Search - Battlefield: Arnhem - Operation Market Garden on DVD

Lame war film

Thomas R. Addor | brunswick, maine | 01/07/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Some decent footage but it is a rip off compilage of brief scenes shown over and over. Amazingly repetitive and so very poor a protrayal of a fascinating campaign. Not entirely accurate either which compounds and adds insult to injury. STay away from this DVD!"

Better than "Airwar Over Germany"

A. N. Tofanelli | Napa, CA | 09/27/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Once again "Arnhem" is not of the quality of the original BATTLEFIELD series (BATTLEFIELDS?). Still, I found "Arnhem" to be relatively OK. There was an overemphasis on commander biographies which really tried my patience and there was much repetitive information re. the campaign which made its presentation boring. There were many repetitive film clips and clips of the German 1944 Ardennes Offensive which, of course, had nothing to do with Arnhem. For an historical doc this sort of defeats the purpose of watching. Overall, I didn't mind seeing this doc once--but once is enough. The detailed and coherent chronology of the original BATTLEFIELD series is sadly lacking here."

A good overview of the campaign

JAG 2.0 | IN United States | 06/21/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I felt this DVD gave a very good introduction to the campaign. Most of the major issues were covered in depth and presented to the viewer in a logical, methodical fashion.

Yes, I too found the commander bios took a little more time than I would have liked, but they were relevant to the campaign, unlike other DVD's in this series that even presented bios of Churchill, Hitler and Roosevelt that simply were irrelevant to the battle or campaign.

I must defend the use of german archival footage from battles other than Market Garden in this DVD. Apparently, the reviewer that complained about this issue is ignorant of the fact that german archival footage of a great many battles is scant to non-existant - especially at this point in the war. They had to show something, so they used footage that at least showed the kind of forces at Germany's disposal.

I think the makers of the DVD did a very good job of showing the daring of Mongomery's plan while also making the viewer aware of the many risks involved in it.

I think there are two issues that the DVD really didn't deal with effectively:

Firstly, the scarcity of supplies (as a result of not being able to take a large port intact early in the french campaign) - especially fuel - caused the allies to have to decide where the supplies would be best used to do the most good in defeating Germany as quickly as possible. There simply wasn't enough fuel to allow the advance of all their forces so they had to choose one area in which to invest their resources.

Secondly, although Mongomery was known for slow, methodical, set-piece battles, he created Market Garden to defeat the "real" enemy - Patton. He and US Gen. George S. Patton were rivals for fame and glory. He knew that unless he could propose an operation sufficiently impressive to garner the precious supplies for his army group, it would probably be given to US Gen. Omar Bradley - and that meant Patton would get all the glory.

I thought it was a good, but not great, treatment on the subject and worth the asking price."