Paper on WWII essays

Paper on WWII essays In A Bridge to Far the Allies try to end World War II by dropping soldiers behind enemy lines and cut off supply lines. The movie goes into great detail of the confusion and power struggles amongst the leaders of the allies. In 1944, the German armies were being pushed back across the Low Countries. The Allies' great strategic problem was the Rhine, the wide river which formed Germany's western border. A daring plan was conceived which would overcome the Rhine obstacle and open the road to Berlin. Market Garden, as the plan was codenamed, involved parachuting spearhead units onto the great bridges over the Rhine and securing them for the critical few hours it would take for an armored column to drive up and relieve them. It is easy now to point to the flaws in Market Garden, but at the time it looked like a daring and viable alternative to slogging it out against the Siegfried Line. No-one had anticipated that the Dutch people would pour out onto the streets in throngs, thinking th at they had been liberated, and thus slowing down the armor. The intelligence indications of heavily-equipped German units in the zone were ignored because they were inconvenient and from outside the intelligence community. Critically, the plan allowed for only one single road to be available to the Irish Guards for the key northward push. The film illustrates very effectively the way in which a plan can develop its own momentum, regardless of the shortcomings which riddle it. The sequence of the boarding and dropping of the paratroops is an excellent scene, as is the German ambush which delays the progress of the armored column. A Bridge to Far was an excellent display of what happened with the plan itself, but it also went into great detail of the behind the scenes actions of the leaders, giving the viewer a better concept of the power ladder for the allies. The historical quality of the movie appears to be very genuine, from the armor ...