Saturday, December 10, 2022

POTD: A Bridge Too Far

From 2022 07 06 Kinderdijk
A modern bridge, not the Bridge Too Far

Today's photo-of-the-day is from the Rhine River in Netherlands. If you're of a certain age, you might remember the epic war film "A Bridge Too Far". It depicted a failed Allied military operation in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II. Thousands of Allied soldiers were air dropped behind enemy lines. The objective was the bridge at Arnhem. Capturing that would cut off the German army from retreat and give the Allies a safe crossing of the Rhine to invade Germany. The problem was that the road to the bridge was a single lane across marshy land, with several key bridges to capture on the way to Arnhem.


Why do I relate all that? Well, we were on a Rhine River cruise. Seeing the the landscape in person, seeing dikes that the roads are built on, seeing the marshy land that any troop transports or tanks leaving the road would get bogged down in, seeing all that brought the movie to life for me, even though I was relaxing on the sun deck of a modern river cruise ship. Travel — you never know what you'll see that will stir up old memories. In this case, it gave me new appreciation for the people in the old stories who braved mortal dangers to secure our liberties today.

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