McPherson
Banned
It was a bad mistake on my part – I underestimated the difficulties of opening up the approaches to Antwerp ... I reckoned the Canadian Army could do it while we were going for the Ruhr. I was wrong ... In my – prejudiced – view, if the operation had been properly backed from its inception, and given the aircraft, ground forces, and administrative resources necessary for the job, it would have succeeded in spite of my mistakes, or the adverse weather, or the presence of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps in the Arnhem area. I remain Market Garden's unrepentant advocate.
What if it was not GEN Montgomery's plan (In my opinion, YMMV; faulty concept of operation.), but GEN Gavin at Nijmegen who screwed everything up with not immediately assaulting Nijmegen bridge at once, instead of concentrating on the Groesbeek Heights drop zones defense? Just where did that critical 36 hour delay occur that resulted in the Arnheim disaster?
Understand that GEN Montgomery is an excellent general and probably one of the top 3 British generals available at the time.
Nevertheless... I am not too keen on Montgomery as an op-art practitioner, being that I have heartburn about his mistakes during Husky (Hung up around Aetna because he could not use a road net or read a map.), Haystack (Where that 16 hour delay to move north allowed the Germans to concentrate exclusively against Clark and almost destroy the Salerno beachhead.) and especially Overlord (Failure to take Caen on day 1 as part of the Anglo-Canadian plan to get to the high ground beyond the city.) and the subsequent disastrous Normandy campaign he waged (Again Caen with several botched assaults; I'm not ever buying the alibi either, that he used the Anglo-Canadians to draw all the panzers to Caen front since his subordinates and he killed a bloody lot of British and Canadian soldiers with lousy tactics and battleplans and THEY (the generals; not the troops.) failed to close the noose at Falaise after COBRA; not the Americans, who could actually execute an encirclement, but were denied the boundary permission to do it themselves.), but am I wrong about Market Garden? Was it executable as he conceived it, and was it the 82nd Airborne which failed to take its bridge fast enough, was that the key event, that doomed the plan?
McP.