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difficulties and the advent of autumn, Eisenhower gave in to Montgomery’s arguments. If he were given supply priority, Montgomery said, he could mount a massive operation that would carry the British 2nd Army across the Rhine. Thus was born Operation Market-Garden, the most famous airborne assault of the war. In Market, three airborne divisions—two American and one British—would drop behind enemy lines and secure a series of river crossings all the way to the Rhine, sixty miles from the Allied front lines. Farthest out on the limb would be the British 1st Airborne Division, landing at Arnhem and taking and holding the great Rhine bridge there. In the Garden half of the operation, 2nd Army, led by the Guards Armored Division, would dash up the corridor created by the airborne troops, and the Allies would have a long narrow path that would compromise the entire German position in the Low Countries and carry them into Germany.

The daring attack opened on September 17 with the airborne divisions droning over from England and landing all over their targets. The U. S. 101st Airborne got several bridges; farther up the corridor the U. S. 82nd Airborne had a hard fight for the major crossing of the Maas at Nijmegen, and did not secure it until the 20th. The British, meanwhile, landed seven miles from Arnhem and had to fight their way into the town. By chance several good German outfits were in the area, and the enemy reaction was fierce. Nonetheless, the paratroops pushed into Arnhem, got a hold on the northern end of the bridge, and then could get no farther.

Meanwhile, the ground troops, from sixty miles away, set off on their dash to the rescue. Tanks, self-propelled guns, reconnaissance cars, all roared up the roads to Eindhoven and the 101st, Nijmegen and the 82nd, and on toward Arnhem. The farther they got, the more trouble they met. The corridor was so narrow the Germans could reach it with artillery from both sides; the roads often led straight as a die across the lowlands, and the tanks, moving single file, could be held up by one well-sited gun. The weather turned poor, air support and supply broke down, and though the British got close enough to Arnhem to allow some of their exhausted paratroops to break out of the German ring, they could not quite make it all the way.

The whole operation was a daring innovation for Montgomery, who generally preferred to have all his battles planned to a nicety, and was hardly known for the unconventional nature of his strategies. He himself later insisted that had he had all the material he wanted, he could have made it work. As it was, though, Market-Garden virtually exhausted Allied resources for the moment, and forced them to squander pilots, planes, and soldiers who were either insufficiently trained, or already nearly worn out by fighting since D Day. Montgomery thought of Market-Garden as the operation that might have led to the winning of the war in 1944. What it really showed was that the Allies were not strong enough to end it in 1944.

The campaign in France, even though it ended on the sour note of Arnhem, was one of the great campaigns of military history, certainly one of the great ones of the Second World War. The Germans had lost enormous numbers of men and even greater amounts of material. Under Eisenhower’s direction the campaign had gone generally smoothly and harmoniously. France and Belgium were liberated, ports were opened, supply problems mastered. All over Europe, the Germans were in disarray; in Italy they barely hung on to the last slopes of the Apennines; in the east the Russians were banging at the frontiers of the Reich. By day and by night the bombers still dropped their deadly loads on the Fatherland. It could only be a matter of time now. Within months, at most, the Master Race would be mastered.

25. Winning in the Pacific

THE TIDE OF WAR that had turned against Japan in 1942 mounted inexorably during the next eighteen months. The long costly battles in the Solomons and along the coast of New Guinea had steadily sapped the imperial vitality.