Armageddon - Max Hastings [31]
Lieutenant-General Frederick “Boy” Browning, the corps commander who would lead the airborne landing, was a forty-one-year-old Guardsman who aroused mixed feelings. His aristocratic mien received more respect than it deserved from some British colleagues. Although a junior officer of proven courage in the First World War, he had never seen action in Hitler’s war. He possessed a certain celebrity as husband of the novelist Daphne du Maurier, yet Americans found him the sort of mannered Englishman they liked least. Gavin wrote in his diary on 6 September: “[Browning] unquestionably lacks the standing, influence and judgment that comes with a proper troop experience . . . His staff was superficial . . . Why the British units fumble along, ‘flub the dub’ as the boys say, becomes more and more apparent. Their tops lack the knowhow, never do they get down into the dirt and learn the hard way.” But Browning’s eagerness for Market Garden was plain. “We called it Operation KCB,” a 1st Airborne Division intelligence officer, Captain John Killick, said sardonically, noting a belief among his comrades that its principal objective was to win Browning a knighthood. Killick described the airborne commander as “that popinjay,” referring to the general’s preoccupation with his own turn-out. Many even among the British would have been happier to see command of Market Garden in the hands of the able and combat-experienced American airborne commander Matthew Ridgway.
Gavin disliked the plan from the outset: “It looks very rough. If I get through this one, I will be very lucky. It will, I am afraid, do the airborne cause a lot of harm.” The Polish Parachute Brigade commander, Stanislaw Sosabowski, whose men were scheduled to reinforce the British on the third day of the operation, also expressed fierce reservations. The British regarded the Pole as an absurd figure. Staff officers sometimes giggled like schoolboys when Sosabowski held forth emotionally at planning meetings. “But later,” said John Killick, “we realized that some of the things he said, some of the difficulties he raised, were serious and valid.”
If legend is correct, that “Boy” Browning suggested before the drop that Montgomery’s plan represented an attempt to advance “a bridge too far,” then the remark confirms his critics’ views about the general’s meagre intellect. Market Garden could not succeed partially, by winning some of the bridges north-east of the British front. To justify the whole operation, it was essential to seize the Rhine crossing at Arnhem. Anything less would be meaningless, an assault into a cul-de-sac.
The overwhelming flaw in the plan was that it required the British Second Army’s tanks to relieve in turn the 101st Airborne at Eindhoven and Son, the 82nd at Nijmegen and the 1st Airborne at Arnhem along a single Dutch road. It was impossible for the vast armoured column to leave the tarmac, because the adjoining countryside was too soft to accommodate tanks, and in some places was heavily wooded. On the advance to Arnhem, the overwhelming superiority of the allied armies over the enfeebled Germans became irrelevant. The outcome would be determined by a contest between the defenders and the needle point of the British force—which effectively meant a single squadron of tanks and its supporting infantry. If the advance bogged down, 1st Airborne Division would be left unsupported to hold the most distant objective—the bridge at Arnhem—for longer than any force in the short history of airborne warfare. The plan called for the tanks of XXX Corps