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.
Here are five films and TV shows that explore the origins, impact and aftermath of the allies’ September 1944 strategic gamble.
Theirs is the Glory was the first film to tell the story of Operation Market Garden, and in my opinion, it remains the best.
Filmed on location in the Netherlands, it features original wartime footage together with staged reenactments. Many of the latter involved British soldiers and Dutch civilians who had actually participated in the fighting.
Widely commended on its release for its authenticity, the film – which is focused specifically on the battle at Arnhem – is dedicated as an “everlasting memorial” to those who were killed.
First aired in November 1976, this television film (which was a joint BBC-Dutch production) provides an interesting take on the aftermath of the battle for Arnhem. It is centred on the real-life story of Colonel Graeme Warrack (played by John Hallam), a British doctor who decided to stay with the wounded after the allied withdrawal. He was subsequently captured by the Germans and spent several weeks caring for the injured before escaping back to allied lines.
In 1963, he authored a memoir about his war experiences. Titled Travel by Dark, it was the inspiration behind this production.
This is by far the most famous of all the productions focused on Operation Market Garden. Based on a book by Cornelius Ryan, directed by Richard Attenborough and involving a star-studded cast – including Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Dirk Bogarde, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford and Lawrence Olivier – the film is broad in scope and cinematic in sweep.
It tells the story of the operation from inception to execution, and it does so with an attentive eye to historical detail. Stories of many of the key players are told, and some of the Anglo-American tensions exposed during the operation get an airing.
Nonetheless, its accuracy has also often been critiqued and many contemporary reviewers found it rather too long. It bears comparison with another similarly “epic” second world war film – the 1962 production The Longest Day (likewise inspired by a Cornelius Ryan book), for which it is something of a companion piece.
Following in the wake of his successful 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers saw Hollywood director Steven Spielberg turn his talents to the small screen, albeit as producer.
Based on a book by historian Stephen Ambrose, the series follows “Easy Company” of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and 101st Airborne Division, from training in the US, to dropping into Normandy on D-Day, through to ending the war in Austria.
In episode four, titled Replacements, the men take part in Operation Market Garden, parachuting into the Netherlands and helping to liberate Eindhoven. The subsequent episode, Crossroads, picks up the story in the weeks after the operation and sees the company contribute to Operation Pegasus, the rescue of British paratroopers cut off after the withdrawal from Arnhem.
The aftermath of Operation Market Garden occupies a complicated place in Dutch memory. Allied troops were welcomed enthusiastically by Dutch civilians and the local resistance were active in the fighting.
But in the subsequent weeks the consequences of the operation’s failure were also borne by the Dutch, around 20,000 of whom starved to death during the winter of 1944-45. This was in part due to a deliberate German policy – they stopped the transportation of food in the western Netherlands in retaliation for Dutch railway workers (and the exiled Dutch Government in Britain) supporting the allies during Market Garden.
The Forgotten Battle, an Anglo-Dutch production, explores some of these complexities in Dutch memory. It is focused on the post-Market Garden Battle of the Scheldt, the allied attempt to secure the territory around the port of Antwerp in nearby Belgium.
At the centre of the film is the story of Teuntje Visser, a young Dutch woman drawn into the work of the resistance following the death of her brother at the hands of the Nazis. Another of the story’s key characters is a British sergeant in the Glider Pilot Regiment, who finds himself cut off behind German lines after the failure of Market Garden.
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Sam Edwards has previously received funding from the ESRC, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, the US Army Military History Institute, and the US Naval War College. Sam is a Trustee of The D-Day Story (Portsmouth) and of Sulgrave Manor (Northamptonshire), he is a Governor of The American Library (Norwich), and he is Co-Editor of the British Journal for Military History.
