Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II
    Unavailable
    The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II
    Unavailable
    The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II
    Audiobook16 hours

    The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II

    Written by Antony Beevor

    Narrated by Sean Barrett

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The prizewinning historian and internationally bestselling author of D-Day reconstructs the devastating airborne battle of Arnhem in this gripping new account.

    On September 17, 1944, General Kurt Student, the founder of Nazi Germany's parachute forces, heard the groaning roar of airplane engines. He went out onto his balcony above the flat landscape of southern Holland to watch the air armada of Dakotas and gliders, carrying the legendary American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the British 1st Airborne Division.

    Operation Market Garden, the plan to end the war by capturing the bridges leading to the Lower Rhine and beyond, was a bold concept, but could it have ever worked? The cost of failure was horrendous, above all for the Dutch who risked everything to help. German reprisals were pitiless and cruel, and lasted until the end of the war.

    Antony Beevor, using often overlooked sources from Dutch, American, British, Polish, and German archives, has reconstructed the terrible reality of the fighting, which General Student called "The Last German Victory." Yet The Battle of Arnhem, written with Beevor's inimitable style and gripping narrative, is about much more than a single dramatic battle—it looks into the very heart of war.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 11, 2018
    ISBN9780525641506
    Unavailable
    The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II

    More audiobooks from Antony Beevor

    Related to The Battle of Arnhem

    Related audiobooks

    Modern History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      'The Battle Of Arnhem' Brings A Wealth Of New Detail To A Major World War II Disaster

      Sep 11, 2018

      Bestselling historian Antony Beevor recounts the heartbreaking series of catastrophes that many Germans considered their last great victory of the war.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Clash On The Devil’s Bridge

      Jun 18, 2020

      Clash On The Devil’s Bridge
      7 min read

    • Article

      Public Appeal

      Apr 5, 2022

      Public Appeal
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Red Baron and the .303 Bullet

      Feb 17, 2020

      IT WAS AN hour before noon on 21 April 1918, when a .303 Brit bullet slammed into the chest of the pilot of a red, three-winged aeroplane flying over the Somme River in France. Moments later, the world’s most feared fighter ace cras landed in a beet

      5 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Jun 8, 2021

      Reviews
      9 min read

    • Article

      Dropping In On Arnhem

      Aug 28, 2019

      Dropping In On Arnhem
      5 min read

    • Article

      Art In The Aftermath

      Nov 1, 2018

      Art In The Aftermath
      2 min read

    • Article

      Operation Market Garden

      Sep 5, 2019

      Alongside day-by-day, hour-by-hour battlefield analysis of the full operation, Buckingham’s narrative also includes first-hand accounts from the last remaining veterans of Operation Market Garden. With an extensive list of sources and even an index,

      1 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Nov 23, 2021

      Reviews
      8 min read

    • Article

      Seeing the Balance Turn

      Nov 2, 2022

      Seeing the Balance Turn
      11 min read

    • Article

      Black Programs

      Jan 23, 2024

      Black Programs
      5 min read

    • Article

      Hitler’s Wolfpacks

      Nov 27, 2017

      Hitler’s Wolfpacks
      15 min read

    • Article

      The Myth Of The U-boats

      Apr 21, 2022

      The Myth Of The U-boats
      6 min read

    • Article

      David Lord

      Jan 18, 2024

      David Lord
      5 min read

    • Article

      Miracle From The Air

      Apr 25, 2023

      Miracle From The Air
      12 min read

    • Article

      War In Focus

      Jan 20, 2022

      War In Focus
      1 min read

    • Article

      ‘The Great Crusade’

      Jun 30, 2023

      ‘The Great Crusade’
      6 min read

    • Article

      Wheres And Whyfors

      May 8, 2018

      Congratulations to MHQ on yet another terrific issue with your Spring 2018 edition. Excellent! One article that stood out to me from a point of personal interest was Marc G. DeSantis’s “This Frightful Catastrophe.” DeSantis did an excellent job of re

      4 min read

    • Article

      Hardware Albatros D.III

      Dec 24, 2019

      Hardware Albatros D.III
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Bigger They Are…

      Jul 25, 2023

      The Bigger They Are…
      9 min read

    • Article

      Wilderness Workhorse

      Sep 28, 2021

      Wilderness Workhorse
      7 min read

    Reviews for The Battle of Arnhem

    4/5

    47 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      As usual, Antony Beevor delivers a detailed, thoughtful and deeply researched book. Previously I would have counted D-day as his best work but Arnhem now ranks as a close second in my mind, even above the legendry Stalingrad. Personal accounts mix seamlessly with grand strategy and the whole book feels tightly written with every aspect of the battle covered with respect and care. Well worth it.
    • 4/5
      This is one of the most depressing military histories I have ever read. I've read a few books about Operation Market Garden including, of course, Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge to Far. But what makes this book so depressing is also what makes it so refreshing. So many military histories, in general but concerning this operation specifically, spend a lot of their time playing the "what if" game. They focus on one or more factors, perceived operational flaws, bad decisions, and argue that if those things had played out differently then history would have been different.Beevor is having none of it. He argues from the get-go that Market Garden was a terrible plan, conceived out of Allied arrogance, on a ridiculously short time scale, with zero attention to even some basic details (making sure radios worked and that everyone knew what frequencies everyone else was using) and that the plan had zero chance of ever working. The only "what if" that is raised implicitly (but never explored) is: what if the Allied commanders weren't a bunch of schmucks engaged in a pecker-waving contest and came up with a completely different plan from top to bottom?Unfortunately, a lot of ordinary soldiers paid a horrific price for the arrogance of Montgomery and the mutual distrust of US, Polish, and British commanders. Beevor maintains for the most part a clear narrative of extremely complex events, interspersed with many anecdotes and firs-person accounts. These are often short, pithy examples, and his sense of when to insert one of these to help illustrate the human toll of the battle is impeccable. The effect is a steadily escalating sense of the scale of the horror and suffering. Germans and allies often fought in close quarters with little or no quarter: prisoners were shot by both sides, wounded were executed by both sides. Both sides employed ghastly weapons such as phosphorous shells and grenades. Beevor's major achievement in this piece is the focus on the experience of the Dutch resistance and civilians. The Dutch paid a terrible price for helping the Allies. In addition to the "routine" Nazi reprisals, the Germans forcibly evacuated virtually the whole of Arnhem (after having set fire to or blown up many portions of the city that hadn't already been destroyed in the fighting). Given the focus on the Dutch, I had expected a little more focus on the Hunger Winter of 44-46, which seemed to be hurried in at the end. Like all popular histories, the book would also benefit from a more creative use of well-designed charts and tables. This was a huge battle, unfolding in multiple places, fought by different commands. Just keeping the major players and units straight can be a challenge. Nevertheless, this is a thought-provoking history that will appeal to those who have read other histories of the operation or who are learning about it for the first time. More than a useful historical resource, however, there is an underlying bleakness here which is perhaps the only sane response to an operation that wasted a lot of lives for no real gain.
    • 4/5
      In many ways the updated and expanded version of 'A Bridge too Far', with the story being told in a series of vivid vignettes and personal anecdotes. It is superior to A Bridge too Far, as Beevor doesn't focus as much to the race to the bridge at Arnhem, but gives due attention to the problems of the US airborne down the corridor, the German reactions and above all, the Dutch, who -rightly- figure largely in this book. The failed attempt at Arnhem did a lot to make the last war winter particularly miserable for the Dutch, something Beevor points out explicitly. None of the British upper echelon commanders come out very well in this book. Market Garden was a last attempt by the British to take the lead in conduct of the war, and was a grand failure.As Bornanalog mentioned in his review on this site, Beevor doesn't go for the 'heroic failure' angle. We get the story of a lot of people getting killed because of overoptimistic and shoddy planning and command decisions.
    • 4/5
      Operation Market Garden ranks among the worst military blunders of the Second World War. The brainchild of British general Bernard Montgomery, it was a plan to open an invasion route into northern Germany through the Netherlands by sending in paratroopers to seize key bridges, then speeding armored forces over them to secure a position over the Rhine River. What was promised to bring a quick end to the war, however, quickly became a nightmare as tanks were soon bogged down on the only highway available, leaving the British 1st Airborne Division at the northernmost point of the operation unsupported and subject to devastating German counterattacks.

      Ever since its failure historians and armchair pundits have speculated as to how the plan might have succeeded. Antony Beevor is having none of it, however, making plain early in his history of the campaign that “[i]t was quite simply a very bad plan right from the start and right from the top. Every other problem stemmed from that.” The extent of this is made plain over the course of the book, as he details the unsupportably optimistic assumptions, unrealistic expectations, and botched execution that defined the disaster. What unfolds is a tragedy both for the soldiers involved and for the Dutch civilians, who were punished for their support for the Allied advance with a “famine winter” that is an often-unaddressed legacy of the campaign.

      With its sharp analysis, evenhanded coverage of both sides, and incorporation of the civilian experience Beevor’s book embodies all of the qualities of his work as a military historian. Yet the nature of the battle complicates his efforts to provide a clear narrative, as too often events were characterized by small-unit actions independent from one another. Beevor captures them admirably, but it does force him to bounce the reader from one end of the campaign to the other. This makes for a disjointed account, though one that helps to underscore the futile nature of the campaign and one of the many reasons for its failure.
    • 4/5
      Solid and unstinting account of the failed Market-Garden operation in September, 1944. Beevor makes it fairly clear that the operation suffered from a number of very significant command flaws, not the least of which were Eisenhower not being able to control Montgomery, and Horrocks being too ill to command. In spite of great heroism and drive by the soldiers themselves, the operation failed. An interesting counterpart to "A Bridge Too Far," which I think glossed over some of these things.