Hello and welcome to Battleground 44. Today our subject is the Battle of Arnhem, that incredibly bloody and dramatic nine-day action for 80 years ago

between September the 17th and September the 26th on the banks of the Lower Rhine in Holland.

The operation was an initiative by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who, somewhat in contradiction

to his well-earned reputation for caution,

careful preparation, and insistence on overwhelmingly favourable odds, urged on his superior,

Dwight D. Eisenhower, a plan to see three bridges across important waterways of the Allied

Army's march on Berlin. It was called Operation Market Garden.

The crucial element in the plan, the market bit,

was the airborne forces, British, American and Polish,

who were to be dropped and landed in advance

behind the German lines to create literal bridgeheads

and await the relieving forces of 30

Armoured Corps charging up from the Belgian border. If all went well, the war might be cut short

by several months with a prospect of Christmas in Berlin. But all did not go well, as we'll be

hearing shortly from Saul David. Market Garden was in his

judgment, delivered in his book, Sky Warriors, British Airborne Forces in the Second World War,

one of the big hits of the summer, I might say, a heroic failure. But nonetheless, a much-celebrated

one, such as in the Cornelio, so Ryan Book, A Bridge Too Far, and the film

with the same name was an all-star cast directed by Richard Attenborough. Well, so let's talk about

that title first, A Bridge Too Far. It's great, isn't it? But this is what General Boy Brown

at the commander of First British Airborne Corps was said to have murmured when told

by Monty that his men were to take the bridge across the lower Rhine at Arnhem. Or did your

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