The Battle of Arnhem

After the first months of gaining ground on the European continent, in the summer of 1944 the Allied troops grew in hope that the war could be ended before Christmas. The impressive plan to achieve this goal, the largest airborne operation in history, was codenamed 'Operation Market Garden'.
As many as 35,000 British, American and Polish troops would capture the strategically extremely important bridges over the rivers in the Netherlands, from the border with Belgium to Arnhem, clearing the way to Nazi Germany for the advancing ground army. But the resistance of the Germans was severely underestimated and the terrible weather also threw a spanner in the works, so that the ground troops did not succeed in breaking through to Arnhem. The failure of this ambitious operation and the thousands of Allied casualties have ensured that Market Garden is still a controversial page in the history of the Second World War.