For military historians the dates September 17-24, 1944 – 65 years ago this month – recall the momentous tragedy of World War Two known as Operation Market-Garden. This was General Bernard Montgomery’s daring idea to send 35,000 airborne troops on an all-out raid to capture the bridge at Arnhem, then 65 miles behind German lines, pivot into the industrial Ruhr Valley and end the war by Christmas.
In 1977 a famous movie named “A Bridge Too Far” painted a fairly good overview of this biggest paratroop drop in history.
Of course it could not work – the Germans were fighting harder as they neared the Fatherland and had withdrawn parts of their mauled tank forces around the area where the Allied airborne forces (“Market”) were to land and hold until British tanks (“Garden”) could reinforce them for the march into Germany.
One key town on that fateful 65 mile corridor was the Dutch city of Nijmegen where the Germans were about to blow the bridge to prevent the tank forces from crossing to the rescue of the trapped British at Arnhem.
The Nijmegen Bridge spanned the fast-flowing Waal River, a Rhine tributary 400 yards wide. In the movie Ryan O’Neal as Jim Gavin, commander of the American 82nd Airborne, briefs Major Julian Cook (played by Robert Redford), the 27 year old battalion commander of the 504th Regiment. The goal was to capture the north end of the bride in a daring afternoon raid by canvas boats to the far shore, all the while under murderous shelling from the Nazi defenders on the opposite embankment.
Cook was in the first wave of 26 flimsy boats bearing 260 men, half of whom drowned or succumbed to enemy fire while paddling furiously with their rifle butts (not enough paddles had arrived). The scene reminded Cook of bloody Omaha Beach at D-Day where Americans faced open fire while attempting a water-borne assault. Both in the movie and in Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far, Cook prays out loud with every two strokes of his rifle, “Hail Mary – full of Grace – Hail Mary – full of Grace – Hail Mary – full of Grace.”
Major Cook, a devout Catholic, reported later that “The Lord is with Thee” was too long and the double-beat fitted the cadence of the desperate rowing more accurately. In the movie it makes for one of the most stirring action scenes ever recorded. They took the bridge and their sacrifice ultimately made it possible for remnants of General Roy Urquhart’s (played by Sean Connery) battered 1st Airborne Division to escape from the hornet’s nest in which they had landed north of Nijmegen. Ryan notes on page 583 of his text that before Urquhart’s desperate move to escape the trap “everybody knelt as a chaplain said the Lord’s Prayer” – a scene not recorded in the 1977 version.
Cook went on to lead soldiers in Vietnam and was the toast of his family. None doubted the sincerity of his prayers on that arduous plunge into the waters of death in September, 1944. Christians in strange places indeed.
— Neil Earle