The real problem was not so much the divisional aircraft allocations but Brereton’s subsequent decree that there would be only a single lift per day for the entirety of Operation MARKET.55 Brereton made this decision on the advice of his senior air commander, Major-General Paul L. Williams, who had commanded the US 9th Troop Carrier Command from February 1944 and thus during Airborne operations in support of the Normandy landings. Williams had hitherto been known for his willingness to accommodate the needs of the Airborne soldiers, but on this occasion he expressed serious concerns over the number of aircraft held by his units, which had recently doubled with no concomitant increase in groundcrew; shortage of the latter was an ongoing concern dating back to before the Normandy invasion.56 He therefore advised Brereton against carrying out more than a single lift on the first day of MARKET, citing concerns over aircrew fatigue and, more importantly, because he did not think his undermanned groundcrews would be able to refuel, carry out routine maintenance and repair battle damage with sufficient speed to make multiple lifts per day a practical proposition. Brereton’s decision to act on Williams’ reservations was not greeted with enthusiasm by his audience and especially Urquhart, whose formation had already drawn the short straw with regard to aircraft allocation. The single lift per day edict compounded the latter deficiency by spreading the delivery of 1st Airborne Division over three consecutive days. As MARKET GARDEN was predicated on a forty-eight-hour timetable assuming everything ran to schedule, this meant the final increment of the Division would not land in Holland until the day after the ground relief force had reached Arnhem. The combination of smaller aircraft allocation and single lift per day thus significantly reduced Urquhart’s flexibility in executing his mission, and to an arguably greater degree than the other MARKET formations. Brereton’s edict was not accepted without comment. Air-Vice Marshal Hollinghurst, who was in charge of air-ground co-ordination of the Arnhem portion of MARKET as well as exercising overall command of the RAF contingent, told Urquhart that Nos. 38 and 46 Groups were capable of carrying out two lifts on the first day with a pre-dawn take-off. Despite this, Brereton still turned down Urquhart’s subsequent request for his formation to be permitted two lifts on the first day. The problem here was that because the two RAF Groups were unable to muster sufficient machines on their own, the 1st Airborne Division’s first lift was dependent upon US resources for over a quarter of its aircraft, a fact which presumably influenced Brereton’s reaction. A subsequent attempt by Montgomery to sway Brereton met with a similar lack of success, although it is unclear exactly when and how Montgomery became aware of the single-lift edict. According to one source Montgomery spotted the ‘disastrous flaw’ himself on receiving a copy of the MARKET plan, but given the latter had not yet been drawn up at this time and his lack of Airborne expertise it is more likely he was alerted to and drawn into the argument by Browning in support of his determination that MARKET went ahead at all costs. However he learned of it, Montgomery despatched Brigadier Belchem, who was apparently serving as his temporary chief-of-staff at the time, to plead Urquhart’s case. Brereton again refused to be swayed, this time justifying his position by citing his original insistence that initial decisions had to be binding, and because there was insufficient time for the disruption such a revision of the plan would entail.57
As a result of these edicts, Brereton is widely considered to have compromised MARKET, both at the time and since. Air-Vice Marshal James Scarlett-Streatfield, Hollinghurst’s successor as head of No. 38 Group, made this point explicitly in the RAF post-operation report.58 Similar criticisms, especially regarding the delivery of the 1st Airborne Division in three increments, are a recurring theme in more recent works on MARKET GARDEN,59 with some also suggesting that Brereton’s support for Williams was influenced, unconsciously or deliberately, by his background as an airman rather than a soldier.60 However, as with the daylight insertion, the criticism fails to address whether Brereton’s edicts were indeed avoidable and objective analysis of the evidence suggests they were not. In addition to his paucity of groundcrew, Williams was also grappling with a shortage of experienced or even fully trained aircrew, which again pre-dated the Normandy invasion. Although the 52nd Troop Carrier Wing had been drafted in from the Mediterranean for that operation, only one of its three constituent Groups had any combat experience and the other two required intensive navigation, night flying and formation flying training; this was also the case with the 50th and 53rd Wings, which had come directly from the US. The shortage of navigators was so acute that only four out of every ten C-47 crews employed on the D-Day drop included one, usually flying at the head of a serial.61 The situation is unlikely to have improved by September 1944, especially given Williams’ reference to the doubling of his units’ aircraft holdings. While possibly not so critical to formations taking off before dawn, the shortage of navigators would have been more problematic for aircraft returning in darkness, as would have been the case with a second lift in the shortening September days.
In fact, the key issue was the lack of natural illumination. The Allied Airborne landings in Sicily and Normandy may have been carried out at night, but the aircraft had taken off before twilight because merely assembling the large numbers involved into formation was a major operation in its own right. The US first lift into Normandy, for example, involved marshalling almost 900 C-47s and gliders into a block of sky 300 miles long and 1,000 feet wide, and MARKET envisaged doing the same with around 1,600 aircraft taking off from airfields spread across the length and breadth of southern and central England. With fully trained and experienced aircrew, carrying out such an undertaking in moonlight would have been dangerous in the extreme; with inexperienced and partially trained aircrew in the total darkness of a no-moon period it would have been little short of suicidal. Hollinghurst was presumably willing to carry out a pre-dawn take-off because his RAF and Commonwealth aircrew were trained and practised in night-flying techniques; No. 38 Group had reportedly carried out conventional night bombing missions in the run-up to D-Day, for example.62 However, it is difficult to see how even this would permit the RAF contingent to form up and maintain formation in total darkness, and particularly as most of the RAF machines were slated as glider tugs. It is also significant that the acknowledged experts on night flying, RAF Bomber Command, did not countenance formation flying, preferring to allow aircraft to proceed independently after well-spaced take-offs to avoid collisions. This was obviously not an option for serials carrying troops or towing gliders for a division-sized Airborne landing. Williams’ insistence on a single lift per day and Brereton’s acceptance of it may therefore have been less than ideal, but it was the only realistic option in the prevailing circumstances, hindsight-based criticism notwithstanding.
The next bone of contention to arise on 11 September was connected to the MARKET drop and landing zones. The ones attached to the outline plan were the same zones selected by the RAF planners for Operation COMET, and the reaction of the US division commanders to their work was mixed. Gavin was concerned at his 82nd Airborne Division being dispersed across four widely dispersed drop zones spread over an area of roughly twenty-five miles. Two of these zones lay either side of the River Maas near Grave, with a large combined drop and landing zone five miles to the east between Mook and Groesbeek and another regiment-sized drop zone just to the north-east of that between Groesbeek and Wyler. Such dispersal flew in the face of past experience on Sicily, which indicated that it was wiser to land on or close to the objective, even at the cost of casualties, than landing safely at a distance and then being obliged to fight through to the objective. However, after examining the intelligence gathered at British 1st Airborne Corps at Moor Park and given the equally dispersed nature of his objectives, Gavin appears to have concluded that there was no practical alternative under the circumstances and accepted the drop zones as proposed.63
Major-General Taylor’s reaction was somewhat different and justifiably so, for the 101st Airborne Division had bee
n allocated a string of individual battalion drop zones running north from Eindhoven through Son, St. Oedenrode and Veghel. Taylor consequently wasted no time in voicing his objections to Browning at having his Division scattered in highly vulnerable increments across southern Holland. According to the 101st Airborne Division’s semi-official history, Browning responded by inviting Taylor to travel to British 2nd Army HQ in Belgium to explain his objections to Lieutenant-General Dempsey in person. When the latter accepted Taylor’s objections, Browning in turn persuaded Brereton to permit the 101st Airborne Division to modify its landing zones.64 Once again, it is unclear precisely what authority or expertise permitted Dempsey to adjudicate on such matters, although it is possible that his involvement was the result of political manoeuvring by Browning, aimed at offsetting his reduced personal stock with Brereton following their disagreement over LINNET II. Brereton’s acquiescence may also have been due in part to the intervention of Brigadier-General Stuart Cutler, the 1st Allied Airborne Army’s Deputy Chief-of-Staff, who sparked an acrimonious exchange by pointing out that as presented, the 101st Airborne Division’s landing plan was counter to official US War Department Airborne doctrine. Brereton bridled at the suggestion but relented after Gavin and Taylor were brought in and supported Cutler.65 Whatever the precise details, the important point was that Taylor’s objections were taken on board and the 101st Airborne Division ended up landing in just three locations; two small drop zones located either side of the Willems Canal near Veghel, and a large combined drop and landing zone seven miles or so to the south-west, between the Wilhelmina Canal and River Dommel located within a few hundred yards of the Division’s objectives at Son, Best and St. Oedenrode.
The allocation of landing areas once again impacted most severely on Urquhart’s 1st Airborne Division, which was assigned the same landing area as that for Operation COMET. This consisted of a drop zone and two landing zones astride the Arnhem‒Ede railway line near Wolfheze, seven miles west of the Division’s primary objective, the Arnhem road bridge. The only significant difference was that the MARKET plan dispensed with the pre-dawn glider coup-de-main landings to seize the pontoon, railway and road bridges in Arnhem proper. Urquhart’s first reaction was to try and switch to new landing zones on both sides of the Lower Rhine closer to his objectives. When that failed he tried to get the glider coup-de-main reinstated but that too was unsuccessful, despite his enlisting the support of Colonel George Chatterton, commander of the Glider Pilot Regiment. Chatterton’s intervention was rebuffed on the grounds that any revision was impossible because it would add additional complication to an already complex air plan. The primary obstacle to Urquhart’s suggested revisions to the air plan was Hollinghurst, who came up with a number of seemingly plausible reasons for vetoing the soldier’s requests. The RAF planners had forecast losses of up to forty per cent for the Arnhem portion of the MARKET plan as originally formulated, and approaching close to Arnhem at all was thus deemed too dangerous for transport aircraft, tugs and gliders alike. This was justified by referencing reports from RAF reconnaissance flights that claimed there were forty-four heavy guns and almost three times as many light pieces emplaced in Arnhem and its immediate vicinity. In addition, moving the landing zones east and closer to the 1st Airborne Division’s objectives was not considered an option because it would oblige the transport aircraft to overfly the German-held airfield at Deelen, seven miles north of Arnhem, and thus expose themselves to its allegedly extensive flak defences. Breaking east was not an option due to the Ruhr flak defences, and breaking west would risk entanglement with the transports delivering the US divisions further down the airborne corridor. Finally, it was claimed the polder land south of the Arnhem road bridge was too riven with ditches and embankments for parachute landings, and too soft and boggy for glider landings or general troop movement.
There was little to support most of these claims. In the event, the projected forty per cent aircraft loss figure proved wildly inaccurate, for not one of the aircraft assigned to the first lift into Arnhem was lost. No verifiable evidence for the flak gun numbers Hollinghurst claimed has been uncovered, although unverified information from the Dutch resistance is sometimes cited as the source,66 and his claim appears to have been based upon unverified reports from RAF bomber crews flying over the area en route to their targets in Germany, which was a tenuous source at best. Significantly, no such concerns had been raised during the preparations for COMET only days previously, when intelligence disseminated by No. 38 Group to its aircrew referred only to heavy anti-aircraft guns at Nijmegen and Deelen airfield and the possible presence of mobile flak guns in the general area.67 There was some evidence with regard to Deelen airfield, although it ran counter to Hollinghurst’s claims as the airfield had been heavily bombed by the RAF on 3 September, presumably as part of the preparations for COMET. Subsequent reconnaissance by RAF No. 541 Squadron showed that the airfield been rendered at least temporarily unusable and all the surviving flak guns had been removed.68 It is unclear if Hollinghurst was privy to this information on 11 September and if not why that was so, but by that time the German presence at Deelen airfield appears to have consisted of a single Kompanie from Nachrichten Regiment 213, a Luftwaffe signals unit commanded by Hauptmann Willi Weber.69 On the other hand, Hollinghurst’s claims that the polder south of Arnhem was unsuitable for airborne landing was arguably correct at least as far as gliders were concerned, as the area was soft and criss-crossed with drainage ditches. It was not correct with regard to parachute landings however, as Hollinghurst must have known given that the final MARKET plan designated that very area as DZ K and allotted it to the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade for the third lift; in the event the Poles landed on 21 September on near-identical terrain 3,000 yards to the west.70
All this raises the suspicion that these objections were deployed primarily to avoid the bother of adapting the air plan rather than concern over the threat posed by German deployments, a view expressed at the time. Urquhart, for example, was of the opinion that having compromised over the daylight landing the RAF planners were unwilling to make further concessions in the air plan.71 Either way, the crucial point here is that Hollinghurst was able unilaterally to stymie attempts to modify or indeed shape the air plan to the needs of the ground component of the operation, and the reason he was able to do so goes back to the very beginnings of the British Airborne Force. At that time the Air Ministry, while covertly attempting to strangle the project at birth by starving it of resources, nonetheless ensured that it maintained sole control over the planning of Airborne operations. As an Air Ministry policy document from December 1940 put it, ‘…for economy of resources, the staging and conduct of airborne operations should be a Royal Air Force responsibility planned to meet Army requirements.’72 This, incidentally, explains why Hollinghurst had been appointed to oversee air-ground co-ordination of the Arnhem portion of MARKET while there does not appear to have been any equivalent arrangement on the US side. In practical terms this arrangement gave the RAF planners total and undisputed control over Airborne operations up to the point the landing force was on the ground and while the soldiers were at liberty to provide input, the planners were not in any way obliged to heed it. Most crucial of all, there was no machinery to compel them to do so. The arrangement endured, arguably more by luck than judgement, until the advent of Operation MARKET brought the differing Army and RAF approaches to operational matters into direct conflict. The priority of the former, as a manpower-centred force, was to achieve its assigned mission at whatever cost; the guiding priority of the latter, as a technologically centred force, was to preserve its raison d’etre, its aircraft. This was a fundamental mismatch, and thanks to the untrammelled autonomy of the RAF planners, the result was an air plan precisely tailored to meet RAF priorities and preferences despite running counter to all Airborne experience to date, and indeed basic tactical and operational common sense. As such, it provides a textbook example of placing the institutional cart bef
ore the operational horse and the heinous consequences thereof.
The War Office accepted RAF primacy over airborne planning presumably because it had little option due to the RAF’s independent status and all that entailed, and because it conveniently obviated the need to expend its own resources. Nonetheless, the War Office is culpable up to a point for failing to address the RAF planning monopoly before it became a crucial issue, although the principle of air forces being responsible for planning was widely accepted as the Airborne norm, even though the formal arrangement between the RAF and Army was a purely British idiosyncrasy.73 The arrangement did not pass totally without comment at the time. Urquhart, for example, complained about RAF intransigence, albeit resignedly, while Brigadier John Hackett likened the RAF planners to naïve cooks blithely putting together technically marvellous plans that paid no heed whatsoever to the subsequent realities faced by those they were transporting to battle.74 This was reinforced by Major Anthony Deane Drummond from 1st Airborne Division Signals, who expressed the opinion that the RAF planners selected the MARKET landing area purely because it fitted their preconceptions of what a landing zone should look like.75
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