MARKET GARDEN INSIDE THE 1ST AIRBORNE DIVISION’S FAILURE AT ARNHEM
The Battle of Normandy effectively ended on 21 August 1944 with the closing of the Falaise Gap, 76 days after Allied troops first set foot on the D-Day landing beaches. The battle cost the Germans around 10,000 dead and 50,000 prisoners along with almost all their heavy equipment and vehicles, and an estimated tide of 20,000 survivors fled eastward as far as southern Holland, where the local civilians dubbed Tuesday 5 September ‘Dolle Dinsdag’ or ‘Mad Tuesday’.
The Allied pursuit began on 28 August with British tanks reaching Arras on 1 September, Brussels was liberated two days later and by 6 September the advance was approaching the Dutch border in the face of stiffening German resistance. In an effort to maintain the momentum Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower authorised Operation Market Garden, which was intended to bypass the Westwall fixed defences guarding the German frontier and open a route into the North German Plain and thus the heart of the Third Reich.
Operation Market was the largest airborne operation in history and involved landing 40,000 men from three Allied Airborne Divisions along a 60-mile corridor running north from the Belgian border to the Dutch city of Arnhem on the Lower Rhine, tasked to seize and hold 17 bridges across eight separate waterways starting at the Wilhelmina Canal just north of Eindhoven. The operation began on 17 September 1944 with the US 101st Airborne Division assigned to secure the southern third of the corridor, the centre portion including the city of Nijmegen was the responsibility of the US 82nd Airborne Division and the furthest third was allotted to the British 1st Airborne Division.
The ground component of the Operation, codenamed Garden, tasked British 30 Corps – spearheaded by the Guards Armoured Division – to break through the coalescing German defence on the Belgian border and advance rapidly up the Airborne Corridor, relieving each crossing in turn. All this was scheduled to take a perhaps optimistic 48 hours. In the event the two US Airborne divisions secured all their allotted objectives, although the first bridge across the Wilhelmina Canal was destroyed, prompting a 36-hour delay compounded by the tardy performance of 30 Corps, while the road and rail bridges across the River Waal at Nijmegen were not secured until the evening of 20 September, 24 hours behind schedule.
Matters went most awry at Arnhem however, despite a near flawless delivery. The 1st Airborne Division’s plan was to despatch the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron and the 1st Parachute Brigade to secure the objectives in Arnhem. The
