page_title: Operation Market Garden
section_title: Oosterbeek
hierarchical_section_title: Operation Market Garden / Battle / Day 3: Tuesday, 19 September / Oosterbeek
caption_attribution_description: English: Four British paratroopers moving through a shell-damaged house in Oosterbeek to which they had retreated after being driven out of Arnhem.
context_page_description: Operation Market Garden was a failed World War II military operation fought in the Netherlands from 17 to 25 September 1944. It was the brainchild of Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery and strongly supported by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The airborne part of the operation was undertaken by the First Allied Airborne Army with the land operation by XXX Corps of the British Second Army. The objective was to create a 64 mi salient into German territory with a bridgehead over the River Rhine, creating an Allied invasion route into northern Germany. This was to be achieved by seizing a series of nine bridges by Airborne forces with land forces swiftly following over the bridges. The operation succeeded in liberating the Dutch cities of Eindhoven and Nijmegen along with many towns, creating a 60 mi salient into German-held territory limiting V-2 rocket launching sites. It failed, however, to secure a bridgehead over the Rhine, with the advance being halted at the river.
  Market Garden consisted of two sub-operations:
  Market – an airborne assault to seize key bridges, and;
  Garden – a ground attack moving over the seized bridges creating the salient.
context_section_description: To the north of Oosterbeek, the 4th Parachute Brigade led an attempt by the 1st Airborne Division to break through the German lines, but communication difficulties between British paratroopers and General Frederick Browning and the Americans, and enemy resistance, caused the attack to fail with heavy losses. The 1st Airborne Division, scattered far and wide and hard pressed by the enemy on all sides, had lost its offensive capability. Unable to help Lt.-Col. Frost, who commanded the only battalion that had made it to the Arnhem bridge, the remaining soldiers attempted to withdraw into a defensive pocket at Oosterbeek and hold a bridgehead on the north bank of the Rhine after overwhelming German resistance.
  At 16:00 hours the British 4th Parachute Brigade's withdrawal was supported by the arrival of 35 gliders containing a portion of the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade and its anti-tank battery, who were deployed in a Landing Zone still controlled by the enemy, which killed all but a small contingent of the reinforcements. While the drop of the remainder of the Polish paratroopers was postponed due to dense fog, its commander General Sosabowski was parachuted in to Driel.
caption: British paratroopers in Oosterbeek
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