Stephen Ambrose

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The Culprits of Market-Garden

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SOURCE: “The Culprits of Market-Garden,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 30, 1994, p. 27.

[In the following excerpt, d'Este concludes that D-Day, June 6, 1944 is “enormously readable and will undoubtedly become a standard work of its genre,” despite its overemphasis on the American role in the Normandy invasion.]

The summer of 1994 marked the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversaries of two famous and very different battles of the Second World War. On June 6, the world's attention was focused on Normandy, where in 1944 the turning point of the war occurred when Allied forces launched their long-awaited cross-Channel invasion on Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, and Utah beaches.

There is a dramatic contrast between D-Day and September 17, 1944, the date the Allies launched Operation Market-Garden, the greatest airborne and glider operation in history, and a bold strategic gamble aimed at ending the war in the same year by gaining an Allied bridgehead north of the Rhine. D-Day was characterized in these pages (TLS, June 10) as “a necessary day”, a prerequisite that had to be successfully carried out if the Allies were to defeat Nazi Germany and end the war. Arnhem may best be remembered as “a tragic day”, which began so promisingly but ended, as Martin Middlebrook, the author of Arnhem 1944, writes, as “the last major battle lost by the British Army, lost not by the men who fought there but by the overconfidence of generals, faulty planning and the failure of a relieving force given too great a task.”

Whereas D-Day was the result of months of rigorous planning, Market-Garden was a military disaster thanks largely to the blunders of its architects, who planned it in haste, and in the process not only violated established principles of offensive warfare, but failed to heed the valuable (and costly) lessons learned from earlier airborne operations, including Normandy. In Normandy, bravery and good leadership were rewarded by victory; at Arnhem, valiant men were ill served and died needlessly. Although the stand of Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost's 2nd Parachute Battalion at Arnhem bridge is widely considered one of the most heroic episodes of the Second World War, Market-Garden failed to establish the vital bridgehead north of the Rhine, a strategic objective which has come to be popularly known as “a bridge too far.”

Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944 and Martin Middlebrook's Arnhem 1944 are as different as the battles they chronicle. As both Eisenhower's official biographer and a historian of the Second World War, Ambrose brings impressive credentials to the writing of a fiftieth-anniversary account of D-Day, which he appropriately subtitles The Climactic Battle of World War II. Ambrose's book draws on a vast archive of 1,400 oral histories collected at the Eisenhower Center of the University of New Orleans, of which he is the director, to retell the dramatic tale of the first twenty-four hours of the great invasion.

Unfortunately, readers interested in a full account of the Anglo-Canadian landings are certain to be disappointed. Ambrose's account is unbalanced: twenty chapters (more than 300 pages) are devoted to the American airborne and amphibious landings, while five short chapters (sixty-six pages) detail the Anglo-Canadian landings. The primary focus of the book is bloody Omaha beach, where for a precarious time the landings seemed destined to fail. Ambrose attributes the Allied triumph on D-Day to the valour of the officers and men who snatched victory from what might have been a disaster on Omaha. However, in his zeal to pay tribute to the heroics of the participants, he offers simply too many first-person accounts and too little objective analysis of the decisions and events of that momentous day, which ought to be part of any fifty-year retrospective. For example, the landings and operations of the British 3rd Division in the Sword sector are not even mentioned, despite the fact that what transpired there was the object of later controversy concerning the early capture of Caen, which Montgomery had promised. Despite these shortcomings, however, D-Day, June 6, 1944 is enormously readable and will undoubtedly become a standard work of its genre.

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