In the fall of 1944, Allied commanders planned to land airborne divisions in an attempt to capture a series of bridges behind German lines, including the "bridge too far" at Arnhem. Geoffrey Powell, himself a veteran of the Arnhem operation, drew on conversations with many other survivors of the battle to write one of the most dramatic of all accounts of the battle

When the book was first published in 1976 under a pseudonym, it was at once recognized as one of the finest evocations of an infa...