Books

On 17 September 1944, General Kurt Student, the founder of  Nazi Germany’s parachute forces, heard the growing roar of aero engines. He went out onto his  balcony above the flat landscape of southern Holland to watch the air armada of Dakotas and gliders, carrying the British 1^st Airborne and the American 101^st and 82^nd Airborne Divisions. He gazed up in envy at this massive demonstration of  paratroop power.

Operation Market Garden, the plan to end the war by capturing the bridges leading to the Lower Rhine and beyond, was a bold concept: the Americans thought it unusually bold for Field Marshal Montgomery. But could it have ever worked?  The cost of failure was horrendous, above all for the Dutch who risked everything to help.  German reprisals were pitiless and cruel, and lasted until the end of the war.

The British fascination for heroic failure has clouded the story of Arnhem in myths. Antony Beevor, using often overlooked sources from Dutch, British, American, Polish and German archives, has reconstructed the terrible reality of the fighting, which General Student himself called ‘The Last German Victory’. Yet this book, written with Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war.