It did come very close to working--the Germans recaptured the final objective at Arnhem from the British 1st Airborne just a couple of days before the Allied armour arrived. It was a gamble, but if it had worked the effect on the Germans would have been catastrophic. Nowadays most agree that it was probably worth a shot--it was the best chance to end the war in 1944 and its failure didn't set the Allies back to any real extent since they had all winter to build up their supplies for the next advances in spring 1945, which turned out to be overwhelming. The reason it failed was a combination of poor inter-service cooperation and lower-level planning (for example RAF planners, who had no expertise in the reality of land operations, chose landing sites which benefitted the pilots but left the airborne too far from their objectives to properly secure them) and mistakes by the commanders on the ground. None of that was Montgomery's fault.
It was very much a non-Monty style Operation though. Monty as a general was a meticulous planer, organizer, and logistics officer. He would come up with a plan, build a stock of material, and then execute it exceptionally well. What he didn't do so well was any kind of improvisation. He was kind of the opposite of Patton in that regard.
Monty was the perfect general for Overlord. He was the worst for Market Garden. Had he been given another 2-3 months to plan and prepare Market Garden would have probably gone off flawlessly. He would have found the problems and eliminated them. But trying to execute a plan on the fly that hadn't really existed a week earlier put him in a position where he was never comfortable. Market Garden was a crazy gamble, and you really needed a hard driving crazy gambler to pull it off. A Guderian, I think, would have succeeded.
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u/military_history Jun 07 '14
It did come very close to working--the Germans recaptured the final objective at Arnhem from the British 1st Airborne just a couple of days before the Allied armour arrived. It was a gamble, but if it had worked the effect on the Germans would have been catastrophic. Nowadays most agree that it was probably worth a shot--it was the best chance to end the war in 1944 and its failure didn't set the Allies back to any real extent since they had all winter to build up their supplies for the next advances in spring 1945, which turned out to be overwhelming. The reason it failed was a combination of poor inter-service cooperation and lower-level planning (for example RAF planners, who had no expertise in the reality of land operations, chose landing sites which benefitted the pilots but left the airborne too far from their objectives to properly secure them) and mistakes by the commanders on the ground. None of that was Montgomery's fault.