Crossing the Rhine - 9780871139894

In September 1944, with the Allies eager to break into Nazi Germany after Normandy but conflicted about how to do so, Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower is forced to arbitrate a power struggle between two rival subordinates: Lieutenant General George Patton, commander of the U.S. Third Army, and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who leads the British Twenty-first Army. Patton wants to continue his assault from the south, while Montgomery proposes a complex two-pronged attack on the lower Rhine - Germany's last great natural barrier in the west - that calls for thirty-five thousand American and British paratroopers to be dropped sixty-five miles behind enemy lines in the Netherlands, where they will be reinforced by a column of ground forces. After intense debate, Eisenhower approves Montgomery's plan, code named "Operation Market Garden," over a chorus of complaints by Patton and other U.S. officers.
The attack, immortalized in the classic book and film A Bridge Too Far, will go down in history as the most ambitious - and disastrous - airborne assault of all time. Allied soldiers outnumber Germans by two to one, but the plan breaks down when the ground forces encounter unexpected resistance and cannot reinforce the paratroopers, who find themselves lightly armed and isolated behind enemy lines. After nine days of brutal fighting, with heroic stands at the towns of Arnhem, Oosterbeek, and Nijmegen, the Allies suffer massive casualties and are forced to retreat. Several months later, after the Allies repulse Germany's last-ditch attempt to extend the war with the Battle of the Bulge, Montgomery orchestrates another airborne attack on the Rhine, with soldiers fighting around the town of Wesel in Germany. This time they prevail and begin their march into the heart of the Third Reich.
Lloyd Clark is at the forefront of the next generation of military historians, and in Crossing the Rhine he uses new firsthand research to chronicle both battles - examining them in relation to one another and in the larger context of the war - to show how the Allies' earlier audacity led to their later success. He places the attacks in context by recounting the events that preceded them: the heated disagreements between U.S. and British generals, the extensive training of airborne soldiers, and the growing disillusionment of German troops. And he argues that, contrary to popular opinion, these operations were the right offensives at the right times for the right reasons.