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 ...

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...