Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday morning, July 7, 2020. Posted Tuesday morning, July 28.
After having gone a bridge too far: British POWs captured during the Battle of Arnhem, September 1944. German Federal Archives via Wikipedia.
[Editor’s note; Another desperate attempt to catch up on my July blogging preparatory to falling behind in my August blogging. This post expands upon an entry in my notebook from three weeks ago.]
Pop Mannion had a subscription to the New York Review of books that he must have last renewed for five or more years. Two years after his death issues are still landing in the mailbox here at the Homestead---to my pleasure and frustration. The trouble with reading the New York Review of Books is that every issue contains reviews and ads for twenty or thirty books I want to read. The good news is that just about every review is as worth reading as the book being reviewed and often is extensive and insightful enough that I don’t feel the need to read the book. In some cases, however, a review will make me feel as if I have read the book and make me still want to read the book, like Max Hastings’ review of “The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II” by Max Beevor in the May 28th issue, which I just got around to reading this morning [July 7, 2020]. The battle of Arnhem, which took place in the Netherlands in September of 1944, was the subject of the movie “A Bridge Too Far” a fairly faithful and cinematically compelling adaptation of the book by Cornelius Ryan, who also wrote “The Longest Day” which was adapted into a less faithful but more cinematically compelling movie starring, among a hundred others, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne. “The Longest Day” tells the story of one of the greatest Allied victories of World War II. “A Bridge Too Far” tells the story of the British’s greatest defeats. The outnumbered and outgunned Germans outfought them every mile of the advance while the American troops being held in reserve were left to look on in horror and fury as the Brits mucked it up in every conceivable way, mostly due to poor planning and the arrogance and incompetence of their commanding officers, from Montgomery, whose brainchild the operation was, to the lowliest lieutenants. “A Bridge Too Far” was published in 1974 and it appears to be only available in a Library of America edition, paired with “The Longest Day.” I suspect that it’s still worth reading, although I read it when the movie came out in 1977 and haven’t reread it since. I remember being disappointed by Ryan’s less than admiring take on the British’s “success”. The movie, downbeat as it is at the end, makes the evacuation of Arnhem by the cornered main forces, seem like a moral victory. Ryan matter of factly presents it as the unnecessary and wasteful loss that it was. Going by Hastings’ review of “The Battle of Arnhem”, Beevor is even more matter of fact and much more critical. I’m sending you to the review but the trouble with that is it’s behind NYRB’s paywall. The better thing for me to do is review the review, and I might do that, along with finishing the dozens of other posts I have in the hopper. I might even read the book, again, once I get through the dozens of other books in my stack of to-reads. We’ll see. No promises. Meanwhile, here’s a passage from Hastings' review that I think will give you a taste of the review and Beevor’s book and which you might find fun in itself...
Bevor enjoys a further advantage [over Ryan and other historians of the War]: Almost all the veterans of the First Airborne are now dead. Thus it is no longer necessary in Britain to try to sustain that it was an elite formation, all of whose men fought like tigers. Some did, but others ran away. When John Keegan avowed this disagreeable reality in print back in 1994 [in his history of World War II], the commander of the Fourth Airborne brigade at Arnhem, the formidable pocket-sized general Sir John Hackett, sprant at the historian’s throat. A severely mauled Keegan observed to me that he would never write about Arnhem again as long as Hackett was alive. It was unacceptable to Hackett’s generation to face uncomfortable truths about its own battlefield limitations. And media sentimentality always swings behind supposed “war heroes” at the expense of scholarly critics.
--- Max Hastings, from “Botch on the Rhine”, a review of “The Battle of Arnhem” by Anthony Beevor in the May 28, 2020 issue of the New York Review of Books.
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