Ep 81 – A Bridge Too Far – Operation Market Garden Discussed at Length

In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we take on Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), the war epic based on Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same name about Operation Market Garden. We take you through one of WWII’s most ambitious (and doomed-to-fail) military plans as we discuss the film. From Sean Connery’s Major General Urquhart to Gene Hackman’s Sosabowski (we approve), we talk about what led to Market Garden's failure, and how Dutch civilians like Kate ter Horst were astoundingly brave in the face of absolute hell.

Market Garden, a little complicated? We try to make it simple for you!

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm Mary Chin.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie though, ifyou will.
I just want to start out with a little PSA.
You can find us wherever you getyour podcasts.

(00:23):
So you can find us on Spotify and on Apple and on Amazon, and
you can rate US five stars. We would very much appreciate
it. And also, if you have a friend
who doesn't know enough about Market Garden, do send them this
episode because this episode is about A Bridge Too Far, which
came out in 1977. It was directed by Richard

(00:45):
Edinburgh and written by WilliamGoldman.
It's based on a book, A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan.
The film follows the British division under Major General boy
occurred during Operation MarketGarden in the Netherlands in
September of 1944. So at the very almost end of the
war, it was a Co production between the United Kingdom and

(01:06):
the United State and was shot almost exclusively on location
in the Netherlands. What did you think of this
movie, Sam? I really liked it.
It's long. I mean, it's like almost 3 hours
I think. But I thought it was really
good. I mean, I had read the book,
which is 600 pages and does not feel like 600 pages.
So I'll say the same thing aboutthe movie.

(01:27):
It's almost 3 hours, but it doesn't feel like it's three
hours. And there's some great acting in
it. We'll obviously get into it, but
like, Robert Redford is in it, so it's fun to see him and
Michael Caine and, you know, a whole bunch of different people.
And I think they did a really good job of articulating why
Market Garden failed without making it into a history lesson

(01:48):
that kind of beats you over the head.
I thought they did a really goodjob of telling it as a narrative
and making it make sense, if that makes sense.
What did you think of it? I like it quite a lot actually.
I did know quite a few bits of thesis about Market Garden and I
had seen this movie a couple weeks ago.
But when I was preparing for thepodcast, I rewatched a movie and

(02:12):
it suddenly all made sense to me, like all the different
pieces of information because it's a lot like there's a lot
happening in Operation Market Garden.
And I'd been to several locations in the Netherlands
that played a big role in MarketGarden.
But I knew sort of what happenedat each location, but I didn't
quite know how it all fit together.

(02:34):
And I do now. So thank you movie.
I did think it was long. I thought it was strangely funny
in places too. Some of it's really amusing and
the acting is quite good. If you want to compare it to
what did we watch last week, TheBattle of Britain, it's a
similar movie, but I thought this voice had a better

(02:54):
narrative and it gave you something to root for a little
bit more than it did in the Battle of Britain movie.
So yeah, I like it. And there's seven or eight
nature actors in this that I allreally liked in this, so it gets
high points for me. I do wonder if part of what
makes the movie so good is that the book is really good.

(03:16):
Cornelius Ryan also wrote The Longest Day, which we might
cover at some point. He just does such a good job of,
of telling this story in a way that maintains tension and, you
know, you're not blanking out when you see a whole page of
like, here's what this group wasdoing and here's what that group
was doing. And here's whatever.
He does a really good job of making it seem like urgent and
immediate and super, super interesting.

(03:38):
Yeah. I.
Think I might pick it up becauseMarket Garden is so extensive.
Could you maybe give a little summary of it for our listeners?
Yeah, I would love to. In June of 1944, obviously,
obviously the Normandy landings occurred.
So now the Allies are on the continent and they've been
making these really fast pushes in land and they're kind of

(04:02):
going in two directions. So you have patent and the
Americans making a drive in the sort of South, and then you have
Montgomery and the British making a drive in the north.
But the problem that you're having is that the Germans still
hold all of these major ports. And so the Allies are making a
lot of progress, yes, but what'shappening is that they're really
stretching out their supply lines.
And so Montgomery has this greatidea for this big push into

(04:25):
Germany. And here's how we're going to
end the war and we're going to resolve all our problems.
So Operation Market Garden was launched on September 17th, 1944
by the Allies and it combined two parts.
So we have Market, which is the largest airborne operation in
history, and Garden, which is the ground offensive that ties
into it. So if you want to kind of
picture this in your mind on a map in the South, you have the

(04:48):
Dutch, Belgian border and that'swhere Montgomery and the British
troops are kind of gathered. That's where they're pushed, has
sort of stalled out. And what they want to do is they
want to make a drive north through the Netherlands to
Arnhem. And what they're going to do at
that point is they're going to wheel east and that's going to
take them into the heart of the German industrial heartland of
the Roar. And so in order to do that, they

(05:11):
have to pass over all of these bodies of water.
So there's all these bridges, etcetera.
The other complications is that Arnhem lies 65 miles behind
enemy lines. So if they want to make this
drive north through the Netherlands successful, what
they have to do is they have to drop 35,000 paratroopers behind
enemy lines. And their job is going to be to
take and hold all of these bridges to allow the British

(05:32):
armored division, supported by infantry, to make that drive
north. Essentially, you've got airborne
troops from Britain, the US, andPoland who are trying to seize
and hold the bridges, and they're going to hold them open
so the British armored forces can advance through them.
So the theory here is they're going to outflank the German
defenses by heading north beforethey go east.
And unfortunately, in practice, this plan is pretty ambitious.

(05:55):
If it sounds like a lot like it relies on speed lock and
precision, it really does. The armored advance encounters
stiffer resistance and more difficult terrain than they
thought, so it stalled out. Lightly armed airborne troops
faced off against two unexpectedPanzer divisions and lost
precious time having to rebuild bridges and protect their own
drop zones for later supply and reinforcement drops.

(06:15):
So this meant but the final bridge at Arnhem couldn't be
held. Many airborne troops were cut
off and captured and the whole attempt lasted 9 days.
Instead of 36 hours that they planned I think.
Yeah, they were hoping to be in Arnhem within two days and that
did not occur. Now they all really wanted it to
succeed, but it's very much a case of everything that can go

(06:39):
wrong will go wrong. With Operation Market Garden,
there's not a single element of the plan that goes as planned.
Someone that Ryan quoted in his book, and I can't remember who
it was, but they were talking about how with a military
operation, generally speaking, you want it to be 75% pretty
much a sure thing, and 25% can be left up to luck.

(07:01):
And with Market Garden it was 75% was going to be up to luck
and 25% was a sure. Thing that sounds like annoying
odds to me. Yeah, let's get into the plot.
Because it's a long run. I went through the difficult

(07:25):
task of writing the entire opening scene for you all.
The reason I did is because it quite nicely explains what has
happened up till then and what the thought process is.
We don't jump straight into the movie.
We open with real footage and a voiceover by a woman.
And she says it's hard to remember now, but Europe was

(07:46):
like this in 1944. The Second World War was in its
fifth year and still going. Hitler's.
Well, German troops control mostof Europe.
D-Day changed all that. D-Day, June 6th, 1944 When the
Allied forces under the command of General Eisenhower landed on
the northern coast of France. By July they were able to begin

(08:07):
their own offensive. By August Paris was liberated.
Everywhere the Germans were treated.
But the Allied victories came problems supplies to had to be
driven from Normandy over 400 miles away and became
dangerously short. The Allied France began to come
to a halt. Another problem facing
Eisenhower was this his two mostfamous generals, Petanu was in

(08:31):
the South and Montgomery, he wasin the North, disliked each
other intensely. The long standing rivalry had
never been more fierce. There simply was not enough
supplies for both armies. Each wanted to be the one to
defeat the Germans, which wantedto be the other to Berlin.
In September of 1944, Montgomerydevised a new and spectacular

(08:52):
plant, given a garden named Market Garden.
Eisenhower and a great pressure from his superiors finally sided
with Montgomery and Market Garden became a reality.
The plan, like so many plans andso many wars before it, was
meant to end the finding by Christmas and bring the boys
back home. Yeah, so Eisenhower, his whole

(09:13):
thing was he was determined to free the port of Antwerp in
order to alleviate the supply issue.
And this was his whole thing. He was like, look, we're still
bringing supplies in off the beaches at Normandy.
That is super inconvenient. What we have to do is open this
port. So he's not interested in he's
he's getting these suggestions from Montgomery being like, oh,

(09:35):
well, let's give me give me all the resources and I'll drive to
Berlin. And Eisenhower's like, it's just
not realistic, honestly. We need to be dealing with the
things that we can actually do, and I'll actually make a
difference. But Monty kind of got lucky
because Eisenhower is super keenly interested in the
opportunity to make use of the Allied airborne forces.
Obviously, they've been dropped in in Normandy, but they haven't

(09:56):
really been given an opportunityon their own to see what they
can do. And another thing is that the
Germans at this point have begunlaunching V2 rockets from
Holland, which are landing on London.
And this necessitates some kind of quick response in order to
prevent this from happening any further.
And so when Monty comes to Eisenhower with this plan, you
know, there's a couple of other factors in here.

(10:17):
It's not necessarily that Eisenhower got pressured into it
by his superiors. There were elements of the plan
that he also liked. I'm sure.
I mean, there are a lot of people who like this plan.
And to be fair, if it had worked, it would have been a
brilliant operation. But I guess a couple, couple too
many things went wrong. So I think the movie does a
great job at giving you contactsright out of the day.

(10:40):
If you compare that again to theBattle of Britain, where I was
like, what's going on? Where are we, where are we?
I don't know. Here you immediately know what's
just happened in Holland and in France, and this is where we're
going and This is why we're doing this.
I thought it was quite nice. I also did really like all the
real imagery from World War 2 asan opening point, and after that

(11:05):
the movie starts in earnest. So the first movie scene is of a
Dutch family. They're played respectively by a
scene from Eric von Albert and Malice von Ogmar.
They are, they are a father, a wife and a son.
That's a weird way to say it. They are mother, a father and a
son, and they are in Arnhem and they are members of the

(11:27):
Resistance. It's pretty subtle in the
beginning, but you quickly find out that they are, they are seen
talking on the phone, having learned that the Germans are
kind of panicking. And in the scene quickly after
we see the retreat. However, we learned very quickly
that the retreat is not the last.
And I want to ask you a questionsome did you have subtitles for

(11:48):
the Dutch in this? Interesting question because
when I first downloaded this movie there were no subtitles
for anything that wasn't in English.
So I downloaded a new version but because I had already seen
the first scene I just didn't watch it again so I don't know.
But actually I must have had subtitles for the Dutch later in
the movie, so I'm going to say yes, yes I did.
Perfect. Because there's quite a lot of
it in Dutch in there. I do want to say if you want to

(12:11):
watch it in a way that's less difficult, you can watch it on
MGM Plus if you have it. I had to sail the high seas for
this one again this week. Yep, it's difficult but these
old timey movies sometimes. But hopefully it'll have
subtitles because when I was watching it, I was watching it
with English subtitles because class captions often tell you

(12:34):
restocking which is helpful and that wasn't subtitled.
So I don't know, I'm not sure ifthere's much help.
I remember this part in the bookreally clearly, Ryan, talking
pretty extensively about how theGermans at this point are kind
of on the run through the Netherlands.
So people are coming out of their houses and they're seeing
like just the German army in shambles.

(12:57):
There's Germans who have stolen baby carriages and they're
carrying their machinery in them.
They've stolen bicycles. Anything that they can get to
help them get out of the Netherlands and back to Germany
faster. That's what they're doing.
And so of course, the Dutch are ecstatic about this because they
think the Allies are going to beon their doorstep any minute and
they're getting radio broadcast from London being like, the

(13:18):
Allies are already over the border, the war is going to be
over soon. And so everyone's very
enthusiastic. But then after a few days, this
retreat starts to slow and the German army starts to kind of
get it shit together. And people start to get this
distinctly ominous sense that perhaps the war is not almost
about to be over at the German Western Front HQ, because we are

(13:39):
getting the German perspective on this as well.
Field Marshall Gerd von Runstead, played by Wolfgame
Price, and his chief of staff, General Gunther Blumenthrit,
played by Hans von Borsetti, review the dire situation facing
the German army. So at this point, Hitler's
interference with the way his generals were trying to run the
war was having direct consequences.

(14:00):
Rather than enabling them to make strategic retreats to
regroup to meet the Allies againin situations that were more
favorable, they were forced to hold out at all costs during the
Battle of Normandy. So different armies are in
shambles. You have the Germans fighting
for dear life in these little isolated pockets to hold these
various ports where they're all surrounded by the Allies, but

(14:22):
they're not allowed to surrender.
Von Ronstadt had actually been removed from his post when
Hitler asked him how to proceed after the invasion of Normandy,
and he replied, and the war, youfool.
But he was reinstated after two successors in the span of about
two months. Couldn't do better.
So he's back and he's picking upa shit situation and he's going
to have to figure out what to do.
With it, I did like this actor, by the way, or this choice of

(14:45):
making him this kind of cynical,almost sarcastic leader.
I thought the Germans were portrayed as much more serious
than the Germans in Battle of Britain.
I'll stop comparing it to Battleof Britain in a moment, by the
way. But it just they're so similar
yet so different. Yeah, for sure.
So we jumped from the German HQ to General Browning's HQ in

(15:09):
England, where we see a bunch ofpress discussing Operation
Market Garden. So we begin with Lieutenant
General Frederick Browning, played by Dick Bogart.
He's a deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, and
so he's the big chief in this bunch of people.

(15:30):
Yes, he's been chosen to commandthe whole thing.
And I have a passage here from the book that's taken from the
final conference at Montgomery'sheadquarters on Operation Market
Garden from September 10th, 1944.
And it says on the narrow corridor that would carry the
armored drive, there were five major bridges to take.
They had to be seized intact by airborne assault.

(15:51):
It was the 5th, the crucial bridge over the Lower Rhine at a
place called Arnhem, 64 miles behind the German lines.
That worried Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, Deputy
Commander, First Allied AirborneArmy.
Pointing to the Arnhem bridge onthe map, he asked, how long will
it take the armor to reach us? Field Marshall Montgomery
replied briskly, 2 days. Still looking at the map,
Browning said. We can hold it for 4.

(16:14):
Then he added, But, Sir, we might be going a bridge too far.
Ha ha, there it is. Yeah.
Do wish not. Browning is pretty critical of
his mission, but he also really wants it to go ahead.
I don't know that he was openly critical of the mission.
I think that he had some reservations about the haste
with which it was arranged. I mean, if you think about the

(16:35):
other airborne landings they hadplanned, they took months and
they have a week to plan this one.
So I think he was a little hesitant about that, but I also
think he did want the opportunity to use the airborne
troops so. We'll see if he's going to feel
the same way after. So next we have Major General
Maxwell Taylor played by Paul Maxwell, which I thought was

(16:56):
funny on 1st Airborne as you might remember from Bannon
Brothers and he used to drop near Antiguon to capture the
bridges there and one of them isin Sun, which is not pictured in
Bannon Brothers, but Easy Company did work to rebuild that
bridge. Yes, anytime I hear General
Taylor. I just pictured Joe Toy from

(17:17):
Bannon Brothers when he's asked where his boots are and he says
in Washington up General Taylor's ass.
We also meet Brigadier General James Govan, played by Ryan
O'Neal. He's division commander of the
US and Airborne division and he's to hold the bridge across
the way from mass in class and the mass market now.
And he's also supposed to take and hold the bridge across the

(17:41):
way for a while in 9 million. It's really difficult to speak
English and Dutch at the same time, by the way.
And then we need kind of, I wantto say our hero character of
this movie, it's Major General Urquhart, played by Sean
Connery. He will lead the British
Airborne herself and hold the bridge of and he has told he has
to hold it for two days. That's pretty just sad.

(18:03):
I mean, good luck. And also here is Major Generals
Stanislaus Swarovski, played by Gene Hackman, who I thought was
really funny in his role. I thought Gene Hackman was great
in this. He was good, isn't he?
I really liked him. He did such a good job of like,
his character doesn't speak thatmuch but his face says volumes.

(18:24):
I think it's quite good that he doesn't speak that much because
he's supposed to have a party's action and I'm not sure how good
it is, sorry. He's trying his best.
Yeah. Anyway, he is brigade commander
of the party's first independentparachute brigade of the police
armed forces, and he has to go with Urquhart.
And he's immediately suspicious.Like he's like, I don't know if

(18:45):
this is a good plan. Nice.
And I guess he's right. Yeah, there's a little scene
where he says to, I think it's Browning.
He's like, look, I'm going to need you to give me a letter
saying that I had to follow yourorders because I don't want to
be held responsible when this all goes tits up.
Basically. And this is based on something
that more or less happened in real life because Market Garden,

(19:07):
similar to D app was like the 10th iteration of a plan, right?
It's like they had all these, they were going to do operation
comment and then that got cancelled.
They were going to do this and that got cancelled.
And now we're on Market Garden, which is like a mutation of the
other ones. And so before Operation Comet,
which was a previous iteration of Market Garden, the real
Sozubovsky said the same thing to Browning.

(19:27):
Basically like ah, I'm going to need a piece of paper showing
that like I'm following orders here and this was not my idea.
And then Browning kind of replies, Do you really want me
to write this letter? And he's like, no, Sir.
But really, he doesn't want him to write the letter, but he
doesn't want to admit it. Anyway, there's a mention of
another brass in here, which I wrote down because it's useful

(19:49):
to know. He is Lieutenant General Brian
Horrocks, played by Edward Fox, who was also in the Battle of
Britain. So go check that out, that
episode. And he wrote, recommend 30
Corps, which are the grand forces of the British Second
Army with about 20,000 vehicles.Yes, and I do find that each of

(20:10):
these characters is distinct enough that anytime you see
them, you kind of know which part of the invasion plan that
you're in. You know, you see Gavin and
you're like, OK, we're with the and I felt that was pretty easy
to follow. It is if you pay attention to
the first scene, to this first scene, basically.
If you don't, then it's kind of well, here's this guy again.

(20:31):
Yeah, but I mean, in the old days when they made movies, they
didn't think people would be on their phones half the time.
Fairpoint. So we get a handful of small
scenes wherein we start seeing the cracks a little bit.
We're learning some ominous signs.
So we learned that there will bejumps over a span of three days.
They essentially don't have enough aircraft and gliders to
get everyone over there at once.So they're like, right, we're

(20:53):
going to get a bunch of guys over there on the first day.
The second day, we're going to bring more guys and supplies.
The third day, the Polish are going to come, there's going to
be some more supplies. And of course, this is going to
mean that on the ground, the Airborne are going to have to
defend their drop zones because they're Germans are going to
pretty quickly figure out that they're getting more supplies

(21:14):
dropped that way, and they're going to be jumping in daylight
for the first time. When they jumped at Normandy, it
was at night. Sure.
Eyes. Sure.
Yeah, go for it. The scene in which we find this
out is between Captain Alley or Harry by Peter Farmer, who is
Dutch. In the movie he plays the Dutch

(21:34):
liaison officer with the 82nd. He's having this conversation
with Kevin. Gavin is kind of upset with him.
He's like, why don't? Why didn't you tell me that the
Brits are for Nightmares are so hard to take.
They do a good job for portraying real men in this
film. Yeah, for sure.
And it's another kind of exampleof the British have lots of

(21:55):
opportunities to listen to actual Dutch people who know the
terrain and know what the Germans are up to and are
actually on the ground and they're not really doing it.
And I'm part of that is that there had been a couple of major
issues earlier in the war where the Dutch resistance had been
infiltrated by the Germans and this resulted in a lot of Allied

(22:16):
agents getting killed. And so there was this sense
among the higher ups anyway, that potentially information
coming from the Dutch resistanceor coming from Dutch people was
not reliable. But yeah, this is not the the
first time that the British willget information from the Dutch
and not take it seriously. We also learned that the British
airborne troops are going to have to land 8 miles from their

(22:36):
objective at Arnhem. And this is due to a couple
reasons. The terrain is not super
favorable for a landing. They don't want to be landing
right in town like on buildings and stuff like that.
They need to be able to have an open area.
But all the areas that are really close to Arnhem have
really massive anti aircraft batteries built up.
And so they're worried about that.

(22:56):
So as you can imagine, landing 8miles from your objective
presents all kinds of obstacles.You have to get your guys to the
objective once they're on the ground.
And obviously you lose a little bit of the element of surprise.
We also learned that the radio those potentially might not have
signal strength over that great of a distance.
And we learned that there are reports from the Dutch
resistance that indicate that field Marshall model played by

(23:19):
Walter Kohut is staying at HotelHartenstein and Usterbeek, which
means that the Germans still mean business in the area.
They wouldn't have a field Marshall there if there weren't
major German movements happening.
And Recon photos obtained by Major Fuller played by Frank
Grimes support this claim because two Panzer divisions
appear to be nearby. So this is tanks, right?

(23:39):
They're being that the Germans have pretty extensive tank
divisions nearby, and this has not been factored into the plan.
The Allies are firm in their belief that they're going to be
fighting old men and kids when they go into the Netherlands.
They do not think that they're going to have to deal with, you
know, actual resistance. But at this point, the ball is
rolling and no one's willing to listen.

(23:59):
They're going, look, we've canceled this many airborne
jumps. We don't want to cancel anymore.
We're going to proceed and see what happens.
Really like the nature Fuller. He is not a real person, but he
was very likely based on Major Bryant Urquhart, not related to
Roy Urquhart in this movie. And they probably did it to
avoid confusion. And shortly before the startup

(24:21):
of Operation Market running goatBreakers at Bletchley Park
intercepted and decrypted a number of German messages that
supported the resistance reports.
So they didn't only not want to listen to the Dutch, they also
didn't want to listen to their own goat brokers.
And Hotel Hartenstein is now thehome of the Airborne Museum in

(24:42):
Osterbach. And also near there is Saint
Elizabeth Crust House, which is the hospital and the Airborne
War Cemetery and also which we'll see later in the movie,
Gator Horst's house. And it's all fairly close
together. So if you're ever in Osterbach,
you can do all this probably within three hours.

(25:03):
You can see all of it. I need to do that.
Yeah, you need to come over and do that for sure.
So we meet with General Horrocks's 30 Corps at the
Belgian Dutch border, and they're preparing for their
speedy Dr. N It's very importantthat they are speeding because
they have to get the rest of thesupplies up to the people at the

(25:24):
bridges and all that. And leading the way is
Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandalur.He is a part of the Irish Guards
Armored Division and he's playedby Michael Kohn.
Yeah, I mean, not just supplies,but to reinforce, force them,
right. Like you're dropping these
paratroopers behind enemy lines and they have very little like
anti tank equipment, for example.

(25:45):
And they're very lightly armed. So while they might be able to
take advantage of the element ofsurprise and seize these
bridges, if they are surrounded by Germans, they're not going to
be able to hold them for very long.
So they need the Armored Corps to get up there lickety split.
And I feel like General Herax isvery convinced that they'll just
do it. He's very enthusiastic in his
speech where he's telling all the men that they'll just fix

(26:07):
it. It goes dark red.
We get this whole big taking offand flying scene and it's
really, I mean, this is, this isbigger than Normandy, right?
Like in terms of of an airborne liftoff.
And so you've got gliders, you've got planes, you've got
troop carriers, you get all kinds of stuff.
South of Arnhem, General Bittred, he's corps commander of
the second s s Panzer Corps, played by Maximilian Chanel.

(26:29):
He watches the Allies fly in andhis units are going to be
important because essentially what had happened was there were
these two s s Panzer Corps divisions, and these guys are
tough, right? They're the elite of the German
army and they got a little battered after the Normandy
landing. So they were actually sent to
Arnhem to recoup and recover andget re outfitted and all this

(26:51):
stuff. So they're they're thinking that
this is a quiet spot. We're going to be chill.
And then they look up in the skyand they see this massive allied
Armada flying overhead. And what's very cool about this
very long scene is that it's almost all real.
I like this out there. There are over 1000 landings of
people. So all the parachutes you see in

(27:12):
the air, there are many. They're all real drops, which I
thought was so neat. Yeah, it's a really cool visual.
And it looks like that in in real life too.
They do a commemoration of the drop near Vancombe.
That doesn't mean anything to you, but they do it in like a
big open field where they actually jumped and it looks the

(27:33):
exact same way, so it's so neat.That is really cool.
So the next scene we kind of move near Ireland for the final
objective in the north and things begin begin to go wrong
almost immediately because subsequently they drop 8 miles
from Ireland. Urquhart learns that our mode of
transportation to get to the bridge, which are outfitted

(27:56):
jeeps from the special drinks cadron have been badly damaged
enough to get to arm on foot, which is quite far.
And as expected, the radios don't work and Urquhart can't
reach anybody to tell them that they've had this misfortune and
he can't even reach his own battalion CEO.
So he's in the middle flower in the field and he doesn't have
any armored vehicles that he waspromised and no juice to get a

(28:20):
lift on, so he's pretty screwed.Yeah, this real sense that I got
from Erka, from the book and from the movie was just this
sense of frustrated powerlessness.
So much of this is outside of his control, but he's doing his
absolute best anyways. Yeah, Sean Carter is such a
particular actor, but I thought he was really good in this.

(28:42):
Yeah, I thought he was good in this too.
In the same end of things. Lieutenant Colonel John Frost,
played by Anthony Hopkins. He's the CEO of Second Battalion
of the Parachute Regiment, FirstParachute Brigade, First British
Airborne Division. So he's part of Urkut's crew,
Right. Urkut's division has three
battalions. John Frost is commanding one of
them. He makes it to Arnhem.
Each battalion is going up a different Rd. into Arnhem, so

(29:05):
his happens to be the most lightly defended.
He makes it to town with most ofhis men, a few stragglers from
the other two British Airborne battalions, and he's able to
take the north side of the bridge, but crucially, not the
South side. The South side stays in German
hands. And what I noticed, which you
don't really see in the movie, is that the two other battalions
in Urquhart's division, they're fighting their way from the drop

(29:26):
zone toward Arnhem as well. But they're on 2 separate pre
planned approaches. And unfortunately, these happen
to be much more heavily defendedthan anticipated.
So they suffered heavy losses and they were prevented from
coming to Frost's aid. And the CEO of one of these
battalions is actually depicted in Band of Brothers, Lieutenant
Colonel David Dobie, and he was the architect of Operation
Pegasus, all the first OperationPegasus, which we do see in Band

(29:49):
of Brothers, where they evacuated a large group of men
trapped in German occupied territory after the battle.
Interesting, I've completely forgotten about that.
It's kind of this really small scene in band I feel, where they
rescue the Brits. But it's fun.
I like that. That funny.
Makes sense to me now. Great.
Yeah, context. I feel like I'm banned.

(30:10):
You don't really get a sense of Operation Market Garden, even
though they're part of it. You just feel like they're
deliberate and open and that's it.
It's true. You're really not getting the
bigger picture, which is fair. I guess we're focused on what
one company alone is doing. Yeah, I do feel like they could
have shown some Brits are because that's such a cool thing
and also such an unfair. On the other end, near the

(30:32):
Belgian border, the beginning ofthe tank on Infantry Drive from
the South is going on. So I found that those tanks
proceed across a long road underthe cover of smoke, but the
Germans are waiting and fire up on the first ones, essentially
just blocking the road and causing delay.
And the road this is, it's not the road they show, I don't

(30:52):
think, but it's the freedom thathelps highway because it's just
one long road and it's a bad idea if you have a lot of tanks.
And it's like a narrow Rd. too. So it's not very useful.
Yeah, one of the problems they run into a lot of the way along
is that the terrain around the dyke roads is not good for
tanks. So they have to travel on the

(31:12):
dyke road. And of course then you're on
sort of an elevated position where you're very open to being
fired at by the enemy, and you can only go one at a time.
So if the front tank gets hit, you have to waste valuable time
moving that tank out of the way so the next one can go.
Yeah. So the Germans, you immediately
take advantage of this. And I feel like Vandalur is very

(31:34):
optimistic. He's very keep calm and carry
on. But immediately they're behind
schedule, so it's not very good.And meanwhile, the 101st arrive
at the Swan Brits near and open,only to see it blown out by the
Germans, which means that 30 core, which is from the lure on
this armored vehicles won't be able to cross it to get to the

(31:55):
other bridges. So you see the problem here, And
with this 101st is Colonel Robert Stack, played by Elliott
Gould, whose character was basedon Robert Stink we do hear about
in The Brothers. Yes, he's just the absolute
beautiful stereotype of an American.
He's a loudmouth. He's just, he's brash, he's no

(32:16):
nonsense. I thought he was kind of fun.
He's got a big cigar. He is traveling on a big cigar.
Yes, On the German side, everyone except Field Marshall
Modal wants to blow up the bridges at Arnhem and knee
Megan, especially Major General Ludwig, played by Hardy Krueger.
And the reason for this is obvious, right?
They're like, if we blow the bridges, we prevent the Allied
advance. And Modal is convinced they will

(32:37):
need the bridges to counterattack.
And everyone around him is looking at the actual state of
the German army. And they're like, bro,
counterattack with what? Like, at this point, it's better
just to cut our losses. But he's not going to listen.
Someone, meanwhile, on the German side has recovered an
entire plan for Market Garden from a downed British glider.
But Modal is convinced that it'sa fake.

(32:58):
He's like, they probably wanted us to find this.
There's no way they're really aiming for these bridges.
That can't be the plan. I'm going to stick with what I'm
doing. Spread of alert.
It is the plan. It is the plan.
In the Ryan book, he said that he wasn't able to find the
actual plan or like any actual evidence that the plan was found
by the Germans. He thought maybe like a part of

(33:19):
the plan may have been found, but he wasn't actually able to
find like real concrete evidencethat this happened.
Interesting. Somewhere else in Ireland,
Urquhart is trying to get to thebridge on foot because of course
he has no radio contact with Frost and his other battalion
commanders. But he's hemmed in by the
Germans everywhere, like they'reall around him.
So he hides in a family ethic and the ethic.

(33:42):
And the house was owned by the Darksund family back then.
And today there's a wooden Urquhart sign on the side of the
house that you can see from the street.
And you can see the window that you see Urquhart looking through
in the movie. And Urquhart and two other
officers hid there for about 12 hours.
So that's a long time. I read in the book too that

(34:04):
apparently once the Darksund family had hid Urquhart and his
compatriots in the attic, they went next door to the neighbor's
house so they could pretend thatthey didn't live there.
So if the Germans came into the house, they would just find like
an empty house and they'd be like, oh, I guess the British
just came in here of their own accord.
No Dutch people helps them. Oh, interesting, I didn't know
that. I've been to the high star.

(34:25):
I've been to all of the places on this movie.
Amazing. Still in England because at this
point everything's gone to shit.They've had really bad weather,
so they're having a hard time. The Poles are supposed to be
dropped into the Netherlands, but it keeps being delayed
because of fog. So Sabowski is getting more and
more frustrated that the drop has been cancelled again.

(34:46):
He knows that supplies and reinforcements must be
desperately needed on the groundat Arnhem by now, and he is
correct about that. Yep, again we get to enjoy Gene
Hackman. He's absolutely brilliant in
this movie. I think he might be one of my
two favorite characters in the movie.
Yeah, he's great. We get a couple of little side

(35:06):
plot in this movie. One of them is 1 where we follow
our staff Sergeant Eddie Doan, played by James Khan.
He's he's 101st Airborne and he picks up his quote UN quote dead
captain in a Jeep and narrowly escapes to Germans.
This is a very, very dense scene, but the captain that he's
rescuing is in fact still alive.So Don first is an army doctor,

(35:30):
and I thought there was Doctor Spanner that we see earlier in
the movie who was played by Lawrence Olivier.
But it's not that doctor. It's a different doctor.
And he forces him to operate on his captain by holding him at
gunpoint. And the doctor operates and then
has done operanded by MPs and hetells him to keep him here for

(35:51):
at least 10 seconds, quote and quote.
So he's like, I'm going to have to have you arrested because you
pointed a gun at me. But in all seriousness, he
doesn't really care that much and this is based on a true
story. Although Dolan's first name was
trained from Charles to Eddie inthe movie and also the Doctor in
real life. They just have him arrested and

(36:11):
there was someone else that kindof let him go.
But it's a fun little thing. Yeah, it was a brief moment of
relief in the book because he comes upon his captain, who's
been shot in the head and has been put, and this is from the
book, who's been put on a pile of corpses.
And Dohan takes one look at him and he's like, I don't know, I'm
getting a live vibes. So that's when he picks them up.

(36:32):
And like, everyone thinks this man is dead.
Like, they think this Dohan guy is crazy, but he pulls out a gun
and he's like, fix my friend or else.
Yeah, it was. I really enjoyed that moment.
I got a real kick out of it reading about it.
And the captain did survive in real life.
Not only did he survive, but he pretty much fully recovered.
He had partial blindness. I think that was the only long

(36:53):
term consequence of his being shot in the head.
Imagine if everybody had just left in there would have just
died. Yeah, the 101st, with the help
of British supplies put up an emergency Bailey bridge at SAWN.
So now the armored vehicles can get across.
But 30 core is now 36 hours behind schedule.

(37:13):
The guys up ahead, the 82nd US Airborne Division and the
British First Airborne Division,they are starting to struggle
because they were not expecting to have to hold these bridges
for that long. So 30 cores next port of call
knee Megan, is not going to be any easier.
The 82nd Airborne are encountering stiff resistance at
the the highway bridge there, including armored units which
they of course were not expecting.

(37:34):
If only. They'd listen to some other
people. Yeah.
Jarnam Frost and his hearty bandof survivors continue to hold
the north side of the bridge, but they have many wounded and
are now on ammunition. The other battalions haven't
been able to reach them in any meaningful numbers, and the
Germans have them effectively surrounded at this point.
The Germans also control their drop downs so they haven't been

(37:58):
receiving any supplies or which is not very good.
Yeah, we should talk about DavidLord, the pilot.
Amazing. Tell me all about him.
So there's this pilot, David Lord, and he's flying this
supply plane and he is flying over the Netherlands and he's
about to drop his supplies, I believe he's carrying

(38:19):
ammunition. And his plane gets hit and it's
engulfed in flames to the point where they know that this plane
is going to crash land. It's not a matter of if, but
when, but he knows how much the guys on the ground need these
supplies. So he does one super slow run
over the drop zone and they don't manage to drop everything.
So he does a second super slow run over the drop zone.

(38:40):
Keep in mind, his plane is on fucking fire this whole time.
Super run over the drop zone so they can drop all their stuff
and they can land it where they're supposed to.
Unfortunately, after that the plane does crash and Lord is
killed along with many of his crew and he was subsequently
awarded a Victoria Cross, posthumous Victoria Cross of
course for his actions and the Super unfortunate part that he

(39:00):
didn't realize was that the dropzones had already been overrun
by the Germans and so all of these supplies unfortunately did
not make it to his Allied compatriots.
It's so heartbreaking. Listen, they do a great job of
showing you this in the movie because they show you the
British trying to create a different sign saying here's
where to land. Come on, guys, land over here or

(39:22):
drop over here. But they keep dropping supplies
into German hands. It's just this hardbacking.
But there's no radio communications, so it's really
subtle. Yeah, I think it's just hard for
us to imagine now, right? The the people in England have
no clear sense of how things areeven going.
Like they don't know what is needed and what's not needed

(39:43):
and, and where everyone's at. Urquhart finally escapes from
his attic and he makes it to Hotel Hartenstein, which is now
the British First Airborne headquarters.
And that's when he learns of howdire the situation has become.
I mean, he saw a lot of it for himself, but now he's getting
the specific grim details. He's finally able to get Frost
on the radio at the bridge. But there's no good news. 30

(40:05):
Core isn't coming yet. They're still going to have to
hold out because the tanks are still delayed at New Megan and
Urquhart and the other British airborne survivors.
They can't physically reach Frost and the others because
there are Germans in the way. And so instead of doing that,
they figure we're going to hold a bridgehead approach toward
Arnhem at Oster Bake open for aslong as we can.

(40:26):
So that when the armored divisions do make it up here,
they'll be able to speed there and relieve Frost at Arnhem as
quickly as possible. And so Erka doesn't have a lot
of guys either, but he's like, we're going to do our best for
Frost and those guys and we're going to try and get this
corridor open and we're going tohold it open for as long as we
can the. Radio call from Erka to Frost is

(40:47):
so disheartening. They're so optimistic still.
Like they know it's all shit, but still they're trying to
remain optimistic. Yeah, that whole part of the
book, there's basically on one side of the bridge you have
Frost and his little merry band,and then on the other side of
the bridge you have a guy named McKay, and he has his own kind
of group of guys. And it's truly wild how few guys

(41:11):
they have. At one point at the end, McKay
has three guys left who aren't injured.
It's truly wild how low on ammunition they are, how low on
people they are. They don't have food, they don't
have medicine. They have basements full of
wounded men. And they're still in reasonably
good spirits, you know, while they're still holding the line.
I can't even imagine being optimistic, but that's just me,

(41:32):
I guess. We get another.
I call it a side plot. It wasn't a side plot in Market
Garden per SE, but it's a littleside plot in the movie because
we meet Gator Horst, who is played by Liv Allman, and she's
convinced by Doctor Spanner, played by Laurence Olivier and
the British to turn our eyes into a makeshift hospital.

(41:53):
Sarkajaros is just a mother of four children or five children,
I, I think 4. And her husband is, I don't know
what his, he's not mayor yet, but he, he's got some
connections with the British andhe's doing a lot with the
underground. And they have a beautiful house
near the church in Ulster Bank. And the British show up with his

(42:13):
doctor and they're like, please,let us make a temporary aid
station of your house. And we'll only use two rooms.
And they end up taking the entire house.
But during the 8 days of fighting, Cato was turned into
about 250 wounded British paratroopers herself, along with
some orderlies and some of her most payment actions.

(42:34):
And looking after these men included walking around her home
reading the Bible to dying soldiers.
And we see this in a later scene.
Gate actually wrote about her experience in her book Cloud
Over Arnhem, which is a very short book, but it's no longer
available. But you can buy a book called
Angel Over Arnhem, which has those diary entries for you to

(42:57):
read. And I read them and they're
absolutely, absolutely heartbreaking.
But she's also very optimistic the entire time, which I think
is what made her and the Britishget along so well.
And also she was a woman lookingafter them.
That helps to write this and shestarred as herself in a movie
called Bears is the Glory, whichis a reenactment of the Battle

(43:19):
of Ireland from 1946 and you canfind it on YouTube.
I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to giving it
a watch. Yeah, a really cool lady.
Just a reminder that, you know, anyone can step up, you know?
And this house was a beautiful relic after kind of rich
people's house. But she didn't give a damn about
any of her belongings. She and her children stayed in a

(43:42):
basement a lot because it was safer.
But she went up there and she had like, apples from an orchard
and like cherry juice, which is very prominent in her her
Diaries. And she kept giving it to the
man when the water ran out and all that sort of stuff.
And it's quite hard for me to read.
I was reading in the Ryan book because he interviewed her and

(44:04):
he was talking about how their house was being shelled and the
wounded man are screaming and moaning and she's just trying to
put her head down and help as much as she can.
And she mentions at one point and orderly just get sick of it.
And he goes out into the street and just walk straight up to a
German tank and is like, do any of you know what a fucking Red

(44:25):
Cross means? And he comes back in the house
and the shelling actually does die down.
Yep. And I have a funny story about
Caterhorst and her husband. Yeah, because after the war,
they adopted the grave of our pilot that we just talked about
because his brother named Frank had actually stayed in her house
as a wounded soldier. And so to adopt A grave in an

(44:47):
island means you kind of take care of it at the cemetery.
And I thought it was really beautiful.
Yeah, that's lovely. The US 82nd Airborne, aware that
that time is running out for their embattled compatriots at
Arnhem, will cross the Wall River at knee Megan in little
boats led by Major Julian Cook, played by Robert Redford.
Their mission keeps getting delayed, which means they end up

(45:10):
having to go in daylight, which is obviously not optimal.
They're crossing a river. They're in plain sight of the
Germans, you know. Nearly half the men become
casualties, but they are ultimately successful in
securing the bridge from the other side, thereby freeing 30
Core for the final drive up to Arnhem.
Yes, and this river is a very wide river.
Like it's not like you can just walk across this bridge and

(45:33):
under a minute. It takes a while.
And there's a thing I wanted to mention.
I must have mentioned it before at some point on the podcast,
but near the point where they crossed our new bridge
currently, they called it the overstack, which means the
crossing. And on this bridge, there are 48
pairs of lights that turn on every sunset and a veteran walks

(45:55):
along them every night to honor the man who died. 48 men died
and they get honored every single night at sunset in my
belt. And I witnessed this once, I
wouldn't say walk because I don't walk, but I got to cross
the bridge when a veteran was crossing with a group of people.
And we just walk behind him in silence.

(46:16):
And it's a very moving thing to do because the lights come on
one by one as you walk across. So I don't know, it just brings
the war really close again. And it's quite beautiful that
they still do it. So I love.
That yeah, I love that too. That's so poignant.
It's iron and bridge. The Germans at this point are
like the British, cannot hold out any longer.

(46:37):
Let's talk to them about capitulation.
And there is a character here called Major Harley Carlyle.
He's with Frost, and he's playedby Christopher Goode.
And he trusted Germans very cheekily that they don't have
the proper facilities to take them all personally.
And the Germans don't like it very much.
And it's kind of a rich or destroy our eminent entirety.

(47:01):
And both Frost and Carlyle are severely bonded.
They're out of Emma, and Frost eventually has to stand behind.
That's your Germans. Get there.
Yeah, the Germans reach a point where they know that Frost and
his guys are in hidey holes on the riverfront.
And they're like, right, we are just going to put a tank shell

(47:21):
into the floor of every single one of those buildings until
they collapse, until there is nowhere for the British to hide.
That's rough. Yeah.
So there's a passage that I pulled from the Ryan book.
At this point, the British are being overrun.
The passage goes at the same moment.
During these last hours, one final message was radioed from
someone near the bridge. It was not picked up by either

(47:42):
Urquhart's headquarters or by the British Second Army, but at
the 9th s s Hoenstaufen headquarters.
Lieutenant Colonel Harzer's listening monitors heard it
clearly. Years later, Harzer could not
recall the complete message, buthe was struck by the last two
sentences. Out of ammunition.
God save the King. It gets for itself not loud.
Yeah, for sure. The 10,000 men of the British

(48:05):
First Airborne were expected to hold the bridge for two days.
Approximately 700 men. The only men who made it held it
for twice as long against unimaginable opposition.
The bridge has since been renamed in John Frost's honor.
Yeah. It's called the John Frost
Brook. I crossed it sometimes because I
work near there. Nice.
And there's actually, there's a couple of stairs leading up to

(48:28):
the bridge and you can see them,I think in the movie.
And if you go to those stairs, they're made of metal, so you
can see all the bullet holes that are still in those stairs.
Wow. So the character of Carlisle was
based on a different man. His name was Digby Tatum Water.
It's a difficult name to pronounce, but he carried an

(48:51):
umbrella and he once wore a bowler head in a banner church
against the tanks at Arnon Bridge.
And he also disabled an armored car with his umbrella by parking
the driver in the eye with him. So this is a very funny
character. I was really hoping the umbrella
would make the movie because, I mean, it's based on true events.

(49:11):
And in the book, they're talkingabout how he's carrying this
umbrella around and one of his fellow officers, like they're
getting the shit shelled out of them.
One of his fellow officers is like, do you think that's going
to be very helpful? And Tatum water goes My
goodness, Pat, what if it rains?This Man I restores a book about
this man. So funny.
And yeah, he talks about this inthe movie, but they asked him

(49:33):
about it after the war. They're like, why did you carry
that umbrella around? And he's like, honestly, I kept
forgetting the password, so I would just carry the umbrella
around because everyone would know that I had to be British.
Can't even imagine like the image of him wearing like a
burger hat in the bayonet charge.
Yeah, I mean, this guy, it's, it's all about morale, right?
I mean, they're, they're really trying to do their best to keep

(49:56):
calm and carry on, you know? Yeah.
So Savowski finally gets his landing, but the Germans are
waiting. Of course the Germans are
waiting because by the time the Poles landed, the British were
supposed to have full control over the bridge.
And at this point, they do not. So the Polish unit can't get to
the rescue of Urquhart and the remaining members of the British
First Airborne who are trapped in increasingly in peril on the

(50:18):
other side of the Rhine. Fighting is increasing all along
the narrowing corridor held by the Allies, and the armored
divisions just aren't going to make it to Arnhem.
The decision is made by Browningand the generals to pull
Urquhart out and thus finally admitting that Market Garden
will not succeed. I just wanted to quickly also
mention that the Polish, if you read Get Your Horse's diary, she

(50:42):
writes about the constant hope that they have that they're
going to be liberated. Like on the day of the landings,
they are very convinced and thatthey're going to be liberated.
But even like 4 days in when a police soldier shows up at her
house, even though he's wounded,they think they're being
rescued. Like they think the puzzle here

(51:02):
now everything will be fine but everything is not.
Fine, Yeah. Oh man.
It's pretty remarkable how much Hope is in her Diaries because
all that she saw was just her. Like all these men were like in
really poor shape and they couldn't really be evacuated to
any of the hospitals at this point because it was too

(51:23):
dangerous. I was fighting all around.
You don't really see that much in the movie, but Osperberg had
some of the heaviest fighting ofall in Market Garden.
But. Well, well, yeah.
And her husband was caught righton the other side of the German
advance, so he wasn't able to come home.
So it's this poor woman having to keep an eye on her four kids,

(51:43):
and meanwhile she's also got allof these surrogate kids, if you
will, all of these young men of the Airborne that she's helping.
Yeah, they named her at the Angel of Ireland for a reason
like that. But if you read her Diaries, she
doesn't feel like she is she's she's just very like going about
her day. But to to them, she was really

(52:04):
just wondering how. It's quite interesting.
Doctor Spander, who was played by Laurence Olivier.
I'm sure I've already said this,but that's fine.
You definitely did say it, but Ido love that we're getting
Laurence Olivier 2 weeks in a row.
Yeah, sure. We got lots of people to in a
row. Yeah, he's a lot older in this
movie now. He for sure is.

(52:25):
I didn't realize it was LaurenceOlivier at first.
No, I thought Laurence Olivier was the army doctor from before,
but it's not him. Anyway, he negotiates A
ceasefire with the Germans to evacuate the word.
I don't think it was him in reallife, but I don't know.
No, the thing about the one in real life was that the s s

(52:45):
medical officer who was coordinating things on the
German side, if you will, had a very, I guess, specific goal in
mind. Because after the evacuation
happened he basically approachedthe medical team on the Allied
side and was like hey can I get a piece of paper saying that I
did this. Basically being like, I see the
writing on the wall and if the war goes the wrong way I was in

(53:07):
the SSI. Need something that shows that I
did a good thing so that I don'tget my ass handed to me when
fucking Nuremberg inevitably happens, right?
I feel like we're seeing this before.
Yeah, absolutely. Urquhart and his men finally
escape across the river with thehelp of Canadian engineers.
By the way, Little Canada mention this doesn't get
mentioned in the movie, but theywere Canadian.
And this whole escape is absolutely dire because at this

(53:31):
point, they're having to do it at night.
They are going to leave wounded men manning the guns.
They're going to leave a radio guy behind on the radio.
For all intents and purposes, they're making it look to the
Germans like they are still fighting because they know that
if once the Germans find out that they're trying to retreat
across the river, it's just going to be open season.
So they're trying to reduce casualties as much as they can

(53:52):
during this escape. And man, reading about it in the
book about how guys are on the beach and the officers are
basically trying to prevent masspanic and the boats are flimsy.
Some of them, they're flipping over in the water.
Some men decide they're going totry and swim the currents really
strong. So some men make it.
Some men get swept away. In the morning when the sun

(54:15):
comes up, the Canadian engineerstry to come back a couple more
times to get more guys. But unfortunately at this point,
the Germans are fully aware of what is happening.
So there's a few 100 guys who are left behind on the other
shore and they have to figure out what they're going to do.
Are they going to hide? And for the next night, are they
going to try and swim? So it's just, it's a horrible,
horrible scenario. Urquhart obviously has been

(54:35):
through the most in the past fewdays.
And he gets invited to meet withBrowning and he shows up in his
wet uniform. And it's absolutely to make a
point. They give him the opportunity to
change his clothes. And he's like, I'm not doing it.
I want this guy to look me in the fucking face and see what
happened to us. Yeah, I feel like I don't
remember where I read this, but I think only about 3000 out of

(54:57):
the 10,000 people that were dropped got back or something.
Like the numbers are really bad.Yeah, brutal.
Like, just unimaginable casualties as this stretches on,
right as it goes past four days,five days, six days.
And Urquhart and his men are fighting for their lives
effectively, and they're trappedon the other side of the river.
He's drafting these messages that have to be coded before

(55:19):
they can be sent, right. So he he'll draft a message.
He hands it to his guy who does the coding for him.
And the messages are like, yeah,we're really low on ammunition.
We don't have much food. We don't have much medicine.
We're still holding out, but like could really use relief in
the next 24 hours and so on and so forth.
And then at a certain point, he drafts a message that he hands
to his coder guy and he's like, I want you to code this, but I

(55:42):
don't want you to send it yet. And the coder guy reads it and
it's basically his admission that we can't hold out anymore.
And the coder guy is just absolutely stunned because to
have a British Army officer admit that like, this is it,
we're fucked, it's over, was just absolutely staggering to
him. And so, yeah, it was just one of
those things where, yeah, you drop with 10,000 guys and like

(56:02):
2500 guys make it back. Probably not good.
No, it's a very bad thing. It kind of ends sadly, because
it ends on a scene where Kate and her children abandoned their
entirely ruined home with only acatch of their belongings that
they have left. And we watched wounded soldiers

(56:23):
everywhere at the headquarters of her rails, kind of sitting in
the field singing Abide with Me as they're waiting to be
captured by the Germans. So that's how to move.
Yeah, and no end card on this one.
No surprising, I was also looking for one but there wasn't
one. But they did have a very long
opening sitting like this. That's true.

(56:43):
And I mean, we can provide an end card, we can tell people
what happened next. Sure, because this is very
important and it also connects nicely to another episode we've
done. Go on.
Yeah, so when Market Garden failed, as we mentioned at the

(57:05):
beginning, Eisenhower all along had really wanted to take the
port in Antwerp in order to fix their supply line issues.
And now that this mighty thrust into Germany wasn't happening,
he returned to his original plan.
And so the First Canadian Army was tasked with clearing the
Skelt estuary in Belgium and thesouthwestern Netherlands.
That campaign was known as the Battle of the Skelt in October

(57:27):
to November 1944 and opened the port of Antwerp to Allied
shipping. And you can listen to our
episode about the forgotten battle if you we'd like to learn
more about that. It's called the slack on the
Scala in Dutch because I want tobe Dutch from Saturn.
But it makes you wonder, right, if they've done this first with
the worth and the differently? Yeah, for sure.

(57:47):
And it's always, you know, it's always the clash of
personalities, right? Who's going to manage to
convince Eisenhower that he should throw all of the
resources behind their army and their plan?
Yeah, it's a really tricky. It kind of makes the best that
we were all like properly on thesame side instead of having our
own agendas. I did laugh because Montgomery

(58:09):
was known for being just really British, like kind of
conservatives in his battle plans typically.
And so for him to come up with this plan that was kind of
really imaginative was very out of character.
And even the Germans said so. They were like, wait, wait,
wait, wait, wait. This was Montgomery's idea.
No way. Yeah, I think there's a scene in
the very beginning where they'rekind of talking about whether

(58:30):
they wanted Monty's plan or Patton's plan.
And they were, they for sure thought it was going to be
presents plan and then ended up being Montgomery plan.
Yeah. Anyway, I think we should rate
this movie. Sure, how many umbrellas with
bowler hats out of 10 would you rate this movie?
I would rate this movie 8 umbrellas with bowler Hats out

(58:51):
of I think I really enjoyed it. I didn't really enjoy it the
first time I watched it, but thesecond time I was kind of
prepared and I knew a little bitmore about Market Garden and it
feels really true to history forme, but without being really
dreadfully boring. So I did enjoy it and it's
funnier places and the pacing's all right.

(59:14):
It's a bit slow, but it's not terrible, and the music is fun
and all the practical effects are great.
And of course I get to recognizeall the places that I know,
which is always fun. So I think it might be one of
those that I really enjoy maybe a couple of times, not a couple
times a year, but maybe once a year.

(59:35):
I don't know. How about you?
I think they did a really good job of capturing simultaneously
this creeping, paralyzing sense of dread as it becomes clear
that the Allied advance is stalling and the Germans are
getting more on reinforcements and slowly but surely starting
to beat them back simultaneously, right up until
the end, so many people are hopeful that, you know, if we

(59:58):
just get that one drop, if we just get across this bridge, we
can succeed. And I really felt that this
movie was emotionally evocative.I thought they did a good job of
giving each of the characters. You know, their own motivations
and their own sense of devotion to this plan, whether or not
they thought it was a good idea.We get to see them maybe wrestle

(01:00:18):
with that a little bit and ultimately, in the case of
Browning, etcetera, have to faceup to the consequences of their
actions. And yeah, it's all, it's like a
very human thing to take the bigswing and then to fail.
I think that this is really the first time looking at the maps
and reading the Ryan book, whichby the way, I can't recommend it
off. It's great.
This is the first time that I also really got a firm handle on

(01:00:41):
Market Garden, I think. Yeah, this movie does a great
job. It has.
The acting is really good. I love Robert Redford, man, I
was so excited to see him in this movie.
I'm so glad that we have Kate, for example, a lady with
something to do. Yeah.
So I think I'm going to give it 8 1/2 bowler hats and umbrellas
out of 10. I definitely recommend it.
It's a little long, but I think if you commit to it, you won't

(01:01:02):
be disappointed. And also I would recommend
watching it twice because the first time it might be a little
bit confusing if you haven't looked at the net, but the
second time it makes much more sense.
Are you reading anything, Sam? I am, I'm reading Enemy at the

(01:01:27):
Gate, The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig, and there is a
movie based on this that has Jude Law in it, so perhaps we
will talk about that soon. Perhaps.
Perhaps. Are you reading anything?
Well, I was reading the Gator Horsburg, Angela Varna, but I
finished in one day, so I'm no longer reading it.
It's a good book. There are like letters from the

(01:01:50):
people that stayed in her house to her later.
There's a bunch of photos in there, like Urquhart, who had
never met her, obviously had wanted to meet her after she was
flown out to England and all that sort of stuff.
And she survived the war with her husband, and she died in
1992 when she and her husband were hit by a car in front of

(01:02:13):
the house on the sidewalk. And it's really sad.
And another sad thing that I think I should mention, because
it's kind of a stark reminder that there was a war, is that
her the Sun bike. He died in 1948 because he
stepped on a landmine that was left behind from World War Two.

(01:02:35):
Well, it's heartbreaking. Yeah, just the the civilian
costs even in the aftermath, youknow.
Right. And in the book also there's a
report of her husband who becameacting mayor of Rankin, which is
one of the regions where this all took place.
And he wrote that after the English left, the civilians were

(01:02:55):
used to take mass graves and bury all the dead.
They were first to do all this for the Germans, so it's not
like they were left alone. After no, and if I'm not
mistaken there were some areas that were completely The Germans
made everyone leave their homes,right?
They were evacuated and they were taken elsewhere until the
end of the war. Yes, Oyster Bank for example.

(01:03:16):
There is an official evacuation.The Germans showed up and told
everyone to leave, and they didn't give them much of A
choice. What else did I want to say
about Kate? Kate actually did advise a
little bit on the movie. She wrote to Edinburgh and about
the script, and she told him to change a couple of things and he

(01:03:37):
did. So yeah.
I love that. One of my favorite things about
the Ryan book was that he spoke to Eisenhower Montgomery, like
all these big ticket guys after the war because he's a
journalist. So he was able to sit down with
all these people. But he also talked to Kate and
he talked to all these Dutch civilians.
And he didn't just talk to the important guys.
You know, he's quoting from everybody.

(01:03:57):
He's quoting from Brian Urquhart, who tried to warn
everyone. He's quoting from, you know,
Browning, who has his own thoughts and feelings about how
things went or how things shouldhave gone.
So yeah, I really enjoyed the bread of experiences.
Excellent. I'm excited to maybe get my
hands on one of his books because there's another one, so

(01:04:17):
I don't know where I'll start, but it sounds like something I
might really enjoy. Definitely.
That's it for this week. Thank you everybody for
listening. You can't find us wherever you
get your podcast or made us fivestars.
We would really like it if you did.
You can send this episode to a friend who would enjoy a guy
with an umbrella in the medal for war.

(01:04:39):
You can follow us on Instagram at Rosyda Reviewer Podcast or
you can visit our website, rosydareviewer.com For more
information and we'll see you next week.
Bye.