the Americans took too long to capture the Nijmegen bridge. the British tanks did not like to fight at night. the Germans captured the operational plans. The British Army blamed the Air Forces for not dropping enough men on the first day of the operation. The British claimed that Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, did not give them the administrative support that they needed to enable the operation to succeed. stand at Arnhem was a monument to British valor, but a monument too to human weakness, to the failure to strike hard and boldly. The Americans accused XXX Corps of being too slow. Of the 10,000 or so men who had landed around Arnhem by parachute or glider less than a quarter returned. Despite an astonishing display of determination and stubborn resistance, they were surrounded and defeated before XXX Corps could reach them. The Germans called it the Hexenkessel - the witches’ cauldron. The men of the British 1st Airborne Division were forced into two small areas - one around the northern end of the Arnhem road bridge (Sketch map 6) that was their target and another that came to be called The Cauldron (whose shrinking boundary was called The Perimeter) (Sketch map 5) around the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek. The ground forces did not get across the Arnhem bridge.
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