>Manages to capture and liberate large parts of the Netherlands
>Captures most bridges including Nijmegen
>Relatively 1:1 loss ratios against the Germans despite on the offensive
>Somehow is considered a failure for not capturing Arnhem

Are historians too harsh on Market Garden? Yeah it didn't fulfill all objectives but it managed to do alot, especially compared to other airborne/offensive operations.

>>63932815 (OP)
yes, they are

there was a concerted post-WW2 effort to downplay British battles for many reasons: Americanism, Communism, anti-Imperialism, anti-Montgomeryism, you name it

in terms of human lives, Market-Garden was a cheap attempt at turning the Siegfried Line. compare against Huertgen for example.

>>63932844
Yeah exactly. Compared to alot of other airborne operations it is probably one of the most successful and it showed that it could be combined with armored thrusts, just needed some tweaks and better planning.

>>63932815 (OP)
I understand a bunch of American armour decided to change their objective. Cheers for that.
Having armour backup wasn't some part of the plan nor nuthin.

Please do not go full Lindybeige.

Was pic related the biggest tard wrangler in military history?
>Patton
>Montgomery
>Charles de fucking Gaulle
Enough to drive any sane man crazy

>>63932844
Agree with the premise that people were too harsh on MG and anti imperialism, but can you expand on anti-Montgomeryism? Never heard of it

>>63932844
>>63932918
>>63932942
I don't really care about Americans vs Brits, but from an objective perspective (i.e. non-Anglo) it seems that the end results isn't all that terrible given the casualties taken. Pretty sure those living in Eindhoven and Nijmegen were happy to be liberated.

>>63932964
This is also especially true when compared to Hostomel which many dub the "modern-day" Market Garden, which I consider an offense to Market Garden desu.

>>63932948
Literally the only reason he was chosen for the job.

>>63932964
In any case, it's smarter than ramming your head against the hürtgen forest with all your might. i studied in aachen and to this day some areas in the hürtgen forest are still off-limits because there are still so many mines there. you don't have to be called napoleon or hannibal to realize that this area is extremely unsuitable for attack operations. Who was the genius that cooked that operation up?

>>63932815 (OP)
Generally all the focus is put on the Bongs ignoring really obvious warnings regarding the German Panzer Divisions being stationed near Arnhem, Bong tankers being a bit too conservative and generally ignoring the Dutch resistance. Despite this the amount of gains made were extremely good and legit if the Panzer Division wasn't where it was and weather was better then yes this would have succeeded. Also the Burgers dropping with the literal battle plans and said plans getting captured by the Germans didn't help the operation though the Germans thought they were fake as they didn't think anyone would have been stupid enough to drop with them so that is relatively mute.

It is also worth pointing that Montgomery took the full blame despite it not being entirely his fault and that was virtually unheard of for a General to do.

>>63932948
>can you expand on anti-Montgomeryism
he had a habit of bragging about his achievements that did not endear him to some British and American generals. he also tended to look at the optimistic view of things, which alarmed more cautious generals

this is fine for subordinates in a professional setting - as a matter of fact, pre-war Montgomery taught THE class at Sandhurst on leadership by keeping up an optimistic front in combat, and he applied it well in WW2 so his troops generally liked him - but amongst peers and in a social setting it was irritating and borderline boorish
so, in a way you could say he was kind of a British Patton.

Slim by contrast was also a popular soldier's general, but he was much more well-liked and could even get along with the acerbic American General Stilwell. in the post-war political wrangling therefore, Slim won.

some people say Americans are harsh on Monty because he was British
while this is true, it must also be said even the British didn't like him

>>63933044
His personality indeed left a lot to be desired. It was said that German prisoners being forced to have dinner with Montgomery was considered a war crime.

He also infamously wagered with General Smith that if he took a city by a certain date that he was to get a B-17 to use as his own private plane. Smith thought it as a joke so when Monty took said city ahead of schedule Monty went full autist demanding his B-17.

Despite all this shit though Monty really knew his stuff and bitch slapped the British Army into a non retarded fighting force. Before he was around it was customary for British troops to have virtually no clue what they were to do or even communicate with each other. He was able to fight and beat the Germans consistently with relative 1:1 odds and quite literally frustrate them into rage quitting an advance. Everyone thinks of him as an attrition warfare General but in reality he was taking German tactics and doing full uno reverse cards on the Germans.

>>63933119
Wasnt El Alamein more or less decided before the first shot was fired due to axis supply restraints and allies overwhelming air and arty superiority?

>>63933119
>Monty really knew his stuff and bitch slapped the British Army into a non retarded fighting force
mainly through his charm, believe it or not

the improvements in inter-arms coordination were mainly in the process of being put through when he came on the scene, so he really contributed little to the technical part of that. much of the credit for the actual brainwork should go to more junior staff officers whom we will never really know much about.

however, one of the feats that can be attributed solely to him and him alone is cajoling the Dominion contingents to adopt mechanised combined arms, which Auchinleck basically lost his job over

>Everyone thinks of him as an attrition warfare General but in reality
the British invented the phrase "bullets not bodies"

part of the lessons of 1943 was teaching this to the Americans, who subsequently claimed credit for it. but initially the Americans - who had bought deeply into the "blitzkrieg" idea - were manoeuvrists. and it wasn't until the battles of Tunisia and introduction to the 88mm Flak gun that they had a bit of a rethink

>>63933154
yes and no
if they'd been silly about it, they could have lost many more casualties making it a Pyrrhic victory or downright defeat
>overwhelming
ground strength was only something like 2:1 or 3:1 iirc which is not brilliant; Kesselring successfully held northern Italy against those odds

>>63933016
>"Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man" - George S. Patton
>"Oww! My balls!" - George S. Patton

>>63933154
It was a much closer run thing than you'd think when you factor what was there versus actually in fit state to go into combat assuming talking 2nd Battle?
Main deciding factor was logistics i.e. building up fuel and ammo reserves which worked insanely well with fluid defense.

>>63932815 (OP)
>check wikipedia

I don't see

>XXX Corps crossing the Rhine into Germany
>Allied capture of the Ruhr Valley in October, 1944
>collapse of the Nazi state in November/December, 1944
>WWII in Europe ending on December 25, 1944
>pregnant Anne Frank

Pretty safe to say it was a failure.

>>63933220
Patton had nothing to do with Hurtgen.
>passive-aggressive projective greentext
Kill yourself.

>>63932975
Hostomel and the other drops in the Kyiv aera was more like the initial Fallschrimjager landings in 1940. Market Garden had a well defined strategic plan- flawed as it was- whereas the Fall Gelb landings were a much more parallel case to the VDV of the Luftwaffe huffing their own farts and thinking they could just yolo :DDD drop straight into a city and adjust to the situation on the ground, not accounting for the fact that the Dutch Air Force ground crews at the drop zones could actually put up a fight and that 40mm Bofors guns can be fired over open sights. Not a good day to be a Fallschrimjager for sure.

>>63933360
So who did?

>>63933367
The difference is that the germans were pioneering that whole fallschirmjaeger shit while the ziggers are incompetent subhumans who cant figure out an airborne assault in the year of our Lord 2025.
Never quite understood why Hitler prohibited Airborne Assaults after Mercury, sure the losses at 6000 and 300 airplanes were quite high for the germans but those of the allies were higher (23.000 total) plus the objective was achieved.

i read somewhere that for an opportunity like to present itself you'd have to take the risk for the operation. even if slim, if successful it would have been monumental

>>63933016
The family of a guy I was in the army with had a farm down there and every few months he'd have a story about a neighbour driving his tractor over a mine or someone finding some more dead soldiers in their fields.

>>63933943
>2025
it was 2022, shitlord
> https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battaglia_di_Creta
German side:
1,971 dead
1,888 missing
2,594 injured
Allied(Brit commonwealth actually) : 1,751 dead in Crete
1,828 dead in the Royal Navy
1,900 wounded
17,509 prisoners (12,254 British and 5,255 Australians)

The ratio was pretty good, considering the german paras literally landed with pistols or some even with bare hands

>>63933943
>>63934060
Yeah, the comparison of Hostomel to Crete was always insulting towards the Germans.

>>63934072
also, the luftwaffe managed to bags 2 light cruisers and a destroyer, on what merit would an operation like this, even by modern standard would ever be considered a failure, even if the casualties ratio for the luftwaffe and paras might be a bit too high

>>63932815 (OP)
The plan was a failure, because the intent was to capture Arnhem and get across that nasty ground and those rivers in one fell swoop.
Instead the entire operation was a clusterfuck that failed to achieve its primary objective, taking up important resources that could and should have been used elsewhere.

>>63933943
>Never quite understood why Hitler prohibited Airborne Assaults after Mercury

1. Aircraft losses, Ju-52s were already in short supply due to commitments in North Africa and the soon-to-be Eastern Front and the loss of nearly 200 of them meant that they could no longer be massed for large combat operations. For the Stalingrad airlift, they literally had to pull Lufthansa airliners out of service because not enough Luftwaffe Ju-52s were available.

2. The Fallschirmjägers' equipment shortcomings had become apparent during Crete. They could not reliably go up against even light tanks and expect to prevail, and the Red Army the Germans would soon be facing had the largest fleet of tanks in the world (even if the majority of them were obsolete shitboxes, they were still sufficient for dealing with paratroopers).

3. The Luftwaffe going forward wasn't really able to achieve consistent control of airspace over hostile territory. Even in the USSR where the Luftwaffe was racking up 100:1 kill ratios, the sheer number of planes the VKS could put into the air at any given time meant that flying a slow unarmed transport over Soviet-held territory carried enormous risk (even a single I-16 slipping past the escorts could absolutely fucking massacre a flight of Ju-52s). You saw the outcome of this during the Stalingrad airlift where 266 Ju-52s were lost despite German fighter escorts operating literally out of the pocket until very late in the battle (the last ones evacuated two weeks before the end of the battle).

Allied airborne operations like D-Day, Market Garden, and Varsity were only mounted with total air supremacy where the Luftwaffe couldn't get a plane off the ground without getting swarmed by interceptors.

4. Given how badly the Fallschirmjägers had fared compared to earlier jumps, it was safe to assume that the novelty had worn off and that even costly victories like Crete were likely not going to be repeated in the future.

>>63933154
100%

Malta was in Allied control and stopping German shipping. The Battle for Mersa Matruh was already something the Germans should have lost, and once again at that - the Brits kept repeatedly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the desert. The Germans did not have the supplies needed, not the armor, not the air support (out of range and exhausted for the most part) and they were using captured British trucks just to get that far in the first place.
The British officers in the region were just generally shit and there was an American liaison in Egypt whose communications back to the States the Germans were listening and so realized they could just keep pushing forward despite everything.

>>63933943
>those of the allies were higher (23.000 total) plus the objective was achieved
at Crete, the Allies lost regular infantry while the Axis lost large numbers of the elite
and 300 aircraft is a massive blow at this stage of the war, considering that the Luftwaffe lost 1,900 in the Battle of Britain, and the Allies had barely any aircraft, and all they got was one measly island
furthermore, the Allied casualties include sailors, REMFs, and thousands who were stranded simply because Crete was an island
(at the end of the battle they didn't even bother rooting the survivors out of the hills, or sweeping for stragglers, they just put troops on the beaches and waited for the stranded to come down and surrender. the island is tiny, food and water is scarce, they had no ammo, there was nothing they could do)

Hitler's point was: the casualties were bad enough, but if Crete was not an island, if the Luftwaffe didn't enjoy a 10:1 advantage, if they hadn't enjoyed the attacker's advantage of being able to concentrate forces on one small sector of the defence, it would have been much worse

>>63932815 (OP)
Historians aren't harsh enough on Market Garden. It was a boondoggle that caused the Dutch Famine.

>>63933016
Hürtgen was Omar Bradley's blunder and allied HQ operating with a lotnof false assumption after a summer campaign of victories.
I had a few relatives who fought for zhe Wehrmacht there and their stories were wild.
>Near the end of November many axis combat positions had little to no ammo.
>So most of the time when GIs stumbled into them, they would just direct them back to their lines becausw fuck fighting in that forest.
>Many times mines were hung in trees with wires, so when one went off half the forest became shrapnellville.
>During thanksgiving US GIs got their turkey and even the bumfuck forward position was supposed to get one.
>Great uncle was barely 17 sharing a few foxholes with oldtimers from WW1.
>Suddenly a bunch of yanks stumble into them loaded with food.
>Everyone is confused but one oldtimer and the yank Sergeant both spoke french.
>After a few words the oldtimer orders by gruncle to help carry the turkey and sides back to the cp.
>yanks don't fucking know what is going on but they come along.
>Oldtimer leads the troupé to the medic's tent, which housed 3 injured GIs.
>The injured yanks get their turkey and enjoy it and share it witg everyone.
>Suddenly some bigwig Colonel shows up, full blooded Prussian.
>Simply asks the oldtimer if the post is manned and then gets a bottle of sherry.
>He proceeds to get shitfaced with the yanks and then sends the non injured carrier boys back to their lines.
>Gruncle went like: this shit was not chivalry. We all were just dumbfounded what the americabs delivered.
>He had never seen this much food in one place before.

>>63934217
>muh dutch famine
sucks to suck kaaskop

>>63934180
thanks for the detailed explanation, and the end of the day all the problems the germans faced in ww2 comes back to follkowing a retarded ideology and picking a fight they never had a chance of winning (despite incredible luck and enemy incompetence early in the war)
>>63934304
cool stories, sad thing that most of those who fought in ww2 are dead or almost dead by now

>>63932948
Man those are just to name a few. He dealt with complete arrogant twats from the Navies and Air Forces too. He also had to constantly spar with Admiral King, who was a top tier stubborn asshole in his own right, for resources being sent to Europe over the Pacific.

>>63934541
I thought Germany First was established almost immediately after the USA joined the war?

>>63933044
Eisenhower put it best when said that Montgomery “was a brilliant man to serve under, a difficult man to serve with, and an impossible man to serve over.”

>>63932844
Engloids getting a taste of their own medicine, I guess. For a people that claim to have invented banter, they surely seem not to be able to handle it.
Relax, it's just jokes.

>>63934180
When the Luftwaffe chief of supply learned about the plan for Barbarossa, he tried to calculate the number of cargo aircraft that would be needed to successfully maintain logistical airlift support for an offensive of that size, and immediately shot himself in the head after doing the math and realizing there was zero fucking chance of it working out.

>>63934801
dunno, both in BoB and Masters of the Air the eternal American goes out of their way to show the Bongs as limpwristed/fags. Observation from a german viewer

>>63935093
>goes out of their way to show the Bongs as limpwristed/fags.
no one needs to go out of their way to do that lol

>>63933943
> Hitler prohibited Airborne Assaults after Mercury
that's just fuddlore
picrel

> Relatively 1:1 loss ratios
according to whom?

from looking at the wiki you literally have to take the highest numbers for the germans and take the lowest for the allies to arrive at something CLOSE to 1:1
also
> despite on the offensive
is something that has always bothered me, especially when the numbers include POWs
yes, KIA and WIA might be higher but forces that are on the defense usually take little to no POWs

>>63934801
your mum enjoyed handling them, clearly

>>63934304
holy fuck
10/10 read

>>63932815 (OP)
It's because the Bongs thought they too can do blitzkrieg. In reality, the WWII Bongistan army were basically English (debatable) speaking Russian Army tier in terms of education and initiative. They both even use the same steamroller-broad front smash tactics. Only difference on land was Bongs had a better Air Force and a penchance for sneaky commando raids. The criticism was that the Bongs lost a lot of their elite units due to leadership and intel incompetence.

>>63932948
>but can you expand on anti-Montgomeryism? Never heard of it
The tard wrangler you mention often chose Monties plans over the many American generals. Post war there was an effort to downplay that for various reasons.

Montie had many pro's and con's but one thing for certain is that he was probably the best staff-officer the allies had during the war. His operations ran like clockwork, his planning was extremely thorough and he avoided casualties whenever possible (his mantra was "Steel not men" so most of his operations involved WW1 style artillery fire programs). Cons were that he was a hyper-autists with a colossal ego.

This generated post-war cope here in the states.

>>63934322
It was directly caused by the Allies. If the Allies had attacked Germany directly further south then nothing would have happened.

>>63936236
>It's because the Bongs thought they too can do blitzkrieg. In reality, the WWII Bongistan army were basically English (debatable) speaking Russian Army tier in terms of education and initiative. They both even use the same steamroller-broad front smash tactics. Only difference on land was Bongs had a better Air Force and a penchance for sneaky commando raids. The criticism was that the Bongs lost a lot of their elite units due to leadership and intel incompetence.

>>63933024
The Brits did have reason to consider any Dutch resistance reports suspect. It was notoriously infested with gestspo and sicherheitdienst agents. Brits had bad previous results when trying to plant the SOE there.

Although the Hürtgen and Lower Rhine battlefields seem far apart, they seem to be related.

>>63935290
>> Relatively 1:1 loss ratios
who are you quoting? 6.000 to 24.000 is 1 to 4 my man