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The Allied Breakout from Normandy

But they still lacked a usable major port. The French rail system was largely wrecked. Some planners complained that the Allied pre-D-Day bombing had been overdone, but this seems a judgement that could be made only once the Normandy battle was safely won. The movement of fuel, ammunition and supplies for two million men by roads alone posed enormous problems. Almost every ton of supplies had to be trucked hundreds of miles from the beaches to the armies, though Marseilles soon began to make an important contribution. ‘Until we get Antwerp,’ Eisenhower wrote to Marshall, ‘we are always going to be operating on a shoestring.’ Many tanks and vehicles needed maintenance. In much the same fashion that the Wehrmacht allowed the British to escape from the Continent amid German euphoria in 1940, an outbreak of Allied ‘victory disease’ permitted their enemies now to regroup. By the time Montgomery launched Operation Market Garden, his ambitious dash for the Rhine, the Germans had regained their balance. Their strategic predicament remained irrecoverable, but they displayed persistent stubbornness in local defence, matched by aggressive energy in responding to Allied initiatives.

On 17 September, three Allied airborne divisions landed in Holland: the US 82nd and 101st were tasked to seize river and canal crossings between the Allied front line and Arnhem; the British 1st Airborne to capture the Rhine bridge and hold a perimeter beyond it. The entire formation was dispatched to a drop zone north of the great river. The American operations were largely successful, though German demolitions at Zon enforced delay while a replacement Bailey bridge was brought forward. The British, however, furthest from Montgomery’s relieving force, ran into immediate difficulties. Ultra had revealed that the remains of 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions were refitting at Arnhem. Allied commanders discounted their presence, because the formations had been so ravaged in Normandy, but the Germans responded to the sudden British descent with their usual impressive violence. Scratch local forces, many of them made up of rear-area administrative and support personnel, improvised blocking positions that drastically delayed the paratroopers’ march to the bridge. Model, Hitler’s favourite ‘fireman’ of the Eastern Front, was on hand to direct the German response. Some elements of 1st Airborne Division displayed a notable lack of verve and tactical skill: they were broken up and destroyed piecemeal while attempting to advance into Arnhem. Even the small number of German armoured vehicles within reach of the town were able to maul airborne units which had few anti-tank weapons and no tanks.

The lone battalion that reached the bridge could hold positions only at its northern end, separated from the relieving armoured force by the Rhine and a rapidly growing number of Germans. The British decision to drop 1st Airborne outside Arnhem imposed a four-hour pause between the opening of the first parachute canopies and Lt. Col. John Frost’s arrival on foot at the bridge; this provided the Germans in their vehicles with far too generous a margin of time to respond. The British might have seized the Rhine crossing by dropping glider-borne coup de main parties directly onto the objective, as the Germans had done in Holland in 1940, and the British at the Caen Canal on D-Day. Such an initiative would have certainly cost lives, but far fewer than were lost battering a path into Arnhem. As it was, from the afternoon of the 17th onwards, the British in and around the town were merely struggling for survival, having already forfeited any realistic prospect of fulfilling their objectives.

There was, however, an even more fundamental flaw in Montgomery’s plan, which would probably have scotched his ambitions even if British paratroopers had secured both sides of the bridge. The relieving force needed to cover the fifty-nine miles from the Meuse–Escaut Canal to Arnhem in three days,