On the night of September 17, 1944, in an open field in Arnhem, the Netherlands, a team of German machine gun crew members were leisurely smoking cigarettes and looking up at the sky from time to time.
Suddenly, a piercing siren sounded! Subsequently, countless flares rose from the ground to the sky, instantly illuminating the dark sky like day.
Against the backdrop of flares, dense aircraft and umbrella flowers appeared in the air. The German machine gunners also quickly threw away their cigarette butts, picked up the MG42 machine gun and began to shoot into the air.
The Allied "Market-Garden" campaign was fought, with tens of thousands of Allied paratroopers jumping from their transport planes in the dark of night. But what they didn't know was that the two German panzer divisions had been waiting on the ground for a long time.
What's more, the US paratroopers were all high-altitude parachutes at that time, and generally opened their parachutes at an altitude of about 400 meters. But the consequences were severe: German fire on the ground had enough time to slowly aim and shoot them.
Therefore, many US paratroopers have not landed on the ground, and they have already been shot and killed in mid-air. The German soldiers on the ground beat the Polish paratroopers in the air as if they were hitting birds with shotguns. Faced with the fierce german fire on the ground, the poor paratroopers did not even have the opportunity to return fire.
However, in the face of heavy casualties, the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions still captured the intended target.
Even worse were polish and British paratroopers: there were about 1,500 Polish paratroopers at the time, and half of them were already dead after landing.
Another British airborne unit: the First Parachute Division. Due to the misplacement of intelligence and transport aircraft landing, they lost all their heavy equipment. As a result, when they ran near the Arnhem Bridge, they were surrounded by nearly 10,000 German soldiers there.
The Allied "Market-Garden" operation is actually a combination of the "Market" airborne operation and the "Garden" ground propulsion. But the airborne operation was undoubtedly a failure, and the Allied paratroopers let the Germans experience the thrill of shooting for a long time, and many people "landed into boxes".
And those Allied forces that successfully landed also failed to form a strong fighting force, and the pre-war goals were not achieved.
At the same time, operations on the Garden were slow: at 14:35 on 17 September 1944, the British 30th Army, the spearhead of operation Garden, was met with strong German resistance, something Montgomery had not anticipated.
Here's a story: a German assault gun ambushed a British tank behind a house, only to be spotted by American infantry in advance.
But the infantry commander looked at it again and again with his binoculars, and finally said: I can't see the German assault guns. The soldiers said you could see it if you blew up the house. Who knew that the commander said: "The property of civilians cannot be destroyed unless it is particularly necessary".
As a result, this "nobility" directly led to a Passing British Firefly tank being killed by the Germans. It is precisely because the Allied ground forces have always held a "steady win" mentality that they are seriously ill-prepared for the difficulty of this operation! As a direct result, the Allied ground forces paid a heavy casualty price in exchange for a forward distance of no more than 8 kilometers.
After several days of fierce fighting at the Remagen Bridge, N'Höven, and Anheng, the initial vigor of the Allied "Operation Garden" was gradually lost, and the German offensive became more and more fierce.
The losses of the Allied forces participating in the war were getting worse and worse, and the two parts of the "market" and "garden" could not converge as originally planned. In this case, General Montgomery was forced to give the order to abandon the offensive on September 24, 1944.
Subsequently, the Allies began to build a defensive line around Nijmegen, covering each other and withdrawing from the battlefield. By 26 September 1944, only 2,398 of the 10,600 British airdrops had been dropped to the battlefield, and the rest were either killed or captured.
The Germans eventually traded more than 8,000 casualties in exchange for nearly 20,000 Allied losses, which was a big victory. After the fiasco of Operation Market-Garden, large-scale airborne operations never appeared in the war again.
