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These small absurdities of war developed into a grisly scenario. Weather delayed supply drops and reinforcements. Radio communication broke down. By coincidence, German panzer divisions were resting in Arnhem—just because, on the eve of the attack, it was "a peaceful sector where nothing was happening." And so what began almost as a lark—a triumphal march down roads lined by cheering crowds offering trays of milk, fruit and beer—concluded as a nightmare.
Police Reporter. Who or what was to blame? Ryan's answer is that Operation Market-Garden would have worked only if everything had gone strictly by schedule. Far too much was left to chance—as much as 75%, a Dutch chief of staff estimated. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, in a taped interview with Ryan 19 years later, speaks bitterly of Montgomery as "a man that just can't tell the truth." Ryan does little to defend the field marshal.
In its sense of inevitable doom, Ryan's account reads like a Greek tragedy—written by a meticulous police reporter who wants to spell all the names right, get the exact time and street address straight, and record just who ran amuck with a razor against whom. The extravagant cruelty and bravery of human beings, the ultimate waste of war fill these pages, but as evidence largely uncommented upon.
Was it an awareness of his own limits or a feeling for what his readers want that kept Cornelius Ryan from going beyond the bounds of first-rate narrative journalism? Epic only in sales—more than 10 million copies of The Longest Day and The Last Battle have been printed in 19 languages—Ryan once again seems satisfied to prove himself the best anecdotist among today's military historians: the conscientious Herodotus of World War II. · Melvin Maddocks