Inside a 19th-century, primrose-yellow mansion used by both the British and the Germans as HQ during Operation Market Garden, this much-visited museum does a good job of laying out this disastrous mission and putting it into context. A bunker running beneath the cafe terrace is the atmospheric venue for the Airborne Experience, a dramatic, subterranean maze simulating a night scene from the Battle of Arnhem (17–26 September 1944) using B&W footage from the 1946 film Theirs is the Glory.
The emotive film was shot just one year after the battle, on location in war-ravaged Oosterbeek and Arnhem. It featured surviving veterans who had fought in the battle and the pain in their eyes is not for the faint-hearted.
The museum shop sells an excellent range of battlefield and cycling maps, and books about the momentous Battle of Arnhem including the most recently published read, Arnhem: The Battle of the Bridges (2018) by Antony Beeton. Temporary exhibitions fill the villa's elegant ground floor which still retains its high moulded ceilings.
