Operation Market Garden – the 80th anniversary of which takes place over September 17-25 – has gone down in history as a strategic failure. The brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, this military operation was intended to hasten the end of the second world war.
It planned to use the First Allied Airborne Army (consisting of around 35,000 British, American and Polish parachute and glider troops) to seize a series of bridges in the Netherlands so that allied armoured formations could cross the Rhine and take the war into Germany itself.
The Dutch towns of Eindhoven and Nijmegen were successfully liberated, but the key objective – the bridge at Arnhem – remained in Nazi hands, despite the heroics of the British paratroopers tasked with its capture. These heroics (and that of their comrades elsewhere) have drawn recurrent attention in popular culture, as too have the details of the broader operation.
