SEVENTY-TWO years ago this weekend, British airborne forces were involved in one of the most famous battles of the Second World War around the Dutch town of Arnhem.

On September 17, 1944, 35,000 Allied men were flown 300 miles from English airbases and dropped 60 miles behind enemy lines in the Netherlands. These paratroopers and glidermen were to secure key bridges and towns so that approaching Allied ground forces could sweep easily through the country and onwards to Germany.

However, this operation – code name: Market Garden – met with unexpected German resistance, and the Allied ground forces were unable to reach the airborne men as quickly as they had hoped.

Most famously, those who had landed near Arnhem with instructions to capture a road bridge over the Rhine found themselves trapped and surrounded on the northern riverbank for nine days – an episode that was turned into the feature film A Bridge Too Far, starring Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Ryan O'Neal, Laurence Olivier and Robert Redford.

The man Redford played was an all-American war hero, Major Julian Aaron Cook, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Regiment, who, on September 20, bravely led a daring daylight assault across the Waal River. A smokescreen was created to hide the attack, but the wind blew away, leaving Maj Cook’s 26-boat flotilla naked on the water. Under terrible fire, he successfully steered his own barge across and then plunged back into the water to drag other damaged boats onto the bank.

Once ashore, Maj Cook’s regiment cleared the bank and captured their road bridge. For his leading role in Market Garden, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, promoted to lieutenant colonel, and allocated Redford to play him on the silver screen.

But Maj Cook, who was born in Vermont, had County Durham roots.

Because, early in the 20th Century, his father, Nelson Pingrey Cook, was touring northern England as a commercial traveller (he also seems to have been promoting baseball as he went). When the 1901 census was taken, he was recorded staying in the Wheatsheaf Hotel in Spennymoor.

His travellings must have taken him to Bishop Auckland because, according to a family story, he had such a fine meal in the Wear Valley Hotel in Newgate Street that he demanded to give his complements to the chef in person.

Out came the hotel cook, 26-year-old Honora Gallagher, a Coundon lass from a large Irish family. Although the American traveller was ten years older, and despite Honora having a daughter from a previous relationship, they fell in love, and in 1902, the cook became a Cook as they got married at St Wilfrid’s Church, Bishop Auckland.

They settled in Coundon and had four children – two were boys, whom they gave names beginning with J (John and James).

In 1909, they decided to return to Nelson’s home, a farm in Mounty Holly in Vermont. They sailed from Liverpool on board the Ivernia and, although their eldest John died almost as soon as they arrived, more sons followed. All were given J names: Joseph, Jerome, Jermyn (who was given Brancepeth as a middle name) and, finally, in 1916, Julian – the half-Coundon boy who grew into an all-American war hero.

Julian visited his mother’s relations in County Durham several times during the war, and, as depicted in A Bridge Too Far, met one of them – his cousin – on the Arnhem battlefield.

He was Sergeant Harry Gallagher, of Coundon, who before the war was a shop assistant in Bishop. He joined the Irish Guards as a tank driver, and landed in Normandy after D-Day. Three months later, his role in Operation Market Garden was to roll into the Netherlands from Belgium and reach the paratroopers who had dropped 60 miles away.

Immediately over the border, though, the Guards’ column came under attack near the Meuse-Escaut Canal. Nine tanks in front of Sgt Gallagher were destroyed, but he managed to reverse his to safety. He then spent 90 minutes rescuing men from the stricken tanks while under fire – bravery for which he received the Military Medal.

So the meeting of the two decorated men from the same family gets a fleeting mention in the crowded 1977 film.

“Harry, who died in 1981, was my grand-dad’s brother, and I remember when A Bridge Too Far came out, he wrote to the cinema manager in Durham and we got free tickets,” says Judith Vincent of Brandon Village, who has helped enormously with this article.