It began with a torn file in a Brussels transport plane, as Montgomery and Eisenhower clashed over strategy. This episode explores Operation Market Garden, the largest airborne operation in history at the time, and how ambition and ego drove a catastrophe.

We trace the supply crisis behind the Red Ball Express, the broad-front versus single-thrust debate, the fatal assumptions about German collapse, and the funnel of Hell’s Highway that doomed the ground advance.

• How outrun supply lines and the sealed port of Antwerp stalled the Allies
• The two-part plan to seize nine bridges and cross the Rhine
• Ignored aerial photos of SS panzer divisions near the drop zones
• A captured copy of the operational order in a crashed glider
• The Dutch railway strike and the resulting Hunger Winter