- Competing with each other for 'first-over-the-Rhine'
brownie points, 'Operation Market Garden' was Field Marshall Bernard L.
Montgomery's overly ambitious plan to pierce the Ruhr from which the French
had been ejected twenty years earlier.
-
- When troops of the First British Airborne dropped on
Arnhem* to seize the bridge crossing the British media hailed the operation
as 'a stunning success'. In fact it was yet another monumental blunder
dressed up as victory, though the full extent of the disaster wasn't open
to inspection for another thirty years when Cornelius Ryan's book, A Bridge
Too Far caused a re-think.
-
- At the time the BBC announced the operation as 'an incredible
achievement, certainly one of the outstanding operations of the war.' When
the British forces were forced into ignominious retreat the BBC quickly
changed its tune to, 'a valuable stand by a depleted, gallant, and undaunted
force.'
-
- This, in fact, was nearer the truth, but it did miss
the point. The operation was foolhardy to the extreme and should never
have even been considered. Correspondent Cyril Ray, who took part in the
drop on Nijmegen complained bitterly. "We tart up our reverses so
heroically, that it takes an effort to grasp that Arnhem was not merely
a British defeat, it was a German victory."
-
- He was even less happy to discover that the British officer
in charge of censorship stuffed the correspondent's dispatch into his battle-dress
blouse and produced them several days later. "Terribly sorry, you
chaps, but I quite overlooked them." American readers were also kept
in the dark. There wasn't a single American correspondent at the crucial
battle of Arnhem.
-
- One thing which has however assiduously been ignored
by practically all writers about this disaster is the following. The British
troops (who fought with an uncommon tenacity and bravery) experienced such
heavy casualties, that they were unable to take care of their wounded.
-
- A British officer conceived of the idea to approach the
German SS troops under a white flag to ask for assistance! The SS, honourable
as always, stopped shooting, received the British delegation and agreed
to a cease fire, during which the British wounded were to be transported
to German field hospitals to be taken care of. This was done and the British
were cared for the same as the German wounded.
-
- Disgracefully, no English soldier thusly saved and humanely
treated has ever said 'Thank you', or if he ever did, none of his remarks
have ever been published. This act of kindness and fairness by the SS has
got be the first in history and to ignore it shows the depth of dishonesty
by the allies.
-
- * The eastern Netherlands town along the banks of the
Rhine, where an embittered defense was conducted against the advancing
Western armies allied to Bolshevism, international plutocracy, and world
Zionism.
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