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Episode Title: A Bridge Too Far — Operation Market Garden and The Intelligence Nobody Wanted to Hear

Season 3, Episode 2 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War

At two o'clock in the afternoon on September 17th, 1944, the largest airborne operation in the history of warfare began.

Five thousand aircraft crossed the Dutch coast in a formation that stretched for a hundred miles. Civilians stood in the streets and wept. After four years of German occupation, the sky was full of Allied planes and paratroopers. Liberation felt hours away.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had a plan to end the war by Christmas. Operation Market Garden would drop three Allied airborne divisions behind German lines to seize a series of bridges across the Dutch rivers — the final bridge at Arnhem over the Rhine — while XXX Corps drove north along a single road to link up with them. If it worked, the Allies would be across the Rhine. Germany's industrial heartland would be exposed. The war could be over before winter.

There was one problem. A British intelligence officer named Major Brian Urquhart had assembled aerial reconnaissance photographs showing German tank formations in the exact area where the 1st British Airborne Division was scheduled to land. He brought the photographs to his commanding general. He told him there were SS Panzer divisions resting and refitting in the Arnhem drop zones.

He was told his concerns were those of a nervous child suffering from a nightmare. He was sent on medical leave for nervous exhaustion.

Operation Market Garden launched on schedule. The 1st British Airborne Division landed eight miles from the bridge it was supposed to capture — in the middle of two SS Panzer divisions that the command had been told weren't there.

The Americans reached their objectives. XXX Corps fought its way up a single road that could be — and was — cut repeatedly by German forces on either side. At Arnhem, Lieutenant Colonel John Frost held the north end of the bridge with roughly seven hundred men for four days, waiting for a relief column that never arrived. Ten thousand British paratroopers went into Arnhem. Approximately two thousand came back across the Rhine.

A bridge too far. In more ways than one.

In this episode, Amanda and Harry examine the intelligence the command chose not to believe, the structural decisions that compounded the disaster, and why Operation Market Garden stands as one of the most painful examples in the war of what happens when the men who have the right picture are removed from the room.

Season Three of WWII Unwound is called The Decisions That Shaped the Western War. Last week it was the Battle of the Bulge — an intelligence officer sent on leave the day before the attack he had predicted. This week it's Arnhem — an intelligence officer sent on medical leave before the operation he warned against. The pattern is not a coincidence.

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