As we all know or at least as people such as myself who are interested in military history of the first and second world wars during World War II there was a certain operation held which resulted in a almost total debacle of the conflict on the part of the allies.
Operation market garden was the brainchild of Sir Bernard Montgomery of Great Britain. As we know Field marshal Montgomery was riding high on various successes throughout the war. Probably his most notable being his victory over Erwin Rommel in north Africa. Obviously he wanted to undergo something to help shorten the war.
Now in this case I understand his motive thinking. Wanting to shorten the conflict makes absolute sense. It saves time, money but most of all it saves lives. If he could’ve shortened the war chances are he could’ve saved millions of lives on both sides of the conflict. Yet as history has shown Operation market garden was an absolute an unmitigated disaster. Why was this? Why did so many other large scale operations like overlord, husky and so many others succeed where market garden failed?
Also because of this failureWhy wasn’t Montgomery removed from command? Because of the failure and the loss of thousands of allied lives you would think that he would’ve been removed from his command and placed somewhere else. The Americans did this to General George Patton for a short time following an incident in Italy. So why was this not done with Montgomery?
Market Garden failed for a multiplicity of reasons, only some of which can be laid at the feet of Field Marshal Montgomery.
The Market Garden plan was too ambitious, and it's unlikely at at any other point in the war Monty would have considered it. His speciality was the set-piece battle with enormous materiel preparation. Only the belief that the Germans were on their last legs could have led him to plan such as gamble, and he was far from the only one who believed that: the Allies were in a state of "victory fever" by September 1944. Following the American breakout from the Normandy beachhead in August 1944, the Allies had outraced their own timetables as the German Army fled back to the frontier. The original plan for Operation Overlord had assumed that the Allies would not reach the River Seine until early September, when in fact they were now 150 miles beyond. U.S. troops first crossed the German border on 11 September 1944, over seven months ahead of schedule. There were increasingly unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved in headquarters both above and below Montgomery's: Eisenhower had final responsibility for approving the plan, and he should have recognised that the Allied advance was beginning to slow and would stall almost entirely without opening the Scheldt Estuary and the port of Antwerp.
On the ground itself, there were numerous failures that Monty couldn't be held responsible for: the British 1st Airborne Division failed to properly prepare their radios before deployment, apparently the result of their being stood up and then stood down from so many scrubbed airborne missions beforehand that they became lax in properly-charging their radio batteries. As a result they had basically unworkable communications. This resulted in two pockets under Lieutenant Colonel John Frost and Major General Roy Urquhart forming in Arnhem that were unable to communicate with each other or the rest of the army, which might have spurred British XXX Corps to advance faster. XXX Corps itself showed a bizarre lack of perseverance. The Guards Armoured Division made no effort to continue the advance to Eindhoven through the night of 17 September under the "logic" that the demolition of the road bridge at Son made capturing it less urgent. Exactly the opposite was true: the U.S. 101st Airborne Division had no engineer assets that could reconstruct a bridge capable of supporting armoured vehicles, and establishing a Bailey bridge the next day cost XXX Corps another 12 hours.
None of the airborne divisions involved considered landing coup de main parties right next to the bridges, as had been done at Pegasus Bridge on D-Day. The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division also showed a lack of urgency in capturing Nijmegen bridge: on 17 September, the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment did not move for nearly three hours after being ordered to seize the bridge. Major General James M. Gavin later admitted that its CO, Colonel Roy E. Lindquist, was the least impressive of his regimental commanders, and Nijmegen was not secured by XXX Corps until 20 September, requiring a fight through the city that further delayed the already-sluggish advance. The failure to seize Nijmegen on the first day, and the delay imposed by needing to make an opposed crossing over the Waal and fight through the city, in my opinion, turned a delayed but salvageable operation into a disaster: by the evening of the 20 September, Frost's pocket at Arnhem Bridge had surrendered, allowing the Germans unimpeded access over the Lower Rhine to harass XXX Corps' flanks.
In summary, while Market Garden was in all likelihood not achievable in its goal of knocking Germany out of the war by seizing the Ruhr, it failed because of a number of factors that were not solely Monty's fault, and were caused by mentalities that were common up and down the Allied chain of command in the early autumn of 1944.
Sources:
Antony Beevor, Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble
Antony Beevor, Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges 1944
Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton
Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45
Allan Mallinson, The Making of the British Army: From the English Civil War to the War on Terror
Roland G. Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies: September 1944 – May 1945
Steven J. Zaloga, Atlas of the European Campaign, 1944-45