The strategic context
By September 1944, Allied forces had broken out of Normandy and liberated Paris. The German army appeared to be in disarray. In this atmosphere of strategic confidence, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery proposed an audacious shortcut: a massive airborne assault to seize the bridge network of the Netherlands, allowing armoured columns to cross the Rhine and outflank Germany’s western defensive line before winter.
Operation Market Garden was the largest airborne operation ever attempted. Three divisions — American, British, and Polish — were to be dropped from transport aircraft to secure a corridor of bridges while armoured vehicles of British XXX Corps raced north along a single highway to relieve them.
What went wrong
At every point along the planned corridor, something failed. Intelligence assessments indicating the presence of German armoured units near Arnhem were not given sufficient weight in the operational planning. Radio equipment assigned to the British airborne division at Arnhem proved incompatible with local conditions and failed at critical moments. The armoured relief column encountered stronger resistance than anticipated and moved more slowly than the operational schedule required.
The bridge was held as long as any soldiers could have held it. But the relief column did not arrive in time.
Arnhem
At Arnhem — the furthest and most critical objective, the bridge over the Rhine — a single British airborne battalion reached and held the northern end of the road bridge. For four days they held it against mounting armoured counterattack, in the expectation that XXX Corps would arrive within hours. XXX Corps did not arrive. On the fourth day, overwhelmed and out of ammunition, the survivors were taken prisoner.
The broader airborne force, spread across the surrounding countryside, fought a withdrawal action for several more days before crossing the Rhine southward. Of the approximately 10,000 men who had landed at Arnhem, roughly 2,400 were evacuated. The remainder were killed or captured.
Consequences for civilians
The failure of Market Garden had direct and severe consequences for the civilian population of the western Netherlands. As the Allied advance halted south of the Rhine, the urban west — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague — remained under German administration through the winter of 1944 to 1945. The occupying authorities imposed transport restrictions that severed food supply lines to the cities. The result was the Hunger Winter, in which an estimated 22,000 civilians died of starvation and cold.