Guards Armoured Division

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06 Jun 2026

The Market Garden Briefing at Leopoldsburg

Battlefield BlogBelgium WWII, Brian Horrocks, Guards Armoured Division, Irish Guards, Leopoldsburg, Operation Market Garden, Sherman Firefly, XXX Corps

A Sherman tank stands outside the railway station at Leopoldsburg, in northern Belgium. Most people walk past it. It marks one of the quietest turning points of the war in the west: the morning the ground plan for Operation Market Garden was handed to the men who would carry it out. A cinema called the Splendid "This is a story you will tell your grandchildren, and mightily bored they'll be." Edward Fox delivers the line as Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks in the film A Bridge Too Far. The detail of the scene is invented, but the place was real. It stood…

14 May 2026

By Joris

The Surviving German Anti-Tank Blocks at Nijmegen Bridge

Battlefield Blog82nd Airborne, Guards Armoured Division, Nijmegen, Operation Market Garden, Waal Bridge

On the north bank of the Waal at Nijmegen, close to where the road bridge comes down on the Lent side, two grey concrete blocks stand in the open. They are scarred, weathered, and easy to walk past without a second look. They are also among the last surviving pieces of German road defence of their kind anywhere in the Netherlands. The blocks are part of a Panzerkampfwagenmauer, an anti-tank wall the Germans built across the northern approach to the bridge in 1943. Each block stands 3.4 metres high and 2.3 metres wide, with a broad base that originally sat…