Before I went down the rabbit hole I was really into my military history. So much so that I tried to make a career of it and began a planned series of novels, set during World War II, about the adventures of fictional hero Dick Coward.
Book two of the series - Coward At The Bridge - was set during one of the most controversial operations of the war, Market Garden.
This was the doomed venture that gave us the phrase “a bridge too far.” In a quixotic plan dreamed up by Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery, the cream of the Allied military - British, American and Polish airborne troops - were dispatched on a daring mission to capture and hold a number of bridges behind German lines, the last of which was in the Dutch town of Arnhem.
Had the operation succeeded, the war would have been shortened by several months. A British armoured corps would have surged over the captured bridges, like Blitzkriegin reverse, and cut the Germans off from the industrial Ruhr heartland so vital to their war effort. The war would have ended because Germany would have had nothing left with which to fight it.
Instead, the operation was a costly failure. The conventional historical narrative tells us that this was because it was too ambitious. It placed too much hope on everything going perfectly (which obviously didn’t happen); it failed to factor in certain key potential drawbacks, most notably - as the Polish commander General Sosabowski famously put it at one briefing - “the Germans.”
But what if - (as per) - the conventional historical narrative is lying to us? What if Market Garden was actually a brilliant idea which failed not by accident but by design? What if all the excuses we’ve been given, such as faulty wirelesses and unexpected panzers in the landing area and strategic incompetence, were just a cover for the real reason it ended in disaster: it was betrayed, at every stage, by the Elite establishment.
This is the thesis of former BBC journalist Tony Gosling in his short book The Traitors of Arnhem?. I’ve meant for ages to have him on my podcast to discuss it because it’s such an extraordinary story with such an implausibly diverse cast of characters, from Churchill, Montgomery and Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann to the future NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington, the novelist Daphne Du Maurier, the actress Audrey Hepburn, James Bond creator Ian Fleming and even, latterly - read on for further details - the bestselling author of sex-laced Cotswolds potboilers, Jilly Cooper. And also because his thesis makes so much sense of the otherwise inexplicable.
When you visit the bridges at Arnhem and Nijmegen (scene of an heroic assault by 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne) and the landing grounds at Oosterbeek, you cannot but be struck by how close the operation came to succeeding. No thanks to useless senior officers like 1st Airborne Division’s commander Lt General ‘Boy’ Browning, but through sheer determination and heroism against much more heavily armed SS Panzer units, the paratroopers and glider troops very nearly achieved their goal. They captured the necessary bridges and could just about have held them for long enough for the armoured breakthrough by XXX Corps.
But XXX Corps never appeared. This was dramatised in the movie A Bridge Too Far, in the scene where Captain T Moffatt Burriss (portrayed in the movie as ‘Major Cook’ by Robert Redford) confronts a stationery British tank crew. Burriss and his men have just gone through hell crossing the River Waal in inflatable paddle boats under heavy fire to secure Nijmegen Bridge. They’ve done the hard part. Now all those Sherman tanks of the Guards Armoured Division have to do is roll along the virtually unprotected road to Arnhem and come to the rescue of the beleaguered British airborne troops at the bridge, led by the magnificent Lt Col John Frost. But the tank crew, per the movie, are too busy drinking tea and won’t be persuaded to move under any circumstances. Burriss/Cook is apoplectic.
The scenario is more or less accurate, except that the tank crews haven’t simply stopped because they fancy a brew. They’ve been given express orders not to advance by their commander General Horrocks. Horrocks is widely considered to have been one of the better British generals - “a man who really led, a general who talked to everyone, down to the simplest private soldier”. He appears to have had a conscience too because in later years he entrusted to his friend Leo Cooper, publisher of the military book imprint Pen & Sword, a letter which was only to be opened after his death. The letter, he told Cooper, would give the real reason why he gave the order to halt the advance for a total of 17 hours. It was restarted one hour after the beleaguered paratroops had surrendered, by which time of course it was too late.
This posthumously-released confession would have been dynamite. Imagine, if you were a publisher of military books and you had in your possession a written testimony which solved one of the biggest mysteries of the war. You’d keep it in a safe place, right? But Leo Cooper didn’t. According to his wife, Jilly - yes, that Jilly Cooper - he was simply disorganised and it got lost in all his papers, never to resurface. Which is possible, I suppose. But is it not equally possible, indeed more likely given the magnitude of the secret being revealed, that the document was lost on purpose? Perhaps the intelligence services became aware of it, broke in, and destroyed it. Or perhaps Leo Cooper opened the letter, took advice on what to do with his bombshell, and decided to bury it rather than stir up a hornet’s nest.
The excuse given by mainstream historians for the halt is that it was considered too dangerous for the tanks to advance. The road to Arnhem lay on top of a single, elevated causeway through a marshy floodplain, so tanks had no room for manoeuvre and could easily be picked off. Just one 88 mm gun, one Panzerfaust even, would have been all that was needed to take out the lead tank, blocking the road for all the vehicles following behind. But as 10 SS Panzer Division General Heinz Harmel admitted after the war to author (and paratroop colonel) Robert Kershaw: “If they had carried on their advance it would have been all over for us.” The route was undefended.
So what was the real reason for the halt? One person who may have known but forever kept schtumm was the commander of the leading tank troop, Captain Peter Carington, later to inherit the title Lord Carrington. If he did know, then Carington was richly rewarded for his discretion. He went on to enjoy a stellar career in business and politics - chairman of the General Electric Company, chairman of the Lancaster House conference which transformed Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, Foreign Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet during the Falklands War, Secretary General of NATO. Quite impressive for someone described by his Eton housemaster as “a really stupid boy.”
But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. The Caringtons go back a long way. Here is a detail I picked up from a fascinating Substack deep dive by Golden Nuggets into the curious history of the Scilly Isles, one of King Charles’s favourite haunts, and in particular into the family that runs one island, Tresco, as its private fiefdom, the Dorrien-Smiths. Here is the relevant paragraph:
This supposed ‘fiction’ of the Smiths' noble ancestry was first propagated by the Robert Carrington, Augustus Smith’s cousin, who adopted that surname as a nod to acclaimed descent from a certain Knight Templar and standard-bearer to Richard I during the Third Crusade — Michael Carington. The story holds that this Michael Carington played a key role in the siege of Acre by scaling the wall and opening the city gates for the crusading forces, earning great honours from Richard the Lionheart. From there, the Carington family name is said to have endured until the 15th century, until one of Sir Michael’s descendants changed his name to ‘Smith’ or ‘Smyth’ to keep a low profile following the Wars of the Roses, going on to reside at Cressing Temple, the largest of the old Templar holdings. The 19th-century Robert Carington sought to claim this lineage via a Cavalier branch of the clan.
So Carington was descended from a Knight Templar. That would explain a lot. During his time in government, I remember, he was presented to us by the media as a stiff but capable eminence grise, a war hero to boot, who lent experience, backbone and class to the Thatcher cabinet. But this was just a cover. Clearly Carington’s true role was as a very high level fixer for what I suppose you might call the Black Nobility, or for the bloodline families, of which he was a high ranking member. We can infer this from the fact that he became president of the Pilgrims Society, was chairman of Bilderberg, was a Garter Knight, Royal Institute for International affairs president, and - according to Executive Intelligence Review - mentor to Henry Kissinger.
If those details don’t ring enough alarm bells, then try this essay by Patrick O’Carroll, which John Waters ran on his Substack. Here’s a taster:
The record shows that the Irish ‘Troubles’ of 1968-98 were masterminded, run, stoked, and finally wound down by ‘Illuminati’ Agent Peter Carington (‘6th Baron Carrington’), who was the British defence secretary in 1970-74, the secretary-genocidal of NATO in 1984-88, and the chairman of the Bilderberg Steering Committee in 1990-98.
Carington was a high-level ‘Illuminati’ Agent FAR-ABOVE everyday politics (i.e. above the Punch & Judy Show in which Rothschild-Tory pretends to ‘oppose’ Rothschild-Labor). The ‘Illuminati’ trusted and authorised its agent Carington not only to make reliable and autonomous decisions regarding northeast Ireland, but also decisions on the decolonization of Rhodesia, and the waging of the Argentine-Malvinas Conflict (‘Falklands War’) in 1982.
O’Carroll goes on to accuse Carington of having masterminded the Ballymurphy Massacre, when the British Army shot dead eleven unarmed Catholic Civilians in Belfast. And the Bloody Sunday Massacre in Derry, when the Army killed thirteen unarmed Catholic Civilians. Carington was also identified by British Home Secretary Merlyn Rees as the man responsible for introducing methods of torture as British policy in Northern Ireland. Later, as NATO Secretary General, he would certainly have been involved in Operation Gladio. O’Carroll also fingers him as a ‘warlock of the Order of the Garter,’ which he describes as a ‘witchcraft coven.’
That last detail may be a bridge too far even for some Awake readers. But no matter. Even if you don’t believe that Carington was literally a warlock, he was certainly a high ranking member of the Satanic elites which rule the world through secret societies like Bilderberg and Le Cercle, and through supranational bodies like NATO. What are the chances, do we think, that such a key figure in the Elite hierarchy should also have been the tank commander at the very tip of the spear of the relief column on which the success of Market Garden would stand or fail?
It seems to me, re-examining the military history phase of my life from my Awake perspective, that there were, in fact four world wars. There are the two we read about in all the history books and which get explained for us in TV documentaries and which get dramatised in all the war movies. And then there are the two we don’t get to hear about because we were never meant to. These were the wars fought by people like Peter Carington and Victor Rothschild (who worked for MI6 but also, simultaneously, for Soviet intelligence and, later, Mossad) and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands - and, indeed, Bernhard’s close pal Prince Philip, with whom he later founded the World Wildlife Fund. At these people’s level, the distinctions between Allies and Axis were all but meaningless because they were all members of the same Big Club that the rest of us aren’t in. For them, this wasn’t the epic confrontation between fascism and freedom that Allied propagandists sold in the newsreels and Churchill in his speeches. Rather, for them, it was just business as usual: a more extreme form of the disaster capitalism which the Predator Class use as a control mechanism, as a population suppressant and as a business model.
Understood on these terms, Market Garden makes a lot more sense. It explains some otherwise inexplicable incidents in the operation, such as the fate of the intelligence officer, Major Brian Urquhart, who on the eve of the drop, spotted two SS Panzer divisions lurking in the landing zone. (Urquhart was promptly sacked). It explains apparent cock-ups in the planning, like the bizarre decision to carry out the landings over two days rather than one (losing the advantages of concentrated force and surprise) and not nearly close enough to the bridges (in contrast, say, to 6th Airborne’s remarkable coup de main at Pegasus Bridge on D-Day). The reason, argues Tony Gosling, was that Market Garden was sabotaged right from the start.
It’s likely that among those who sabotaged it was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Before he married into the Dutch royal family, this thuggish German aristocrat was an enthusiastic Nazi and an officer in the SS. Bernhard may have run cover for the Dutch resistance leader Christiaan Lindemans, a German double-agent who worked under the code-name King Kong, and betrayed the Market Garden plans to the German Abwehr. None of this would have been possible, Tony Gosling believes, if the betrayal and the post-war cover up had not been approved at the highest level in the Allied military. In other words, the most senior Allies and the most senior Germans were in cahoots.
This cosy relationship became notably apparent during the top secret operation in 1945, ‘masterminded by Churchill’s personal assistant Desmond Morton and financed directly by King George VI, assisted by Naval Intelligence commander Ian Fleming’, to spirit Hitler’s treasurer and Nazi party chief Martin Bormann. A secret squad of 150 of Britain’s best commandoes, along with a 100 strong German Jewish contingent commanded by Major Israel Bloom, snuck Bormann out via canoe under the noses of the Soviets. Bormann - like so many senior Nazis: see Operation Paperclip - was too useful an asset to the Illuminati class to be allowed to slip through the cracks.
Whatever court historians may tell us about the ‘whys’ and ‘what ifs’ of Market Garden, the real reason it failed - according to Gosling’s persuasive account - is that it was too good an idea to be allowed to succeed. Once the Elites grasped what a potential game-changer it was in shortening the war they had to stop it in its tracks because they just weren’t ready yet for the war to end. They needed to extend it those extra few months so they could tie up a few business ends and transition smoothly into the Continuation Nazi post war years.
As Gosling puts it:
“For the lofty ‘higher ups’ this war was but a game of chess. While brave men thought they fought and died for their different countries, and causes, right or wrong, the highest echelons of the ruling classes were using the war to redraw the world map to their advantage, consolidate their control and raise money for their organised crime networks.
As former CBS correspondent turned Nazi hunter after the war Paul Manning and others have documented Nazi party chief Martin Bormann created 750 companies after the war into which he secreted former SS staff, the laundered millions of WWII Nazi loot, and recruited Jewish individuals to front these companies so nobody would believe they could be Nazi funded and inspired. The biggest organised crime network in history was spawned.”
Bilderberg was a key part of this process. It was named after a hotel in Oosterbeek, close to where some of the landings took place, and was founded in 1954 by the Nazi Prince Bernhard, with many former Nazis among its senior members. This continued plans formulated in 1944 at the Red House meeting convened by Martin Boorman to arrange for a Fourth Reich to be formed after the war where, as Gosling puts it, ‘banks would replace tanks as a means to acquire the factories and farms of all educated and free-thinking enemies with the moral fibre to stand against them.’
Knowing all this, I would have written a very different World War II series of novels from the one I started: one much darker, more cynical and certainly less beholden to the romantic idea I had when I was young that war could, on occasion, be glorious and noble and just.
But that doesn’t mean I have remotely lost my admiration for the ordinary fighting men who took part in it. I met one or two of them while researching the book, including Tony Deane Drummond, who spent 13 days hiding in a cupboard, sometimes with Germans in the same room, before escaping across the river; and Mike Dauncey, the glider pilot who narrowly missed a VC for a string of acts of almost suicidal heroism, including disabling an SP gun with a Gammon grenade having just been shot in the scalp with a sniper’s bullet and half blinded with a grenade splinter. Like most people, they had no idea that they were living in a world run in the interests of a tiny elite which sees them as no better than cattle. They’d been given a job to do and they did their best. No one told them that the mission they’d been sent on was meant to end in failure. That’s why, against impossible odds, they almost won.
