3
The First Allied Airborne Army
While the British and the Americans were charging forward from the River Seine towards the German border, the British 1st Airborne Division back in Britain seethed with frustration as one operation after another was cancelled. ‘Saturday, 2 September,’ Major J. E. Blackwood of the 11th Parachute Battalion wrote in his diary. ‘Briefed to drop SE of Courtrai to stem the Hun retreat across the River Escaut. Cancelled because of storm. Damn the storm! Sunday, 3 September, Briefed to drop near Maastricht. Operation cancelled because Yankee armour advancing too fast. Damn the Yanks!’
Members of the 1st Airborne Division were the most exasperated because they had been left out of the D-Day operation. Kept in reserve for a follow-up or for an operation of opportunity, they been stood to and stood down so many times that they were starting to become cynical. On a couple of occasions, the operation had not been cancelled until after they had been loaded into their aircraft and gliders on the runway.
The first plan hatched by Montgomery in the second week of June was to drop the division around Évrecy to create a breakthrough to seize Caen. For a number of reasons Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory opposed the idea with determination. He was almost certainly right to do so, but as he had wrongly predicted total disaster for the airborne drops on D-Day, Montgomery felt confirmed in his opinion that the airman was just a ‘gutless bugger’.
In August, with Patton’s breakout from Normandy, one airborne operation after another was dreamed up and the transport aircraft were consigned to fuel deliveries to help his advance. Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton, the air force commander of the newly created First Allied Airborne Army, complained to the supreme commander: ‘I must emphasize that continued cargo carrying will render the Troop Carrier Command unfit for a successful airborne campaign.’ He had a point. It was Eisenhower who had insisted, when appointing Brereton, that his chief priority was to improve the navigation training of IX Troop Carrier Command so that paratroops were no longer dropped in the wrong places, as had happened in the invasion of Sicily in 1943 and then again in Normandy.
The next idea was to seize crossings across the River Seine, but General Patton was already there. On 17 August, planning started on a drop in the Pas de Calais east of Boulogne. But then Brereton and Montgomery’s chief of staff, Major General Francis de Guingand (known as ‘Freddie’), agreed that the effort should be switched to the enemy’s main line of retreat. Operation Linnet, planned for 3 September, would aim for Tournai over the Belgian border and for a bridgehead over the River Escaut. Linnet was cancelled on 2 September, with the possibility of switching to a Linnet II to seize bridgeheads over the River Meuse with three airborne divisions ahead of the American First Army. That too was cancelled at the meeting between Montgomery and Bradley the next day.
The First Allied Airborne Army had only been called into being on 2 August 1944 by General Eisenhower. Despite Eisenhower’s devotion to balanced Allied relations, General Lewis Brereton’s staff consisted mainly of American air force officers. At their headquarters, Sunninghill Park near Ascot, they enjoyed Saturday-night dances at their own club and watched movies such as Kansas City Kitty and Louisiana Hayride.
The only senior British officer with the First Allied Airborne Army was Brereton’s deputy, Lieutenant General Frederick Browning. The whole set-up, with a USAAF general and staff commanding two major army formations – the American XVIII Airborne Corps and the British I Airborne Corps – was bound to complicate priorities and roles. Matters were not helped by a strong mutual dislike between Brereton and ‘Boy’ Browning. The only characteristic the two men had in common was vanity. Brereton, a small, difficult man, was such a compulsive womanizer that his activities provoked a severe rebuke from General George C. Marshall, the American chief of staff and a man of the strictest moral rectitude.
Browning, a hawk-faced Grenadier Guards officer with the air of a matinée idol, was married to the writer Daphne du Maurier. (She had chosen maroon for the paratrooper’s beret as it was ‘one of the General’s racing colours’.) Although undoubtedly brave, Browning was highly strung. He could not help tugging at his moustache when nervous. His barely concealed ambition, combined with an immaculate uniform and a peremptory manner, did not endear him to other senior officers, especially the American paratroop commanders. They regarded ‘the suave and polished Boy Browning’ as a patronizing and manipulative empire-builder.
Unfortunately, when the tensions came to a head, Browning picked the wrong fight with Brereton, threatening to resign. On 3 September, he wrote to oppose Operation Linnet II which was intended to help Bradley’s advance: ‘Sir, I have the honour to forward my protest, in writing . . .’, he began in the formal way. He went on to list his reasons for concluding that dropping three airborne divisions, one British and two American, to seize crossings over the River Meuse between Maastricht and Liège would fail. The whole enterprise was to be launched in less than thirty-six hours. The First Allied Airborne Army had no maps of the area to brief troops, no information on enemy dispositions and flak defences, and Allied fighter cover would not include the whole area of operations.
Browning was undoubtedly right, but Linnet II was cancelled by Bradley and Montgomery during their meeting that same day on very different grounds: the greater need for fuel deliveries. As a result Browning’s protest served only to rile Brereton, who seemed much keener to help Bradley’s forces than the British. And whatever the circumstances, a threat to resign cannot be repeated with any effect soon afterwards. Browning, who was desperate to command an airborne corps in action before the war came to an end, knew only too well that next time it would be seized upon. His American counterpart, Major General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, the commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, longed to take over and was better qualified. Ridgway had led the 82nd Airborne Division into Sicily, into Italy and into Normandy in June, so he had seen far more airborne combat. Browning had not been in action since the First World War.
Immediately after Montgomery’s meeting with Bradley on 3 September (where he had disingenuously agreed not to use airborne forces), he promptly signalled his chief of staff Freddie de Guingand at 16.00 hours: ‘Require airborne operation of one British division and Poles on evening 6 September or morning 7 September to secure bridges over Rhine between Wesel and Arnhem.’ This was to be called Operation Comet.
De Guingand contacted Brereton’s headquarters and at 22.30 hours Brigadier General Floyd L. Parks, Brereton’s chief of staff, telephoned General Browning to pass on the order. ‘You will immediately prepare detailed plans for an airborne operation along the River Rhine between Arnhem and Wesel.’ Browning did not object this time. As well as his own determination to lead an airborne attack, the morale of the 1st Airborne Division badly needed an end to the dispiriting series of last-minute cancellations.
Browning was far from alone in his desire to use airborne forces in a dramatic and decisive way. Both Brigadier General James M. Gavin, the commander of the 82nd Airborne, and Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, who commanded the 101st, were keen to prove that airborne troops were critical to winning the war. Churchill also wanted the operation to boost British prestige just as it was flagging. And Montgomery saw it as a chance ‘to seize control of Allied strategy’.
Both the Americans and the British had invested major resources to create the First Allied Airborne Army with six and a half divisions.* Although a small army in conventional terms, it was by far the largest and best-equipped airborne force ever assembled. General Marshall, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in Washington, and General ‘Hap’ Arnold, head of the US Army Air Force, were impatient to use it in a major strategic operation. The American press was carried away by the idea that airborne operations represented the future of warfare. Time magazine even believed that ‘peace could be maintained in the postwar world with the establishment of an airborne international army.’ This was a fantasy which ignored basic limitations, such as the comparatively short range of fully loaded troop-carrying aircraft. It was a mistake often shared by generals who should have known better.
On 4 September, Browning and de Guingand flew to France, and at 19.00 hours a conference began at Dempsey’s Second Army headquarters. ‘We discussed plans for the capture of Nijmegen and Arnhem,’ Dempsey noted. ‘I will start with XXX Corps from Antwerp on the morning of 7 September 44 and Airborne Corps will drop two or three airborne brigades on the morning of 7 September to get the bridges.’
Back in England, British and Polish airborne officers did not share their superiors’ enthusiasm for Operation Comet. The plan for a parachute brigade to drop nearly 110 kilometres behind German lines to seize the bridge over the Neder Rijn, or Lower Rhine, at Arnhem, and for Major General Stanisław Sosabowski’s Polish Independent Brigade and an airlanding brigade to take Nijmegen, the great bridge and the high ground to the south-east of the city, prompted ironical remarks about ‘the British and the Poles capturing Holland all by themselves’. Sosabowski, who had been a professor at the Polish war college, interrupted Major General Roy Urquhart in the briefing. ‘But the Germans, General . . . The Germans!’ He also referred sarcastically to these ‘planning geniuses’ who had come up with such an idea. Brigadier John ‘Shan’ Hackett also became restless at the naive assumptions that all would go well on the day. Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, who would command the troops at Arnhem bridge, was completely frank with his officers. ‘Believe me, it will be some bloodbath,’ he told them.
Encouraged by the heady optimism prevailing in headquarters on the continent, the First Allied Airborne Army also grossly underestimated the determination of the enemy. ‘Large forces of airborne troops,’ their intelligence chief wrote, ‘having the audacity to drop in daylight, may well scare the enemy into a state of complete disorganization.’ Despite Eisenhower’s instruction that the First Allied Airborne Army was to support Montgomery’s forces, Brereton also favoured using it to help Bradley. On 5 September, two days after agreeing to Comet, Brereton even approved the preparation of ‘a plan to lift the US Airborne corps and drop [it] back of the Siegfried Line in the vicinity of Cologne’. This would have led to a terrible disaster if it had gone ahead, because the Germans would have concentrated all available forces to defend the city and the Rhine crossings there.
Eisenhower had insisted that something must be done to secure the Scheldt estuary to open the port of Antwerp and trap the German Fifteenth Army. Montgomery’s headquarters reacted to this only on 8 September, demanding an airborne assault on the island of Walcheren, despite the fact that planning for Comet was under way. This time Browning and Brereton were united in their opposition. Browning ‘believed that the Air Forces could achieve almost as much by attacking the shipping by which troops are being evacuated from south of the Scheldt estuary’, but this would have been hard since the Germans were moving them only at night. Brereton turned the project down because the ‘small size of [the] island indicates excessive losses due to drowning of troops dropped in the water’. The terrain was no good for gliders, and Walcheren had strong flak defences.
The almost casual way in which both First Allied Airborne Army and Montgomery’s headquarters came up with one airborne plan after another, and in this case two at the same time, almost beggars belief. Brigadier Edgar ‘Bill’ Williams, Montgomery’s chief intelligence officer, admitted later that ‘we didn’t work in the serious way we did for D-Day. We were in Brussels where we had parties and a gay time. Everyone worked, but the psychology was wrong.’ In addition, Montgomery saw only Browning when discussing airborne operations. He did not want to consult the RAF, even though the War Office and Air Ministry had agreed after the airborne chaos in Sicily that the air force side must lead the planning process. And Browning probably did not want to admit to the field marshal that the real decisions would be taken by USAAF officers at Brereton’s headquarters. In any case, the lack of liaison between ground and air was pitiful, if not scandalous. It was bad even on the air side. Leigh-Mallory had to write to Brereton to point out that he had failed to invite to planning meetings the RAF commanders of 38 and 46 Groups whose transport aircraft would be an integral part of Operation Comet.
On 9 September Sosabowski, accompanied by Major General Urquhart, the commander of the 1st Airborne Division, met Browning at Cottesmore airfield in the Midlands to discuss Comet. ‘Sir,’ Sosabowski said to Browning without any preamble, ‘I am very sorry, but this mission cannot possibly succeed.’
‘Why?’ Browning demanded. Sosabowski replied that it would be suicide with such small forces. Browning then attempted flattery. ‘But my dear Sosabowski, the Red Devils and the gallant Poles can do anything.’ Sosabowski, although distinctly unimpressed by such a facile compliment, restricted himself to the observation: ‘Human abilities do have limits after all.’ He then told Urquhart that he would have to have all his orders in writing as he refused to be held responsible for such a disaster. Browning, even though he had obliquely acknowledged that the forces might be insufficient, took deep offence at Sosabowski’s attitude.
In Belgium General Dempsey had just reached similar conclusions to those of Sosabowski. The day before he had summoned General Horrocks of XXX Corps to Brussels aerodrome for a quick conference. As he expected, Horrocks confirmed that their bridgehead over the Albert Canal was ‘being strongly opposed by the enemy’. Dempsey expressed his concerns to Montgomery the next day, then flew to see Horrocks again in the afternoon. ‘It is clear’, Dempsey wrote in his diary, ‘that the enemy is bringing up all the reinforcements he can lay his hands on for the defence of the Albert Canal, and that he appreciates the importance of the area Arnhem–Nijmegen. It looks as though he is going to do all he can to hold it. This being the case, any question of a rapid advance to the northeast seems unlikely. Owing to our maintenance situation, we will not be in a position to fight a real battle for perhaps ten days or a fortnight. Are we right to direct Second Army to Arnhem, or would it be better to hold a left flank along the Albert canal and strike due east towards Cologne in conjunction with First Army?’ But this was the last thing that Montgomery wanted. He wanted to go north and force the Americans to support him.
Early the next morning, Sunday 10 September, Dempsey went to Montgomery’s headquarters and managed to persuade him that ‘in view of increasing [German] strength on the Second Army front in the Arnhem–Nijmegen area the employment of one airborne division in this area will not be sufficient. I got from C-in-C his agreement to the use of three airborne divisions.’
Montgomery liked the idea of cancelling Operation Comet and replacing it with a larger one which brought the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions under his command. But to Dempsey’s dismay Montgomery also brandished a signal at him which had arrived from London the day before. Two V-2 rockets had exploded in England having apparently been fired from the area of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The government asked urgently for an estimate of how long it would take his army group to seal off the area. For Montgomery, who wanted to go north via Arnhem, and not east via Wesel as Dempsey and others on his staff preferred, this was just the confirmation he needed to justify his decision.
There was only one cloud on the field marshal’s horizon, but for him it was a dark one. Eisenhower, he discovered, was allowing Bradley and Patton to advance into the Saar, south-east of Luxembourg. The supreme commander was not according full priority to his Northern Group of Armies, as he thought had been promised. Matters were not improved by communications failures at Eisenhower’s tactical headquarters back at Granville, 650 kilometres to the west. At that moment, Montgomery was having typed a long letter to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, complaining that Eisenhower was totally out of touch, that there was no ‘grip’ on operations, and it included the lines: ‘Eisenhower himself does not really know anything about the business of fighting the Germans: he has not got the right sort of chaps on his staff for the job, and no one there understands the matter.’
Dempsey summoned Browning to his tactical headquarters, where in the next two hours they put together an outline plan. The new operation, which would be called Market Garden, consisted of two parts. Market was the airborne operation, in which the American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions would seize river and canal crossings from Eindhoven to Nijmegen, with the big bridges over the Rivers Maas and Waal, the largest in Europe; while, further on, the British 1st Airborne Division and the Polish brigade would drop near Arnhem to capture the great road bridge over the Neder Rijn. Browning was pleased with his phrase, describing Market as an ‘airborne carpet’, as if it simply had to be unrolled in front of the ground troops.
Operation Garden would consist principally of Horrocks’s XXX Corps led by tanks, charging north up a single road, with polderland flood plain on either side broken only by woods and plantations. They would keep going all the way over the bridges secured by the paratroopers. After crossing the bridge at Arnhem, they would occupy the Luftwaffe air base of Deelen. The 52nd (Airlanding) Division would be flown in, and from there XXX Corps would carry on all the way to the shore of the IJsselmeer, a total distance of more than 150 kilometres from the start-line. The objective for the British Second Army was to cut off the German Fifteenth Army and the whole of the western Netherlands, outflank the Siegfried Line, be across the Rhine and in a position to encircle the Ruhr from the north, or even charge on towards Berlin.
Montgomery, meanwhile, headed for Brussels aerodrome to see Eisenhower, who had flown in with his deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder. This meeting had been arranged some days before, and discussion of the airborne operation was not on the agenda. Eisenhower, still suffering badly from his knee, could not descend from the aircraft, so proceedings took place on board. Montgomery, incensed by the frustration he had been expressing in his letter to Brooke, was in a fractious mood. He refused point blank to allow Eisenhower’s chief supply officer, Lieutenant General Sir Humfrey Gale, to be present, but insisted that his own chief administrative officer, Major General Miles Graham, should remain.
Montgomery pulled from his pocket a sheaf of telegrams. ‘Did you send me these?’ he demanded, waving them.
‘Yes, of course,’ Eisenhower replied. ‘Why?’
‘Well, they’re nothing but balls, sheer balls, rubbish.’ After letting him run on for a short time, Eisenhower leaned forward, put his hand on Montgomery’s knee and said: ‘Monty, you can’t speak to me like that. I’m your boss.’
Halted in his harangue, Montgomery could only mumble an apology. But he still insisted that Patton must be stopped, that his own army group should be given two American corps from Hodges’s First Army and that it should receive ‘absolute priority’ in supplies, ‘if necessary to the exclusion of all other operations’. Eisenhower rejected that interpretation of the word ‘priority’ and emphasized that the objective was the Ruhr, not Berlin. He was prepared to give Montgomery priority, but he was not going to halt Patton. Eisenhower reminded him that he already had the support of the First Allied Airborne Army. This led to a very brief discussion of the latest airborne plan.
Eisenhower followed standard US Army practice. Having agreed an overall strategy, he did not believe in interfering further. Montgomery was able to use this later to imply that at this meeting Eisenhower had given his blessing to the new Market Garden plan. They discussed only the timing and the problem of supplies, which Montgomery dramatized in order to obtain more. Eisenhower should perhaps have raised the question of aircraft range. He had received a warning from Brereton that the Allied airborne divisions and troop carrier formations should move to the continent, otherwise an operation across the Rhine would be too far. He was, however, ‘alarmed at the administrative picture as painted by Monty’, and agreed to see if supplies to Dempsey’s Second Army could be increased. Graham, who should have known the situation, believed that the 500 tons a day they were receiving was more than enough for Market Garden, but not enough for the deep penetration into the North German plain which Montgomery wanted. Both Eisenhower and Tedder considered it ‘fantastic to talk of marching to Berlin with an army which is still drawing the bulk of its supplies over beaches north of Bayeux’. The port of Antwerp had to be opened first.
Dempsey, meanwhile, had worked fast. By the time Montgomery returned from Brussels aerodrome to his tactical headquarters, Dempsey had ‘fixed with [Browning] the outline of the operation’, his diary entry stated. ‘He can be ready to carry this out on 16 September at the earliest.’ Horrocks was his next visitor that afternoon. ‘Saw Commander XXX Corps at my headquarters and gave him the plan for the operation to be carried out by Airborne Corps and XXX Corps with the co-operation of VIII Corps on the right and XII Corps on the left.’
Montgomery had wanted to present the First Allied Airborne Army with a fait accompli, approved by the supreme commander, and this he achieved. He had also decided on Arnhem and not Wesel, a crossing which he would almost certainly have had to share with the American First Army.
There have been suggestions that Browning too preferred Wesel, but Browning had strenuously supported Comet, which included Arnhem. Now, he was to command three and a half airborne divisions to do the same job, not just one and a half, so he was unlikely to oppose the field marshal on the subject. And the suggestion that on 10 September Browning had said to Montgomery that Arnhem might be going ‘a bridge too far’ is highly improbable, since they do not appear to have met that day. There is no mention in Dempsey’s diary of Browning at the early-morning meeting with Montgomery, and he had reached Dempsey’s headquarters only at midday when Montgomery was with Eisenhower.
Browning’s excitement was quite palpable at the prospect of the airborne corps seeing action at last. He sent the single codeword ‘New’ from Dempsey’s headquarters back to the First Allied Airborne Army at Sunninghill Park. This signified that a planning conference was to be called that evening when he returned.
General Brereton, on the other hand, must have felt deeply affronted that Montgomery had made no attempt to consult him in advance. His resentment would have been perfectly justified. Eisenhower’s original directive had insisted that planning should be shared.* Montgomery had deliberately ignored this. He wrote to Field Marshal Brooke: ‘Airborne Army HQ had refused my demand for airborne troops to help capture Walcheren . . . and they are now going to be ordered by Ike to do what I ask.’
Twenty-seven senior officers gathered in the Sunninghill Park conference room at 18.00 hours to hear Lieutenant General Browning’s account of decisions taken that day in Belgium. Brereton was there, so were his chief of staff Brigadier General Parks, Major General Paul L. Williams of IX Troop Carrier Command, Brigadier General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne Division and Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe of the 101st. Astonishingly, neither Major General Urquhart of the 1st Airborne nor Major General Sosabowski had been invited. The only British officer present from outside Brereton’s staff was Air Vice Marshal Hollinghurst of 38 Group. It is more than likely that Browning did not want Urquhart present so that he controlled his planning entirely.
Browning presented what he and Dempsey had worked out, using an airlift timetable based on Operation Linnet. Disingenuously, he implied that it had Eisenhower’s blessing, when the supreme commander had not seen it. Brereton and his staff privately dismissed it as just ‘a tentative skeleton plan’. Browning finished by declaring that the operation would take place between 14 and 16 September, just over three days away. It was a dangerously short time.
Brereton raised the first key decision: was it to be a night or a day operation? German night fighters ‘would be more effective than their day fighters, but flak would be much more accurate by day than by night’. Brereton decided on a daylight operation ‘in the belief that a proper employment of the supporting air forces available could knock out flak positions in advance and beat them down during the airborne operations themselves’. His headquarters claimed that ‘this was a bold decision since the flak was known to have increased by 35% in the Market area, the troop carrier aircraft were unarmoured, were not equipped with leak-proof tanks, and flew at speeds between 120 and 140 miles an hour.’ But Brigadier General Gavin’s chief intelligence officer, who was present, felt they had exaggerated. Brereton’s ‘estimate of flak differed widely from that given me at Second US Bombardment Division just four hours previous. This bombardment division was flying missions daily over the Nijmegen area.’
Brereton then asked Major General Williams to speak. The troop carrier commander’s words must have come as a bombshell to Browning. Most of the key assumptions on which he and Dempsey had worked that day were now thrown in the air. ‘General Williams stated that the lift would have to be modified, due to the distance involved, which precluded the use of double tow lift . . . single tow only could be employed.’ This meant that with each plane towing one American glider, instead of two, as Browning had calculated with Dempsey, only half the number of gliders could be taken on each lift. And since the mid-September days were shorter and the mornings mistier, Williams ruled out two lifts in a day.
These changes meant that it would take up to three days to deliver the airborne divisions, and that depended on perfect flying weather. Operation Market, the airborne side of Market Garden, would thus not be landing any more assault troops on the crucial first day than Operation Comet, because half the force would have to be left behind to guard landing and drop zones for the subsequent lifts. And the Germans, having identified Allied intentions, would be able to concentrate troops and anti-aircraft batteries against these areas on subsequent days. Williams’s obdurate attitude might be seen to contain an element of revenge after the deliberate refusal to consult the air force side in advance, but the fault lay far more with Montgomery and his determination to impose an ill-considered plan.
Next morning, 11 September, Major General Urquhart attended Browning’s briefing. The headquarters of British 1 Airborne Corps was just north-west of London in the large and elaborate Palladian building of Moor Park, with its great portico of Corinthian columns. Browning drew three large circles on the talc-covered map to show the objectives of the three divisions. As he finished drawing the third one, he fixed Urquhart with a deliberately unsettling stare, saying ‘Arnhem Bridge – and hold it.’
Later, a more detailed examination of the terrain revealed that the high ground north of the Neder Rijn meant that their defence plan would have to include the whole city of Arnhem, with a population of nearly 100,000, as well as the drop zones outside. That signified a perimeter many times the size of a usual division frontage. Urquhart could not help wondering whether his 1st Airborne had been given the furthest and most dangerous objective as a compliment to its effectiveness or because Allied diplomacy could not survive a disaster to an American formation under British command. He strongly suspected the latter, and he was right.*
A follow-up meeting took place at IX Troop Carrier Command’s headquarters at Eastcote, also on the north-western edge of London. American air force officers more or less dictated the choice of drop and landing zones. Their main priority was to avoid German flak batteries on the way in and on the way out. For simplicity in the short time available, the air transport chiefs were working from the plans elaborated for earlier operations. Yet Major General Williams rejected the glider-borne coup de main parties to seize the main bridges by surprise attack, which had been a key element in the previous plan. Air Vice Marshal Hollinghurst of the RAF’s 38 Group said that he was perfectly happy to go ahead with them. Williams overruled him on the grounds that ‘normal sized coup de main parties would not have been strong enough to seize and hold the major bridges.’ But according to Hollinghurst in a memo, the decision to mount the whole operation ‘in broad daylight’ was ‘because the [American] Eighth Air Force cannot operate their fighters at early dawn or dusk’ and this was why the coup de main parties were cancelled. The Americans had stricter rules on visibility than the RAF. But it was also true that a company landed before dawn, like the Pegasus Bridge operation in Normandy, would have attracted all available German forces to the bridge well before the arrival of the main force, and Browning refused to consider a daylight coup de main.
Major General Maxwell Taylor, the commander of the 101st Airborne which was responsible for the first sixty kilometres of the road, refused drop zones ‘in seven separate areas’ close to the seven bridges he had to seize. He feared too great a dispersal of his division. They were reduced to two, and later after a meeting with Dempsey, his responsibility for defending the route north was reduced to twenty-five kilometres.
Gavin was also unhappy with the dispersion of his dropping zones. Williams flatly refused to change them. The 101st at least was to have the greatest number of aircraft because it was closest to the base of the operation. The 82nd Airborne had the next largest allocation and the British 1st Airborne the fewest, partly because General Browning appropriated thirty-eight gliders for his own corps headquarters. (German officers when analysing the operation afterwards came to the opposite conclusion. They believed that the furthest division should have been the strongest.)
German flak concentrations dominated the planning of the air routes and the drop zones. Troop Carrier Command wanted to stay well away from the key objectives of Arnhem and Nijmegen bridges because of their anti-aircraft defences. At Arnhem, they were also threatened by the Luftwaffe airfield of Deelen just to the north of the town. As a result the British division was to be dropped well to the west, with an approach march of between ten and thirteen kilometres to the road bridge through a major town. Surprise, the most vital element in airborne operations, was therefore lost before they even took off.
‘One of the greatest difficulties in mounting this operation rested on the inflexible planning of Troop Carrier Command,’ Gavin’s chief intelligence officer, Colonel Norton, recorded. ‘The ground plan became practically secondary to the air plan.’ Major General Urquhart of 1st Airborne simply did not have the experience to negotiate forcefully with Troop Carrier Command. He accepted the landing and drop zones he had been given. ‘The airmen had the final say,’ Urquhart wrote later, ‘and we knew it.’ But those airmen were firmly convinced that there were no alternative sites.
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.
Williams also acknowledged that at 21st Army Group ‘enemy appreciation was very weak. We knew very little about the situation.’ Yet towering over everything else, and never openly admitted, was the fact that the whole operation depended on everything going right, when it was an unwritten rule of warfare that no plan survives contact with the enemy. This was doubly true of airborne operations. The probability of the Germans blowing the huge road bridge at Nijmegen over the River Waal was barely discussed. Had they done so, XXX Corps could not possibly have reached the 1st Airborne at Arnhem in time. The German failure to destroy it was an astonishing and totally uncharacteristic mistake on their part, and one which Allied planners should never have counted on.
Also on 11 September, Admiral Ramsay flew to Granville, to where Eisenhower had returned after the meeting with Montgomery at Brussels aerodrome. ‘Went on to see Ike and found him in pyjamas with his knee bad again,’ Ramsay wrote in his diary. ‘Stayed to tea and he let himself go on subject of Monty, command, his difficulties, future strategy etc. He is clearly worried, and the cause is undoubtedly Monty who is behaving badly. Ike does not trust his loyalty and probably with good reason. He has never let himself go to me like this before.’
Over the next few days Ramsay kept trying to have a meeting with Montgomery about the Scheldt estuary to open the great port of Antwerp. The field marshal would not see him. As far as he was concerned, Antwerp had been settled as an objective for the First Canadian Army. But his obsessively tidy mind had insisted on a geographical progression. The Canadians should continue advancing up the coast to capture and open the much smaller and more damaged Channel ports first. In any case Montgomery clearly believed that if he could get across the Rhine, then Antwerp could be dealt with later.
At the same time, Montgomery was trying to extract everything he could. On 11 September, the day after their meeting in the aircraft at Brussels aerodrome, he sent a signal to Eisenhower: ‘Your decision that the northern thrust towards the Ruhr is not to have priority over other operations will have certain repercussions which you should know . . . Revised Operation Comet can NOT repeat NOT take place before 23 September at the earliest . . . The delay will give the enemy time to organize better defensive arrangements.’ He claimed that he now found that he lacked sufficient supplies. Eisenhower, horrified that the Allies might fail both to achieve a bridgehead across the Rhine and to secure Antwerp, sent his chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, to sort things out.
The next day, Bedell Smith flew to the field marshal’s tactical headquarters. He promised an extra 500 tons of supplies a day, even if that meant depriving three American divisions of their transport, and assured Montgomery that the US First Army would receive priority too so that his right flank would be protected. This would mean holding back Patton in the Saar. Montgomery felt he had won ‘a great victory’. He boasted to Field Marshal Brooke that his signal to Eisenhower had ‘produced electric results. Ike has given way and he sent Bedell to see me today. The Saar thrust is to be stopped.’
Montgomery, having obtained what he wanted, despatched another signal to Eisenhower: ‘Thank you for sending Bedell to see me. As a result of the guarantee of 1,000 tons a day and of fact that Hodges will now get all the maintenance he needs I have investigated my own problem again. I have now fixed D Day for Operation MARKET for Sunday 17 September.’ Bradley, meanwhile, was furious that he had never been consulted, and as soon as he heard he told Eisenhower he ‘objected strenuously’ to the plan. Patton was sickened. ‘Monty does what he pleases,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and Ike says “yes, sir”.’ In fact Montgomery received nothing like what he had been promised, and he used this later in an attempt to divert blame for the failure of Operation Market Garden. General Eisenhower, until the very end of his life, could not get over the way Montgomery was never able to admit that he had been responsible for anything going wrong.