Page "Operation Market Garden" Paragraph 38

The rout of the Wehrmacht during July and August led the Allies to believe that the German army was a spent force unable to reconstitute its shattered units.

During those two months the Wehrmacht had suffered a string of defeats with heavy losses.

Between 6 June and 14 August it had suffered 23, 019 killed in action, 198, 616 missing or taken prisoner and 67, 240 wounded.

Many of the formations the Wehrmacht had possessed at the beginning of the Normandy campaign had been annihilated or had been reduced to skeleton formations by the end of August.

As the German armies retreated towards the German frontier, they were often harried by air attacks and bombing raids by aircraft of the Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force, inflicting casualties and destroying vehicles.

Attempts to halt the Allied advance often seemed fruitless as hurried counter-attacks and blocking positions were brushed aside and at times there seemed to be too few German units to hold anywhere.

By early September the situation was beginning to change.

The failure of the 21st Army Group to seal off the Scheldt Estuary area had allowed the 65, 000 troops of the German Fifteenth Army to be extricated from the area with 225 guns and 750 trucks via a flotilla of commandeered freighters, barges and small boats.

From there they moved to the Netherlands.