A battle of bloody desperation, it must rank as one of the most heroic epics of the Second World War. Jack Smyth, a war correspondent from Reuters, thinks he is headed to the Parachute Training School at Ringway to learn how to successfully jump out of a plane and parachute to the ground. Instead, he finds himself dropping with the Airborne Division outside Arnhem, the operation moving so quickly that he is on his way to Holland before he even has time to practise a parachute jump.
Once in Holland, Smyth finds himself part of fast-moving events, following the movements of the paratroopers with whom he dropped as they strive to take and hold the northern end of the bridge of Arnhem itself. A journalist, there is little he can do other than watch the numbers of the “Red Devils” steadily dwindle as they fight off the determined assaults of two Panzer Divisions, and do his best to write about the horrors of war as he experiences them. After a last attempt to break the German lines between them and the advancing Allied Army, Smyth is wounded and captured along with several other injured paratroopers.
Moved from one location to the next, strafed by the Allies’ planes, fighting hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and pain, he finally finds himself thrust into a cell in a German compound somewhere near Berlin. The Germans, desperate to extract information regarding any possible future airborne operations, see Smyth as a likely source — as a war correspondent, he surely knows more than the average man on the ground. Although Smyth knows nothing, the Germans refuse to accept this and repeatedly subject him to severe beatings.
Eventually, as it becomes clear that he will not reveal any information, he is transferred to a prison camp, where life is tolerable, if tedious, and is finally released by the advancing Allies in April 1945.