Arnhem is among the most written-about battles of the Second World War. Little wonder: it has everything.
The airdrops – by British 1st Airborne at Arnhem, US 82nd Airborne at Nijmegen, and US 101st Airborne at Eindhoven – amounted to the most ambitious airborne operation in military history. Not only did it involve the largest number of parachute and glider troops ever to take part in a single operation – 35,000 – but it also involved an armoured thrust by Brian Horrocks’ XXX Corps, improvised amphibious assaults across major rivers, a massive air-resupply effort, repeated use of air-to-ground rocket strikes, and ferocious German counterattacks spearheaded by elite SS units.
The weaving together of so many different elements in the Operation Market Garden plan, all within the framework of a strict timetable, is another notable feature of the campaign. So too is the way in which the plan achieved its own momentum, eventually becoming an unstoppable force, even when intelligence emerged that two SS Panzer divisions had arrived at Arnhem.
