On the morning of 17 September 1944, the sky over the Netherlands filled with the drone of engines and the blossoming of thousands of parachutes. It was, at the time, the largest airborne operation in history, and it carried an audacious promise: that the war against Germany might be won before the year was out. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had staked everything on a lightning thrust through the flat, canal laced Dutch lowlands and across the Rhine into the heart of the Reich. For nine days that promise hung in the balance, until it broke apart on a bridge at a town called Arnhem.
A Plan to End the War
By the late summer of 1944 the Allied armies had swept out of Normandy and raced across France and Belgium, and a mood of optimism gripped the high command. Montgomery proposed a plan of startling ambition. Rather than advance on a broad front, he would concentrate his forces for one narrow, decisive lunge. The operation came in two parts. Market was the airborne drop: entire divisions would fall from the sky to seize a chain of bridges over the rivers and canals of the Netherlands, capturing them intact before the Germans could destroy them. Garden was the ground advance: British armour of XXX Corps would then race north along the captured bridges, cross the lower Rhine, and burst into open country beyond the German frontier. If it worked, the Siegfried Line would be outflanked and the war, Montgomery believed, might end in 1944.
Market: The Sky Full of Parachutes
The airborne carpet was laid by three divisions dropped in daylight. Nearest to the front, the American 101st Airborne came down around Eindhoven and Son to secure the southern crossings. Further north, the American 82nd Airborne landed near Nijmegen, tasked with the great road bridge over the Waal. At the far end of the corridor, the British 1st Airborne Division descended near Arnhem to take the bridge over the lower Rhine, the last and most distant objective of all. The Americans, despite fierce fighting, took most of their assigned bridges, and the 82nd would later storm the Nijmegen span in a costly daylight river crossing. But at Arnhem the plan was already unravelling. Fearing anti-aircraft fire and poor ground, the British had been dropped an estimated seven or eight miles from their bridge, and worse, the area sheltered refitting SS panzer units whose presence the planners had discounted. What was meant to be a swift coup became a desperate battle for survival.
Garden: The Long Road North
Everything now depended on speed, and speed was exactly what the ground advance could not deliver. The tanks of XXX Corps had to travel up a single raised highway that ran across low, soft, often flooded ground where armour could not deploy off the road. The route soon earned a grim nickname, Hell's Highway, as German counterattacks lanced at it again and again, cutting the column and forcing costly delays. The timetable slipped hour by hour and then day by day. To lend weight to the embattled airborne bridgehead, the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade under General Stanislaw Sosabowski was dropped later in the operation, near Driel on the south bank of the Rhine, and its men fought to reach and reinforce the survivors across the river. But by then the corridor was too long, the road too exposed, and the relief column simply could not reach Arnhem in time.
The Bridge Too Far
At Arnhem a single battalion under Lieutenant Colonel John Frost had reached the northern end of the road bridge and held it with extraordinary tenacity, cut off and surrounded, for far longer than anyone had a right to expect. Around them the rest of the division was pressed into an ever shrinking pocket at Oosterbeek, pounded by artillery and armour. When the ground troops still had not arrived, the decision was taken to withdraw what remained. On the night of 25 to 26 September, under cover of darkness and rain, the survivors were ferried back across the Rhine. Of the roughly ten thousand men of the 1st Airborne who had landed, only around a quarter came back. The bridge, in the phrase later made famous, had proved a bridge too far. The Rhine remained uncrossed, the Reich unbroken, and the war ground on into 1945.