I’ve been a lifelong fan of the movie A Bridge Too Far, which tells the story of Operation Market Garden, an Allied attack on Germany through the Netherlands during the Second World War. I first saw it when I was rather a young lad, and it stood apart from the many triumphant WWII movies as an honest look at one battle our side didn’t win. And the film’s musical score mesmerized me. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched it.

Years later I found that Cornelius Ryan’s eponymous book the movie was based on is an awfully good read, too.

Both the book and the movie present the reason for the Allies’ loss as mostly a combination of bad luck and poor intelligence. But in his recent book The Devil’s Bridge: The German Victory at Arnhem, 1944, British historian and former intelligence officer Anthony Tucker-Jones shows that, in fact, the Germans mounted a brilliant–and brilliantly-constructed–defense that was the overriding element of their victory.

For the uninitiated, it was mid-September 1944. The German army had essentially been on the run ever since the Allied breakout from the invasion beaches in Normandy early that summer. US General George Patton’s 3^rd Army, in particular, had chased the Nazis across the entirety of France and was now threatening their homeland.

British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery concocted a plan he felt would end the war quickly: a combined infantry, armor and airborne assault to capture a series of bridges northeast from his lines through occupied Holland, with the goal of opening a path to Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr. He felt it would cause the collapse of Nazi munitions production and bring hostilities to an end. While the plan meant opening a very long and narrow salient through German lines, and stretching supply lines to the extreme, Montgomery counted on the Germans being the spent and nearly-defeated force he believed them to be.

They weren’t. As Tucker-Jones puts it in a mid-book summary, “Model, Student and Bittrich [the German Generals in charge of local forces], or more precisely their men, had performed miracles during the hard-fought battle for Arnhnem. Deserters, stragglers, teenagers, trainees, old men and Luftwaffe staff somehow stopped three airborne, three infantry and one armoured division. Forming ad hoc battle groups, they literally fought Operation Market Garden to a standstill. This was a quite remarkable achievement and represented a major blot on Field Marshal Montgomery’s reputation that he could never quite escape.”

That’s precisely the view Tucker-Jones presents throughout the book: how the Germans were able to summon the wherewithal to finally turn back an Allied assault. With superb storytelling and impeccably researched facts, Tucker-Jones shows how Germany’s victory here went far beyond Montgomery’s fatal underestimation of the Nazis’ will to fight. He shows how Allied errors piled up: their failure to capture the Scheldt approaches that left the prime port of Antwerp worthless; the failure of the Americans to land forces at the north end of the Nijmegen bridge; the similar failure by the British to land forces at the south end of the Arnhem bridge; and repeated ignoring of intelligence showing what German forces were in the area and how well they could respond to the attacks. Most notable of all in that failure was the high-handed dismissal of clear intelligence of Bittrich’s Panzer divisions being deployed right in the area of the attacks.

And throughout he demonstrates how those tattered groups he mentioned above were able to quickly refit, assemble themselves into fighting units, and put up effective resistance to the Allied push.

The failure of Operation Market Garden wasn’t bad luck, and it certainly wasn’t poor intelligence. Tucker-Jones does a masterful job of telling us exactly how.

I’ll still enjoy A Bridge Too Far – both the movie and the book. Perhaps I’ll enjoy them even more now, with my more complete understanding of what exactly went so terribly wrong for our side. My thanks to Anthony Tucker-Jones for his masterful effort to further educate me.