In Europe

sign saying ‘Surveillance’, a long line of rubbish bins, and not a soul in sight.
    But still, I am walking along the most important European battlefield of autumn 1944, a normal stretch of coastline that once, briefly, was what it was all about.

Chapter FORTY-FIVE
Oosterbeek
    WHAT IF D-DAY HAD FAILED? OR WHAT IF, IN 1931, A NEW YORK taxi driver had not just clipped the fat man crossing the street, but killed him? Or if the Americans had not dawdled for two years before starting the Manhattan Project, and the atom bomb had actually been available to the Allies in 1943?
    And what about the Netherlands in 1944? What if Hitler had been unable to profit from the three-month respite provided him by Walcheren? Or if the Allies had won the Battle of Arnhem and been able to race across the almost defenceless German lowlands to Berlin in autumn 1944? There would have been no starvation that winter in the Netherlands, no offensive in the Ardennes, Anne Frank would have become a great writer, and at Yalta Stalin would never have been in a position to claim all of Eastern Europe. But could the British and Americans really have driven on so much further after a breakthrough at Arnhem, without sufficient fuel, without a good chain of supply from Antwerp? Wouldn't they have choked on their own success once again? What if …
    By chance, Winrich Behr, now a major on Field Marshal Model's staff, was there at the start of the Battle of Arnhem. ‘Our headquarters were at Hotel Hartenstein, in Oosterbeek. It was a lovely, quiet Sunday, we were having lunch, and suddenly we heard machine guns and the loud buzzing of planes. One of our superiors had the soup spoon shot out of his hand. I went outside and couldn't believe my eyes: floating gently down out of the sky were paratroopers. At first I thought it was a British special commando team out to liquidate a couple of generals. But the landing was so huge that I soon realised that this was something very different.’
    Today there are still rumors that Operation Market Garden was betrayed to the Germans beforehand. According to Winrich Behr, no such information ever reached the German command: ‘The simple fact is that we were sitting there, the whole general staff. That I was sitting there calmly, eating an egg.’ The problem, Behr says, lay with the Allies: they simply had too little information. ‘The British didn't know that there were a couple of SS armoured divisions at Arnhem. From what I heard later, the Dutch resistance had reported that, but Montgomery didn't trust their information; he thought we had infiltrated the resistance. Actually, our armoured divisions were there by accident. They had fought in Normandy, and then been sent to Arnhem to rest up and repair their equipment. But they were soldiers with experience at the front. And they went into action right away.’
    Today, the most important landing field is covered in corn and the occasional sunflower. It was here that they came down on that lovely Sunday afternoon of 17 September, 1944, those thousands of paratroopers, those countless gliders full of infantrymen, that entire overwhelming aerial caravan some 400 kilometres long. And over there, across from the Albert Heijn supermarket in Oosterbeek, close to the patio of restaurant Schoonoord, beside the Gall & Gall off-licence and Klimop florists, is where there were mowed down.
    Market Garden was one of the most daring operations of the war. After all the delays that followed the landing at Normandy, the Allies were attempting, in one great, whirlwind push from Eindhoven, by way of Veghel and Nijmegen, to cross the Rhine at Arnhem, at a place the Germans least expected it. Thousands of American, British and Polish paratroopers were to secure the many bridges along the way, to allow the British tanks to roll through virtually unchallenged. The Americans of the 82nd Airborne Division were to take the Waal Bridge at Arnhem; the British of the 1st Airborne, along with a Polish brigade, would see to the nearby Rhine Bridge. The road to Berlin would then be cleared: the Allies could be there before winter came.
    This winner-take-all initiative was hatched by Montgomery, but the plan soon received the wholehearted support of Eisenhower. ‘I not only approved of Market Garden, I insisted on it,’ he admitted to Stephen Ambrose twenty years later. All of the Allies’ precious fuel was directednorthwards for the sake of Arnhem. General Patton, whose tanks were poised