Zutphen and Operation Market Garden
1/21
It has been a fun trip in Europe! This last full day was spent going back to the Netherlands. Today we learned about Zutphen and got to go the a museum on operation Market Garden.
Zutphen is one of the oldest towns in the Netherlands. It has a church named St. Walburgis which dates back to. The 11th century. The town is also home to one of the five medieval libraries in Europe and it contain very old books and manuscripts still chained to their ancient wooden desks. The town still has many monumental buildings dating back to the 14-15 centuries despite the fact that part of the town was destroyed by WWll.
Operation Market Garden had the objective of securing the bridges across the Rhine for crossing to Germany. The Market was the first airborne division taking control of the bridges. The Garden was the Grand forces attempting the cross the bridges. Unfortunately the operation failed due to the Germans demolishing a bridge before it could be secured. Grand forces where delayed so the Airborne division had to evacuate. This delayed the end of the war. While I was in the museum that was teaching us about this I was most affected by what they had in the basement. It actually gave a bit of sense of what the battle actually looked like and felt like. It was quite grim looking but it was very interesting to experience.
Christopher Pappageorge