Mert Market

British Broadcasting Corporation HomeAccessibility linksHistoryBy Mark Fielder

Last updated 2011-02-17Mark Fielder discovers how Operation Market Garden could have shortened World War Two by six months, and how the plan failed at the last moment.In May 1945 it was the Russians who hoisted their flag over the ruins of the Reichstag building in Berlin. In this way World War Two, in Europe, was signalled as being effectively over. However, the troops who captured Berlin could easily have been British or American, if events around a small town in Holland had turned out differently.If Operation Market Garden, planned to take place in the area near Arnhem, in Holland, had succeeded, the western Allies could have punched their way across one of the last great natural barriers between them and the German fatherland.Their tanks and troops might have reached Berlin weeks before the Russians, ending the war by Christmas 1944. The fate of post-war Europe might have been very different.