'The Last German Victory'
This week's excerpt comes from a recent re-appraisal of Operation Market Garden

There is an extensive literature surrounding Operation Market Garden. I have already featured excerpts from 'Aspects of Arnhem' and from ‘The Shrinking Perimeter’ . A relatively new study, published in 2021, takes a somewhat different approach. This study places the battle within the context of both British and German combat doctrines at the time.
This is a study that takes a fresh perspective on the battle. Aaron Bates’ comprehensive, serious analysis, looks closely at the prevailing military thinking that guided both the planning and the conduct of the battle. The Last German Victory: Operation Market Garden, 1944 contributes not just to the debate about what went wrong at Arnhem but also about the role of Airborne troops generally.
After discussing the emphasis on Artillery within the overall British military doctrine - in a chapter entitled Little More than Guts and Bayonets: British Doctrine and the Role of Firepower in Operation Market Garden - the author uses several ‘case studies’ to examine the practical effect of the doctrine at Arnhem:
… an almost Napoleonic series of frontal assaults up the main streets of Arnhem towards the German lines …
British Firepower in Operation Market Garden – Case Study Three – Infantry Firepower in the 1st Airborne Division
Though the lack of effective infantry firepower or tactics was thus not a fatal impediment for the well-supported infantry divisions of the British ground forces, it quickly proved to be a devastating weakness for the isolated 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem. Compared to even the fairly limited assets available to infantry battalions within a standard British infantry division, the infantry units of a British airborne division were severely lacking in organic firepower. Beyond the rifles, submachine guns, and Bren light machine guns of its infantry squads, and a single 2in mortar per platoon (which lacked the explosive power to be useful for much more than laying smokescreens) each battalion of a 1944 British infantry division had only a platoon of six 3in mortars to provide immediate organic fire support to its four rifle companies.
This firepower could be supplemented, however, by the allocation of detachments from the divisional Machine-Gun Battalion, which fielded sixteen 4.2in heavy mortars and thirty-six .303 Vickers medium machine guns.
In contrast, while the British Parachute Battalion of 1944 fielded its own platoon of four Vickers guns in its Support Company, its mortar platoon was reduced to only four tubes (technically the battalion was authorized eight mortars, but could only crew the extra four by swapping out the medium machine guns, which the battalions at Arnhem do not seem to have done).
The airborne division’s three airlanding battalions were considerably better off, with each battalion fielding a ‘Mortar Group’, with twelve 3in tubes and two four-gun Vickers MMG platoons. This extra firepower was largely wasted in the offensive phase of Market, however, as the battalions of the 1st Airlanding Brigade remained guarding the landing zones while the lighter, but more mobile, parachute battalions of the 1st Parachute Brigade led the push towards the bridges; Urquhart later stated that the 1st Airlanding Brigade’s firepower ‘would have been invaluable offensively during the first twenty-four hours’.
Even when the 2nd Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment was sent to join the 1st Parachute Brigade’s attack on the afternoon of 18 September, most of its heavy weapons were left behind to help protect the landing zones and Divisional HQ area, depriving the assault force of what might have been a significant boost to their firepower.
Moreover, unlike a standard infantry division, the British airborne divisions had no pool of additional heavy infantry weapons to call upon, leaving the attacking parachute battalions almost entirely reliant upon the overburdened divisional light artillery regiment for fire support.
One area where British airborne troops were relatively well-equipped in terms of firepower was in the field of submachine guns; the British Army’s development of the light and cheap – if occasionally less than fully reliable – 9mm Sten submachine gun had been heavily influenced by the need for a highly portable automatic weapon for use in the fledgling airborne force, and these forces received a generous issue of them. Whereas a standard 845-man British infantry battalion in 1944 was officially issued with fifty-six Sten guns (though units often acquired more ‘unofficial’ weapons), mostly for use by officers, squad commanders, and some heavy weapons crews, a 1944 Parachute Infantry Battalion was allocated a ‘pool’ of 300 Sten guns to be issued as needed among their 613 men, while further weapons seem to have been issued equally generously to the various divisional supporting units; Captain Eric MacKay, for example, who commanded A Troop of the 1st Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers, noted that, of the twenty-seven men that remained under his direct command by the early afternoon of 19 September, fully fourteen were wielding Sten guns in defence of the position at the Arnhem road bridge.
Though it is unclear how many men in the 1st Airborne Division chose to carry Stens in place of their standard rifles during the Market Garden operation, the weapon’s relative prominence in numerous accounts by survivors and the mention of Sten ammunition as one of the division’s most critical requirements for resupply in administrative reports suggests that a considerable portion of the division’s pool of submachine guns was indeed brought along, likely in anticipation of close-quarters urban combat in defence of the hoped for Arnhem bridgehead.
However, while these numerous Sten guns would indeed have been a very useful addition to the infantry firepower of the British airborne troops at Arnhem, they also would have introduced some significant drawbacks: firing as it did a relatively low-powered 9mm pistol cartridge, the Sten, like most submachine guns, would have been limited to an effective combat range of about 50 to 100yd and had only a limited ability (in comparison with rifle cartridges) to penetrate either dense vegetation or urban masonry – both of which were common in the fighting around Arnhem.
Furthermore, the prevalence of automatic weapons among the airborne troopers would have contributed to the aforementioned high rate of ammunition consumption and subsequent supply difficulties. While the Sten’s handiness and high rate of fire in comparison with the standard Lee–Enfield service rifle would likely have outweighed these limitations in the generally close-ranged combat at Arnhem, the widespread employment of submachine guns was far from a perfect solution to the British airborne’s firepower problems.
… taking advantage of their high standards of marksmanship, fitness, discipline, and high morale to close with the enemy and overwhelm him in close combat.
As a result of these limitations in their armaments, British parachute battalions relied heavily upon aggressive close-range shock tactics, taking advantage of their high standards of marksmanship, fitness, discipline, and high morale to close with the enemy and overwhelm him in close combat. These tactics were very prevalent at Arnhem, with numerous references throughout the documentation and literature on the battle to the widespread use of bayonet charges by the airborne troops to clear German resistance nests or counterattack penetrations of their own lines.
To be sure, these tactics could and did often achieve a degree of success, at least in the short term. However, they also proved extremely costly; right from the start, the British paratroops seem to have suffered heavily every time they clashed with the Germans, even in the relatively limited scale skirmishes of the first 24 hours.
For example, the 1st Parachute Battalion’s R Company was reporting approximately half of its original 117 men having fallen as casualties by midnight on 17/18 September, less than 12 hours after the landings, while, in the wake of a series of assaults on German strongpoints throughout the morning of the 18th, the same battalion’s T Company was reduced to a mere twenty-two men by the early afternoon.
Similarly, accounts of the desperate final assault into Arnhem on 19 September describe an almost Napoleonic series of frontal assaults up the main streets of Arnhem towards the German lines located in rows of buildings along perpendicular streets – historian Robert Kershaw described it as ‘the tragedy of the “Charge of the Light Brigade” in miniature’. Though the charge overran a few outlying positions, it eventually ended, as mentioned earlier, with only a handful of unwounded men even reaching the main German lines before being overwhelmed by the subsequent counterattack.
When a headcount was conducted of the remnants of the 4 attacking battalions on the evening of the 19th, it was found that only 116 and 40 men were left in the 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions, respectively (from an establishment strength for a parachute battalion of 613), while the 11th Parachute Battalion and the 2nd South Staffordshires, neither of which had been engaged with the enemy before that morning, were down to 150 and 100 men respectively – the South Staffordshires having landed with a total of 779 men.
Though it is likely that some of the missing men had merely become separated in the chaos and may have later returned to the unit, the assault clearly left the participating units in no position to continue their offensive efforts. Moreover, the British use of these shock tactics persisted even after the devastating losses of the 19th, with numerous German penetrations of the Oosterbeek perimeter being counterattacked at bayonet point.
One such counterattack by 7/KOSB on 21 September retook a lost position (a large building dubbed the ‘White House’), but achieving this minor victory reduced the already battered battalion, which had numbered 270 men the previous day, to less than 150 men fit for duty. These losses ensured that the battalion’s success was an entirely pyrrhic one, as its reduced fighting strength soon forced it to abandon the recaptured position and pull back to a shorter defensive line. Furthermore, the losses suffered in this type of close fighting fell disproportionately on the small-unit leadership in the British battalions, who generally led such charges from the front; the 7/KOSB War Diary notes that the fight at the ‘White House’ cost them twelve officers, including the last of their company commanders, as well as the last of their company sergeant majors.
Clearly the 1st Airborne Division’s shock tactics were a losing prospect at Arnhem, producing only limited results while rapidly inflicting a scale of casualties that rendered the division’s infantry brigades almost entirely combat ineffective less than two days after they landed. Thus, lacking in either artillery or organic firepower, and not trained or equipped to fight effectively without outside support, the British 1st Airborne Division was forced into exactly the sort of costly infantry assaults that British interwar doctrine had sought to avoid, which quickly rendered the division unable to complete its mission.
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© Aaron Bates 2021, 'The Last German Victory: Operation Market Garden, 1944'. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd
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