THE TRAITOR OF ARNHEM

Unnerving findings about one of the great failed Allied operations of WWII.

On Sept. 17, 1944, Operation Market Garden landed a massive Allied force by parachute and glider behind German lines in Holland, and a British division launched an offensive from Belgium to link up. Success would entail outflanking German defenses, crossing the Rhine, and ending the war in 1944. It failed—resistance was far greater than expected. Historians fault poor terrain, bad weather, and faulty intelligence, but British journalist Verkaik, author of The Traitor of Colditz, is not the first to claim that traitors betrayed the effort. One candidate was Christiaan Lindemans, a legendary Dutch resistance fighter. Frequently arrested, resistance fighters often emerged from their interrogation as double agents, and Verkaik provides evidence supporting ongoing suspicions that Lindemans was among them. Turning to Britain, Verkaik writes that 24 hours before the operation, Nazi commanders received a warning from “a shadowy source deep in the heart of the British state, known…as Agent Josephine.” Although aware of “Josephine,” British intelligence never discovered her, possibly because a traitor led the search. That was Anthony Blunt, one of a crew of British communists who kept the USSR informed of Allied operations. With victory guaranteed, Stalin was more interested in slowing the Allies’ advance on Berlin than defeating Hitler. Market Garden’s failure (as well as December’s German Ardennes offensive) accomplished this, leaving the Red Army dominant in Eastern Europe and powerful communist parties in the west. Verkaik often overwhelms the reader with findings from archives, interviews, memoirs, letters, declassified MI5 and MI6 files, and postwar analyses that support, deny, or obfuscate the case for betrayal. He believes that Blunt was Josephine. His evidence is circumstantial, but there is plenty of it.

A disturbing reevaluation of an iconic World War II battle, not definitely proven but well argued.