Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  The battle of Arnhem has been described as a tragedy of errors although it might be more accurate to describe it as a succession of needless errors, and any tragedy lay in failing to address the ones that mattered. However, while errors of whatever type undoubtedly played an important if not key role in the failure of MARKET GARDEN, they were not solely responsible. A host of coincidences and other factors were involved, many of which were benign or relatively trivial and thus easily overcome in isolation, some of which were unavoidable but few if any were fatal in themselves. The problem was their combination and interaction across the timeframe of the operation, during which they coalesced into a series of reasons and events that, in conjunction with errors, ultimately led to failure.

  Although it is frequently overlooked because of the focus on the 1st Airborne Division’s activities north of the Lower Rhine, the primary reason MARKET GARDEN did not meet its stated aim was simply the failure of 30 Corps to reach Arnhem on schedule, or indeed at all. To a degree this was due to events outwith the GARDEN force’s control, specifically the German destruction of the bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal at Son on 17 September and their stubborn defence of the south end of the Nijmegen road bridge. However, the underlying problem, a collective failure to move with the urgency the situation warranted, was well within 30 Corps’ control and disjointed the operational schedule from the very outset. The Guards Armoured Division did not move off until 14:35 on Sunday 17 September, after the MARKET force had been delivered and thereby squandered eight hours of precious daylight as 30 Corps HQ had banned movement during the hours of darkness. This was despite the fact they were scheduled to cover the fifteen miles or so to the 101st Airborne Division at Eindhoven by nightfall on 17 September, which occurred at around 19:00. The Guards Armoured did not reach Eindhoven until 18:30 on 18 September despite minimal German opposition. This was twenty-four hours behind a schedule that was supposed to see them forty miles further on at Nijmegen, or on the approach to Arnhem, and the additional time required to erect a Bailey bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal extended the schedule shortfall to thirty-six hours. The same lack of urgency was on display when the 2nd Battalion 505th Parachute was poised to carry the Nijmegen road bridge in the evening of 19 September and again when the Grenadier Guards finally pushed tanks across the bridge on the evening of 20 September, when the north end of the Arnhem road bridge was still in British hands and the intervening ten miles virtually undefended. In halting for the night after crossing the bridge the Grenadier Guards were once again following set routine, the only difference being the presence of the more vociferous Lieutenant-Colonel Reuben H. Tucker and his 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment drawing attention to the inappropriateness of the Guards’ behaviour. The Nijmegen example was compounded by the Guards Armoured Division’s idiosyncratic system of permanently pairing tank and infantry battalions by regimental affiliation, which constrained operational flexibility and in this specific instance militated against maintaining a reserve for rapid exploitation, a breach of basic military principles. The repeated failure of the Guards Armoured Division to press on after crossing the River Waal marks the point where MARKET GARDEN failed as originally envisaged.

  Lack of urgency was not the sole preserve of the Guards Armoured Division. The 43rd Division’s advance up the Airborne Corridor was leisurely even allowing for German pressure and traffic congestion. It was content to sit in place for almost three days after reaching the Lower Rhine and demonstrated much more alacrity in bringing forward elements of the bridging train after the decision to evacuate the Oosterbeek pocket had been taken than it had hitherto. To be fair, the tendency was less apparent at the Battalion and Brigade level and appears to have emanated more from the top of the Division, where Major-General Thomas revelled in his acerbic manner and ignorance of the realities of Airborne operations, as exemplified by his behaviour toward Sosabowski and his radio exchange with Urquhart on 24 September. Collectively speaking, neither Division performed particularly impressively after crossing the River Waal, even allowing for the constricted battlefield and stiff German resistance. The distinct impression created by both formations was that their job was done on crossing the River Waal, and the more so because the 1st Airborne Division had not fulfilled its end of the mission by holding a crossing over the Lower Rhine. Responsibility for this lay not with Adair or Thomas, but on the next rung of the ladder with Lieutenant-General Horrocks, who appears to have permitted his Division commanders sufficient leeway to consistently contradict his orders for haste with impunity. Admittedly this lack of grip may have been the result of illness stemming from Horrocks being seriously wounded in a German air attack in North Africa in June 1943 whilst commanding 10 Corps, which put him out of action for fourteen months, before using his leverage as a Montgomery protégé to secure command of 30 Corps from CIGS Sir Alan Brooke in August 1944. He was obliged to stand down from his command for several days at the end of that month; his unhealthy demeanour drew comment from onlookers during MARKET GARDEN and on 28 December Montgomery was obliged to send Horrocks home on sick leave as ‘during the last ten days he has been nervy and difficult with his staff and has attempted to act foolishly with his corps’.73 Illness would explain Horrocks’ failure to properly control his wilful senior subordinates. It would also explain the contradictions in his GARDEN orders and intentions. Responsibility does not lie solely with him, but also with his superiors who placed an unfit man in a Corps-command position and, by extension, the patronage system which the upper echelons of the British Army used to allot senior command positions.

  At the upper level of the Allied Airborne Command a number of factors that are frequently perceived as errors were simply unavoidable under the prevailing circumstances. Launching MARKET in a no-moon period ruled out a night landing for example, and lack of illumination was also a factor in restricting flight operations to one lift per day. Flying two lifts per day would have involved aircraft taking-off and forming up before dawn or returning after dark, for which the US 9th Troop Carrier Command providing the bulk of the airlift lacked sufficient navigators and training. The post-D-Day expansion of aircraft numbers had also created a shortage of groundcrew to service, refuel and repair the aircraft in the turnaround time available. Similarly, delivering the 1st Airborne Division in three lifts over three days was unavoidable as there were simply insufficient transport aircraft to move all three Airborne divisions simultaneously in their entirety, although the 1st Airborne Division could and should have mitigated this with some judicious prioritising and tailoring of loads, if only because it was naïve in the extreme for the RAF planners in charge of the British end of MARKET to assume that the Germans would sit passively by for three days while the 1st Airborne Division availed itself of the same landing areas. On the other hand, although the RAF planners have been criticised for selecting landing areas so far from the 1st Airborne Division’s objectives, this too was unavoidable because there were simply no suitable areas for the purpose closer to Arnhem, as is clear from an examination of contemporary maps and the fact that several hundred Airborne soldiers were able to reach the north end of the Arnhem road bridge within six hours of landing shows the distance from the landing area was not the crucial obstacle it is sometimes portrayed as being.74 It was feasible to put a parachute brigade down at the south end of the Arnhem road bridge but this would have meant separating the formation from its glider-borne heavy equipment and most crucially its anti-tank guns, as the information available to the planners at the time showed the terrain south of the bridge to be soft polder riven with ditches and thus unsuitable for glider landings, and Frost’s battle at the north end of the Arnhem road bridge clearly showed the crucial importance of anti-tank guns in permitting the otherwise lightly armed Airborne troops to maintain an effective defence. Landing Horsas carrying Jeeps and 6-Pounder guns on the Arnhem‒Nijmegen highway south of the road bridge might have been feasible as a way of overcoming this, possibly as part of a glider coup-de-main effort to secu
re the bridge as envisaged for Operation COMET, but that was edited out of the MARKET plan.

  Dispensing with the latter was arguably an avoidable high-level error, although putting a large force on the Arnhem road bridge at the outset might have prompted a stronger and more determined German reaction; it can be argued that Frost’s party at the Arnhem road bridge only lasted as long as it did because the Germans initially concentrated on keeping reinforcement from the west and south at bay, rather than recapturing the north end of the bridge. A larger British presence at the bridge at the beginning might well have provoked a reordering of German priorities. Despite his lack of Airborne experience, Urquhart certainly thought the coup-de-main a worthwhile idea, which he unsuccessfully attempted to have to reinstated with the support of the commander of the Glider Pilot Regiment, Colonel George Chatterton. He was rebuffed by the RAF planners ‒ and Air Vice-Marshal Hollinghurst in particular ‒ on the grounds of some rather unconvincing evidence topped with the claim that any revision would add additional complication to an already complex air plan, and Browning backed Hollinghurst’s judgement when Chatterton subsequently approached him directly. There is no evidence that Browning actually approached Hollinghurst or the planners ‒ probably because of the personal stake he had in MARKET GARDEN going ahead ‒ but he did ask Major-General Richard Gale for a second opinion, which he then chose to keep to himself when Gale backed Urquhart’s position. The episode provides an object lesson in the consequences of allowing the RAF planners total control of Airborne operations until the Army force was on the ground, with no requirement to heed Army requirements or systemic machinery for challenging planning decisions.

  Regarding the failure to reinstate the Arnhem coup-de-main into the MARKET plan, Browning was essentially powerless owing to the total control the RAF exercised over the planning and delivery process, but he was connected to a number of errors and these were largely committed because of personal ambition. Whilst ethically distasteful, Browning’s deliberate suppression of intelligence on the German forces in the vicinity of Arnhem proved to be relatively benign in the event, for despite popular assumptions based on deliberate misinformation in the British Official accounts, the 1st Airborne Division was not facing anything like a single SS Panzer Division on 17 September, never mind two, and the bulk of the German armoured, infantry and artillery units employed at Arnhem and Oosterbeek were drafted in from elsewhere. The same cannot be said of Browning’s appropriation of thirty-two Horsa gliders from the first lift into Arnhem to carry his Advanced 1st Airborne Corps HQ into Holland, the means by which he intended to remedy his total lack of operational Airborne experience and shore up his position at the top of the Allied Airborne tree. This removed sufficient gliders to carry almost an entire Airlanding infantry Battalion, decreased the 1st Airlanding Brigade’s infantry strength by almost a third at a stroke and this from a first lift that needed every rifleman it could muster. However, Browning’s most serious interference was his prioritising securing the Groesbeek Heights in their entirety over seizing the Nijmegen bridges and his specific order binding Gavin to that flawed prioritisation. Browning’s thinking here is unclear, but was presumably rooted in his total lack of operational Airborne experience because while the Groesbeek Heights were tactically important, they were strategically incidental to the MARKET GARDEN mission, while the Nijmegen bridges were absolutely key. Failing to secure the Nijmegen bridges as top priority at the outset condemned the Guards Armoured and 82nd Airborne Divisions to days of house-to-house fighting and a daylight assault river crossing with all that entailed, and more importantly provided the Germans with an extended opportunity to demolish the Waal bridges. Feldmarschall Model did not take that tack because he envisaged using the structures as a conduit for a counter-attack, but if he had ordered the bridges destroyed in the four day period between the initial landings and the Allied crossing of the River Waal, then Operation MARKET GARDEN would have ended in immediate and irrevocable failure.

  Browning’s presence in Holland contributed little if anything to the prosecution of MARKET GARDEN that could not have been achieved from his HQ at Moor Park, although that would not have aided his bid to maintain his position in the Airborne hierarchy. Radio problems prevented him communicating effectively from his Forward Airborne Corps HQ before 30 Corps reached Nijmegen, and he appears to have spent most of his time thereafter subordinating himself to Horrocks rather than applying himself in support of the Airborne soldiers he had played a major role in placing in harm’s way; the spectacle of him sleeping in a comfortable bed while the 1st Airborne Division was fighting and dying on the way back across the Lower Rhine is an unedifying image. Browning was also responsible for saddling the 1st Airborne Division with a commander with no Airborne experience whatsoever over better-qualified candidates as a sycophantic sop to Montgomery, with serious consequences discussed below, and his role in setting up Major-General Sosabowski as the fall guy was as distasteful as his comfortable sleep on the night of 25-26 September. It is perhaps gratifying to note that Browning’s Machiavellian scheming did not bear the expected fruit. He was replaced as Deputy Commander of the 1st Allied Airborne Army by the infinitely more qualified Gale in December 1944 and never held another operational command. He was instead despatched to Burma to serve as Chief-of-Staff to the Supreme Commander South-East Asia Command, Lord Louis Mountbatten ‒ a far more appropriate employment of his undoubted political talents ‒ before being further side-lined to the War Office in 1946 to serve as a Military Secretary. Two years later he was quietly removed from the active list and made Controller and Treasurer to Princess Elizabeth’s Household, a position he held until retirement in 1952. Operation MARKET, rather than being the apogee of Browning’s career (and guarantor of his place in the Airborne canon), effectively marked the end of it.

  While 30 Corps’ failure to reach Arnhem in time was the primary reason for the failure of MARKET GARDEN, the second most salient reason was the 1st Airborne Division’s failure to secure a crossing over the Lower Rhine in sufficient strength to hold out until relieved by ground forces. The elements of the 1st Airborne Division’s first lift tasked to secure the Arnhem bridges were noticeably slow in rallying and moving off from the landing area despite the accurate, timely and unopposed nature of the landing, and this may have been at least to a degree due to the overconfident attitude displayed by the 1st Parachute Brigade’s constituent units, as noted by several officers in the period between January and September 1944. The 1st Parachute Brigade was not on the move until just over an hour-and-a half after landing and the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron until two full hours had passed; the latter’s tardiness was directly responsible for it running into the very northern end of Bataillon Krafft’s blocking line east of the landing area, which had been set up just minutes before. The Reconnaissance Squadron then compounded its tardiness by remaining in place for almost three hours exchanging fire with Bataillon Krafft before quietly withdrawing to the landing area after the Squadron commander was summoned away, thereby abandoning its potentially vitally important mission following a skirmish that cost two Jeeps and nine men. To be fair, subsequent events show this seeming reticence to be very much the exception for the Reconnaissance Squadron and more importantly for the 1st Airborne Division’s units as a whole, up to the Battalion level. These without exception fought with skill, fortitude and aggression over and above what might have been reasonably expected; the fighting on the Oosterbeek perimeter, at the Arnhem road bridge and in the vicinity of the Onderlangs provides numerous examples of units fighting virtually to the point of destruction while maintaining cohesion and focus upon their assigned missions. This shows that once battle was joined, there was very little, if anything, wrong with the 1st Airborne Division at the lower level despite the overconfidence and incidents of indiscipline that occurred in the run up to MARKET GARDEN ‒ the problems lay higher up the chain-of-command.

  This was not universally the case at the Brigade level. Despite comi
ng from a cavalry background and therefore lacking operational airborne and indeed infantry experience, Brigadier Hackett made a passable job of commanding the 4th Parachute Brigade before being laid low by a German mortar bomb. Similarly, Brigadier Hicks, who had served with the 1st Airborne Division in North Africa and Sicily, did a very sound job of commanding the 1st Airlanding Brigade in particularly difficult circumstances, including successfully executing the withdrawal plan, although his tenure as Division commander in Urquhart’s absence is best classified as passively competent rather than one of a commander-in-waiting. The problems were actually pretty much confined to Brigadier Lathbury at the 1st Parachute Brigade. Although he was the Division’s senior Brigade commander, Lathbury lacked operational experience having spent his time in staff, training or administrative appointments until leading the 1st Parachute Brigade’s operation to secure the Primasole Bridge in Sicily in July 1943. There, as a result of his own and a parallel lack of institutional experience, Lathbury’s plan amounted to a manual of how not to perform an Airborne operation and these same errors were replicated in his plan at Arnhem. Despatching his Brigade along three separate and widely spaced routes en route to half a dozen equally widely dispersed objectives resembled a training exercise rather than a scheme for execution in a shooting war. It dispersed the formation’s collective combat power, militated against effective co-ordination, effectively ruled out any prospect of mutual support and obliged each Battalion to fight its own battle in isolation and, in the event, without the benefit of guidance from above. Had events unfolded according to plan, Lathbury’s force would have been spread wide and thin, with a third of the Brigade isolated on the high ground north of Arnhem, a third dispersed in company packets holding the pontoon bridge, the Arnhem rail bridge and the German HQ in the centre of Arnhem, and the remainder holding the Arnhem road bridge. The plan was therefore a recipe for the Brigade’s sub-units to be isolated, overwhelmed and defeated in detail, although events took a hand in the matter before that point was reached.