What A Bridge Too Far got right – and wrong – about the Battle of Arnhem

Dickie Attenborough’s all-star film of the Allies’ great folly went to great lengths to do right by history. But he had a fight on his hands

There’s a scene two hours into A Bridge Too Far – Richard Attenborough’s epic recreation of the doomed Operation Market Garden – in which a lone German soldier walks across Arnhem Bridge with a white flag, to suggest to the decimated British forces, led by Anthony Hopkins’s Lt Col John Frost, that it’s time to discuss surrender.
“We haven’t the proper facilities to take you all prisoner – sorry,” shouts Frost’s second-in-command, using the moment to poke fun at the enemy. “We’d like to, but we can’t accept your surrender. Was there anything else?”
By this point in the film, the fight to control the bridge – the Battle of Arnhem, which was fought 80 years ago – has raged for more than a day, recreated by Attenborough through a series of thumping action sequences, with dynamite-powered explosions and real tanks on the Wilhelmina Bridge in the Dutch city of Deventer, doubling for Arnhem.
The script, by Oscar-winner William Goldman, had originally called for Hopkins’s Lt Col Frost to say the “we can’t accept your surrender” zinger – to give him a star moment. The film, after all, was sold on its star power, with 14 major names – including Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Michael Caine, Gene Hackman, James Caan, and Dirk Bogarde – which was twice as many stars as there were days given to planning Operation Market Garden.
The real John Frost was one of several Arnhem veterans who stood on the sidelines of Dickie Attenborough’s film, helping direct the battle as accurately as possible. Before shooting had started, Frost summoned William Goldman to dinner in London and insisted the surrender line was given to someone else. “People will think I’m making too much of myself because I did not say that line,” Frost told Goldman, who regretted upsetting the war hero.
It speaks to the film’s admirable effort to do right by history – technical quibbles aside, it’s a broadly accurate retelling of Operation Market Garden – and the film’s steer away from glorified, Hollywood heroism (for the most part, at least).
As Simon Lewis describes it in a recent book on the making of the film, A Bridge Too Far was “a huge war movie with a depressing ending” – a recreation of an Allied disaster.
A Bridge Too Far was certainly a sizable campaign with a crew of 300; up to 1,000 extras; more than 100 vintage vehicles; a small army of actors trained by military experts; and a then-mega budget of $25 million. Released in 1977, it feels like a follow-up to The Longest Day. Not just because both are based on books by Cornelius Ryan, but because they’re both from a particular strand of war film: the ensemble epic that strives to tell it as it happened.
Not everyone was happy with its version of history. Controversy over the depiction of Lieutenant-General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, played by Dirk Bogarde, caused a letter-writing furore, and a falling out between Bogarde and Attenborough.
The real Operation Market Garden was conceived by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. It came three months after the Normandy landings, with the German army in a chaotic retreat. Monty’s plan was to drop three airborne divisions in the Netherlands – The American 101st and 82nd Airborne and the British 1st Airborne – who would each take a series of bridges at Eindhoven, Nijmegen, and, most crucially, Arnhem. Meanwhile, the XXX Corps would advance 64 miles from Belgium to Arnhem in two days (or so they thought) and link up with the airborne divisions. The aim was to take control of Arnhem Bridge, and push over the Rhine and into Germany. “Market” referred to the airborne plan, “Garden” referred to the ground force.
In the film, they want to bring the boys home by Christmas. It’s true that Monty thought it would end the war, but the plan was also born from his rivalry with the US Army’s General Patton in the south of France. As described Sir Antony Beevor – author of Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 – Monty wanted to break through into Germany before Patton. He believed that Dwight D Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, would give him priority of supplies and command over US formations. So, Monty pushed the plan through – over the heads of air force commanders, whom he saw as gutless.
As seen in A Bridge Too Far, there were various problems: the drop zones were eight to 10 miles from Arnhem; the XXX Corps were massively delayed, as the one highway to Arnhem – a single narrow road – was subject to attacks and snarl-ups; Polish paratroopers, supporting the British 1st Airborne, were delayed by bad weather; the radios didn’t work properly; and the Germans, who the Allies thought would offer little resistance – “Hitler youth and old men on bicycles,” says Browning in the film – regrouped for an efficient counterattack. The British 1st Airborne soon found themselves surrounded by SS Panzer troops.
The prevailing view is that Operation Market Garden – which launched on September 17, 1944 – was a folly; that it was destined to fail. Indeed, Sir Antony Beevor argues that Operation Market Garden “should never have been launched”.
Cornelius Ryan’s book was published in 1974. Ryan, a former war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, wrote it while he was dying of prostate cancer. Even on his deathbed, Ryan was determined that A Bridge Too Far would be made into a film. His friend, Joseph E Levine – the producer of hundreds of films, including The Graduate – picked up the rights. Levine persuaded Richard Attenborough to direct by promising to finance Attenborough’s passion project, Gandhi (though he didn’t in the end).
Simon Lewis, author of Making A Bridge Too Far, describes Attenborough as “a brave choice” at the time. “He was a very respected actor at the time but an inexperienced director.” says Lewis. “He’d only made two films at the time, Oh! What a Lovely War and Young Winston. Both were received well critically but had not done well at the box office.”
Lewis details in his book how the whole endeavour was a risk: war films were out of fashion and British-centric war films didn’t fare well at the all-important American box office.
Levine had an idea, though an all-star cast. For Attenborough, it solved a problem with the multi-strand war picture, in which lots of men in similar uniforms do lots of fighting. The stars would help differentiate one part of the story from the next.
The cast is impressive: Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Hopkins, Edward Fox, and Denholm Elliot from the British side of things; Robert Redford, James Caan, Ryan O’Neil, Elliott Gould, and Paul Maxwell on the American side; Laurence Olivier as a Dutch doctor; and Gene Hackman keeping the Polish end up with a dodgy accent.
The stars were put on a “favoured nations” agreement of $250,000 each per week, though Connery read in the newspaper that Robert Redford was getting double: $2 million for four weeks’ work. “At first I thought it was a mistake,” Connery said. Then I learnt it wasn’t.” Connery – playing Major-General Roy Urquhart – forced a renegotiation shortly before filming began.
Dickie Attenborough later described how “with one exception (and I refuse to name him), all these stars were wonderful, magic, always on time, always word perfect.” That one exception could have been James Caan, who, according to Lewis’s book, would arrive late and hungover, and wielded a lasso. “And he kept lassoing the prop guy, who didn’t feel like he wanted to be lassoed,” remembered camera assistant Steve Barron.
Dirk Bogarde, meanwhile, had been unsure about taking on the role of Boy Browning, but was persuaded by the money and “the line” – Browning’s famous warning to Montgomery that the plan might be going “a bridge too far” to succeed. The line features at the end of the movie, though it’s doubtful that Browning said it to Monty in reality.
Browning was the head of the 1st Airborne and a former Olympic bobsledder. In the absence of Monty in the film, it falls to Browning to take the blame for the folly of Market Garden. Even Bogarde had thought that Browning was “rather a p—-, I think.” In an early scene, Browning is shown reconnaissance photos that identify Panzer tanks in the Arnhem area but proceeds with pig-headed determination. Browning’s widow, the author Daphne du Maurier, protested the scene after seeing a script draft (her protests against Bogarde’s portrayal were loaded with homophobia, concerned that he would be “effete and mincing”).
It’s true that there were warnings about German tanks, but Browning – despite his personal doubts – proceeded anyway. According to Beevor, Browning was worried that if he didn’t go ahead with the plan, his command would be given to his American counterpart, Major General Matthew Ridgway. “[Browning] should have gone back to Field Marshal Montgomery and said, ‘Actually, Field Marshall, but sorry, I think we should rethink the whole plan,’” said Beevor.
A Bridge Too Far was filmed in the Dutch city of Deventer, which would prove a perfect recreation of Arnhem setting with its near identical bridge – the Wilhelminabrug – along with both quaint Dutch scenery and crumbling, dilapidated buildings. But, just as with the filming of The Longest Day in France – where there were near riots over the sight of swastika flags – some locals were upset by the return of Nazi uniforms.
“I think the younger residents lapped it up – particularly the young women,” says Simon Lewis. “But the older generation struggled with seeing German uniforms on their streets.”
Lewis recounts one story, about a background actor who played a Nazi officer. As it turned out, the actor was a real Dutch Nazi who was too vocal about enjoying the uniform. “He was there for two days and then disappeared on the third day and was never found again,” says Lewis. “Something rather nasty happened to him, shall we say.” As detailed in Lewis’s book, locals claimed that the Nazi had ended up in the river.
Many other actors went by the moniker of the APA – “Attenborough’s Private Army”. Lewis considers it Dickie Attenborough’s great “experiment”: to whip them into shape with weapons handling, basic training, and military drills. Training was led by the film’s chief historical advisor, Colonel John Waddy, who parachuted into Arnhem as a 24-year-old.
“Attenborough needed a bunch of guys, mostly in the middle distance, who could portray soldiers and act around his stars,” says Lewis. “He had this novel idea of hiring 50 young actors and training them. Now it’s standard practice in film. To my knowledge, Attenborough was the first one to do it. It was a brave, brilliant idea. I think they make the movie.”
In one amusing disagreement over proper conduct, John Frost told Anthony Hopkins, his screen counterpart, to stop running so fast when he was under enemy gunfire. “I tried to show the Germans contempt for their machine-gun fire,” Frost said.
The film’s hardware was just as authentic. A military vehicle museum in Falmouth provided over 100 vintage vehicles. The crew also sourced Sherman tanks, which were backed up by fibreglass tank moulds put onto Land Rover chassis, as well as fighter planes and Dakota transport planes – though the Dakotas had to be painted a different colour for the purposes of the film.
“The only thing they struggled with was German Tiger tanks” says Lewis, “so they used the Leopard I tank and mocked that up. Interestingly, the Leopard I has been redeployed in Ukraine.”
A Bridge Too Far is one of those special war films that gives you some sense of what it was like to have been there, particularly in the scale of its production: the skull-rattling explosions, the sight of Dakota planes soaring over rooftops en masse, and hundreds of paratroopers filling the skies over Arnhem.
“There are no special effects apart from half a dozen very simple shots using glass paintings,” says Lewis. “But virtually every shot is real.”
The parachute drop – about as spectacular as anything ever seen in a war movie – was performed by members of the British Parachute Regiment, and filmed by cameras in the planes, in a helicopter, and on the ground.
The parachute scene has been a point of some pedantry. Comedian and military historian Al Murray – best known as the Pub Landlord – wrote about A Bridge Too Far in his 2013 book, Watching War Films with My Dad. Going to see A Bridge Too Far with his father in 1977, wrote Murray, was “a major dad-and-lad event”. Murray notes, with some affection, that the paratroopers jump with modernised (though safer) parachutes, and that they jump with reserve ‘chutes, which they didn’t have in reality, but without the heavy load of weapons and ammunition that the real paratroopers dangled in a bag beneath them. (Murray has a book on Arnhem published this week – Black Tuesday, about the Allies’ disastrous day on September 19.)
Other details in A Bridge Too Far are simplified for filmic purposes. The SS commander Karl Ludwig (Hardy Krüger), for instance, is a composite of the similarly named, similarly positioned Heinz Harmel and Walter Harzer. And while the issue with radio communications is broadly true, it was less about the Dutch terrain and dodgy crystals, as detailed in the film, than it was about primitive radio technology over long distances. But such quibbles are the domain of what Simon Lewis calls “rivet counters”.
Says Lewis: “How accurate should something be? A movie’s ultimately a piece of drama. The filmmakers are trying to find, ‘What are the strands of drama? What are the points of conflict? What are the things that will heighten the drama?”  
Though Lewis admits there is a line when it comes to historical accuracy on film. “I do struggle with Ridley Scott’s Napoleon,” he says.
There are elements in A Bridge Too Far that feel stranger than fiction. In one scene, James Caan’s US staff sergeant Eddie Dohun finds his captain, apparently dead, amongst a pile of bodies. He races the captain to a field hospital, but the medic refuses to look at him. Dohun pulls a gun and forces the medic to examine the body. The captain, it turns out, is alive. The film adds a chase and a shootout as Caan races to the hospital, but Dohun’s story is true. In fact, the real Dohun (Charles in real life, not) had the gun trained on the doctor for the whole procedure, which saved the captain’s life.
Another bizarrely true detail seen in the film is that a German soldier found a complete set of plans in a crashed glider. There was also a short truce, as depicted, to move the wounded out of Arnhem.
For Simon Lewis, there is one scene that strays too far into Hollywood-type heroism: Robert Redford taking the bridge at Nijmegen. “It looks like he takes the Nijmegen bridge on his own!” Lewis says. “It does wind up a lot of people.”
The buildup to that moment is absolutely thrilling, however, depicting what Beevor called “one of the greatest examples of collective bravery”. On September 20, men from the 82nd Airborne targeted a pair of bridges – a railway bridge and road bridge, the Waalburg – which meant crossing the 150-metre Waal River under heavy gunfire. Major Julian Cook (Redford in the film) led 260 men across the river in 26 canvas boats. Once the men reached the banks, they had to then charge 900 yards into machine gun-fire. Attenborough recreated the battle at the Waalburg (though he couldn’t do it at the exact spot) with replica boats, while the actors were hammered by simulated shell fire, exploding squibs, and floating dynamite charges. The scenes resemble the ferocity of Saving Private Ryan’s D-Day landing.
There was some added behind-the-scenes tension as the last shots were done on Redford’s final day with the production. If there had been any problems and the scenes had overrun, Redford would have cost the film an additional $125,000 per day.
Redford’s hero does feel like he’s wandered in from one of those war films that beefs up the American role – something like The Great Escape, perhaps (in fact, Steve McQueen almost played Redford’s part). Even Major Cook was unimpressed. Antony Beevor later found a letter from the real Cook in which he “protested strongly” about being played by Redford. “I would have thought men would have been rather flattered, actually,” Beevor said.
There is some debate about the events at Waalburg. “There was a bit of controversy because it was never established historically who took the bridge,” says Lewis. “The British said, ‘It was us because our tanks rolled across!’ The Americans said, ‘No, we took the bridge!’ Attenborough was rather caught in the middle. He tried to find a compromise. He agreed with the historical advisor [the decidedly British Colonel John Waddy] to shoot a small scene of the British tanks rolling over the Nijmegen bridge, but it doesn’t quite get over that point.”
In case there’s any mistake about the Anglo-American tensions, Redford’s Cook criticises the Brits’ tea-drinking habits after securing the bridge. Though the Britishness of A Bridge Too Far is a hoot. “Morning, Alan!” shouts Edward Fox’s Lt Gen Brian Horrocks before the battle commences. “Your sleeping beauties know there’s a war on, do they?!”
The portrayal of Dork Bogarde’s Lt Gen Browning caused the most controversy after the film opened on June 15 1977. The Daily Telegraph criticised the depiction, which was followed by a lively letter campaign in The Times, plus complaints from Browning’s family and fellow soldiers. Bogarde – who had worked in military intelligence and served in Operation Market Garden – was deeply wounded by the backlash and ended his friendship with Attenborough (also his next-door neighbour) in a letter so poisonous that Dickie destroyed the letter “on the spot”. Bogarde accused Attenborough of betraying him with the character and insinuated that the director had deliberately sabotaged his chances of a knighthood (Attenborough himself was knighted during the film’s production). They eventually patched it up.
The real Operation Market Garden was over within 10 days. Of the 10,000 men who dropped into Arnhem, only 2,000 returned. Monty – as repeated in the film – said it had been “90 per cent” successful. The same could be said about the film, perhaps, which ranks alongside the great war epics – though it didn’t fare particularly well in the US, where critics thought it was too over the top. Arguably, the film’s biggest omission is the impact on the Dutch. The Germans cut off food supplies to Dutch cities and 20,000 people starved to death. “The Germans took it out on them afterwards because they’d helped the Allies as much as they could,” said Beevor.
You could also argue that A Bridge Too Far is too generous to Operation Market Garden, that it suggests the plan could have worked. Though Simon Lewis thinks it’s easy to write off the plan in hindsight. “To win a war you have to be bold, you have to take risks,” he says. “You have to gamble – Market Garden was a gamble.”
Making A Bridge Too Far by Simon Lewis is available now
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