A Bridge Too Far, Again?

Iraqi War and Market Garden in 2003:

A Bridge Too Far, Again?

February 2, 2003

R L Norman

On 17 September 1944 thousands of paratroopers descended from the sky by parachute or glider up to 150 km behind enemy lines. Their goal: to secure bridges across the rivers in Holland so that the Allied army could advance rapidly northwards and turn left into the lowlands of Germany…If all carried out as planned, it should have ended the war by Christmas 1944.

Unfortunately this daring plan, named Operation Market Garden, didn't have the expected outcome. The [last] bridge at Arnhem proved to be 'a bridge too far'. After 10 days of bitter fighting the operation ended with the evacuation of the remainder of the 1st British Airborne Division from the Arnhem area.

[my emphasis]

http://www.rememberseptember44.com

Remember September '44: The complete story of the historical airborne operation Market Garden in Holland, 17 September 1944. This website tells the complete story of this historical operation and is a tribute to all those men who fought and died in September 1944.

In the fall of 1944, a plan to shorten the war by several months was designed by British Field Marshall Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery. The idea was to capture several bridges in short succession, leading to the final bridge over the Rhine River at Arnhem, allowing the British army to skirt around the Siegfried line, the German defence line, much as the Germans had done earlier in 1940 against the supposedly inpregnable French Maginot Line. Dwight D. Eisenhower as Supreme Allied commander deferred somewhat to Mongomery, but the plan was fatally flawed, in that holding the last bridge at Arnhem was crucial for any of the advances made to be held. Thus if the last bridge was not reached soon enough by the advancing tanks to relieve the small number of parachute commandoes fighting for their existence around the bridge at Arnhem, then the entire line of advance might basically fail, back to near the pointing start in Belgium. In any event, loosing the Arnhem bridge, would have negated most of the military significance of the plan.

As it turned out, the battle was close to a total failure, with almost 8000 of the 10,000 soldiers who reached the Arnhem bridge being killed wounded or captured. Almost 17,000 total Allied casualties resulted. The casaulties were greater than at D-Day for the British, still Montgomery maintained that the Operation was ’90 % successful’, in that most of the bridges were captured. Montgomery essentially blamed the Americans for not supporting the plan enough from the beginning. Eisenhower probably saved the Americans more casualties, in that he was not willing to ‘bet’ the whole war against Germany on a single slender corridor all the way to the German border, through many miles of hostile territory.

Why did Market Garden fail? Several things can be mentioned. Untested Allied radio communications, bad weather, Intelligence’s failure to place the 2nd SS Panzer Corps in Arnhem, the narrow corridor.... The biggest problem of it all probably was the small margin the whole operation had. Everything had to be carried out on a tight schedule and if anything were delayed, the whole plan would fall apart. One setback may have been surmountable and Arnhem [bridge] would have been reached in time, but that's not what happened. … An operation should be planned so that if 25% of its objectives are achieved, it’s called a success; the other 75% should be left for unexpected circumstances. With Market Garden it was the other way around. 75% of the operation had to be achieved as planned. …

[my empahsis]

http://www.rememberseptember44.com

Market Garden had a very narrow margin for success, and the ‘fog of war’ led to that margin being overcome, as much by bad luck and weather as by the efforts of the Germans to defeat the plan. War is tricky and has more variables than can be planned more most of the time. It requires battlefield generals and admirals with a keen grasp of war history and politicians with a sound grasp of diplomatic history. Our military high command seems to be up to snuff, but our president may not be. The political requirements which Mr. Bush seems to be placing on the high command, seems to be time-compressing the Iraqi war planning into a Market Garden mode, in which a number of successful, simultaneous operations need to take place, in order to prevent the political objectives of the war from being destroyed by the war itself. For if Saddam has time to either:

send weapons of mass destruction into Israel and Palestine or at Allied forces with Scuds
set fire to the Iraqi oil fields
get a ‘Stalingrad’ defense set up in Baghdad
flood the marshes in southern Iraq to delay a northern advance
request assistance from other Islamic governments;

then the new American ‘blitzkreig’ plan as outlined in the February 2, 2003 New York Times website (www.nyt.com) may deteriorate into a prolonged battle of attrition, of several weeks or a few months, where the civilian casualties gradually build, even as American casualties mount as well. At that point, the entire quasi-modern political structure of the Arab-Moslem world may go into melt-down, with governments from Indonesia to Pakistan to Egypt to Moroco, falling and hard-line fundamentalists taking their place. In such a situation, it is not impossible to imagine several hundred thousand irregulars marching across North Africa eastward and another few hundred thousand Pakistani volunteers walking south through Iran towards Iraq.

The problem is that the political success of the war as defined by the Bush administration, is in basic conflict with the basic military planning side of the war. Most air attacks take a while to have an effect before an invasion. This was a lesson hard learned in the early part of the ‘island-hopping’ campaign in the Pacific during World War ll. For example, destruction to the civilian water and electrical infrastructure needs to be minimized, if the country is to be rapidly brought back after the war, yet this infrastructure must be neutralized to hold down American casualties during the battle.

A very short air war, with perhaps 7 to 8 days seems to be planned with about 10,000 precision-guided or laser bombs on hand. While only 9 percent of the bombs in the 1991 Gulf War were precision-guided, about 75 percent of the munitions this time would be. Part of the ground war will be occurring simultaneously with the rapid-fire air war, thus ‘friendly-fire’ casualties are almost inevitable. With less than 250,00 Allied soldiers seemingly planned for the entire operation, compared with over 500,000 in 1991, the entire operation seems to depend upon very deep shock effects from the very short air war and very rapid penetration with the ground forces, all over the country.

In many ways, the battle plan has the fatal flaws of Market Garden written all over it, but with far worse political consequences. My heart-felt sympathies goes out to the frontline soldiers who may well take significant casualties if the plan falters. You deserved a better commander-in-chief, than was obtained in 2000. And even as you may be fighting for survival in various fronts in Iraq, more problems may break out in Afghanistan and Korea. If the worst happens, with governments falling all over the Islamic world like bowling pens after a ‘strike’, we may have to evacuate the army as the British did at Dunkirk in 1940, except that Kuwait is several thousand miles further away from America, than the cliffs of Dover were from the French coast.

In Germany, a weeklong computer war game simulating the proposed war plan in Iraq will end next week, according to the New York Times article. The war game is being run by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of the Army's V Corps, and has commanders or battle staffs from each of the divisions expected to participate in the Iraq. possible political effects of the war need to be included in the game. It will be interesting to learn of the war game’s results. The success of the war, or even its ‘D-Day’ starting point may well depend upon these results and whether or not the results are released publicly prior to the onset of war.