'A Bridge Too Far': An audacious operation's astonishing story

By Vikas Datta

On this September day, over seven decades ago, a most audacious Allied operation, intended to wrap up the Second World War by 1944 itself, ended ignominiously with shattered remnts of their elite forces withdrawing or marching into captivity. With its ambitious, over-optimistic planning but sheer bravery on the ground, Operation Market Garden is possibly one of the war’s best-known episodes, mainly due to a big budget, multi-star Hollywood film, whose most incongruous bits are the truest, and an episode of a popular American TV series. Both owe their origin to books.

The operation aimed at capitalising the German forces’ disorganised retreat through western Europe in August-September 1944 to liberate Holland and secure a launching pad to invade Germany. Paratroopers would seize bridges on/near the Dutch-German border (“Market”), and ground forces link up with them (“Garden”).

But as its most famous account (and film) is med, it proved to be “A Bridge Too Far”, or rather “bridges too far”, despite the valour of the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, the British 1st Airborne Division and their glider and transport aircraft pilots. It was rather the hubris of the commanders and the planners that doomed the mission, in which everything which could go wrong did so unerringly.

How this happened is told in the first overall account — Irish jourlist Cornelius Ryan’s “The Bridge Too Far” (1974). Ryan, who achieved fame with his multi-perspective account of the Normandy landings in “The Longest Day” (1956), did the same for “Market Garden” in his last book. Taking seven years to research and write, it was published a few months before he lost his own battle to cancer.

The 1977 film version, directed by Richard Attenborough (who agreed to fund his own dream project “Gandhi”), mostly remained true to the book, from where some of its most famous dialogues are taken verbatim as well as dramatic events — a US soldier forcing a surgeon at gunpoint to check his apparently dead officer, for one.

However, using one statement out of context — as an unforgettable ending line, it painted the speaker, British First Airborne Corps commander Lt. Gen. Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning (husband of author Daphne Du Maurier) as a villain, or at least unconscioble. (He did make the remark, but at a conference before the operation.)

Browning was, however, guilty of neglecting information that strong German forces were near Arnhem and sending the officer concerned on medical leave (Brian Urquhart, then a major, subsequently went on to a glittering career in the UN, especially in Congo, where he convinced rebels to release him by warning Gurkha soldiers — whom they feared — would come after them if he was harmed).

Arnhem, the furthest objective with the “bridge that turned out to be too far”, has seen most leading British participants share their experiences. Prominent among these are the Division Commander, Maj. Gen. R.E. Urquhart (played by Sean Connery) in his frank but wry “Arnhem” (1958), or “A Drop Too Many” (1980) by then Lt. Col. John Frost, who reached the bridge with his 2nd battalion, was cut off but held on for four desperate days against superior forces.

Then, there are British historian Middle Middlebrook’s “Arnhem 1944: The Airborne Battle” (1994), commissioned for the battle’s 50th anniversary, Chris Brown’s “Arnhem: Nine Days of Battle”, and ex-SAS director and the Attenborough film’s consultant, Col John Waddy’s “A Tour of the Arnhem Battlefields” (1999). (IANS)