What went wrong?
>>62127560They went a bridge too far
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Market_Garden
got too cocky with paratroopers after overlord
>>62127560
>more German troops in theatre than expected>German troops weren't volksturm but SS>German Panzer Groups weren't there to repair and rotate but actually just there>Weather was shit>Off target paradrops>Equipment failures (specifically radios)>US link up was slow because...>Stiffer resistance than expected>More units than expected>Weather slowed down the link upDespite all that it nearly worked and petrified the Germans into dragging AA away from the Eastern Front to defend possible landing sites which led to the USSR advancing easier due to the lack of AA cover.
>>62127583/Thread fuck. But will that stop armchair generals?
>>62127560The Brits thought they too can do blitzkrieg. Thing is, the British Army was an old plodding horse, not a charger. Up till then, all the British victories were pugilistic slugging matches where the Brits bulked up and methodically steamroll the Germans on a broad front. The average British soldier was uneducated and unmotivated while the officers still dream of cavalry charges. They could have never pulled it off.>bbbbubutbut muh SAS, muh CommandosThose are containment units where troublemakers are sent away to do something useful.
>>621275601) any plan that relies on shit going right, is a bad plan2) Monty (and pretty much everyone else) severely underestimated the german willingness to divert manpower and materiel, and the speed at which they pulled it offits almost as if they had forgotten how quickly most of the D-Day plans for the first week or so, let alone day one, fell apart and the allies spent two months in Normandy 3) and then theres the road between Nijmegen and Arnhem>While it may be understandable that the British did not trust the Dutch resistance because they assessed the Germans had penetrated it,>far less justifiable was Montgomery’s refusal “to listen to the Dutch commander-in-chief Prince Bernhard, who had warned him about the impossibility of deploying armored vehicles off the single raised road on the low-lying polderland flood plain.” >Worse, the planners pointedly did not consult Bernhard’s staff. As Beevor writes, “The terrain and its difficulties were well known to them, as this very route constituted one of the key questions in their staff college exams. >Any candidate who planned to advance from Nijmegen straight up the main road to Arnhem was failed on the spot, and this was exactly what the British were planning to do.”https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/The-Battle-of-Arnhem.pdf
>>62128195The Brits taught the Americans how to fight, idiot. Anything you said goes double for the US Army which was smaller than Portugal's when the war began.Market-Garden was because Montgomery got tired of listening to constant American kvetching that they were moving too slow and should be doing rapid flank pushes when in fact the "shells not men" paradigm had been standing the Allies in good stead from El Alamein to Falaise. And to be fair, it was a good plan, and approved by all the Allied generals, and it nearly worked if not for a couple of spare German panzer divisions sitting around. It was worth it to try and turn the German flank without bashing through the German lines by brute force and risking a series of Huertgen Forest battles.>but that one guy predictedEvery plan has its detractors. When the plan works, they're ignored. When the plan doesn't, they get to say "I told you so". That's life.
>>62127691This
>>62127560>Let's drop paratroopers hundreds of miles into enemy territory with their only hope of survival or success being a column of tanks driving down a SINGLE GOD DAMN ROAD FOR A HUNDRED MILES THROUGH GERMAN TERRITORYWhat could possibly go wrong?
>>62128284Pardon my ignorance of Netherlands marshology, but if it's impossible to advance from Njimegen to Arnhem save for the lone raised road, what other options are there? Do you just have to bypass the entire area completely on other roads? This entire green text seems like a massive contradiction
>>62127560>What went wrong?Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to launch a main attack up a single, elevated road, ignore all local resistance reports and then not have enough aircraft to do everything in a single drop. Pure Monty.
