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with access to only a single Dutch road – a cross-country advance was impossible, because the ground was too soft for armour. Within minutes of crossing the start-line, Guards Armoured Division was in trouble as its leading tanks were knocked out by German anti-tank weapons, and supporting British infantry became bogged down in local firefights. The American airborne formations did all that could have been expected of them in securing key crossings, but the Allied advance was soon behind schedule. The Germans were able to make their own deployments in full knowledge of Allied intentions, because they found the operational plan for Market Garden on the body of a US staff officer who had recklessly carried it into battle; within hours, the document was on the desk of Model, who exploited his insight to the full.

On 20 September, when XXX Corps belatedly reached Nijmegen, paratroopers of Gavin’s 82nd Airborne made a heroic crossing of the Waal in assault boats under devastating fire. They secured a perimeter on the far bank which enabled Guards Armoured’s tanks to cross the bridge, miraculously intact. There was then another twenty-four-hour delay, incomprehensible to the Americans, before the British felt ready to resume their advance on Arnhem. In truth the time loss was unimportant. The battle was already lost: the Germans were committed in strength to defend the southern approaches to Arnhem. Residual resistance by the British paratroopers on the far bank was irrelevant, and Montgomery acknowledged failure. On the night of 25 September, 2,000 men of 1st Airborne Division were ferried to safety across the Rhine downstream from Arnhem, while almost 2,000 others escaped by other means, leaving behind 6,000 who became prisoners. Some 1,485 British paratroopers were killed, around 16 per cent of each unit engaged, and 1st Airborne Division was disbanded; 474 airmen were also killed during the operation. Meanwhile the US 82nd Airborne suffered 1,432 casualties and the 101st 2,118. The Germans lost 1,300 dead and 453 Dutch civilians were killed, many of them by Allied bombing.

Apologists for Market Garden, notably including Montgomery, asserted that it achieved substantial success, by leaving the Allies in possession of a deep salient into Holland. This was nonsense, for it was a cul-de-sac which took the Allies nowhere until February 1945. For eight weeks after the Arnhem battle, the two US airborne divisions were obliged to fight hard to hold the ground they won in September, though it had become strategically worthless. The Arnhem assault was a flawed concept for which the chances of success were negligible. The British commanders charged with executing it, notably Lt. Gen. Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, displayed shameful incompetence, and merited dismissal with ignominy rather than the honours they received, in a classic British propaganda operation intended to dignify disaster.

Montgomery’s cardinal error was that he succumbed to the lust for glory which often deflected Allied commanders from their cause’s best strategic interests. General Jake Devers, one of the ablest though least celebrated American army group commanders of the war, wrote afterwards about the inevitability of differences between nations on ways and means, even if they were united in the goal of defeating the enemy: ‘This is not only true of men at the highest political level … it is a natural trait of professional military men … It is unreasonable to expect that the military representatives of nations who are serving under unified command will subordinate promptly and freely their own views to those of a commander of another nationality, unless the commander … has convinced them that it is to their national interests individually and collectively.’ Because Eisenhower lacked a coherent vision, his subordinates were often left to compete for and pursue their own. Montgomery’s ambition personally to deliver a war-winning thrust, fortified by conceit, caused him to undertake the only big operation for which the Allied armies could generate logistic support