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The Economist
May 26th 2018
Books and arts 77
T
HERE is a particularly British tendency
to romanticise valiant military failure.
The retreat to Corunna, the charge of the
Light Brigade and the death of General
Gordon at Khartoum are remembered as
much as famous victories. The “Battle of
the Bridges” of1944, fought predominantly
in the Netherlands, fits into this category.
Two films celebrate the heroics of what
was the biggest airborne battle in history—
“Theirs is the Glory” (made in 1946, imme-
diately after the second world war) and “A
Bridge Too Far” (1977).
Sir Antony Beevor avoids this trap. In
the meticulous narrative style he first em-
ployed in “Stalingrad”, he recreates the op-
eration from the dropping of the first
troops on September17th to the evacuation
of the remnants of the British 1st Airborne
Division eight days later. Tragically, hero-
ismand incompetence are inseparable.
The outline of the story of “Arnhem”
may be familiar, but Sir Antony’s unearth-
ing of neglected sources from all the coun-
tries involved—British, American, Polish,
Dutch andGerman—brings to life every as-
pect of the battle. The misjudgments of
egotistical commanders are exposed by
their own actions and words. The experi-
ences of individual soldiers both appal
and inspire. Five were awarded Victoria
Crosses, Britain’s highest military award,
four of them posthumously. The plight of
trapped Dutch civilians, who took great
risks to help their liberators, is never over-
looked. At times thewealth ofdetail threat-
ens to confuse the reader. But confusion is
the very essence—the “fog”—ofwar.
There is still debate about whether Op-
eration Market Garden (the assault’s code-
name) was a bold strategy that might have
shortened the war or was fatally flawed
from the outset. Conceived by Field Mar-
shal BernardMontgomery, it was meant to
provide a route into Germany’s industrial
heartland that avoided the well-defended
Siegfried Line farther south. The idea was
for airborne forces, dropped by parachute
and gliders, to take a series of bridges over
the Rhine, then to be quickly reinforced by
ground units arriving by road.
How much Montgomery was motivat-
ed by personal rivalries is disputed, but
there is no doubt he sawMarket Garden as
an alternative to Dwight Eisenhower’s
“broad front” strategy, which he despised.
Eisenhower acceded to his relentless de-
mands for resources, including American
airborne divisions and vast numbers of
transport aircraft. In the battle of the post-
war memoirs, Montgomery still blamed
him for his parsimony (while admitting to
mistakes of his own).
In fact, the reasons for the disaster that
befell the airborne assault were many and
various. British tanks arrived too late to
help; they had to come by a narrow road,
dubbed “Hell’s Highway”, which ran
across marshy polder land and was highly
vulnerable toGerman attack. The decision
to spread the drops over three days (be-
cause of shortening daylight) forfeited tac-
tical surprise, as did the drop zones’ dis-
tance from the objectives (the zones were
chosen to avoid enemy flak). Montgomery
discounted intelligence from the Dutch re-
sistance that warned of a large German
build-up around Arnhem. German fight-
ing spirit had not collapsed after defeat in
Normandy, as had been supposed.
Market Garden was not a total failure:
part ofthe southernNetherlandswas liber-
ated and some bridges, though not the key
one at Arnhem, were held. But the price
was high. Allied casualties numbered
around 17,000; thousands more were tak-
en prisoner. German retribution against
Dutch railwayworkerswhowent on strike
to aid the assault led to a famine that killed
over 20,000. A military maxim says that
an operation’s outcome rests 75% on plan-
ning and 25% on luck. Even if this plan had
been impeccable, it needed improbable
good fortune to succeed. As Sir Antony
concludes, it “ignored the old rule that no
plan survives contact with the enemy.”
7
Military history
Fallen heroes
Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944.
By Antony Beevor.
Viking; 480 pages; £25. To
be published in America as “The Battle of
Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of
World War II” in September; $35
He did for them all by his plan of attack
A
S RACHEL KUSHNER’S third novel
opens, Romy Hall is on a bus to Stan-
villeWomen’s Correctional Facility in Cal-
ifornia. At 29 she has lived most of her life
in San Francisco, but not the city of tourist
brochures: “It was not about rainbow flags
or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets but
fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the
way to the Great Highway, where a sea of
broken glass glittered along the endless
parking strip ofOcean Beach.” Hermother
fed her instant ramen, “then attended to
whichever of themen shewas dating”.
Romy’s crime is murder. The Mars
Room is a strip club where she worked. A
client became obsessed with her; finally
she bludgeoned him to death.
This is a disturbing and atmospheric
book, if a flawed one. Ms Kushner makes
the prison, and the world beyond its walls,
vivid. The novel is not Romy’s alone; the
strongest counterpoint to her voice is that
ofGordonHauser, a teacher for theCalifor-
nia Department of Corrections who lives
in a cabin in the Sierra foothills. A parallel
is drawn between Gordon and Ted Kac-
zynski, the real-life “Unabomber”, who
also lived alone and waged a campaign of
domestic terror until his arrest in 1996. Ex-
tracts fromMr Kaczynski’s journals appear
at intervals in the story, ill-judged interpo-
lations that feel forced and overstated.
“The Mars Room” makes a kind of tril-
ogy with Ms Kushner’s previous novels,
both finalists for the National BookAward.
“Telex from Cuba” was set among Ameri-
can expats in Cuba during the 1950s. “The
Flamethrowers” took on art and radical-
ism in the New York of the 1970s. Ms
Kushner ismarkingout territories of Amer-
ican experience; in a country that accounts
for 21% of the world’s prisoners but less
than 5% of its population, prison is fertile
ground. The incarceration rate for African-
American women is twice that of whites.
Romy is white, but nearly all the other
women she encounters in Stanville are
blackor Hispanic.
Ms Kushner’s seriousness about her
subject is always apparent, but the balance
between documentary and fiction is occa-
sionally uneasy. For example, Romy’s love
for her son is a driving engine of the novel,
yet the child is more an archetype than an
individual; some of the incidental charac-
ters seem like extras in “Orange Is the New
Black”. A sense of the inevitable weighs
the story down. But then, that is true of
many lives in the society it depicts.
7
American fiction
Inside the cage
The Mars Room: A Novel.
By Rachel Kushner.
Scribner; 352 pages; $27. Jonathan Cape; £16.99