Arnhem, summarized

I’ve read an enormous amount about Operation Market Garden (AKA the Battle of Arnhem) and while the actual operation was enormously complex — it could be thought of as a dozen distinct battles happening simultaneously — the broad outlines, it turns out, are quite simple. As is widely known, the ideas was to capture a series of bridges in the eastern Netherlands and then use those bridges to transport the Allied armies into Germany. The effort failed, at great cost of life. Why? The plan was far too intricate: the capture of any one bridge depended on a series of maneuvers carried out perfectly and with precise timing. The plan was far too optimistic: it depended wholly on the belief that the Germans would offer little or no resistance, and Field Marshal Montgomery, the creator of the plan, ignored evidence that the German forces were larger than he had anticipated and that the attack force therefore had to be amplified. He openly mocked the intelligence officer who brought him the bad…