Book Review: 'Arnhem: The Battle of the Bridges, 1944'

Operation Market, the airborne element of Market-Garden. Official British Army photo. 

On May 17, 2018, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, published the UK edition of Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944. In this eighth work about the Second World War, the award-winning writer and historian turns his sights on one of the War’s most controversial battles – Operation Market-Garden.

Outside of the professional military world – especially in the airborne community – Operation Market-Garden was better-known in Great Britain than in the U.S. until the summer of 1974. That’s when Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far was published and gave U.S. readers their first real look at the Allies’ ill-fated attempt to drop 35,000 paratroopers behind the German front lines in Nazi-occupied Holland to capture a series of bridges “with thunderclap surprise” and allow elements of the British Second Army to drive up a single highway, grab a bridgehead over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem, then outflank the Siegfried Wall and capture the industrial heart of Germany. But despite the troops’ courage and determination, a combination of bad planning,  hubris, bad weather, and stiffer-than-expected resistance by the Germans, Market-Garden failed, and the bridge at Arnhem remained in enemy hands.

Now, 44 years after the publication of Ryan’s now-classic work, Beevor re-examines “the battle for the bridges” which has been immortalized in film (1977’s A Bridge Too Far, Sir Richard Attenborough’s all-star adaptation of the international best-seller) and in HBO’s miniseries Band of Brothers, comes a new book by Sir Antony Beevor, Arnhem: The Battle of the Bridges, 1944.  

UK Edition. (C) 2018 Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books

On 17 September 1944, General Kurt Student, the founder of Nazi Germany’s parachute forces, heard the growing roar of aero engines. He went out on to his balcony above the flat landscape of southern Holland to watch the vast air armada of Dakotas and gliders, carrying the British 1st Airborne and the American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. He gazed up in envy at the greatest demonstration of paratroop power ever seen.

Operation Market Garden, the plan to end the war by capturing the bridges leading to the Lower Rhine and beyond, was a bold concept: the Americans thought it unusually bold for Field Marshal Montgomery. But the cost of failure was horrendous, above all for the Dutch who risked everything to help. German reprisals were cruel and lasted until the end of the war.

The British fascination for heroic failure has clouded the story of Arnhem in myths, not least that victory was possible when in fact the plan imposed by Montgomery and General ‘Boy’ Browning was doomed from the start. Antony Beevor, using many overlooked and new sources from Dutch, British, American, Polish and German archives, has reconstructed the terrible reality of this epic clash. Yet this book, written in Beevor's inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war. – Dust jacket blurb, Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944    

As in some of his earlier books about World War II battles – Stalingrad and D-Day come to mind – Beevor uses a forensic approach in analyzing a battle that is still heatedly debated by World War II buffs and armchair generals 74 years after it was fought. In excruciating detail, Beevor – a graduate of Sandhurst and ex-British Army officer – looks at every aspect of  Market-Garden, from the politics and inter-Allied rivalry that influenced its inception to the many inherent flaws in the plan and on to the many mishaps that led to the operation’s failure.

Confirming most of the points in Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far, Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges points out the flaws that doomed Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s daring-but-risky plan to vault over the Rhine and drive triumphantly into a supposedly demoralized and all-but-defeated Germany.

As Beevor explains, the organization charged with carrying out the largest airborne operation in history was new, immature, and dysfunctional:

The First Allied Airborne Army had only been called into being on 2 August by General Eisenhower. Despite Eisenhower’s devotion to balanced Allied relations, General Lewis Brereton’s staff consisted mainly of American air force officers. At their headquarters, Sunninghill Park near Ascot, they enjoyed Saturday-night dances at their own club and watched movies such as Kansas City Kitty and Louisiana Hayride.

The only senior British officer with the First Allied Airborne Army was Brereton’s deputy, Lieutenant General Frederick Browning. The whole set-up, with a USAAF general and staff commanding two major army formations – the American XVIII Airborne Corps and the British I Airborne Corps – was bound to complicate priorities and roles. Matters were not helped by a strong mutual dislike between Brereton and ‘Boy’ Browning. The only characteristic the two men shared was vanity. Brereton, a small, difficult man, was such a compulsive womanizer that his activities provoked a severe rebuke from General George C. Marshall, the American chief of staff and a man of the strictest moral rectitude.

Browning, a hawk-faced Grenadier Guards officer with the air of a matinee idol, was married to the writer Daphne du Maurier. (She had chosen maroon for the paratrooper’s beret as it was ‘one of the General’s racing colours’.) Although undoubtedly brave, Browning was highly strung. He could not help tugging at his moustache when nervous. His barely concealed ambition, combined with an immaculate uniform and a peremptory manner, did not endear him to other senior officers, especially the American paratroop commanders. They regarded ‘the suave and polished Boy Browning’ as a patronizing and manipulative empire-builder.

Sir Antony Beevor also devotes much space to the impulses that led to Montgomery’s fierce and ultimately successful campaign to gain Eisenhower’s approval – and most important, the logistical support – for Market-Garden. The recently-promoted Field Marshal – a politically-motivated sop to the British press to compensate for his “demotion” when Eisenhower assumed total command of the Allied force on 1 September – was an unhappy man in the weeks before Market-Garden. He believed that Eisenhower – popularly known as Ike – was more of a diplomat than a strategist and was clueless as a field commander. He disagreed vehemently with his American superior’s “broad front” approach to defeating Germany – a sentiment, Beevor reveals in Arnhem – shared by German generals in their postwar analysis of the 1944-45 campaigns. Monty favored a “single thrust” strategy in the northern sector of the Allies’ 400-mile wide front – preferably with himself in charge of the forces that were to be involved. A master of the “set-piece battle” and Britain’s most popular field commander, Montgomery was, like Browning, difficult to deal with and disliked by many of his American counterparts, including Generals Omar Bradley and George S. Patton, Jr.

Arnhem covers much of the same territory as Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far, although it  benefits greatly from Beevor’s use of new and previously unpublished materials found in the archives of all the nations affected by Market-Garden – the U.S., Great Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. As a result, the author presents new information that Ryan – who was dying of cancer even as he wrote A Bridge Too Far – could not, including the identity of the only American unit that jumped with the British First Airborne Division in its attempt to capture the “bridge too far.”

(As for the now famous catchphrase attributed to “Boy Browning,” which first appeared in Gen. Robert “Roy” Urquhart’s memoir, Arnhem, and was popularized by Ryan’s book and its 1977 adaptation, Beevor doubts that the tactical commander of Market-Garden ever said it.)

U.S. Edition (due out on Sept. 11, 2018). (C) 2018 Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books

As of this writing, Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944  is a best-seller in the UK and other Commonwealth countries. Presently, the only edition available to U.S. readers is the British first edition, which is (as of July 2018) available in hardcover and ebook (Kindle for Amazon) formats. A UK paperback edition is due out in August 2018, while the U.S. hardcover (retitled as The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Battle of World War II) will be published on September 11, 2018.

The book is also receiving positive reviews from British book critics. Per the author’s website, www.antonybeevor.com, the reviewer for The Sunday Telegraph, Noel Malcolm, writes:

“Antony Beevor’s account is, as you would expect from this master-narrator, completely gripping; the story is played out day by day, sometimes hour by hour, but always with one eye on the strategic thinking (or lack of it) and the key causal factors involved. . . This is a much more rounded account than any that have appeared so far.”

I’ve reviewed several of Sir Antony’s books in A Certain Point of View – most recently his 2015 look at the Battle of the Bulge, Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble – and I find that Arnhem: The Battle of the Bridges, 1944 is another masterful work in the same mold as D-Day: The Battle for Normandy and Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege – 1942-1943. Yes, the basic story of the eight-day ordeal faced by the British, American, Polish, and German troops involved in Market-Garden during “the battle of the bridges,” as well as the suffering that the Dutch people suffered as a result of Montgomery’s “90 percent success,” is familiar to many World War II buffs. But if Beevor’s book does not present any “but it almost worked” conclusions that Monty’s fans offer in Market-Garden’s defense, it does expand on works that have come before, including an account of  the “Hunger Winter” caused by the Nazi reprisals against the Dutch who tried to support the liberation of the Netherlands, as well as the negotiations in the spring of 1945 to alleviate the suffering of the population that was still behind enemy lines in the final months of the war.

Beevor’s Arnhem may not change any minds on either side of the “was Monty justified in ordering Market-Garden to be carried out” argument. The author clearly comes down on the side of those observers who say the operation was a “balls up” that was poorly planned and doomed to fail. And though much of Beevor’s fire is aimed at the truculent and egotistical field marshal, he spares no one, including Eisenhower, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold – the Army Air Forces chief who, along with Gen. George Marshall, wanted to see the airborne army being used in a strategic move – and many of the American generals who, like Monty, became prima donnas as a result of their quest for attention from the press.

I have enjoyed reading Arnhem: The Battle of the Bridges, 1944. It is extremely well-written and exhaustively researched, and it reads like a fast-paced political-military thriller.