Duncan Glen and friends take part in the commemoration of Operation Market Garden
It was a good plan. C Company would join forces with D Company and rendezvous with the Dutch resistance on the Groesbeek Heights where they would establish an operating base before moving on to Oosterbeek later in the week to combine with other units for the final drive to Arnhem Bridge.
This was not September 1944 but the same month 73 years later and the participants in question had made the long trip in a variety of wartime vehicles from Devon and Northumberland to be part of the annual commemoration of one of the most significant military actions of World War Two.
Operation Market Garden has exerted an extraordinary influence on military history and its failures and successes are still hotly debated to this day.
Regardless of whether Arnhem really was, in the words attributed to Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, “one bridge too far” it led to the end of the elite British First Airborne Division as an effective fighting force for the remainder of the war.
The military action to secure the bridges over the Waal and the Maas and adjoining canals by American and British airborne forces is burned into the Dutch psyche.…
