Crossing the Rhine: Breaking into Nazi Germany, 1944 and 1945—the Greatest Airborne Battles in History
by Lloyd Clark, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2008, $25.
The Battle of Arnhem—Operation Market Garden, aka the “Bridge Too Far” fight—is one of the most written-about confrontations of World War II, along with Midway, Normandy, the Battle of Britain and a few other major faceoffs. Part of the reason is that Arnhem was an Allied defeat. It’s hard to come up with many others, beyond the original British Expeditionary Force getting kicked out of France in 1940, the debacle at Kasserine Pass and the Wehrmacht’s successful airborne invasion of Crete. But at Arnhem, British, American and Polish airborne troops tried and failed to seize key Rhine bridges that might have enabled Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to lance straight into Germany and end the war before winter 1944–45.
Montgomery often gets unfairly blamed for Arnhem, likely because he was a thoroughly dislikable gent. “I can outfight that little fart anytime,” George Patton once said, as quoted in Crossing the Rhine, the most recent book to deal with Operation Market Garden. Such quotes are, in fact, one of the most interesting parts of Lloyd Clark’s extensively researched book—not only the words of U.S. generals, but British paratroopers and their officers, men of the Polish parachute brigade and even German soldiers. The narrative flows easily; this isn’t one of those battle books requiring constant reference to maps and charts.
Market Garden was an assault by parachutists, as well as airborne units borne by glider—one of the most dangerous troop-insertion methods ever developed and one that, thanks to the advent of helicopters, we’ll never have to see again. Clark provides ample insight into what it must have been like to sit inside a windowless wooden Waco hoping the green pilots knew what they were doing. Often they didn’t, since they’d had exactly zero practice at putting down in the midst of dozens of other gliders on a totally unfamiliar LZ.
Most of Clark’s book details the preparation, landing and fighting involved in Market Garden, but as the title suggests, he also covers the successful invasion of the Rhineland the following March, when U.S., British and Canadian ground and airborne forces accomplished much of what had eluded Montgomery. Clark highlights the various complex command tactics and makes it plain there were no screwups, just a few bad decisions here and there. The RAF and USAAF, for example, refused to fly two “lifts” on the opening day of the assault, leaving too few troops on the ground and eliminating the element of surprise for the second wave on day two. Nor would they drop near the Rhine bridges, for fear of flak —though the Dutch underground had already pinpointed the German gun emplacements, which the Army Air Force could easily have neutralized with its overwhelming fighter-bomber superiority.
Originally published in the UK, Clark’s U.S. editors did a good job of changing Britishisms—aeroplane, defence, lorry, petrol and the like —to American equivalents, though they missed “whilst” for “while.” This precious usage seems to recur every 50th word in the copy and eventually becomes oddly infuriating. Please, Atlantic Monthly Press, do a find-and-replace if there’s to be a second U.S. edition.
Originally published in the July 2009 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.
