Operation Market Garden

Operation Market Garden was an Allied attempt, between 17 and 25 September 1944, to punch a narrow corridor about 100 kilometres through the German-occupied Netherlands and seize a crossing of the Lower Rhine at Arnhem. Airborne troops were to capture a chain of bridges and hold them while British tanks drove north along a single road. The Allies took Eindhoven and Nijmegen, but the final bridge at Arnhem stayed out of reach and the British 1st Airborne Division was almost destroyed.

After the Normandy landings and the German collapse in France in August 1944, Allied armies raced towards Germany but began to run short of fuel. The Supreme Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, favoured advancing on a broad front. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery pressed instead for one concentrated thrust in the north. Eisenhower agreed to his plan, giving it limited priority for supplies. The aim was to outflank the German frontier defences known as the Siegfried Line, open a route to the industrial Ruhr and overrun rocket sites that were firing V-2s at London.

The operation had two parts. In "Market", the newly formed First Allied Airborne Army would land the US 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions around Eindhoven and Nijmegen, and the British 1st Airborne Division, with the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, near Arnhem. In "Garden", XXX Corps under Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks would advance along one narrow, raised highway across six major waterways, aiming to reach Arnhem within 48 hours. All the main bridges had to be taken. There were too few aircraft to land everyone at once, and the British drop zones lay several miles from their bridge. Some 35,000 airborne troops were eventually landed, against perhaps 100,000 German soldiers in the region, including two SS Panzer divisions refitting nearby.

The landings on Sunday 17 September went largely to plan, and the Americans captured most of their bridges, though the Germans blew up the canal bridge at Son. At Arnhem, only part of one British brigade could advance on the town. Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost's battalion reached the northern end of the road bridge that evening, but German troops blocked the rest of the division.

To the south, the big road bridge over the Waal at Nijmegen remained in German hands until 20 September, when American paratroopers rowed across the river in canvas boats under heavy fire while British tanks stormed the bridge. By then Frost's force, around 740 men who had held out for twice as long as planned, was running out of ammunition. The survivors were overwhelmed early on 21 September. The rest of the division was hemmed into a shrinking pocket at Oosterbeek, and Polish paratroopers dropped on the south bank could not get across in strength.

On 24 September the Allies abandoned the Rhine crossing. On the night of 25 September British and Canadian engineers ferried about 2,400 survivors back over the river. Of roughly 10,600 men who had fought north of the Rhine, some 1,485 were killed and about 6,400 captured. Total Allied losses are put at 15,000 to 17,000 killed, wounded and captured. German losses are uncertain, with estimates ranging from about 6,000 to 13,000.

The Allies held the salient they had won, and German counter-attacks in early October failed. But the Rhine was not crossed in force until 1945, and Arnhem was taken only in April of that year. Critics have pointed to the unrealistic timetable, distant drop zones, weak intelligence and the decision to put the operation ahead of opening the port of Antwerp. The historian Antony Beevor called it a bad plan from the start. Dutch railway workers had struck in support of the offensive, and in reprisal the occupiers cut off food transport; in the "Hunger Winter" that followed more than 20,000 Dutch civilians starved.

Our 1938 map shows the Netherlands before the German occupation, and the 1945 map shows western Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.