The River Road
Arnhem
September 1944
“The plan, like so many plans in so many wars before it, was meant to end the fighting by Christmas, and bring the boys back home.”
Extracts from the short story "The River Road"
"Some aircraft are forever associated with a particular place. The Hurricane and Spitfire with the airfields of Southern England (Kenley, North Weald and Tangmere). The Lysander with the tree-lined night time meadows of rural France where it landed on so many occasions, the starting point for numerous highly dangerous covert operations in World War Two. The Dakota DC-3 will always be identified with a particular town in Holland, the capital of Gelderland, a name straight out of Hans Christian Andersen. A town which became for a while in the autumn of 1944 the focus of the Allies attempts to end the Second World War, before the advent of another stagnating winter."
"After it was all over, the Field Marshall declared himself pleased with the outcome, judging Market Garden to have been ninety percent successful. I have always been shocked by his assessment but now I’m not so sure he was all that wrong. They did after all get all the bridges, save Arnhem, and they very nearly pulled the whole mad, daring scheme off."
"A Bridge Too Far?"
"Not for the Dakotas."
The Arnhem plane in action.
Dirk Bogarde (who served as an intelligence officer in WW2) as General Frederick "Boy" Browning: "When the Field Marshall's' plan has succeeded we should be able to end the war by Christmas, in less than one hundred days."
Edward Fox as General Brian Horrock's, Commander of XXX Corps: "This is a story you'll tell your grand children. And mightily bored they'll be by it too!"
Still the definitive account of the battle, over forty years after it was first published.