Tom from Cornwall wrote:In the interest of fairness and in the undoubted knowledge that you have the memory of an elephant I should post what you wrote much earlier on the thread before we got to talking about D-Day...
Frankly given their reluctance to make such an advance on the night of 20 September and that their advance on 21 September didn't begin until afternoon, I sort of doubt it? Not BTW that I am condeming them, they had virtually no infantry up and would have been easy meat, so they were probably sensible.
To which I can only reply that this is what I was trying to say about the American forces on the evening of D Day - "they were probably sensible"!!
Weell...
I don't think the Guards Armoured had been onboard in rough seas for two days or been up since about 0400 when they decided not to advance on the evening of 20 September...and by the morning of 21 September they had quite a snooze. It does appear though that the general stricture against night advances worked in their favor. Otherwise by that time the decision was sensible, like I said before, they had little infantry available, especially given the tardiness of 43rd Division.
Anyway, where in that did you see me complaining about tea times?
The other good news is that I found a reference to Brits drinking tea in d'Este's "Decision in Normandy" in the "Price of Caution" character assassination of the British Army chapter. Even more pertinent to this discussion, is that he says that Gavin told him that is what the Brits did after the capture of Nijmegen bridge - which brings me back to another of my pet questions of what direct, contemporary evidence there is of American chaps shouting nasty things at the Guards at the north end of Nijmegen bridge.
d'Este has his problems...nor can I find anything about nasty things being shouted at the Guards...it was all postwar rumination AFAICT.
As for Bennett's book - yes I have got it, no I haven't read it all (but I did chuck it across the room shouting "bollocks" a couple of times) and somewhere else on one of these threads I recall calling it curious. I certainly wouldn't agree that "David Bennet's arguments regarding the flaws in MARKET GARDEN are very compelling" - but would encourage people to judge for themselves.
What, was that because of his strange excursis about Rommel's "proposed" kidnapping of Hitler?
Or was it his dismembering of the planning assumptions that MARKET GRADEN were based on?
Or was it Appendix 2, which proposes, like I have tried numerous times to get you to see, that there simply were
no solutions to the logistical problems bedeviling the Allies? :roll: At least not in that timeframe and in the circumstances that pertained. Given the logistics in the Final Push in 1945, which also essentially collapsed at the end, despite Antwerp, railroads, and etc being operational, I'm not sure how anyone can say there was a solution?
Cheers!
, one can argue that Eisenhower was as responsible for Operation Market Garden as he was for D-Day and the Battle of Normandy - and that can be read both ways depending on one's point of view. 
