...y. Carl could you be kind enough to check and see when Antwerp finally managed to achieve the minimum of 900 tons per Division level or more than that so they could also build up some reserves in the forward areas? Thanks.
Here is what Ruppenthal has, and a few bits from my notes. It is a thumbnail sketch, which I hope makes sense.
First off Antwerp was captured intact, by the Belgian inhabitants of the city. The German garrison was small, demoralized by the news of the collapse in Normandy, and the fragments of the German armies fleeing past added little to the garrison. I am guessing there was a leadership problem as well. The result was the Belgians were able to arm themselves, and with a handful of British special forces run off the Germans from the critical dock district. Of the 600+ cranes for offloading ships only one or two were damaged. Completely undamaged were the locks to the inner harbor, the pumping stations, the electric power station, telephone exchange. No mines in the harbor basin, no mines in the warehouses, or service buildings. In short the Belgians had a mega harbor in perfect condition ready for the 21st Army Group when the tanks of Horrocks XXX Corps rolled into town on 6th September.
How mega? One magazine article places the nominal peacetime average at 18,000 tons per day. For comparison the same article place The Channel ports as averaging between 4,000 & 6,000 depending on the port, Cherbourg at 8,000, Brest 10,000. Bordeux 6,000. About everything else in reach was placed below 4,000 tons peace time avg intake. The two exceptions were the Marsailles/Toulon group and Rotterdam which were close to the capacity of Antwerp.
These peace time numbers were grossly under what was forced through the ports after the Allies rehabilitated them. Cherbourg went from severely damaged and a few hundred tons per day in early July to 20,000 tons in September & October. That was accomplished by improving harbor navigation, adding cranes, a LST beaching site with paved unloading ramps, and adding a second railroad spur with sidings and a switching or marshalling section. It appears the average for Cherbourg fell off with the advent of bad weather from October and may have fell to 17,000 tons or less per day. The Marsailles port group was similarly boosted to far beyond its typical peacetime average.
I did not see a peacetime capacity for Antwerp in Ruppenthal. He does include the estimated intake the British and US planners arrived at after inspecting the port in September. They put together a tenative plan where the US would draw 25,000 ton and the British 15,000 per day through the port. The portions were adjusted as the port neared operations but the total was not reduced.
Skipping over other changes & estimates the actual intake for the US Army through Antwerp was 10,000 tons daily at the end of the first week of operations = 5 December, and near the end of the 2d week of December hit a 19,000 ton daily intake. Ruppenthal does not have a number for the British in those weeks, but my notes show a quantity very similar to the US intake for a gross of about 37,000 tons per day around 15 December.
The clearance problem is illustrated by the accumulation of 85,000 tons of US Army material in Antwerp by mid December. The expectation had been less than 5,000 tons would remain on any day. The weeks it took to restore minimal railroad traffic, and the inability to restore barge traffic to Liege & Namur or further south created this backlog.
So, to answer the question 37,000 tons/900 = 41 division slices out of 12 & 21 Army Groups. Leaving aside the problems of moving the material the Allies could in theory support over half of 12 & 21 AG from Antwerp in mid December. Of course Eisenhower had by this time signed off on the object of having over 80 Allied divisions, or their equivalent, in the battle zone ASAP.
This transportation problem was similar to that of August/September. When the combined discharge of the Cherbourg group (including small fishing ports) Utah and Omaha beaches and St Malo came in at approximately 35,000 tons or more of US material per day, but only some 15,000 to 20,000 were reaching the forward combat divisions daily. Or about 700 tons per division slice. This included supply to a number of bomber and fighter wings of the US 9th Air Force which displaced to forward airfields in eastern France and Belgium in August, September, and October.
Also, to explain why Ruppenthal is cited so often. His text was written for the US Army Green Books, a multivolume historical text. Ruppenthal was specifically concerned with Logistics, and his material is a summary of a larger body or logistics records and analysis put together as a study aid for revamping the US armies logistics system at some future date. As such it sucks as entertainment. Not at all in the same league as Ambrose, Atkinson, ect... and it lacks the overt agenda of many of the modern historians. But it has lots of numbers and charts, and is as accurate as you will get without going back to the actual US Army logistics records.
But getting back to your main points it does seem to be that up until they reached the Nijmegen bridge that XXX Corps was on time, earlier delays having been made up. If 82nd Airborne Division are able to take the Nijmegen bridge straight after landing whilst IIRC it was still fairly lightly defended and hold both ends that means Guards Armoured Division won't have to help them do the job when they arrive but can instead get on with reaching Arnhem which they look like having a pretty decent chance of reaching on schedule.
