#Reviewing Sir Antony Beevor’s The Battle of Arnhem

Thank you for the great share sir, have a great Tuesday sir

This operation was bolluxed from the start, unfortunately. It cost more lives than necessary and at a point where the operation was no longer really necessary.

Operation Market Garden has always struck me as one of the most important military lessons NOT learned during the 20th Century... let alone applied in the 21st. As the title of the famous film implies; this may simply have been a case of, "A Bridge Too Far". Many have dissected the failure from numerous angles. Did Allied command ignore actionable intelligence regarding the presence of heavy armor? Did political pressure override good military strategy? What hand did "fate" play in the resupply of the airborne troops pinned down during the battle? Were the timelines for the support elements unrealistic in the extreme? My armchair analysis is that it's a clear case (and perhaps one of the first) of over-reliance on units originally conceived for limited raids, to conduct major maneuver operations, unsupported. From Somalia to Tongo-Tongo, and half a hundred other places little known to the general public... we seem to have largely abandoned the notion that he who arrives first, with the most forces, normally wins. What if it had been Patton, instead of Montgomery... who had planned and coordinated this movement? Patton had argued early on for a "broad front"... one that would've hit the Germans from multiple angles concurrently, and forced them to disperse their critically strained main-battle units across a larger area. Instead of elite paratroops consolidated in a small area with limited resources... the Germans would've been facing miles of well-supplied, well-organized, well-supported combined arms. This would've freed the "Paras", and their American brethren from the Airborne, to do what they were built to do... executing "surgical" raids behind the lines, crippling communications and command infrastructures, creating chaos, and disrupting counter-attacks.