A Bridge Too Far (1977) ****

 

When it comes to war, stories of glorious victory abound, but I'm particularly fascinated when a defeat is considered worthy of re-telling. The tale of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae comes to mind. In WWII, Operation Market Garden, an Allied defeat, has sparked numerous books and two movies. 1946's “Theirs is the Glory” was a documentary-style re-enactment of the operation, with some of the roles played by actual veterans of the battle. It's actually pretty gripping. 1977's “A Bridge Too Far” is a dramatization of the events, with an ensemble cast including Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Robert Redford, and more. It would almost be easier to list the big name actors of the time who weren't in the film.

As a military operation, Market Garden was borne of impatience, which is always an invitation to disaster. After D-day, the Allied forces had made steady progress, pushing the Germans back across France, but Allied progress slowed as their supply lines became strained. Eager for a quick end to the war, General Bernard Montgomery planned to drop 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines in The Netherlands. It would be the largest airborne assault, ever. These troops would seize and hold bridges along a narrow highway to the town of Arnhem, where the key bridge crossed the Rhine River. Ground forces would then break through German lines and quickly advance up the road to Arnhem. Controlling that road and the crossing over the Rhine would have given Allied forces a major route into Germany, an advantage that, it was hoped, would end the war by Christmas 1944. In retrospect, it would have been great had it succeeded, as Hitler went on to launch the counter-offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge in December of that year, taking many Allied lives.

The great weakness of the plan was its absolute reliance on speed and surprise. The surprise part worked; the Germans apparently didn't see the attack coming. Had the operation also gone as speedily as planned, with the Allied tanks proceeding nonstop up the road to Arnhem, they likely would have had a great success. As happens in life, and especially in war, there were speed bumps. Once they had set their hearts on the operation, Allied commanders refused to listen to new intelligence that indicated German tanks in the Arnhem area. They plowed ahead, relying on the plan for speed and on their initial assessment that the German resistance would be nothing but “old men and boys.” From missing equipment to pockets of heavy German resistance, a series of snafus and delays dragged the advance out over days, giving the Germans at Arnhem time to get their act together and rout the lightly-armed airborne division there. By the time Allied tanks and artillery arrived, it was too late. The Germans had heavily fortified the bridge over the Rhine, leveled the town, and decimated the 1^st Airborne Division.

It's easy to see, in retrospect, how the operation failed. Commanders created a culture where inferiors became afraid to mention problems that might call the operation into question. Their reliance on speed relied on everything going right, and experienced soldiers should have known better. Many of the delays were of the kind that could never be anticipated individually, but should have been planned for in aggregate.

Critics called “A Bridge Too Far” tedious, boring, and very, very long, which perfectly describes the battle it depicts. I think it's a brilliant film about the true nature of war, in which moments of terror and carnage are bracketed by hours and days of tedium and frustration. There were plenty of Allied forces to defeat the Germans, they just couldn't get to where they needed to be on time. One group of soldiers was getting pounded by German artillery, while thousands more had to wait hours at a time for vehicles to crawl up a narrow road. The movie is very long, but I found it a fascinating, technical war movie. It's a cautionary tale about the limits of Great Power in the face of hubris, and it should be required viewing for military officers, or for anyone who wants to embark on a grand project.

4 stars out of 5