CLUB ROUTE IN EUROPE The Story of 30 Corps in the European Campaign.

In Normandy 30 Corps included the 50th (Northumbrian) Division which landed on Gold Beach. It quickly overwhelmed the German defenders and had linked up with the British I Corps by the end of D-Day. The Corps launched Operation Perch. It made slow gains facing stiff resistance but by 10 June had linked up with US forces advancing from Omaha Beach. On 12 June, the Germans had a gap in their front lines near the Town of Caumont-l’Éventé. The 7th Armoured Division was sent to exploit the gap and head towards Villers-Bocage in an attempt to outflank the German Panzer-Lehr-Division and force them to withdraw, resulting in the Battle of Villers-Bocage. This attack was thwarted by elements of the Panzer Lehr Division and the 101st SS Heavy Panzer Battalion. The Commander of 30 Corps, Lieutenant General Gerard Bucknall was heavily criticised for his decisions during the operation and battle.
The Corps was then involved in a battle of attrition with only minor gains. On 25th July, the Americans launched Operation Cobra, an attack on German positions on the western end of the Contention Peninsula. The British Army launched Operation Bluecoat to support the attack. VIII Corps, on the right flank made considerable progress but 30 Corps was sluggish. Montgomery replaced Bucknall with Brian Horrocks, a veteran of North Africa. The performance of 30 Corps improved considerably and it kept up with the other British Corps during the battle for the Falaise Gap. After the German collapse, 30 Corps quickly advanced north-east and liberated Brussels and Antwerp in Belgium. There the advance was halted because of a shortage of fuel. Elements of Guards Armoured and the 2nd Household Cavalry Regiment managed to secure a bridge across the Maas-Schelde canal into the Netherlands. This bridge was nicknamed Joe’s Bridge in honour of Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur, Commander of the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards who captured the bridge.
Operation Market Garden
After the success in France and Belgium, General Montgomery commanding the 21st Army Group turned his attention to outflanking the Siegfried Line and invading the Ruhr. This required passing a number of choke points over water obstacles, the last of them a road bridge at Arnhem, allowing ground troops to trap the 15th Army, and split it from the 1st Parachute Army on the way around the northern flank of the Siegfried Line. To do this, he requested from General Eisenhower to deploy the 1st Allied Airborne Army, with the US 101st Airborne Division dropped at Eindhoven, to secure the Son and Wilhelmina Canal bridges, the US 82nd dropped at Nijmegen, to secure the Grave and Nijmegen bridges, while the British 1st Airborne dropped at Arnhem, to secure the bridgehead over the Neder Rijn. This would become the MARKET part of the operation. The 30 Corps which consisted of about 50,000 men would advance along the main axis of the British 2 Army’s line of the offensive, and pass through Arnhem within 48 hours, and continue into Germany. This was to be the GARDEN part of the operation.
Operation Market Garden commenced at 14:00H on Sunday 17 September 1944, with the artillery preparation by 350 guns at 14:35] It was to be the most ambitious ground offensive operation by the British Army in the war so far. However it was also beset by problems. The ground was assessed to be too soft to accommodate the Sherman tanks of the leading Irish Guards Battle Group, forcing the entire Guards Division to stay on the single highway. As the 30 Corps advanced north-east, it became obvious that the single highway was prone to traffic jams and was extremely vulnerable to enemy counterattacks.
The lead elements of 30 Corps, Guards Armoured Division were ambushed by German antitank defences, causing delays to the advance while the infantry dealt with the enemy. As a result, they were short of the 82nd Airborne Division’s objectives, having not even reached the 101st Airborne Division’s troops by the end of the first day. On the second day of GARDEN, the Guards Armoured continued northwards to Eindhoven, where they met elements of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. They soon discovered that the 101st had failed to secure the bridge over the Son intact, and there were more delays before engineers arrived to build a Bailey bridge.
On the morning of the 19th the Guards Armoured Division advanced without facing much resistance, and had reached the Nijmegen Bridge by the 20th, where they found that the US 82nd Airborne Division had failed to capture the road bridge at Nijmegen. The 30 Corps brought up boats, allowing two companies of the 82nd to assault across the river, eventually capturing the rigged-for-demolition Nijmegen bridge. The Guards Armoured advanced and quickly established positions on the northern bank.
Further south, in the 101st Airborne sector, many units from the 30 Corps had to be detached to fight off repeated attempts by the German 106th Panzerbrigade to cut the highway. The 231st Infantry Brigade (from 50th Infantry (Northumbrian) Division) and the 4th Armoured Brigade spent most of the time during Operation Market Garden reacting to these probes by Panthers and panzer grenadiers the 101st Airborne Sector. This created major traffic jams and delayed reinforcements reaching the Guards Division – particularly the 43rd Wessex Division, and the other two brigades of the 50th, which further slowed down the Corps advance. By the 21st the Guards Armoured Division troops were exhausted, and Horrocks also took ill, with the Corps periodically being commanded by its Brigadier General Staff (BGS) Brig. Harold English ‘Peter’ Pyman, for which he would be made Chief of Staff of Second Army after the operation. They had fought continuously for five days, much of it against fierce German resistance, and were unable to continue the offensive any longer. The 43rd Infantry (Wessex) Division was brought up to continue the offensive, and they managed to defeat elements of the 10th SS Panzer Division that penetrated to Nijmegen area, and advanced to the Neder Rijn and the area called “the Island”. There, a battalion (4th Dorset’s) successfully crossed the Rhine as a diversion, so that 1st Airborne could withdraw more safely, but many men of the 4th Dorset’s were themselves left behind on the north Bank of the Rhine when the Division withdrew.
Failure by the 30 Corps to arrive at the Arnhem bridge as planned caused most of the 1st Airborne Division to either die fighting, surrender, or withdraw to the Polish 1st Independent Brigade positions, and effectively ended the offensive of operation GARDEN.
In the following weeks, the 30 Corps spent most of its time guarding the corridor that it had managed to create during the advance. Eventually, this corridor would be expanded and would provide a secure base for further operations.
Ardennes
During the Battle of the Bulge, units of 30 Corps moved to secure the bridges over the Meuse. On 27 December the Corps pushed the 2nd Panzer Division out of Celles. On 31 December they captured Rochefort at the western end of the salient.
30 Corps was heavily involved in the fighting that preceded the Rhine crossings. Under command of the 1st Canadian Army, and with additional divisions, it was responsible for the successful, if difficult, advance through the Reichswald Forest that was the first phase of Operation Veritable in February 1945. The subsequent phases were redesignated as Operation Blockbuster. The terrain now allowed a two corps front, with 30 Corps taking the western side until meeting at Geldern with elements of the 9th US Army on 3 March.