Today marks the 77th Anniversary of Operation Market Garden,mostly associated with the book of Cornelius Ryan ‘A Bridge too Far’ which was made into a star studded block buster movie in 1977 with the same title. It is a lengthy blog but it is an important story to be re-told because the effects of this operation were felt long after the war.
Operation Market Garden was in fact two combined operations.
- Market – the airborne forces, the First Allied Airborne Army, who would seize bridges
- Garden – the ground forces, consisting of the British XXX Corps.
On 17 September 1944 thousands of paratroopers descended from the sky by parachute or glider up to 150 km behind enemy lines. Their goal: to secure the bridges across the rivers in Holland so that the Allied army could advance rapidly northwards and turn right into the lowlands of Germany, hereby skirting around the…
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