BBfanboy
Posts: 18046
Joined: 8/4/2010 From: Winnipeg, MB Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: sprior quote:
Commonwealth had already taken tremendous casulties Monty was under tremendous pressure from Churchill to cut back on casualties. During the Normandy campaign the troops suffered loss rates close if not equal to WW1 rates. After that the UK was breaking up combat and support units to keep other units up to strength. Part of the reason Monty was so popular with the rank and file was that they knew he was careful with their lives. Of course he wasn't the first pick for 8th Army but Gort's plane got shot down. An interesting what-if. So true - the German reserve panzer divisions were all concentrated in the area north of Caen, where the British and Canadians were. At that point in the war there were few guns/tank destroyers that could take on the Tigers. US formations also had more truck transport available to move quicker. One of Monty's biggest failures was ignoring the islands guarding the estuary leading into Antwerp. These were very lightly defended until the Canadians were close to Antwerp, whereupon the Germans heavily reinforced them. The Canadians took Antwerp but Monty denied them a place in the victory parade because he thought they had been too slow getting there (they had to fight along the coast, through all the heavy fortifications of the Atlantic Wall), and he rewarded them with the job of taking the islands (basically mud flats with dikes, which the Germans breached to flood the landscape). He did not get them any proper landing craft for the job so they paddled canvas boats across the narrowest crossings, a predictable route. The battle was extremely bloody and took months, while the Allies were denied use of the biggest port in Europe when it was sorely needed to sustain the offensives in the south. The troops assigned to Market Garden could have taken the islands and then broken through in the North after Antwerp was taken.
_____________________________
No matter how bad a situation is, you can always make it worse. - Chris Hadfield : An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth
|