Operation Market Garden is famous for its failure, although before its execution, all signs pointed to an imminent Allied victory. As well as being outnumbered in both men and weapons the Germans were also disorganized due to previous defeats. The reason why the operation failed has, therefore, interested many. Various explanations include logistics and communications as well as politics. However, today there is still no commonly accepted explanation and new books about the operation are being written.
At the strategic level the problem for the Allies was to get across the rivers and canals in Holland to reach the industrial Ruhr in Germany. At the tactical level each watercourse was a problem. Because there is a lack of study of the operation from an engineering perspective, the purpose of this essay is to achieve that by combining land warfare theory with engineering lessons learned. In this qualitative case study J. F. C. Fuller’s theory of protection, offensive power, and movement is used to explain how engineering affected the outcome of the operation.
The analysis shows that engineering played a decisive role in the operation and concludes that the outcome of the operation depended on a few critical situations. The Germans used counter mobility effectively to dictate where to fight the battles. At these chosen locations they used survivability measures, which enabled them to fight a static battle and hold key terrain. Allied mobility operations were vital to their assault, and without engineers the land component would have been stopped on the first day of the operation.