Eighty Years Ago This Week

The Germans overran the British pocket east of the Rhine at Arnhem with a few survivors escaping across the river. With the US Army embroiled in a brutal battle for the Huertgen Forest to the South and a  Canadian force fighting for the right bank of the Scheldt,  the hopes of easy and early victory had evaporated. In his enthusiasm for Market Garden Montgomery had not made the Scheldt a priority although without command of the river, the port of Antwerp was nearly useless. The British high command in the Middle East straddled military and home affairs in an ill-conceived scheme to grant compassionate home leave to married men with three years service in the theatre who wished to start a family. This attracted a flood of applications leading to a suicidally stupid and offensive revision in the scheme designed to hold back numbers: it would apply only to men of 35 years of age who had no children and could show "good reason" why they hadn't; moreover both husbands and wiv...

  The allies launched Operation Market Garden, a combined air and ground drive to secure the three bridges across the lower Rhine with the goal of facilitating an early  invasion of German from the north. Following the speedy expulsion of the the Germans from France and then Belgium it was dangerously easy to imagine the German armies were broken and would not offer serious resistance. US airborne divisions seized the two westerly bridges and an Anglo-Polish force took the easterly bridge at Arnhem which lay some one hundred kilometers behind German lines. General Horrock's British XXX Corps opened a drive to force a narrow corrridor to link the bridges with the main body of the allied armies.  Further south the US army attacked the city of Aachen, the first major objective in Germany. At first the local commander General von Schwerin proposed to surrender the city, which had not been bombed, but Wehrmacht high command decided to make a fight of it. The city was within th...