Hell’s Highway – FW212

Since long before I came to work for Battlefront I’ve had a fascination with Operation Market Garden. The brave forces involved and the heroic commanders that led them are well known and provide an excellent story for a series of Flames Of War books. So you can perhaps imagine my excitement when I got the opportunity to bring my favorite operation alive in Flames Of War, starting with Hell’s Highway.

The main forces included in Hell’s Highway are an Irish Guards Armoured Squadron, a Welsh Guards Armoured Recce Squadron, a Guards Rifle Company, a 2nd Household Cavalry Squadron, US Parachute Rifle Comapny (both 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions) and a Fallschirmjäger company with two variants for the veteran 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment and the battered and rebuilding 3rd Fallschirmjäger Division.

Writing the Book

The book itself was quite fun to write. I’m a very visually-minded person, so I kept the Graphics team busy with lots of maps, diagrams and pictures to illustrate the story of Hell’s Highway. The book includes lots of maps so you can see where your favorite unit was fighting. The maps cover Operation Market Garden as a whole, the 101st Airborne’s corridor, the 82nd Airborne’s assault across the Waal River, and the German defense and attacks from Valkenswaard to Nijmegen.

I also put together a timeline so it’s easy to get the events in the right order and see how they influenced each other. One nice thing about Operation Market Garden is that it was fought over the span of about nine days, making it easy to pin down when events occurred.

However, with so much happening in such a short period of time, it’s easy to get confused where things are happening and what is going on elsewhere. So where ever possible I put in dates and times if they were available.

Each unit has carefully researched histories attached to it. For this I have to thank the unceasing support of the Market Garden 65 guys who helps put together these histories and supplied us with quality research.
Our painting team put together a great painting guide for the British Guards, including a handy reference detailing how to read Brigade squadron markings (those red, yellow, blue and white shapes put on the turret of a tank). The German guide has a bit on painting Luftwaffe splinter camouflage and some tips on painting tanks and assault guns from the Hermann GĂśring Training and Replacement Regiment.