A Bridge Too Far: Operation Market Garden

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Summary: This Title May Confuse You
Review: The book is absolutely great if you like World War 2 history and battles. I bought this book, but to my dismay it is an EXACT duplicate of Osprey Military Campaign Series #24 titled Arnhem 1944. How can this be? I thought I was buying a new source of information and data, from an author I had read and trusted. Now I have two similar books with different titles. I kept it and gave it to a friend as a gift. If you really want an in depth book on the Operation Market Garden battle, read Cornelius Ryan's masterpiece and the REAL "A Bridge Too Far". Sorry Badsey, your switch of titles is just mis-leading, albeit the great source book you've written. Stick to only printing books with one title.

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Summary: Wonderful Illustrated Overview Of Operation Market Garden!
Review: This new short book by British scholar and historian Stephen Badsey masterfully and colorfully presents the boldest, largest and most disastrous Allied airborne attack of the European campaign during WWII. This operation, a massive airborne and armored attack in the autumn of 1944 in a single drive up the coast toward Arnhem in an effort to seize control of a number of bridges key to establishing a beachhead into Germany itself. Had it been successful, the attack could have considerably shortened the war, possibly ending it by Christmas 1944. However, the operation, which was the brainchild of British Army Field Marshall Montgomery, was fatally flawed, and led to a bloodbath which trapped tens of thousands of British, American, and other allied troops behind enemy lines for up to nine days without reinforcements or supplies. Thus, although the Allies did succeed in capturing several of the bridges along the route, their failure to wrest the bridge at Arnhem led to a hellacious firefight that eventually led to an Allied withdrawal.

Badsey, a lecturer at Britain's famed Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, uses a variety of different media in presenting this excellent and informative overview of the fatally flawed campaign, using color drawings, photographs, and a number of maps as reference material to better illustrate the details of Operation Market Garden. Badsey has produced a brief (less than 100 pages) work that manages to capture the conflict in very colorful and imaginative ways. In what is best described as a picture book format, Badsey lets the disastrous story of the wrong-headed Allied decision to risk an immense day-light paratrooper drop with "thunderclap surprise" (catching the Germans with their proverbial pants down) for the first time in the European campaign unfold as an ill-conceived effort to capture a series of bridges critical to a fast and successful prosecution of the Allied thrust into the heart of Germany.

Thus, although this does not provide the riveting story telling of Cornelius Ryan's masterful story-telling, it does convey the tale of the Allied miscalculation of potential German resistance and the speed with which they could proceed up the one road needed to support the airdropped forces is a riveting tale. In doing so, it provides a cautionary lesson for history in terms of the human lives and collateral destruction of the local population and a number of then still untouched and undamaged areas of the area under siege. Like previous books on the subject, this tome draws heavily from the faithful recollections of the actual participants in the action. Thus, the reader is wept into the action as we get a voyeur's view of the moment-to-moment development of the story as it unfolds in all its horrific detail.

Badsey is one of the best of a new generation of British historians developing a fresh and re-energized perspective on a number of the elements of the European campaign. The net effect of this book is not to offer a great deal of new insight regarding Operation Market garden, but rather to present what is known in a quite interesting, entertaining, and therefore more educational way for both the casual reader as well as for more serious students of military history. Moreover, while Professor Badsey is not a master story teller like Ryan, John Toland, William Shirer, or a number of notable others, the present work illuminates the human side of war by helping to shine the light of investigative truth on a still controversial and provocative Allied action that could have expedited the end of the war, but instead resulted in large scale death and destruction. Enjoy!