TAKING THE FIGHT TO NAZI GARMANY

The crossing of the Rhine in March 1945 remains the biggest single-day airborne operation in history. But after the Market Garden disaster six months earlier, Operation Varsity would determine the future of the 'Red Devils', as a thrilling new history reveals

- Saul David

AT 7AM on March 24, 1945, the first of 240 Dakota transport planes took off from airfields in East Anglia carrying the six battalions of the 3rd and 5th Parachute Brigades, 6th Airborne Division. They were followed into the air by 429 tugs mostly Stirlings and Halifaxes towing Horsa and Hamilcar gliders with Major General Eric Bols' Divisional HQ, the 6th Airlanding Brigade and supporting arms on board. It was a beautiful clear day, remembered Nigel Poett, commander of the 5th Parachute Brigade, as he watched the majestic sight of 450 parachute aircraft passing below the glider stream over Belgium from 1,000-ft up.

"As we approached the Rhine," he wrote, "we could see ahead the battlefield, covered by haze and the dust of the bombardment." There were 540 Dakotas and 1,300 gliders in all, protected by almost 3,000 fighters. For James Hill, commander of the 3rd the Parachute Brigade, operation was a world apart in "skill, technique and planning" from his first primitive drop with 1 Para in November 1942 in North Africa (where the Germans first called them 'Red Devils'). Watching the huge air armada approach its target, from a nearby hill top in The Netherlands, was Winston Churchill.

"It was full daylight, before the subdued but intense roar and rumbling of swarms of aircraft stole upon us," he wrote. "After that in the course of half an hour over 2,000 aircraft streamed overhead in their formations." Soon they returned at a different altitude, their parachutists dropped or gliders released, and Churchill witnessed "with a sense of tragedy, aircraft in twos and threes coming back askew, asmoke, or even in flames".