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Operation Market Garden ranks among the worst military blunders of the Second World War. The brainchild of British general Bernard Montgomery, it was a plan to open an invasion route into northern Germany through the Netherlands by sending in paratroopers to seize key bridges, then speeding armored forces over them to secure a position over the Rhine River. What was promised to bring a quick end to the war, however, quickly became a nightmare as tanks were soon bogged down on the only highway available, leaving the British 1st Airborne Division at the northernmost point of the operation unsupported and subject to devastating German counterattacks.

 

Ever since its failure historians and armchair pundits have speculated as to how the plan might have succeeded. Antony Beevor is having none of it, however, making plain early in his history of the campaign that “[i]t was quite simply a very bad plan right from the start and right from the top. Every other problem stemmed from that.” The extent of this is made plain over the course of the book, as he details the unsupportably optimistic assumptions, unrealistic expectations, and botched execution that defined the disaster. What unfolds is a tragedy both for the soldiers involved and for the Dutch civilians, who were punished for their support for the Allied advance with a “famine winter” that is an often-unaddressed legacy of the campaign.

 

With its sharp analysis, evenhanded coverage of both sides, and incorporation of the civilian experience Beevor’s book embodies all of the qualities of his work as a military historian. Yet the nature of the battle complicates his efforts to provide a clear narrative, as too often events were characterized by small-unit actions independent from one another. Beevor captures them admirably, but it does force him to bounce the reader from one end of the campaign to the other. This makes for a disjointed account, though one that helps to underscore the futile nature of the campaign and one of the many reasons for its failure.