Bennett - Magificent Disaster: The Failure of Market Garden, The Arnhem Operation, September 1944

This book would not have been possible without the help, advice and critical comments of Carlo DEste, Brian Urquhart, Russell Kennedy, Anna Nitoslawska, Marikje Dollois, Ivor Green and Tom Goss. Special thanks are due to Henk Duinhoven, who generously shared with me his immense knowledge of the history and topography of the Battle of Arnhem Oosterbeek. I also received valuable help from Barbara Derkow Disselbeck, Nora Ct, Peter Stachura, George MacDonnell, Elsie Lafontaine and Nancy Stroud of the Canadian Department of National Defence Library and Dr. Andrzej Stuchitz of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London. Jean Bradburn tracked down rare articles and lent me Arnhem memorabilia belonging to her father-in-law, John Bradburn of the Second South Staffs. For interviews and conversations, I am grateful to Brian Urquhart, Tony Hibbert, Russell Kennedy, Ken Fleet, John Mills, Leonard Mackiewicz, Robert Taylor, Ted Lawson and Stan Fields.

Since relaxed conversation is as important to historical interpretation as reasoned inference from the written sources, I am grateful to my friends, Tom OBrien, Mike Wright, Jack Bennett, a veteran of the U.S. 525th Engineer Company in the 194445 campaign, the late Dick Martin and the late Kurt Heine, formerly a signaller with the Fifth Waffen-SS Division Wiking. Ivor Green, formerly of the Royal Signals and REME, sent me critical comments on the passages dealing with communications at Arnhem and gave me a most valuable document: his wartime Specification Notes on the No. 19HP wireless set.

Equally, I express my deep thanks to Russell Kennedy, formerly Reconnaissance Officer of the Twenty-third Field Company, RCE, for his critical comments on the passages in the book dealing with the Arnhem evacuation, for supplying me with his memoir Whispers and Shadows, Arnhem Fifty Years Later and for extensive notes on Operations Berlin and Pegasus II. My agent, Arnold Gosewich and my editor, Robert Buckland, guided me in turning a promising manuscript into a viable book, while David Farnsworth of Casemate Publishing saw the book into print without any needless complications whatever. Any errors and misconceptions in the text are, of course, the responsibility of the author alone.

The chief intellectual debt in regard to this book is to Colonel Albert Seaton. In The Battle for Moscow, 194142 (1971), only one of Seatons many accomplished works, we see a historian with all the grasp of a professional soldier constructing and reconstructing a battle from the few available Russian sources and a profusion of those German. On these constructions rest the attribution of reason and motive, then an evaluation of military purpose and conduct. Since Seaton wrote before the era of interviewing participants in the battle, he relied, among other sources, on divisional histories, partly for narrative information and partly to lend color to a terrible battle against the weather and the terrain as well as the enemy. By todays standards, Seatons pioneering work is one of John Lockes underlaborer, essential basic history but old-fashioned. If the same accusation is levelled against this book, I can only plead that very many of the primary written sources have remained so far untouched and that A Magnificent Disaster should have been written a generation ago.

Tom Goss acted as navigator and historical consultant for a battlefield tour in September 2003, which included the Meuse-Escaut crossings, the German cemetery at IJsselstein, Nijmegen, Mook, the Groesbeek Heights, Wyler in Germany, Driel, Heveadorp, Oosterbeek and Arnhem. In blissful ignorance we passed the signs for the National Oorlogs-en Verzetzmuseum, wondering why the Dutch should make so much fuss about a clock museum. We realized our error and returned in haste to look at the splendid National War and Resistance Museum at Overloon, which contains some exceedingly rare exhibits, such as a restored 88mm flak gun, a towed Polsten light cannon and DUKW amphibians. If the 82nd Airborne had taken as much time to find a route off the Groesbeek Heights as we did in ascending them, they would never have reached Nijmegen! A further visit in September 2004 took in the 60th Anniversary of the Arnhem operation, Ede, the north bank of the Lower Rhine and the Deelen Airbase Museum.