I have to say that I’ve always thought that WWII’s Operation Market Garden was actually a very successful military campaign, and not the horrible failure as it’s been painted. And this guy agrees with me:
In fact, the operation succeeded at six of its seven principal objectives, a rate of achievement that would be considered remarkable in almost any other military context. The American 82nd Airborne Division, under Brigadier General James Gavin, faced the daunting task of seizing the great road bridge at Nijmegen across the Waal River, one of the widest river crossings in Western Europe. They did so after brutal urban combat and a daylight assault river crossing in canvas boats under direct enemy fire, one of the most audacious tactical actions of the entire war.7 The bridge was taken intact even after the Germans tried to blow it up. The 101st Airborne Division, led by Major General Maxwell Taylor, seized the majority of its assigned bridges and canal crossings in the southern portion of the corridor and held the vital road that the operation depended on, quickly dubbed “Hell’s Highway” by the soldiers who fought along it, against repeated and determined German counterattacks. British armored units of XXX Corps advanced deeper into occupied territory in a shorter period than in any previous operation in the Western campaign. The scale of what was accomplished tends to disappear in the shadow of Arnhem, but it was genuinely extraordinary, representing the successful coordination of tens of thousands of men, hundreds of aircraft, and an armored column driving north along a single road through hostile country.
I have read a ton of history on the topic — WWII is very much a period of history near to my heart — and I think that too often Market Garden is used a lot by American historians to have a go at Brit Field Marshal Montgomery. (He’s too often caricatured instead of appreciated. Not that I have a problem with that, in general terms, because he set himself up for it pretty much all the way through the war. But we tend to forget that the reason Monty was so cautious a military commander was that he was faced with the stark fact that British and Commonwealth manpower’s losses were, to use the modern term, quite unsustainable.)
Going back to Market Garden: it may well have been a bridge too far (Arnhem), but its only real failure was that even if it had been a total success, it’s doubtful that it would have been the war-ender that Montgomery believed it would be.
I await Reader Sage Grouch’s informed opinion on this.
I left a comment on the post, which I’ll repost below, in which I largely agree with your assessment. Even if M-G had succeeded, its impact would have been severely limited by logistical concerns.
“The one criticism this essay doesn’t really address is the opportunity cost of Market Garden: what could those forces have been used for instead?
The generally agreed upon wisest move would have been to clear the Scheldt estuary to enable the use of the port of Antwerp to supply the Allied armies.
Because even if Market Garden had succeeded, yes they would have had a bridgehead over the Rhein, but that bridgehead is still at the end of an extremely long supply line, one whose ability to supply the troops at the front decreased with every mile they advanced away from Normandy. (And this supply line was dependent mostly on less efficient trucks, because the Allied air forces had so thoroughly smashed the French rail system prior to D-Day.) It is highly questionable whether Allied logisticians could have pushed enough supplies all the way from Normandy, and then down that single, narrow road to Arnhem, to enable a strategically or even operationally significant breakout from the Arnhem bridgehead until the Scheldt was cleared and cargo being unloaded at Antwerp. And in the meantime, a significant number of troops would still be stuck holding that long, narrow road open, or fighting slogging infantry attacks across the polders to widen it, thus reducing the ability to build up reserves to conduct a larger offensive.”
To expand further, in military doctrinal terms, the Western Allied armies in September 1944 were at or near their culminating point – “the critical juncture in an offensive operation where an attacking force attains its peak of relative superiority over the defender before momentum inevitably wanes due to attrition, logistical strain, friction, and other inherent challenges of warfare, rendering further advances hazardous and likely to provoke a damaging enemy counterreaction.” It is the job of the commanders – in this case, Ike, Monty, and Bradley – to recognize where they are relative to that point, and stop before they go past it, so that they can regroup, resupply, and reorganize to prepare for the next phase of operations. Doing so would have been greatly facilitated by, you guessed it, having the use of the port facilities of Antwerp.