Talk:Operation Market Garden

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Casualties

Unsure how this would be best added, considering the table already in the article with extensive notes.

Charles B. MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, p. 199:

  • Airborne Corps losses of 11,850 (968 killed, 2,640 wounded, and 8,242 missing) thru to 25 September:
Corp HQ: 4 killed and 8 missing
1st AB: 286 killed, 135 wounded, and 6,041 missing
1st Pol Bde: 47 killed, 158 wounded, and 173 missing
Brit Glider pilots: 59 killed, 35 wounded, and 644 missing
38 Group RAF: 6 killed, 23, wounded, and 184 missing
82nd AB: 215 killed, 790 wounded, and 427 missing
101st AB: 315 killed, 1,248 wounded, and 547 missing
US Glider pilots: 12 killed, 36 wounded, and 74 missing
IX US Troop: 16 killed, 204 wounded, and 82 missing.
  • 30 Corps: 1,480 casualties, and 70 tanks
  • 8 and 12 Corps: 3, 874 casualties, and 18 tanks
  • 144 transport aircraft

Staff, 21st Army Group (already cited in article), full quote:

  • "[point/paragraph] 125, The enemy lost 16,000 prisoners and 30 tanks and SP guns destroyed; 159 of his aircraft were also destroyed.

Total casualties of the Airborne Corps were 9,600, of which the Brit element was 6986 including 322 killed."

Outcome

Forest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command, p. 288: "A German analysis, captured by the Allies after the operation, concluded that the Al- lies’ “chief mistake was not to have landed the entire First British Airborne Division at once rather than over a period of 3 days and that a second airborne division was not dropped in the area west of Arnhem.”"

References

References

British Guardsmen did NOT operate tanks after dark

XXX Corps commander General Horrocks had expected that the Irish Guards would have been able to advance the 13 miles (21 km) to Eindhoven within two-three hours. However, in the event, they started out at 14:35, 2 hours AFTER the first airborne units were ON THE GROUND and only covered 7 miles (11 km) to Valkenswaard before stopping at nightfall, already 4 hours behind schedule. The plan was for Guard to reach Eindhoven [another 6 miles, (9.7 km) further] just after 17:00 in order to relieve 1st Airborne in Arhem in 48 hours. But, they did not restart for 8 hours, making them a full 12 hours behind schedule. Where was Montgomery's urgency during this loss of 12 precious hours?


Montgomery's tanks DID NOT OPERATE AFTER DARK! William Buckingham wrote in his "Arnhem 1944"(2002) pages 119-120:


"By the time the British Liberation Army set foot on the European mainland, the dictum that armour ONLY FOUGHT BY DAY and carried out maintenance and rearming after dark appears to have become set in stone. It is unclear where this originated. The practice may have grown out of the unreliability and heavy maintenance demands of British tanks earlier in the war [see example John Ellis"The Sharp End" p.126], although the advent of the US-produced M4 Sherman, with its exemplary reliability should have done much to offset this. it may also have been a carry over from the long years of training in the UK between Dunkirk [where the British lost ALL of their tanks and heavy equipment and had to train on obsolete, worn out equipment] and the Normandy invasion. Certainly, the British tank crew training in the run up to the Normandy invasion had to make a conscious effort to break potentially lethal habits engendered by peacetime-training regulations [see example John Foley "Mailed Fist" pp 17-18]. During static phases in the Normandy fighting it became standard practice for British tanks to move up to the line in the pre-dawn darkness and to withdraw after dark [I am indebted to Mr Robert Field of TankNet Military Discussion Forum for bringing this to my attention. The information appears in Tim Saunders', "Hell's Highway” (Battleground Europe Series)].


"This practice appears to have been largely based on the assumption that tanks were too vulnerable to operate in darkness. However Germans, and more especially the Soviets, did not subscribe to this view. Nor, incidentally, did everyone in the British and Canadian armies in North-West Europe. Operation "Totalize," launched by the 2nd Canadian Corps, on the night of 7-8 August 1944 saw a large force Canadian and British tanks and armoured infantry pass virtually unscathed through strong German defences along the Caen-Falaise road. They achieved what they had repeatedly failed to do in daylight, because the darkness nullified the expertly sited German anti-tank guns. But the Guards Armoured Division being Guardsmen, and thus not the most flexible of formations, preferred to limit their offensive activities to the hours of daylight. Sbrenerkener (talk) 20:01, 24 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's obviously not true that British tanks did not operate at night, because they did so in Totalize and then again on the night of 30-31 August when Horrocks ordered 11th Armoured to keep going all night to Amiens, a 30-mile rush. It was dangerous to operate tanks at night in enemy territory because the low visibility gave the advantage to infantry, and difficult in any case because the vehicles (even American Shermans) needed laborious regular evening servicing at the end of the day's run. But at Amiens on the morning of 31 August, 11th Armoured captured General Eberbach, commander Seventh German Army, who drove into the town square in his staff car, thinking he was inspecting his own front-line positions, only to find that the British front line had advanced thirty miles overnight, a thing he had not considered possible, and he was now in British hands.
Guards Armoured Division were not ordered to drive through the night of 17-18 September in Market Garden because Colonel Sink of the 506th PIR, US 101st Airborne, decided for reasons best known to himself that he couldn't be bothered to take his principal first-day objective of Eindhoven after all (despite it being held by only about half a dozen Flak 88 gun crews -- there really weren't many Germans there), leaving it till next day, not least because (well, hello) Sink didn't think his paratroopers could fight at night, and in addition Sink's 506th had also failed to take their other objectives, the canal bridge at Son (blown by the enemy because Sink's paratroops got distracted and were too slow), or the alternate bridge at Best (because again Sink's paratroops were too slow and allowed the enemy to reinforce the location and prevent capture), so the Irish Guards couldn't get much further until the Royal Engineers had built a replacement Bailey bridge at Son anyway. Hence no order to Guards Armoured to drive through the night. Khamba Tendal (talk) 18:59, 18 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

'Lieutenant General Wilhelm Bittrich'

This description, in the 'German preparation' paragraph, is highly inappropriate. For one thing, Nazi SS officers should not be accorded normal military ranks. For another, following his promotion in August 1944, Bittrich was an SS-Obergruppenfuhrer und General der Waffen-SS, equivalent to full general despite his only holding a corps and not an army command. The SS equivalent of lieutenant-general would be one step down, SS-Gruppenfuhrer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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