[WarInEur] Airborne

[SGMINFO at aol.com]

In a message dated 06/01/2008 22:36:08 GMT Standard Time, noble1234 at aol.com  
writes:

Market-Garden wasn't motivated by a use it or lose it mentality, rather  the 
leaders?of the Airborne Army wanted to get into the fight.? They had been  
proposing all kinds of?operations that were rendered moot by events on the  
ground.?

The four week rule reflects the time that an airborne unit  that is in combat 
needs to refit itself to make a jump.??All of the airborne  operations in WW2 
were done by units that had been either never in combat or  out of combat for 
at least four weeks.? 
 
Well I might disagree there, the 'use it r lose it' criticism permeated the  
command, desperately trying to prove that they were not a very expensive 
luxury  article. The lose it side of the coin meant losing these valuable elite 
units to  be broken up for infantry replacements for the endemic shortages in 
late '44.  Having a complete Airborne Army sitting on their backsides doing what? 
whilst  the war roared to a conclusion was not calculated to justify the 
existence of  this branch of the armed services.
 
The 4 week rule is a cruder  fudge factor.
 
4 weeks preparation is not exactly the fit to jump regime...
 
but it does give a notional period in which planning and objective  selection 
is\aking place, and rehearsals and meticulous preparation is made to  attain 
the objective, from recon, to identying the target, and getting approval  
throughout the chain of command, and tasking the support and resources.
 
As you say, many interim objectives were overtaken by events, demonstrating  
that overnight ops were beyond the ability to pull out of the hat. 4 weeks 
gives  some element of delay, but the cabrank approach neatly sidesteps this, and 
 indeed in the allied case in 1944 would not, in game terms, have resulted in 
any  airborne drops being cancelled.
 
Hence the attempt to create some sort of an event horizon for intiating  
drops, without them degenerating into aerial artillery.
 
Market-Garden appears to be pulled out of a hat, but by the look of things  
arose out of several preplanned selections kept in the folder of 'just in case' 
 ops. Much of th detailed stuff had already been roughed out in the preceding 
 weeks and was dusted off to flesh out the move. This is to be contrasted 
with  ops like Merville on D day, where 6 months of prparation went into the 
detail of  the assault.
 
If you consider the amount of topographical detail that had to be worked up  
from PR missions, practice and rehearsal on the specialist assaults needed on  
immediate and intermediate objectives, a couple of weeks for such working up 
was  really pushing it, unless you expected no opposition, as was the case in 
Arnhem.  Had the planners accepted the possibility of class A troops near the 
objective  in position to intervene, the assault would not have been made in 
such a  cavalier fashion. In all cases the airborne were securing unopposed obj
ectives  in verwhelming force, and in several cases over the operation 
planning badly  miscarried as insufficient recon and preparation left formations 
freshly  landed, seriously wrongfooted. With greater time and better appreciation  
and planning, the drops would have either been cancelled, or delayed, for  
altrnative options to be considerd. At no time were the dropping forces expected 
 to be called into aerial assualt or right off the drop zones, as had been 
the  case at Normandy, they expectd to land and seize unopposed, then hold in 
the  teeth of the expectd counter attack.
 
It was expectations of a defeated and retreating, demoralised enemy that  
spurred the movement, not the '2-5' malleting the top of the defenders stack on  
the objective awaiting the assault.
 
-|steve|-
 
 



   
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