Most people mark late September/early October as Harvest Season or the transition into Le Spooky Times; I, on the other hand, mark it as the time of Market Garden and the Battle of the Scheldt. To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the former, I played three WWII shooters that depict Operation Market Garden: Medal of Honor: Frontline, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, and Medal of Honor: Airborne. In particular, replaying the Veghel level made me remember the artwork I had done inspired by it about five or six years ago, where you had to take out a roving tank on your own, using cover to avoid being seeing its crew. I wanted to revisit the idea, this time taking direct inspiration from the level itself, with the rainy weather and the fact that you're in the backyards of all these Dutch houses.
Instead of a scaled Dilophosaurus in a British camo smock with a semi-auto carbine, the character here (still a lady) is a feathered Liliensternus with a Browning Auto Rifle chambered in .303, based off an actual prototype weapon tested by the British. The tank's still a Char G1R, the primary medium tank used by the Communards in WWII alongside variants of the H35/H39 and the SARL 42 and the character is wearing a gray CS Army tunic. I started out using a gray pencil to color the whole thing so it has that dark tint, in line with the one used for the level to convey the ongoing rainstorm to the player. It was admittedly a bit jarring drawing and coloring this when it had been predominately been sunny and warm for the past two or three weeks, with the only real breaks being the rainstorm that passed through parts of the Northwest last Friday and the clouds rolling over this morning as I am writing this.
On September 16, 1944, over sixty-four thousand airborne paratroops descended from the skies of Southern Holland, the largest paradrop in military history; their goal was to seize key bridges and hold the road to Eindhoven and ultimately Brussels, enabling the entrenched British and Dutch forces north of the Rhine to cross south and push the Comintern forces out of the Low Countries. Two Parachute Corps were employed: the British I Airborne Corps, consisting of a mixture of British, Belgian, Free French, Canadian, Borealian, Quebecois, Bedanish, Confederate, Danish, and Welsh paratroopers and the German I Fallschjrmkorps, which consisted of German, US, Texian, Dutch, Frisian, Norwegian, and Polish paratroopers. The former would hold the bridges at Veghel, Son, Eindhoven, Mierlo, and Helmond, while the latter would seize Arnhem, Nijmegen, Emmerich, Cleve, and Gennep. Several corps of Allied troops would then move south from Arnhem to Eindhoven, thus helping to push the Comintern completely out of the Ntherlands, Luxembourg, and West Germany while the German XIV Korps would push in from Emmerich and Cleve to hammer the enemy from the eastern flank. Most of the parachutes units involved achieved success on the first day the but two setbacks would signify the troubles laying ahead for the Allies: first, the bridge at Son, set to be captured by combined US, CS, and Canadian paratroopers, was blown after they were pinned down by emplaced artillery and machine guns. The second setback was the massive delay both army columns would endure at the hands of unexpected resistance from Comintern troops. Both columns were forced to travel on the main roads, owing to the soft soil of the terrain, which enabled local enemy forces (primarily consisting of Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourgois, and German communists) to strike at will, causing further delays as engineers tried to move wrecked vehicles off the causeway. Furthermore, the stalemate around Caen and Strassburg enabled the Communards to send spare units northwards to participate in countless attacks against the entrenched paratroopers, who were equipped for only a few days' worth of combat.
While the columns crossed the Waal and Meuse by the 21st, they were still far behind schedule and the troops around Eindhoven were being hammered hard, their only saving grace being the horrific bombing the Armee d'lAire inflicted on the city on the night of the 16th. While hundreds of civilians were killed, the defending allies were able to use the ruins as a defense against the Comintern, an ironic inverse of the Comintern's defense of the bombed-out ruins of Caen, Porto, and Carthage. Still, the columns had well over a hundred miles to go before they reached Eindhoven and the enemy was only growing more bold, in spite of aid from the local citizens. By the 24th, the jig was up, and the commanders of the US 101st Airborne, Confederate 2nd Airborne, and British 1st Airborne Divisions, agreed to pull back a portion of their troops, with a rear guard left behind to fend off the enemy as long as possible. Some 8,000 paratroopers crossed the canals north of Eindhoven and reached friendly lines while 4,000 were left behind, half of these taken prisoner and the other half hidden away by the locals and would later be rescued in daring raids by Allied troops in conjunction with the the Underground. The Allies suffered 27,000 casualties in just eight days and had fallen short of their objective of opening the road to Brussels, ensuring the Northwest Front would endure for another six months, all because of their overconfidence and political pressure to ensure a quicker end to the war in Western Europe. An alternate attack was launched at the Scheldt Estuary by the Dutch, Canadians, Confederates, and Belgians, aimed at the vital port city of Antwerp; it's eventual seizure in October would make up for the dismal failure of Market Garden.
