Cancelled airborne operations

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Carl Schwamberger
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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#31

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 10 Jul 2009, 05:39

Gooner1 wrote:
Moved across the Scheldt from Terneuzen and
Breskens from 4 – 23 Sep 44:
86,100 men
616 guns
6,200 horses
6,200 vehicles
6,500 bicycles

Add to that the men in the Breskens and Walcheren festung , throw in the Panzer units that were historically used against Market Garden and I think your idea that the Scheldt estuary can be taken in two weeks to be rather optimistic. :wink:
Exactly how many of those immeadialty went on to other locations in Holland depends on which source you read. In early to mid September the number present on those areas was between 20,000 & 40,000 men in organized combat units. Until it was clear the Candians had stopped for thlong run the 15th Army regarded the movement as through Walchern/Beveland not into it. Up to about 12 September I understand between half & a third of those were still south of the Scheldt.

Look at a map. The mechanized corps that interfered with MG were 40 to 100 km from the road junction of Brasschat & Woensdrecht north of Antwerp. To reach there they would be making a march back towards the Allied army with all the attendant risk of being caught by air strikes, in terrain with few woods or orchards to hide in during the day. Then they have a narrow area that is vulnerable. To be of any use further west on the islands they have to load onto ferrys and move onto a battlefield crisscrossed by dykes & drainage ditches, and with nearly zero woods or orchards for concealment.

Any large scale reinforcement of this battlefield removes the small German mechanized reserves from the routes the Allies would use to hook into the lower Rhineland. And, it would place them in a position to be pocketed were the British 2d Army to advance. While we with hindsight know this would not be possible until October the Germans had no firm grasp of this.
Pyhlo wrote:Yes - but a combined operation open the Scheldt first would add ITS POL, munitions etc. cost to what had then to be built up again.
Well, someone expected to be able to carry on all the way to at least the Ruhr with the supplies at hand in September. But more to the point that buildup of supply will go faster in October/November with the average daily discharge of 13,000+ tons per day thru Antwerp (the low estimate for 19 Nov - 19 Dec 1944) on top of the 5,000 to 6,000 tons per day hauled overland to the 2d Army in September. Antwerp had a potiential discharge rate of between 80,000 & 100,000 tons per day. The trick was the two month delay in opening it also delayed the material staged in the US and Britan for rebuilding Belgums railroads. The port operations commander had to reduce the intake in late December after a surge 20,000 tons per day because clearing the cargo was slower than the intake. Anyway the point is opening Antwerp can more than double the supply to 21st Army Group in October. A second point is the Belgian railroads will be at adaquate capacity by December vs late Febuary or March of OTL. That resolves the other half of the Allied supply problem.

[/quote="Von Schadewald"]
How comes the Germans didn't blow up Antwerp docks, or at least the cranes? Were they short of explosives?! [/quote]

Found one remark about this. The locks to the "wet basins" were demolished. I am guessing these were drydocks and the cannal entries. The 625 cranes on the docks are described as intact.

For the numbers above I am drawing on extracts from the US Army Green Book 'Logistical Support of the Armies Vol I' and misl material in the 'Normandy Case Study' of the Command & Staff College reading material.

[/quote="Phylo"]A successful Market Garden and advance after that would have in effect bypassed Antwerp...thus making the position of the defenders in the Scheldt Estuart completely untenable. This was not "Festung Scheldt", there had not been the years of fortification and stockpiling put into the islands etc. as into the Channel Ports.[/quote]

Hitler designated many other locations a Festung & required the unfortunates trapped there to fight on without adaquate preperation. For far less reason than holding the Scheldt closed. No reason for him to be stricken with the idea that this position is untenable and the 15th Army wont be required to leave some sort of defense there. The 15th Army had already been directed to establish a corps size defending force there and those orders do not seem to have been changed when XXX Corps cut deep into Holland. Even with the limited preperations of three week the defenders of Walchern/Beveland managed to resist for approx a month.

Carl Schwamberger
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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#32

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 10 Jul 2009, 05:56

Von Schadewald wrote:"Why did I receive no information about the German formations which were being rushed daily to our front? For me this has always been the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Looking back, I believe that the fly in the ointment was General Brereton's powerful Allied Airborne Army in the U.K. By now it was bursting at the seams, having had no fewer than sixteen operations cancelled at the last moment, owing to the rapidity of our advance. It is probable that the Arnhem operation had already been decided upon at the beginning of September, and the powers that be were not risking another cancellation at the last moment. Back in Washington, General Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, was urging Eisenhower to use this immensely powerful force in one great operation to finish the war in 1944. So Patton's two flanking thrusts on the right and my XXX Corps on the left were halted.

This was a great pity; if those transport aircraft, which had been sitting in the U.K. doing nothing, could have been used to supply us both, the war really would have been over in 1944. The fortnight's delay before the complicated Arnhem operation could be launched proved fatal, for the enemy was growing stronger every day.
"

General Brian Horrocks "Corps Commander" p74

Image
A lot of arguments made for this. Anyone have the cargo capacity of the DC3 flying between the UK and Brusels airfields? And, how many there were available? Using the Overlord logistics planning as a guide Horrocks 30th Corps would require around 900 tons per day per divsion 'slice' to sustain full scale offensive operations.

"Divsion Slice" was one of the general guides used for the logistics planning. It was a average found by totalling all the battalions/independant compamies in the Allied armys projected for the initial six months of Overlord and dividing by the number of expected divsion HQ. So, a army of ten divisions would be expected to consume some 9,000 tons of ammunition, fuel & miscllany per day when attacking. For the first 90 days of Overlord the estimate was 950 tons per day, for th next 90 days this was expected to drop slightly to 900 tons.


Von Schadewald
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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#33

Post by Von Schadewald » 10 Jul 2009, 17:45

It never entered my head that the Scheldt would be heavily mined, so that Antwerp could not therefore be used as our forward base for some time, or, worse still, that the Germans would succeed in ferrying across the estuary from Breskens to Flushing and also from Terneuzen - until it was captured by the Polish Armoured Division - the remaining troops of the German Fifteenth Army, which had been holding the coast. General von Zangen, the Army Commander, reckoned that he had saved the remnants of eight German divisions, a total of 82,000 men and 530 guns. If I had ordered Roberts to bypass Antwerp and advance for only fifteen miles north-west, in order to cut off the Beveland isthmus, the whole of this force, which played such a prominent part in the subsequent fighting, might have been destroyed or forced to surrender. Napoleon, no doubt, would have realized this, but I am afraid Horrocks didn't. My only excuse is that a Corps is the highest formation which fights the tactical battle, and is not concerned with strategical matters, which lie in the province of the higher formations -Army, Army Group, etc. My eyes were fixed on the Rhine. (Horrocks)

Carl Schwamberger
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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#34

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 10 Jul 2009, 23:22

I wonder what Crear or the other senior Canadian leaders had to say about this. It was their area of operations, unlike Horrocks who as part of 2d Army would have secondary intellegence info for it. German opinions from the 15th Army my be usefull as well.

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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#35

Post by Von Schadewald » 11 Jul 2009, 21:09

Somethings are out of men's hands. Montgomery, an ardent Catholic, often referred in his speeches to "The Lord, Mighty in battle" (Exodus 15). Maybe the Beveland Isthmus was just another case of "The race is not always to the swift, nor the victory to the strong" (Ecclesiastes 9).

The US 17th Airborne division "was not chosen to participate in Operation Market-Garden, the airborne landings in Holland, as Allied planners believed it had arrived too late and could not prepare itself in time for the operation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th_Airborne_Division

If the 17th had been prepared, would it as a fourth division have been dropped in Market Garden? Were there enough aircraft to drop a fourth division, and where?

Image

Carl Schwamberger
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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#36

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 13 Jul 2009, 12:05

They could have been dropped in the second or a third lift. Not sure what difference that makes as the key problems occured before the second lift. Not nearly enough aircraft to bring all the divsions in one wave aside from the Polish brigade several US regiments were delayed for the decision to not make two sorties with the aircraft on the first day.

Where would a extra division be used were it available?

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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#37

Post by Delta Tank » 30 Oct 2014, 15:08

Von Schadewald wrote:Somethings are out of men's hands. Montgomery, an ardent Catholic, often referred in his speeches to "The Lord, Mighty in battle" (Exodus 15). Maybe the Beveland Isthmus was just another case of "The race is not always to the swift, nor the victory to the strong" (Ecclesiastes 9).[/img]
Montgomery was an ardent Catholic?? I never read that before. I thought his family was protestant of some variety, father was the Lord Bishop of Tasmania. Did he convert to Catholicism??

Mike

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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#38

Post by Delta Tank » 30 Oct 2014, 15:13

To all,

Of the 16 cancelled Airborne Operations how many were proposed by American commanders and how many were proposed by British/Canadian commanders?

If there was pressure on Eisenhower to use these airborne forces, did he send out a memo to all commanders to propose airborne operations so that we can use these assets?

Mike

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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#39

Post by Delta Tank » 30 Oct 2014, 16:23

To all,

I believe that the only way the war in Europe would of ended by Christmas is if the Germans surrendered. The only thing we could of done in the fall, is close to the Rhine. We did not have the logistic or combat formations to guard our flanks, cross the Rhine and defeat the German Army in the Fall of 44.

Mike

Carl Schwamberger
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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#40

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 31 Oct 2014, 08:57

Delta Tank wrote:
Von Schadewald wrote:Somethings are out of men's hands. Montgomery, an ardent Catholic, often referred in his speeches to "The Lord, Mighty in battle" (Exodus 15). Maybe the Beveland Isthmus was just another case of "The race is not always to the swift, nor the victory to the strong" (Ecclesiastes 9).[/img]
Montgomery was an ardent Catholic?? I never read that before. I thought his family was protestant of some variety, father was the Lord Bishop of Tasmania. Did he convert to Catholicism??

Mike
I dont see anything in his biographys about conversion. His father was a Anglican church clergy, originally in Ireland, then for some years in Tasmania, & back to UK.

Delta Tank
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Re: Cancelled airborne operations

#41

Post by Delta Tank » 31 Oct 2014, 12:33

Carl,

When I posted on this thread I did not realize it was in the "what if" section. I am thinking of starting a thread to answer the question I posed, unless this has already been discussed and my poor computer search skills are foiling me again!

Mike

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