The world had just seen the passing of the fifth anniversary of war—five long years since Hitler had ordered blitzkrieg on Poland. The German Reich was being squeezed by the Russians from the east and the Brits and Americans from the west. Dutch Resistance reports said the dispirited German soldiers that were trudging north over the Arnhem Road Bridge and up Hoofdstraat—the men Audrey and Ella saw pass by every day—no longer wished to fight. But Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, knew the Germans hadn’t quit. In fact, they had dug in across the southern border of the Netherlands with Belgium, along the east-west Meuse-Escaut Canal.
It was the Netherlands that would become the next battleground, and that was a problem because this was a watery country with many rivers to cross. Eisenhower’s army couldn’t move through it if the Germans were to destroy the bridges across the Maas, Waal, and Rhine rivers. They might also blow up key dikes and flood major sections of roadway, which would trap his forces for months. But British Field Marshal Montgomery had an idea to change the game in the west, an idea that, if successful, could bring the war to a close by Christmas and get the Yanks and Brits to Berlin before the Russians. Why not load crack American and British paratroopers onto transport planes and drop them behind enemy lines at all the key bridges in the Netherlands? Use surprise to capture and hold all these bridges while the Allied Army under the command of Monty himself marched up through the Netherlands to the last and most important bridge of all, the span over the Rhine at Arnhem—right by the Muziekschool and the villa and girls school of Cornelia, Countess van Limburg Stirum.
The British paratroopers dropped on Arnhem would face nothing more than some Green Police and barracks troops that had grown fat and lazy in the restaurants of the city center. They would simply capture and hold the bridge and wait for Monty and the British 2nd Army to come rolling in from the south. Montgomery assured Eisenhower the armored column could make seventy miles in two days, but Lt. Gen. Frederick Browning, who was also in command of the British 1st Airborne, the paratroopers that would take Arnhem, offered the opinion that he thought his men might hold the Arnhem Road Bridge for a few days if necessary, then paused and added, “But I think we might be going a bridge too far.” To Browning it seemed especially ambitious to try to capture four major bridges spanning the Netherlands in forty-eight hours, as if there were no Germans along the way at all.
There were so many risks with the plan, which was designated as Operation Market Garden, that any one of them could have merited second thoughts. By their nature, paratroopers traveled light and wouldn’t have the support of tanks or heavy cannon. But Montgomery said their invasion would be so “rapid and violent” that they wouldn’t need heavy equipment.
Other risks involved getting 35,000 American and British jumpers into planes and over their drop zones. There simply weren’t enough planes in England for that number, so the planes would have to make drops spread out over three days to get all the men in. And at Arnhem, there was no good spot near the bridge for the parachutists and gliders to land. They’d have to come down nine miles from the bridge and make their way on foot.
But it would be all right. Arnhem was such a lovely, quiet city that had been spared during the war to a remarkable degree. The Germans didn’t pay it particular mind and except for the Deelen Air Base, which had been neutralized, Arnhem didn’t have a significant military presence. Montgomery saw his plan as a cakewalk, a nearly bloodless operation, and a dagger through the heart of the Reich.