XXX Corps commander General Horrocks had expected that the Irish Guards would have been able to advance the 13 miles (21 km) to Eindhoven within two-three hours. However, in the event, they started out at 14:35, 2 hours AFTER the first airborne units were ON THE GROUND and only covered 7 miles (11 km) to Valkenswaard before stopping at nightfall, already 4 hours behind schedule. The plan was for Guard to reach Eindhoven [another 6 miles, (9.7 km) further] just after 17:00 in order to relieve 1st Airborne in Arhem in 48 hours. But, they did not restart for 8 hours, making them a full 12 hours behind schedule. Where was Montgomery's urgency during this loss of 12 precious hours?
Montgomery's tanks DID NOT OPERATE AFTER DARK! William Buckingham wrote in his "Arnhem 1944"(2002) pages 119-120:
"By the time the British Liberation Army set foot on the European mainland, the dictum that armour ONLY FOUGHT BY DAY and carried out maintenance and rearming after dark appears to have become set in stone. It is unclear where this originated. The practice may have grown out of the unreliability and heavy maintenance demands of British tanks earlier in the war [see example John Ellis"The Sharp End" p.126], although the advent of the US-produced M4 Sherman, with its exemplary reliability should have done much to offset this. it may also have been a carry over from the long years of training in the UK between Dunkirk [where the British lost ALL of their tanks and heavy equipment and had to train on obsolete, worn out equipment] and the Normandy invasion. Certainly, the British tank crew training in the run up to the Normandy invasion had to make a conscious effort to break potentially lethal habits engendered by peacetime-training regulations [see example John Foley "Mailed Fist" pp 17-18]. During static phases in the Normandy fighting it became standard practice for British tanks to move up to the line in the pre-dawn darkness and to withdraw after dark [I am indebted to Mr Robert Field of TankNet Military Discussion Forum for bringing this to my attention. The information appears in Tim Saunders', "Hell's Highway” (Battleground Europe Series)].
"This practice appears to have been largely based on the assumption that tanks were too vulnerable to operate in darkness. However Germans, and more especially the Soviets, did not subscribe to this view. Nor, incidentally, did everyone in the British and Canadian armies in North-West Europe. Operation "Totalize," launched by the 2nd Canadian Corps, on the night of 7-8 August 1944 saw a large force Canadian and British tanks and armoured infantry pass virtually unscathed through strong German defences along the Caen-Falaise road. They achieved what they had repeatedly failed to do in daylight, because the darkness nullified the expertly sited German anti-tank guns. But the Guards Armoured Division being Guardsmen, and thus not the most flexible of formations, preferred to limit their offensive activities to the hours of daylight. Sbrenerkener (talk) 20:01, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
- It's obviously not true that British tanks did not operate at night, because they did so in Totalize and then again on the night of 30-31 August when Horrocks ordered 11th Armoured to keep going all night to Amiens, a 30-mile rush. It was dangerous to operate tanks at night in enemy territory because the low visibility gave the advantage to infantry, and difficult in any case because the vehicles (even American Shermans) needed laborious regular evening servicing at the end of the day's run. But at Amiens on the morning of 31 August, 11th Armoured captured General Eberbach, commander Seventh German Army, who drove into the town square in his staff car, thinking he was inspecting his own front-line positions, only to find that the British front line had advanced thirty miles overnight, a thing he had not considered possible, and he was now in British hands.
- Guards Armoured Division were not ordered to drive through the night of 17-18 September in Market Garden because Colonel Sink of the 506th PIR, US 101st Airborne, decided for reasons best known to himself that he couldn't be bothered to take his principal first-day objective of Eindhoven after all (despite it being held by only about half a dozen Flak 88 gun crews -- there really weren't many Germans there), leaving it till next day, not least because (well, hello) Sink didn't think his paratroopers could fight at night, and in addition Sink's 506th had also failed to take their other objectives, the canal bridge at Son (blown by the enemy because Sink's paratroops got distracted and were too slow), or the alternate bridge at Best (because again Sink's paratroops were too slow and allowed the enemy to reinforce the location and prevent capture), so the Irish Guards couldn't get much further until the Royal Engineers had built a replacement Bailey bridge at Son anyway. Hence no order to Guards Armoured to drive through the night. Khamba Tendal (talk) 18:59, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
- Dempsey did not want to advance too closely to Eindhoven as the Germans may have blown the bridges before the 101st had seized them. Cirillo of the US army states this. There is nothing stating that tanks would not be used at night. As it happened it made no difference as XXX Corps had to erect a Bailey bridge at Zon during the night as the 101st failed to seize the bridge. 2A01:4B00:BB18:A600:E738:4C0D:38F4:6829 (talk) 17:04, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- Rubbish, the ONLY reason they did not advance further from Lent was because they were ambushed in the dark and had no infantry support as those troops were left in Nijmegen to clear the town that the 82nd had not done when they failed to capture the bridge early.
- there was no “dictum” and Buckingham has not reference to back this statement up. Enderwigginau (talk) 04:50, 28 July 2024 (UTC)