A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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 ...

(C) 2008 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment The Longest Day (AKA: Darryl F. Zanuck's The Longest Day) Directed by: Ken Annakin (British Exterior Episodes), Andrew Marton (American Exterior Episodes), Bernhard Wicki (German Episodes) Written by: Cornelius Ryan (with additional material by James Jones, Romain Gary, David Pursall, and Jack Seddon)   Studio: 20th Century Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck Productions Genre: War/Historical Epic Year of Release: 1962 The Longest Day is a vivid recreation of the June 6, 1944 Allied invasion of France, which marked the beginning of the end of Nazi domination in Europe. Featuring a stellar international cast, and told from the perspective of both sides, this fascinating look at one of history's biggest battles ranks as one of Hollywood's truly great war films.   - From the Blu-ray package blurb, The Longest Day (2008 edition) Today, June 6, 2017, is the 73rd anniversary of D-Day, the first day of the Allied invasion ...

There are plenty of books about modern warfare based on “first-hand” sources, oral histories, field notes, and official records written pretty much in the same style as Cornelius Ryan’s  The Longest Day. For instance, Ryan wrote what you might call a sequel to  The Longest Day,  1966’s  The Last Battle.  That book delves into the “race” to capture Berlin in the spring of 1945. There were plans to make a film adaptation of  The Last Battle,  but they were canceled before production began. Ryan also wrote another sequel to  The Last Battle  titled  A Bridge Too Far.  The third book in an unofficial “World War II Trilogy,” it tells the story of Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ failed attempt to obtain a bridgehead over the Rhine in September 1944. Like  The Longest Day,  it was made into one of those “all-star cast” spectacular war films. I think it’s better than  TLD,  but it wasn’t a big hit in th...

(C) 1974 Simon & Schuster Fifty miles south, in towns and villages close to the Belgian border, the Dutch were jubilant. They watched incredulously as the shattered remnants of Hitler's armies in norther France and Belgium streamed past their windows. The collapse seemed infectious; besides military units, thousands of German civilians and Dutch Nazis were pulling out. And for these fleeing forces all roads seemed to lead to the German border. Because the withdrawal began so slowly -- a trickle of staff cars and vehicles crossing the Belgian frontier -- few Dutch could tell exactly when it had started. Some believed the retreat began on September 2; others, the third. But by the fourth, the movement of the Germans and their followers had assumed the characteristics of a rout, a frenzied exodus that reached its peak on September 5, a day later to be known in Dutch history as  Dolle Dinsdag , "Mad Tuesday." Panic and disorganization seemed to characterize...

On the morning of Sept. 17, 1944, taking off from 24 airfields in southeast England in what was "the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled for a single battle," the leading elements of three Allied airborne divisions roared aloft and set a course for their designated drop zones in Nazi-occupied Holland. Aboard this first lift of a scheduled three, men from the veteran American 82nd and 101st Airborne and the British First Airborne Division -- which was making its first combat jump -- anxiously waited for the green lights to light up and to step out into the Dutch sky in a daring and unprecedented daylight parachute and glider landing. Their mission, to capture -- "with thunderclap surprise" -- a series of bridges that spanned the Albert Canal, the Waal River, and the last river between the advancing Allied forces and Germany: the mighty Rhine.  On the Belgian-Dutch border, the tankers, soldiers, artillerymen, engineers, and vehicle drivers of Gen...

It is spring, 1945.  Almost six years have passed since Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and began history's largest and bloodiest conflict, the Second World War. Once, Hitler's Third Reich -- which he had boasted would last 1,000 years -- dominated most of Europe and parts of North Africa. Now, having committed the biggest blunders of his 12-year reign of terror -- the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 and his ill-considered declaration of war on the United States six months later, Germany's Austrian-born Fuhrer watches his Nazi empire shrink as first his conquered territories in Western and Eastern Europe are liberated by the advancing Allies, then his vaunted defenses are broken and German towns and cities find themselves occupied by the Soviets in the east, the Anglo-Americans in the west. Even the mighty Rhine River -- Germany's "moat" -- is no longer an effective defensive barrier against General Dwight D. Eisenhower's Al...