In The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II (Viking, $35, also available as an eBook), award-winning writer and pre-eminent historian of World War II Antony Beevor tells, as no one else can, the story behind the story of one of the most disastrous episodes of World War II.
Beevor’s insights into the strategies of the generals on both sides, the civilian and military heroes, the horrifying casualties, and the seemingly endless suffering of the soldiers, is revealed in all of its absorbing detail.
On Sept. 17, 1944, Gen. Kurt Student, the founder of Nazi Germany’s parachute forces, heard the growing roar of airplane engines. He went out on to his balcony above the flat landscape of southern Holland to watch the vast air armada of C-47s and gliders, carrying the legendary American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the British 1st Airborne. He gazed up in envy at the greatest demonstration of air power ever seen.
Operation Market Garden was the Allies bold plan to end the war by capturing the bridges leading to the Lower Rhine. It was a massive demonstration of paratroop power that ultimately failed. In fact, Beevor believes the whole plan was profoundly flawed and should have never been launched. The cost of this failure was horrendous, especially for the Dutch who risked everything to help.
Highlights include:
• There is a great deal here that is new, both in the human detail of the fighting and the suffering of civilians. Most important, papers in American archives reveal the utterly flawed planning that led to the disaster at Arnhem, which became “The Last German Victory,” as General Student called it.
• The U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions both played vital roles in the Battle of Arnhem. The 82nd secured the flank southeast of Nijmengen on the German border, which faced the Reichswald forest from which most German counter-attacks came. The 101st Airborne had to secure “Hell’s Highway” north from Eindhoven against one German counter-attack after another.
• New material also reveals the true savagery of the fighting for the first time. The Waffen SS in Nijmegen defended the great bridge by setting ablaze the northern part of the town, and the battalion of the 82nd Airborne, led by Major Julian Cook, after performing one of the greatest feats of bravery of the whole war by crossing the River Waal under fire, was so hyped up by the time they reached the far shore that they massacred all the German soldiers who tried to surrender. And the fighting at Arnhem Bridge and Oosterbeek reached an intensity unseen on the western front as so many diaries and previously unseen accounts demonstrate.
• Total casualties on the Allied side reached 17,000. The majority were from the British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem. Dutch casualties during the fighting and its immediate aftermath exceeded 5,000 dead, but the consequences of the failure led to the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 in which some 20,000 Dutch civilians died of starvation as a result of German reprisals.
Here is history at its exciting best, told by the ideal narrator. Using all currently available research and discovering many overlooked and new sources from Dutch, British, American, Polish and German archives, Beevor has reconstructed the terrible reality of this Allied defeat. Yet, The Battle of Arnhem, written in Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war.
With the critical and box office successes of Academy Award-nominated movies like Dunkirk and Darkest Hour, interest in the people and events of WWII remains strong. The Battle of Arnhem brings to life this deadly and critical chapter of World War II.
Antony Beevor is the bestselling author of D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, which received the Royal United Services Institute’s Duke of Westminster Medal; The Battle for Spain, which won the La Vanguardia prize for non-fiction; Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949; Stalingrad, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History, and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature; The Fall of Berlin 1945, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award; and Ardennes 1944, which was shortlisted for the Prix Médecis.
His books have appeared in 32 languages and have sold just over seven million copies. He is the recipient of the 2014 Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. He was knighted in 2017.
Antony Beevor is scheduled to be discussing his latest book, The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II, at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave. in Coral Gables, on Dec. 4 at 7 p.m.
