Here is the true story of the events that inspired the famous film, A Bridge Too Far, told in compelling style by Christopher Hibbert, one of Britain's foremost historians. In September, 1944, in Arnhem, Holland, what was to have been a brilliant battle-a battle meant to hasten an end to the war-instead turned into an epic tragedy. Nine-thousand men of the First British Airborne division parachuted into the countryside, behind German lines, with a mission: to capture and hold the bridge over the Rhine ahead of the advancing British Second Army. But the result was disastrous: the men faced constant bombardment. Nine days later, after some of the fiercest street fighting of the war, only 2,000 of the paratroopers managed to escape to safety.
Author
Christopher Hibbert, MC, FRSL, FRGS (5 March 1924 - 21 December 2008) was an English writer, historian and biographer. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of many books, including Disraeli, Edward VII, George IV, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, and Cavaliers and Roundheads. Described by Professor Sir John Plumb as "a writer of the highest ability and in the New Statesman as "a pearl of biographers," he established himself as a leading popular historian/biographer whose works reflected meticulous scholarship.
