Arnhem, summarized

I’ve read an enormous amount about Operation Market Garden (AKA the Battle of Arnhem) and while the actual operation was enormously complex — it could be thought of as a dozen distinct battles happening simultaneously — the broad outlines, it turns out, are quite simple. As is widely known, the idea was to capture a series of bridges in the eastern Netherlands and then use those bridges to transport the Allied armies into Germany. The effort failed, at great cost of life. Why?

The plan was far too intricate: the capture of any one bridge depended on a series of maneuvers carried out perfectly and with precise timing.

The plan was far too optimistic: it depended wholly on the belief that the Germans would offer little or no resistance, and Field Marshal Montgomery, the creator of the plan, ignored evidence that the German forces were larger than he had anticipated and that the attack force therefore had to be amplified. He openly mocked the intelligence officer who brought him the bad news … and then after the war had the effrontery to say that the plan would have worked if he had had more support.

The plan depended first of all on the airborne troops capturing and holding a series of bridges. But because the air commanders insisted, for the safety of the planes, dropping paratroopers several miles from the bridges, out of range of German flak, and doing fewer drops per day than were required, surprise was impossible. The Germans had plenty of time to blow some bridges and fortify their resistance at others. That meant that some bridges (most famously the big one at Arnhem, the “bridge too far” of legend) never got captured at all, others were blown up, and still others were finally captured but only after great delay and the deaths of many soldiers.

But the ground forces arrived so slowly that even if the paratroopers had been able to secure all the bridges they would have struggled to defend them against recapture.

Antony Beevor’s summary is correct:

Many historians, with an ‘if only’ approach to the British defeat, have focused so much on different aspects of Operation Market Garden which went wrong that they have tended to overlook the central element. It was quite simply a very bad plan right from the start and right from the top. Every other problem stemmed from that. Montgomery had not shown any interest in the practical problems surrounding airborne operations. He had not taken any time to study the often chaotic experiences of North Africa, Sicily and the drop on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy. Montgomery’s intelligence chief, Brigadier Bill Williams, also pointed to the way that ‘Arnhem depended on a study of the ground [which] Monty had not made when he decided on it.’ In fact he obstinately refused to listen to the Dutch commander-in-chief Prince Bernhard, who had warned him about the impossibility of deploying armoured vehicles off the single raised road on to the low-lying polderland flood plain.

The entire operation was constructed to feed Montgomery’s ego: he was appalled that Patton’s Third Army, further south, was moving so much faster than his own. He repeatedly pressed Eisenhower to stop Patton — he actually wanted less success for other Allied commanders so that he would have the chance to achieve greater glory for himself. (He wrote delightedly to his fellow general Alan Brooke when he thought he had talked Ike into putting a leash on Patton.) And it was this very narcissism that committed him to a plan that threw his usual caution to the winds.

But the ultimate responsibility for this failure is Eisenhower’s. He approved it because he was exhausted by Monty’s constant badgering and complaining, and because giving Monty something important to do helped to oil the creaky joints of the alliance. But he knew better, and should have postponed the assault until it could have been done properly, or (the best option) cancelled it altogether: this particular enterprise could never have worked. Ike struggled at the beginning of his command, in North Africa, when he was still learning the ropes, but Arnhem is his greatest blunder: by that time he had no excuse for agreeing to such a convoluted and impracticable plan.

It’s agonizing and depressing to read about this whole shitshow, in older accounts like Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far or recent ones like Antony Beevor’s The Battle of Arnhem, because you see these thousands and thousands of men fighting so desperately, so bravely, when they’re just being fed remorselessly and idiotically into a meat grinder.