Inferno - Max Hastings [366]
The lone battalion that reached the bridge could only hold positions 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 the 1st Airborne outside Arnhem imposed a four-hour delay 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 seventeenth 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, with access to only a single Dutch road; a cross-country advance was impossible, because the ground was too soft for armour. Within minutes of crossing the start line, the Guards Armoured Division was in trouble as its leading tanks were knocked out by German anti-tank weapons, and supporting British infantry became bogged down in local firefights. The American airborne formations did all that could have been expected of them in securing key crossings, but the Allied advance was soon behind schedule. The Germans were able to make their own deployments in full knowledge of Allied intentions, because they found the operational plan for Market Garden on the body of a U.S. staff officer who had recklessly carried it into battle; within hours, the document was on the desk of Model, who exploited his insight to the full.
On 20 September, when the XXX Corps belatedly reached Nijmegen, paratroopers of Gen. James Gavin’s 82nd Airborne made a heroic crossing of the Waal River in assault boats under devastating fire. They secured a perimeter on the far bank which enabled the Guards Armoured’s tanks to cross the bridge, which was still miraculously intact. There was then another twenty-four-hour delay, incomprehensible to the Americans, before the British felt ready to resume their advance on Arnhem. In truth the time loss was unimportant: the battle was already lost. The Germans were committed in strength to defend the southern approaches to Arnhem. Residual resistance by the British paratroopers on the far bank was irrelevant, and Montgomery acknowledged failure. On the night of 25 September, 2,000 men of the 1st Airborne Division were ferried to safety across the Rhine downstream from Arnhem, while almost 2,000 more escaped by other means, leaving behind 6,000 who became prisoners. Some 1,485 British paratroopers were killed, around 16 percent of each unit engaged, and the 1st Airborne Division was disbanded; 474 airmen were also killed during the operation. Meanwhile the U.S. 82nd Airborne suffered 1,432 casualties and the 101st 2,118. The Germans lost 1,300 dead and 453 Dutch civilians were killed, many of them