The General Who Predicted Market Garden’s Failure – And Paid the Price

The General Who Predicted Market Garden’s Failure – And Paid the Price

The old man on the assembly line at CAV Electrics kept to himself. He ate lunch alone, spoke with a heavy accent, and never talked about his past. His co-workers knew nothing about him—just another stateless immigrant doing manual labor. A man whose citizenship had been stripped by the communists and whose reputation had been stolen by the British. The hands that once signed orders for thousands of paratroopers now fumbled with small, greasy components. The eyes that had scanned maps of Europe for strategic advantage now strained under fluorescent lights, checking for assembly defects.

He worked there for nearly 20 years, tightening screws, assembling parts, earning barely enough to survive. No pension, no recognition, no one asking questions. When he died of heart failure in September 1967, his co-workers attended the funeral out of courtesy. They expected a brief, quiet service for a factory hand they barely knew. Then the priest began reading his military record.

Major General Stanniswaf Sosabofski—commander of the Polish First Independent Parachute Brigade, Defender of Warsaw, veteran of the largest airborne operation in military history, the man who had warned the British that Operation Market Garden would fail and was punished for being right.

The Ambitious Plan

September 12th, 1944, saw a conference room in England filled with Allied commanders planning the most ambitious airborne assault ever attempted. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had convinced Eisenhower to approve Operation Market Garden. Three airborne divisions would drop behind German lines in the Netherlands, seizing bridges across the Rhine. If it worked, Allied tanks could pour into Germany, and the war might end by Christmas.

General Roy Urkart of the British First Airborne Division presented the plan. Sosabofski sat in the back, studying the maps with growing alarm. The drop zones were seven miles from the Arnhem Bridge—seven miles of hostile territory that lightly armed paratroopers would have to cross on foot. To a civilian, seven miles sounds like a morning hike. To a general, it is an eternity. It meant paratroopers would lose the element of surprise before they fired a shot. The landings would be spread across three days due to aircraft shortages. Three days without surprise, without concentration of force, and British intelligence claimed the area was lightly defended.

Sosabofski knew this was fantasy. When Urkart finished and asked for questions, Sosabofski wanted to stand up and call the plan impossible. He wanted to demand written orders so he wouldn’t be blamed for the disaster that would follow, but he stayed silent. He later admitted he was already unpopular with British commanders. Who would have listened anyway? The question haunted him for the rest of his life.

A History of Warnings

Sosabofski had raised concerns before. During planning for Operation Comet, Market Garden’s predecessor, he had been more direct. He told Lieutenant General Frederick Browning that the mission was equivalent to suicide. Dropping a single airborne division to capture all those bridges was impossible. His objections were supported by other officers, including Brigadier Hackett. Eventually, Comet was canceled, but Market Garden was Comet with more troops. The fundamental problems remained.

At one planning session, a British officer presented optimistic assessments of German weakness. The enemy was beaten, demoralized, incapable of serious resistance. Sosabofski interrupted in his deep-accented voice. “But the Germans, General, the Germans…” The room went cold. This wasn’t just disagreement; it was a breach of etiquette—a foreign officer speaking accented English telling the heroes of the British Empire that their master plan was a death trap.

You can imagine the uncomfortable shifting in chairs, the shared glances between British officers, the unspoken consensus that Sosabofski was being difficult simply by being realistic. Sosabofski tried to explain that Arnhem was the gateway into Germany. The Wehrmacht would defend it with everything they had. The assumption of light resistance was delusional. Browning dismissed him as a doomsayer, a pessimist who didn’t understand the momentum of Allied victory.

Sosabofski pointed out that the drop zones were too far from objectives, that spreading landings over three days would forfeit surprise, and that lightly armed paratroopers couldn’t hold against armored counterattacks. Every concern was waved away. The operation would proceed as planned. What Sosabofski didn’t know was that a young intelligence officer, Major Brian Urkart—no relation to the general—had photographic evidence of German tanks near Arnhem. SS Panzer divisions were refitting in the exact area where British paratroopers would land. Browning dismissed that warning, too, asserting that the tanks were probably unserviceable, manned by old men and boys.

The Launch of Market Garden

On September 17th, 1944, the largest airborne operation in history launched without Sosabofski. His Polish brigade was scheduled to reinforce the British on the third day, but Sosabofski wasn’t watching with hope. He was watching with dread. Reports filtered back to England. The British had landed seven miles from the bridge—exactly the problem Sosabofski had warned about. German resistance was heavier than expected, precisely as he predicted. Then the weather closed in. Fog grounded Sosabofski’s aircraft on September 19th. He sat at the airfield helpless while the operation he had warned against collapsed without him.

By September 20th, fragments of news made clear the disaster. British paratroopers were surrounded. The bridge was held by a single battalion. German armor was crushing positions that were never supposed to face tanks. Everything Sosabofski had said in that briefing room was coming true, and he couldn’t do anything except wait for weather that wouldn’t clear.

Finally, on September 21st, four days into an operation planned to last two, Sosabofski received clearance, but not to the original zone. His brigade would land at Dreil on the south bank of the Rhine, opposite the trapped British. Anti-aircraft fire tore into the transport aircraft. Sosabofski jumped with 950 men, barely a third of his full brigade. The rest were scattered across English airfields, recalled by weather messages they never received. The ferry they needed had been sunk. The British were dying on the north bank, and Sosabofski had no way to reach them.

His men paddled across in rubber boats under machine gun fire. The boats were small toys really, as they pushed into the black water of the Rhine. The current grabbed them. Then flares popped overhead, turning night into day, and German guns on the high ground opened up. Sosabofski watched from the bank as the river ran red. About 200 Poles made it across. The rest were killed, wounded, or driven back. Sosabofski had warned them this would happen. Now he was watching his men die, proving him right.

The Aftermath of Failure

On September 24th, 1944, the British perimeter at Oosterbeek was collapsing. Sosabofski attended a conference at the headquarters of the 43rd Wessex Division. Lieutenant General Horrocks of the 30th Corps was there, along with Major General Thomas and other British commanders. They discussed plans for a night crossing. Two battalions would attempt to reinforce the trapped paratroopers. Sosabofski studied the plan and felt sick. The proposed crossing point was directly beneath German positions on the western heights. His men would be slaughtered.

He raised his objections. The location was suicidal. They needed either a major assault with the entire 43rd Division or an evacuation of the British forces. This half-measure would achieve nothing except casualties. The British commanders were tired of Sosabofski’s objections. They didn’t ask for his opinion. They simply announced that Polish troops would participate in the crossing under British command.

Sosabofski was furious. His brigade was being committed without his consent to an operation he knew would fail. Horrocks ended the meeting by reprimanding him. If Sosabofski wouldn’t obey orders, Horrocks would find someone who would. The crossing went ahead. It was a disaster, exactly as Sosabofski predicted.

By December 1944, Churchill personally pressured the Polish government in exile for two months. The British wanted Sosabofski gone. They made clear that continued support for Poland depended on cooperation. Poland’s exile government was weak. Their homeland was being occupied by the Soviets. They depended entirely on British goodwill for their survival. They had no choice.

On Christmas Day 1944, Sosabofski’s men learned their commander was being removed. The paratroopers who had followed him through Market Garden, who had watched their friends die in the rubber boats crossing the Rhine, were devastated. They started a hunger strike. These were elite soldiers who had survived one of the war’s worst disasters. They were willing to starve themselves rather than accept the injustice being done to their general. Sosabofski heard about the protest and immediately intervened. He ordered his men to stop. He wouldn’t let them suffer for his sake.

On December 27th, 1944, the Polish president sent the letter relieving Sosabofski of command. He formally handed over command, and two of his brigade officers resigned in protest. The general who had warned against Market Garden, who had been right about everything, was reassigned to command rear guard troops—a humiliating demotion for one of Poland’s most distinguished officers. Montgomery and Browning had won. The scapegoat had been sacrificed.

The Aftermath of the War

The war ended, but Sosabofski could not go home. Communist Poland was controlled by the Soviets, the same Soviets his brigade had been created to fight. Officers who returned faced imprisonment, torture, or execution. In September 1946, the communist Polish government stripped Sosabofski of his citizenship. He became a man without a country, stateless for the rest of his life.

He managed to bring his wife and son from Poland. His son, Stanniswave, had lost his sight during the Warsaw uprising, serving as a medic in the resistance. The family settled in West London with nothing. There was a cruel irony in their small home: the general who had seen the disaster coming when everyone else was blind to it now cared for a son who had literally lost his sight fighting for Poland. Two broken soldiers living in a country that wanted to forget them.

Sosabofski had no pension. The British government provided no support for Polish veterans who had fought under British command. The exile government had no resources. At age 57, Major General Stanniswaf Sosabofski applied for work at factories. He found a job at CAV Electrics in Acton, an assembly plant, manual labor, minimum wage. For nearly 20 years, he worked there. The man who had commanded elite paratroopers spent his days on a factory floor, anonymous and poor.

His co-workers didn’t know. He never talked about the war, never mentioned Montgomery or Market Garden or the bridges at Arnhem. In 1960, he published his memoirs. The book was called Freely I Served. Few people read it. He worked at the factory until he was 75 years old.

The Final Resting Place

On September 25th, 1967, Stanniswaf Sosabofski died of heart failure at Hillingdon Hospital. He was buried in a London cemetery. His co-workers stood alongside weeping paratroopers, finally understanding who the quiet old man on the assembly line really was. It wasn’t until 1969 that his loyal soldiers managed to bring his remains home to Warsaw. At the Pawonsky Military Cemetery, among the graves of Polish soldiers who had died fighting for their country, the general was finally laid to rest among his own.

But it took decades more for full vindication. In 2006, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands awarded the Military Order of William to the Polish First Independent Parachute Brigade, one of the highest military honors the Dutch could bestow. Sosabofski himself was posthumously awarded the Bronze Lion. The Dutch government acted despite British diplomatic pressure against the recognition. A Dutch television documentary had finally told the truth about what happened at Dreil. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands said the Poles deserved to be honored with at least a medal.

The village square in Dreil was renamed Sosabowski Square. A statue of the general now stands there, looking across at the house where he established his headquarters in September 1944. Finally, in 2025, 80 years late, the British government broke its silence. At a historic ceremony in Warsaw, the UK defense minister officially paid tribute to the extraordinary courage of Sosabowski and his men. The Polish government called it a restoration of honor. It wasn’t a full apology for Montgomery’s lies, but it was the vindication the general had been denied for his entire life.

It took eight decades for the truth to catch up to the politics. Montgomery got the statues and the fame in his lifetime. Sosabowski got something more lasting: the judgment of history. Browning escaped accountability entirely. He was knighted after the war. His famous phrase about going “a bridge too far” became the title of the definitive book and film about the disaster. Sosabowski’s crime was simple: he told the truth to men who didn’t want to hear it. He was right when being right was unforgivable.

History is written by the victors, they say. But in this case, history was written by men who needed to cover up their failure. The old man in the factory knew things his co-workers couldn’t imagine. He had commanded men in combat, buried friends in foreign soil, and watched his warnings come true at the cost of thousands of lives. He never complained. He never sought recognition. He just worked his shift and went home. But as he stood on that assembly line covered in grease and anonymity, Sosabowski possessed the one thing Montgomery never did: a clean conscience.