General Rick Atkinson later described it as "the only large, long-range air strike by German bombers during the fall of 1944."

  At Nijmegen, the Waal River crossing nearly failed entirely. The 82nd's 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment had been ordered to "move without delay" onto the Nijmegen road bridge but was still sitting around at 18:00 when Gavin asked whether they had reached it. By that point, the 10th SS Reconnaissance Battalion was arriving to defend it. The 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment ultimately crossed the Waal in boats 2 kilometres downstream on the afternoon of the 20th of September to attack the north end from behind, finally securing the bridge.

• 8. Defeat and Aftermath

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  The British 1st Airborne Division held a shrinking perimeter at Oosterbeek for days, waiting for a relief that XXX Corps could not deliver. Field Marshal Walter Model had been staying at the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek when the British landed to the west. He deduced the operation's focus rapidly, evacuated his headquarters, and organised the defence of Arnhem himself. It was Model's direct personal intervention ordering all available armoured vehicles to the area, not simply the pre-positioned SS divisions, that concentrated German armour at Arnhem at the critical moment.

  When the retreat order came, there were not enough boats to bring everyone back across the Rhine. The Germans rounded up most of those left behind. Some British and Polish paratroopers managed to avoid capture with help from the Dutch underground and were eventually rescued in Operation Pegasus on the 22nd of October 1944. Out of a complement of 10,000 men, the 1st Airborne Division suffered 8,000 dead, missing, and captured. Antony Beevor later wrote that Market Garden "was a bad plan right from the start and right from the top."

  The Germans counterattacked the Nijmegen salient but failed to retake any of the Allied gains from those nine days. The cities of Eindhoven and Nijmegen, several towns, and a number of V-2 rocket launch sites remained in Allied hands. Arnhem itself was not captured until April 1945, near the very end of the war in Europe. The failure to open the port of Antwerp quickly in favour of the Arnhem thrust has been described as "one of the greatest tactical mistakes of the war," a cost in time and supply that the Allied armies would pay through the long winter that followed.