Hundreds of paratroopers dropped out of near-cloudless skies over a heath in the central Netherlands on Saturday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden—one of World War II's most daring but ultimately unsuccessful missions. Paratroopers from the Dutch Air Mobile Brigade and 12 other NATO nations took part in a series of jumps over Ginkel Heath, watched by World War II veterans and around 60,000 spectators, the AP reports. Mayor Rene Verhulst called the heath near Arnhem a place where "courage, sacrifice, and hope came together in the shape of the airborne landings during Operation Market Garden. Today we commemorate the brave young soldiers who risked and sometimes gave their lives for our freedom."
Geoff Roberts, 99, was among 12 World War II veterans present Saturday. For Operation Market Garden, he arrived in the nearby village of Wolfheze a day before the mass drops at Ginkel Heath in September 1944. "I landed at Wolfheze in a glider, and our next job was to capture this area for the people to come in the following day," Roberts said. He said that the arrivals were delayed by bad weather and that by the time the paratroopers arrived, "it was getting a bit naughty" at the drop zone as German forces began fighting back. After days of heavy fighting, he was taken prisoner and sent to work in a coal mine in Czechoslovakia. He was 20 when he returned home at the end of the war.
Operation Market Garden was an audacious plan to take back key bridges and roads from Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands, so that Allied forces in Belgium could advance into the industrial heartland of Germany and bring the war to an end. It involved dropping nearly 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines using an aerial armada of gliders and other military planes. But stiff German resistance and stretched supply lines scuppered the plan as the Allies failed to hold a key bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem in a battle immortalized in the book and 1977 movie A Bridge Too Far. About 11,500 Allied troops died in the nine days of Operation Market Garden, more than during the D-Day landings in France two months earlier. The British 1st Airborne Division led the assault. Paratroopers from the US Army's 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and Poland's 1st Independent Parachute Brigade also were dropped into the Netherlands.
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