A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

When Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London from the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in January of 1944 to take command of the Allied Expeditionary Force and carry out Operation Overlord, the site of the invasion - Normandy - had already been selected. Planning for an eventual invasion of France was already well underway by January 15, 1944; before Eisenhower was selected as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan of the British Army had already crafted a preliminary invasion plan under his title of presumptive Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander (Designate), or COSSAC. After taking the COSSAC assignment in March of 1943, Morgan and his planning staff looked at their maps of occupied Northwest Europe in search of possible landing sites on the northern coast of France, the likeliest target for an invasion due to its proximity to Britain and its southern ports of embarkation. The Pas de Calais was ruled out almost right away even ...

Was Operation Market-Garden, one of the largest airborne operations ever mounted, doomed to fail at the start? Operation Market-Garden, along with the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, was one of the least well-conceived military operations carried out by the Allies in the Western Front. It’s all a question of bridges….. Market-Garden was the brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, who had won renown as the victor of the Second Battle of El Alamein (October 23-November 11, 1942), where he commanded the British Eighth Army. Known as “Monty” by his many admirers and detractors, in 1944 he was Britain’s most popular general due to his victories over Field Marshal Erwin “the Desert Fox” Rommel in North Africa, his successes in the ensuing invasions of Sicily and Italy, and for his handling of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, on June 6, 1944 and afterwards. A veteran of World War I, Monty was a firm believer in training, planning, and carefully planned “se...

(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...